true in principle I cannot find much mention of Austria
in the paper: Poland, Italy and Ireland fill their columns--and the
freeing of England.

They claimed that theirs was in the main the policy of
Clemenceau--but both Chesterton and Belloc admitted that Clemenceau,
even if he desired a strong Poland as a barrier between Germany and
Russia, shared with his colleagues an equal responsibility in the
destruction of Austria which proved so fatal. He was too much a
freemason to desire many Catholic states. The interests of France
were not those of Italy, which certainly went to the wall and was
turned thereby from friend and ally into enemy. And the _New Witness_
summed up the fate of Ireland in the suggestion that Lloyd George had
said to Wilson: "If you won't look at Ireland, I won't look at
Mexico." Both Lloyd George and Wilson were too anti-Catholic to do
other than dislike (in Lloyd George's case _hate_ is the word)
Catholic Poland. It is certain that Lloyd George in particular worked
savagely against the Poland that should have been. A commission
appointed by the Peace Conference reported in favour of Poland owning
the port of Danzig and territory approximating to her age-long
historic boundaries and in particular including East Prussia in which
there was still a majority of Poles: Lloyd George sent back the
report for revision: they made it again on the same lines.

It was a strange anomaly that this man should have sat at the Council
Table representing a great country. In the past men had sat there who
not only knew much of Europe themselves but who had as their advisers
the Foreign office with all its experience and tradition. Belloc
pointed out in an article on Versailles that the English tradition
had been to hold a balance between conflicting extremes and thus to
bring about a peace that at least ensured stability for a long
period. But here was a man too ignorant to realize the dangers of his
own ignorance and therefore seek help from experience. This peace
would be, Belloc foretold, the parent of many wars. The Czechs got
much of what they wanted just as d'Annunzio got Fiume for Italy--by
seizing it. Poland waited for Versallles and enlisted her allies, yet
while the Peace Conference was actually in session Germans were
persecuting Poles in East Prussia so that many thousands of them fled
into Poland proper and thus diminished the Polish population of East
Prussia before any plebiscite could be taken there.