married Miss Ada
Jones, who had long worked with him on the paper, and who continued
to write both for it and later for _G.K.'s Weekly_, doing especially
the dramatic criticism under the pen-name of J. K. Prothero. Later on
she was to become famous for her exploit in spending a fortnight
investigating in the guise of a tramp the London of down-and-out
women. She wrote _In Darkest London_ and founded the Cecil Houses to
improve the very bad conditions she had discovered and in memory of
her husband. At this date Mrs. Cecil Chesterton visited Poland and
wrote a series of articles describing the Polish struggle for life
and freedom. Several Poles also contributed articles to the paper.
There was not I imagine on the staff one single writer with the kind
of ignorance that enabled Lloyd George to confess in Paris that he
did not know where Teschen was.

Here was the first tragedy of Versailles. The representatives of both
America and England were ignorant of the reality of Europe: Wilson
was (as Chesterton often said) a much better man than Lloyd George,
but he knew as little of the world which he had come to reconstruct.
He was, too, a political doctrinaire preferring "what was not there"
in the shape of a League of Nations to the real nations of Poland or
Italy. And with the American as with the Welshman international
finance stood beside the politicians and whispered in their ears. An
interesting article appeared in the _New Witness_ by an American who
said that no leading journal in his own country would print it any
more than any English one. He described the opposition of masses of
ordinary Americans to the League of Nations and how a Chicago banker,
who however had no international interests, had heartily agreed with
this opposition. But the same banker had written to him next day
eating his own words. In the interim he had met the other bankers.
This American correspondent held with the _New Witness_ that the
League of Nations was mainly a device of international finance so
framed as to enlist also the support of pacifist idealists who really
believed it would make for peace.

Only one thing, said the _New Witness_, would make for a stable
peace: remove Prussia from her position at the head of Germany: make
her regaining of it impossible. Make a strong Poland, and a strong
Italy, as well as a strong France. Later on they said they had
disapproved of the weakening of Austria, but though I do not doubt
that this is