Part 9

One day there was an animated discussion in the twilight of the Paris conclave while the press was belauding the plenipotentiaries for their touching unanimity. The debate lay between the United States as voiced by Mr. Wilson and Great Britain as represented by Mr. Lloyd George. On the morrow, before the conversation was renewed, a colleague adjured the British Premier to stand firm, urging that his contention of the previous day was just in the abstract and beneficial to the Empire as well. Mr. Lloyd George bowed to the force of these motives, but yielded to the greater force of Mr. Wilson's resolve. "Put it to the test," urged the colleague. "I dare not," was the rejoinder. "Wilson won't brook it. Already he threatens, if we do, to leave the Conference and return home." "Well then, let him. If he did, we should be none the worse off for his absence. But rest assured, he won't go. He cannot afford to return home empty-handed after his splendid promises to his countrymen and the world." Mr. Lloyd George insisted, however, and said, "But he will take his army away, too." "What!" exclaimed the tempter. "His army? Well, I only ..." but it would serve no useful purpose to quote the vigorous answer in full.

This odd mixture of exaggerated self-confidence, mismeasurement of forces, and pliability to external influences could not but be baleful in one of the leaders of an assembly composed, as was the Paris Conference, of men each with his own particular ax to grind and impressible only to high moral authority or overwhelming military force. It cannot be gainsaid that no one, not even his own familiars, could ever foresee the next move in Mr. Lloyd George's game of statecraft, and it is demonstrable that on several occasions he himself was so little aware of what he would do next that he actually advocated as indispensable measures diametrically opposed to those which he was to propound, defend, and carry a week or two later. A conversation which took place between him and one of his fellow-workers gives one the measure of his irresolution and fitfulness. "Do tell me," said this collaborator, "why it is that you members of the Supreme Council are hurriedly changing to-day the decisions you came to after five months' study, which you say was time well spent?"

"Because of fresh information we have received in the meanwhile. We know more now than we knew then and the different data necessitate different treatment."

"Yes, but the conditions have not changed since the Conference opened. Surely they were the same in January as they are in June. Is not that so?"

"No doubt, no doubt, but we did not ascertain them before June, so we could not act upon them until now."

With the leading delegates thus drifting and the pieces on the political chessboard bewilderingly disposed, outsiders came to look upon the Conference as a lottery. Unhappily, it was a lottery in which there were no mere blanks, but only prizes or heavy forfeits.

To sum up: the first British delegate, essentially a man of expedients and shifts, was incapable of measuring more than an arc of the political circle at a time. A comprehensive survey of a complicated situation was beyond his reach. He relied upon imagination and intuition as substitutes for precise knowledge and technical skill. Hence he himself could never be sure that his decision, however carefully worked out, would be final, seeing that in June facts might come to his cognizance with which five months' investigations had left him unacquainted. This incertitude about the elements of the problem intensified the ingrained hesitancy that had characterized his entire public career and warped his judgment effectually. The only approach to a guiding principle one can find in his work at the Conference was the loosely held maxim that Great Britain's best policy was to stand in with the United States in all momentous issues and to identify Mr. Wilson with the United States for most purposes of the Congress. Within these limits Mr. Lloyd George was unyielding in fidelity to the cause of France, with which he merged that of civilization.

M. Clemenceau is the incarnation of the tireless spirit of destruction. Pulling down has ever been his delight, and it is largely to his success in demolishing the defective work of rivals--and all human work is defective--that he owes the position of trust and responsibility to which the Parliament raised him during the last phase of the war. Physically strong, despite his advanced age, he is mentally brilliant and superficial, with a bias for paradox, epigram, and racy, unconventional phraseology. His action is impulsive. In the Dreyfus days I saw a good deal of M. Clemenceau in his editorial office, when he would unburden his soul to M.M. Vaughan, the poet Quillard, and others. Later on I approached him while he was chief of the government on a delicate matter of international combined with national politics, on which I had been requested to sound him by a friendly government, and I found him, despite his developed and sobering sense of responsibility, whimsical, impulsive, and credulous as before. When I next talked with him he was the rebellious editor of L'Homme Enchaîné, whose corrosive strictures upon the government of the day were the terror of Ministers and censors. Soon afterward he himself became the wielder of the great national gagging-machine, and in the stringency with which he manipulated it he is said by his own countrymen to have outdone the government of the Third Empire. His alter ego, Georges Mandel, is endowed with qualities which supplement and correct those of his venerable chief. His grasp of detail is comprehensive and firm, his memory retentive, and his judgment bold and deliberate. A striking illustration of the audacity of his resolve was given in the early part of 1918. Marshal Joffre sent a telegram to President Wilson in Washington, and because he had omitted to despatch it through the War Ministry, M. Mandel, who is a strict disciplinarian, proposed that he be placed under arrest. It was with difficulty that some public men moved him to leniency.

M. Clemenceau, the professional destroyer, who can boast that he overthrew eighteen Cabinets, or nineteen if we include his own, was unquestionably the right man to carry on the war. He acquitted himself of the task superbly. His faith in the Allies' victory was unwavering. He never doubted, never flagged, never was intimidated by obstacles nor wheedled by persons. Once during the armistice, in May or June, when Marshal Foch expressed his displeasure that the Premier should have issued military orders to troops under his command without first consulting him, he was on the point of dismissing the Marshal and appointing General Pétain to succeed him. Whether the qualities which stood him in such good stead during the world struggle could be of equal, or indeed of much, avail in the general constructive work for which the Conference was assembled is a question that needs only to be formulated. But in securing every advantage that could be conferred on his own country his influence on the delegates was decisive. M. Clemenceau, who before the war was the intimate friend of Austrian journalists, hated his country's enemies with undying hate. And he loved France passionately. I remember significant words of his, uttered at the end of the year 1899 to an enterprising young man who had founded a Franco-German review in Munich and craved his moral support. "Is it possible," he exclaimed, "that it has already come to that? Well, a nation is not conquered until it accepts defeat. Whenever France gives up she will have deserved her humiliation."

At the Conference M. Clemenceau moved every lever to deliver his country for all time from the danger of further invasions. And, being a realist, he counted only on military safeguards. At the League of Nations he was wont to sneer until it dawned upon him that it might be forged into an effective weapon of national defense. And then he included it in the litany of abstract phrases about right, justice, and the self-determination of peoples which it became the fashion to raise to the inaccessible heights where those ideals are throned which are to be worshiped but not incarnated. The public somehow never took his conversion to Wilsonianism seriously, neither did his political friends until the League bade fair to become serviceable in his country's hands. M. Clemenceau's acquaintanceship with international politics was at once superior to that of the British Premier and very slender. But his program at the Conference was simple and coherent, because independent of geography and ethnography: France was to take Germany's leading position in the world, to create powerful and devoted states in eastern Europe, on whose co-operation she could reckon, and her allies were to do the needful in the way of providing due financial and economic assistance so as to enable her to address herself to the cultural problems associated with her new rôle. And he left nothing undone that seemed conducive to the attainment of that object. Against Mr. Wilson he maneuvered to the extent which his adviser, M. Tardieu, deemed safe, and one of his most daring speculations was on the President's journey to the States, during which M. Clemenceau and his European colleagues hoped to get through a deal of work on their own lines and to present Mr. Wilson with the decisions ready for ratification on his return. But the stratagem was not merely apparent; it was bruited abroad with indiscreet details, whereupon the first American delegate on his return broke the tables of their laws--one of which separated the Treaty from the Covenant--and obliged them to begin anew. It is fair to add that M. Clemenceau was no uncompromising partisan of the conquest of the left bank of the Rhine, nor of colonial conquests. These currents took their rise elsewhere. "We don't want protesting deputies in the French Parliament," he once remarked in the presence of the French Minister of Foreign Affairs. Offered the choice between a number of bridgeheads in Germany and the military protection of the Anglo-Saxon peoples, he unhesitatingly decided for the latter, which had been offered to him by President Wilson after the rejection of the Rhine frontier.

M. Clemenceau, whose remarkable mental alacrity, self-esteem, and love of sharp repartee occasionally betrayed him into tactless sallies and epigrammatic retorts, deeply wounded the pride of more than one delegate of the lesser Powers in a way which they deemed incompatible alike with circumspect statesmanship and the proverbial hospitality of his country. For he is incapable of resisting the temptation to launch a bon mot, however stinging. It would be ungenerous, however, to attach more importance to such quickly forgotten utterances than he meant them to carry. An instance of how he behaved toward the representatives of Britain and France is worth recording, both as characterizing the man and as extenuating his offense against the delegates of the lesser Powers.

One morning M. Clemenceau appeared at the Conference door, and seemed taken aback by the large number of unfamiliar faces and figures behind Mr. Balfour, toward whom he sharply turned with the brusque interrogation: "Who are those people behind you? Are they English?" "Yes, they are," was the answer. "Well, what do they want here?" "They have come on the same errand as those who are now following you." Thereupon the French Premier, whirling round, beheld with astonishment and displeasure a band of Frenchmen moving toward him, led by M. Pichon, the Minister of Foreign Affairs. In reply to his question as to the motive of their arrival, he was informed that they were all experts, who had been invited to give the Conference the benefit of their views about the revictualing of Hungary. "Get out, all of you. You are not wanted here," he cried in a commanding voice. And they all moved away meekly, led by M. Pichon, the Minister of Foreign Affairs. Their services proved to be unnecessary, for the result reached by the Conference was negative.

M. Tardieu cannot be separated from his chief, with whom he worked untiringly, placing at his disposal his intimate knowledge of the nooks and crannies of professional and unprofessional diplomacy. He is one of the latest arrivals and most pushing workers in the sphere of the Old World statecraft, affects Yankee methods, and speaks English. For several years political editor of the Temps, he obtained access to the state archives, and wrote a book on the Agadir incident which was well received, and also a monograph on Prince von Bülow, became Deputy, aimed at a ministerial portfolio, and was finally appointed Head Commissary to the United States. Faced by difficulties there--mostly the specters of his own former utterances evoked by German adversaries--his progress at first was slow. He was accused of having approved some of the drastic methods--especially the U-boat campaign--which the Germans subsequently employed, because in the year 1912, when he was writing on the subject, France believed that she herself possessed the best submarines, and she meant to employ them. He was also challenged to deny that he had written, in August, 1912, that in every war churches and monuments of art must suffer, and that "no army, whatever its nationality, can renounce this." He was further charged with having taken a kindly interest in air-war and bomb-dropping, and given it as his opinion that it would be absurd "to deprive of this advantage those who had made most progress in perfecting this weapon." But M. Tardieu successfully exorcised these and other ghosts. And on his return from the United States he was charged with organizing a press bureau of his own, to supply American journalists with material for their cablegrams, while at the same time he collaborated with M. Clemenceau in reorganizing the political communities of the world. It is only in the French Chamber, of which he is a distinguished member, that M. Tardieu failed to score a brilliant success. Few men are prophets in their own country, and he is far from being an exception. At the Conference, in its later phases, he found himself in frequent opposition to the chief of the Italian delegation, Signor Tittoni. One of the many subjects on which they disagreed was the fate of German Austria and the political structure and orientation of the independent communities which arose on the ruins of the Dual Monarchy. M. Tardieu favored an arrangement which would bring these populations closely together and impart to the whole an anti-Teutonic impress. If Germany could not be broken up into a number of separate states, as in the days of her weakness, all the other European peoples in the territories concerned could, and should, be united against her, and at the least hindered from making common cause with her. The unification of Germany he considered a grave danger, and he strove to create a countervailing state system.

To the execution of this project there were formidable difficulties. For one thing, none of the peoples in question was distinctly anti-German. Each one was for itself. Again, they were not particularly enamoured of one another, nor were their interests always concordant, and to constrain them by force to unite would have been not to prevent but to cause future wars. A Danubian federation--the concrete shape imagined for this new bulwark of European peace--did not commend itself to the Italians, who had their own reasons for their opposition besides the Wilsonian doctrine, which they invoked. If it be true, Signor Tittoni argues, that Austria does not desire to be amalgamated with Germany, why not allow her to exercise the right of self-determination accorded to other peoples? M. Tardieu, on the other hand, not content with the prohibition to Germany to unite with Austria, proposed that in the treaty with Austria this country should be obliged to repress the unionist movement in the population. This amendment was inveighed against by the Italian delegation in the name of every principle professed and transgressed by the world-mending Powers. Even from the French point of view he declared it perilous, inasmuch as there was, and could be, no guarantee that a Danubian confederation would not become a tool in Germany's hands.

Two things struck me as characteristic of the principal plenipotentiaries: as a rule, they eschewed first-rate men as fellow-workers, one integer and several zeros being their favorite formula, and they took no account of the flight of time, planning as though an eternity were before them and then suddenly improvising as though afraid of being late for a train or a steamer. These peculiarities were baleful. The lesser states, having mainly first-class men to represent them, illustrated the law of compensation, which assigned many mediocrities to the Great Powers. The former were also the most strenuous toilers, for their task bristled with difficulties and abounded in startling surprises, and its accomplishment depended on the will of others. Time and again they went over the ground with infinite care, counting and gaging the obstacles in their way, devising means to overcome them, and rehearsing the effort in advance. So much stress had been laid during the war on psychology, and such far-reaching consequences were being drawn from the Germans' lack of it, that these public men made its cultivation their personal care. Hence, besides tracing large-scale maps of provinces and comprehensive maps of the countries to be reconstituted, and ransacking history for arguments and precedents, they conscientiously ascertained the idiosyncrasies of their judges, in order to choose the surest ways to impress, convince, or persuade them. And it was instructive to see them try their hand at this new game.

One and all gave assent to the axiom that moderation would impress the arbiters more favorably than greed, but not all of them wielded sufficient self-command to act upon it. The more resourceful delegates, whose tasks were especially redoubtable because they had to demand large provinces coveted by others, prepared the ground by visiting personally some of the more influential arbiters before these were officially appointed, forcibly laying their cases before them and praying for their advice. In reality they were striving to teach them elementary geography, history, and politics. The Ulysses of the Conference, M. Venizelos, first pilgrimaged to London, saying: "If the Foreign Office is with Greece, what matters it who is against her." He hastened to call on President Wilson as soon as that statesman arrived in Europe, and, to the surprise of many, the two remained a long time closeted together. "Whatever did you talk about?" asked a colleague of the Greek Premier. "How did you keep Wilson interested in your national claims all that time? You must have--" "Oh no," interrupted the modest statesman. "I disposed of our claims succinctly enough. A matter of two minutes. Not more. I asked him to dispense me from taking up his time with such complicated issues which he and his colleagues would have ample opportunity for studying. The rest of the time I was getting him to give me the benefit of his familiarity with the subject of the League of Nations. And he was good enough to enumerate the reasons why it should be realized, and the way in which it must be worked. I was greatly impressed by what he said." "Just fancy!" exclaimed a colleague, "wasting all that time in talking about a scheme which will never come to anything!" But M. Venizelos knew that the time was not misspent. President Wilson was at first nowise disposed to lend a favorable ear to the claims of Greece, which he thought exorbitant, and down to the very last he gave his support to Bulgaria against Greece whole-heartedly. The Cretan statesman passed many an hour of doubt and misgiving before he came within sight of his goal. But he contrived to win the President over to his way of envisaging many Oriental questions. He is a past-master in practical psychology.

The first experiments of M. Venizelos, however, were not wholly encouraging. For all the care he lavished on the chief luminaries of the Conference seemingly went to supplement their education and fill up a few of the geographical, historical, philological, ethnological, and political gaps in their early instruction rather than to guide them in their concrete decisions, which it was expected would be always left to the "commissions of experts." But the fruit which took long to mature ripened at last, and Greece had many of her claims allowed. Thus in reorganizing the communities of the world the personal factor played a predominant part. Venizelos was, so to say, a fixed star in the firmament, and his light burned bright through every rift in the clouds. His moderation astonished friends and opponents. Every one admired his exposé of his case as a masterpiece. His statesman-like setting, in perspective, the readiness with which he put himself in the place of his competitor and struck up a fair compromise, endeared him to many, and his praises were in every one's mouth. His most critical hour--it lasted for months--struck when he found himself struggling with the President of the United States, who was for refusing the coast of Thrace to Greece and bestowing it on Bulgaria. But with that dispute I deal in another place.

Of Italy's two plenipotentiaries during the first five months one was the most supple and the other the most inflexible of her statesmen, Signor Orlando and Baron Sonnino. If her case was presented to the Conference with less force than was attainable, the reasons are obvious. Her delegates had a formal treaty on which they relied; to the attitude of their country from the outbreak of the war to its finish they rightly ascribed the possibility of the Allies' victory, and they expected to see this priceless service recognized practically; the moderation and suppleness of Signor Orlando were neutralized by the uncompromising attitude of Baron Sonnino, and, lastly, the gaze of both statesmen was fixed upon territorial questions and sentimental aspirations to the neglect of economic interests vital to the state--in other words, they beheld the issues in wrong perspective. But one of the most popular figures among the delegates was Signor Orlando, whose eloquence and imagination gave him advantages which would have been increased a hundredfold if he might have employed his native language in the conclave. For he certainly displayed resourcefulness, humor, a historic sense, and the gift of molding the wills of men. But he was greatly hampered. Some of his countrymen alleged that Baron Sonnino was his evil genius. One of the many sayings attributed to him during the Conference turned upon the quarrels of some of the smaller peoples among themselves. "They are," the Premier said, "like a lot of hens being held by the feet and carried to market. Although all doomed to the same fate, they contrive to fight one another while awaiting it."

After the fall of Orlando's Cabinet, M. Tittoni repaired to Paris as Italy's chief delegate. His reputation as one of Europe's principal statesmen was already firmly established; he had spent several years in Paris as Ambassador, and he and the late Di San Giuliano and Giolitti were the men who broke with the Central Empires when these were about to precipitate the World War. In French nationalist circles Signor Tittoni had long been under a cloud, as the man of pro-German leanings. The suspicion--for it was nothing more--was unfounded. On the contrary, M. Tittoni is known to have gone with the Allies to the utmost length consistent with his sense of duty to his own country. To my knowledge he once gave advice which his Italian colleagues and political friends and adversaries now bitterly regret was disregarded. The nature of that counsel will one day be disclosed....

Of Japan's delegates, the Marquis Saionji and Baron Makino, little need be said, seeing that their qualifications for their task were demonstrated by the results. Mainly to statesmanship and skilful maneuvering Japan is indebted for her success at the Paris Conference, where her cause was referred by Mr. Lloyd George and M. Clemenceau to Mr. Wilson to deal with. The behavior of her representatives was an illuminating object-lesson in the worth of psychological tactics in practical politics. They hardly ever appeared in the footlights, remained constantly silent and observant, and were almost ignored by the press. But they kept their eyes fixed on the goal. Their program was simple. Amid the flitting shadows of political events they marched together with the Allies, until these disagreed among themselves, and then they voted with Great Britain and the United States. Occasionally they went farther and proposed measures for the lesser states which Britain framed, but desired to second rather than propose. Japan, at the Conference, was a stanch collaborator of the two English-speaking principals until her own opportunity came, and then she threw all her hoarded energies into her cause, and by her firm resolve dispelled any opposition that Mr. Wilson may have intended to offer. One of the most striking episodes of the Conference was the swift, silent, and successful campaign by which Japan had her secret treaty with China hall-marked by the puritanical President of the United States, whose sense of morality could not brook the secret treaties concluded by Italy and Rumania with the Greater and Greatest Powers of Europe. Again, it was with statesman-like sagacity that the Japanese judged the Russian situation and made the best of it--first, shortly before the invitation to Prinkipo, and, later, before the celebrated eight questions were submitted to Admiral Kolchak. I was especially struck by an occurrence, trivial in appearance, which demonstrated the weight which they rightly attached to the psychological side of politics. Everybody in Paris remarked, and many vainly complained of, the indifference, or rather, unfriendliness, of which Russians were the innocent victims. Among the Allied troops who marched under the Arc de Triomphe on July 14th there were Rumanians, Greeks, Portuguese, and Indians, but not a single Russian. A Russian general drove about in the forest of flags and banners that day looking eagerly for symbols of his own country, but for hours the quest was fruitless. At last, when passing the Japanese Embassy, he perceived, to his delight, an enormous Russian flag waving majestically in the breeze, side by side with that of Nippon. "I shed tears of joy," he told his friend that evening, "and I vowed that neither I nor my country would ever forget this touching mark of friendship."

Japanese public opinion criticized severely the failure of their delegates to obtain recognition of the equality of races or nations. This judgment seems unjust, for nothing that they could have done or said would have wrung from Mr. Wilson and Mr. Hughes their assent to the doctrine, nor, if they had been induced to proclaim it, would it have been practically applied.

In general, the lawyers were the most successful in stating their cases. But one of the delegates of the lesser states who made the deepest impression on those of the greater was not a member of the bar. The head of the Polish delegation, Roman Dmowski, a picturesque, forcible speaker, a close debater and resourceful pleader, who is never at a loss for an image, a comparison, an argumentum ad hominem, or a repartee, actually won over some of the arbiters who had at first leaned toward his opponents--a noteworthy feat if one realizes all that it meant in an assembly where potent influences were working against some of the demands of resuscitated Poland. His speech in September on the future of eastern Galicia was a veritable masterpiece.

M. Dmowski appeared at the Conference under all the disadvantages that could be heaped upon a man who has incurred the resentment of the most powerful international body of modern times. He had the misfortune to have the Jews of the world as his adversaries. His Polish friends explained this hostility as follows. His ardent nationalist sentiments placed him in antagonism to every movement that ran counter to the progress of his country on nationalist lines. For he is above all things a Pole and a patriot. And as the Hebrew population of Poland, disbelieving in the resurrection of that nation, had long since struck up a cordial understanding with the states that held it in bondage, the gifted author of a book on the Foundations of Nationalism, which went through four editions, was regarded by the Hebrew elements of the population as an irreconcilable enemy. In truth, he was only the leader of a movement that was a historical necessity. One of the theses of the work was the necessity of cultivating an anti-German spirit in Poland as the only antidote against the Teuton virus introduced from Berlin through economic and other channels. And as the Polish Jews, whose idiom is a corrupted German dialect and whose leanings are often Teutonic, felt that the attack upon the whole was an attack on the part, they anathematized the author and held him up to universal obloquy. And there has been no reconciliation ever since. In the United States, where the Jewish community is numerous and influential, M. Dmowski found spokes in his wheel at every stage of his journey, and in Paris, too, he had to full-front a tremendous opposition, open and covert. Whatever unbiased people may think of this explanation and of his hostility to the Germans and their agents, Roman Dmowski deservedly enjoys the reputation of a straightforward and loyal fighter for his country's cause, a man who scorns underhand machinations and proclaims aloud--perhaps too frankly--the principles for which he is fighting. Polish Jews who appeared in Paris, some of them his bitterest antagonists, recognized the chivalrous way in which he conducts his electoral and other campaigns. Among the delegates his practical acquaintanceship with East European polities entitled him to high rank. For he knows the world better than any living statesman, having traveled over Europe, Asia, and America. He undertook and successfully accomplished a delicate mission in the Far East in the year 1905, rendering valuable services to his country and to the cause of civilization.

"M. Dmowski's activity," his friends further assert, "is impassioned and unselfish. The ambition that inspires and nerves him is not of the personal sort, nor is his patriotism a ladder leading to place and power. Polish patriotism occupies a category apart from that of other European peoples, and M. Dmowski has typified it with rare fidelity and completeness. If Wilsonianism had been realized, Polish nationalism might have become an anachronism. To-day it is a large factor in European politics and is little understood in the West. M. Dmowski lives for his country. Her interests absorb his energies. He would probably agree with the historian Paolo Sarpi, who said, 'Let us be Venetians first and Christians after.' Of the two widely divergent currents into which the main stream of political thought and sentiment throughout the world is fast dividing itself, M. Dmowski moves with the national away from the international championed by Mr. Wilson. The frequency with which the leading spirits of Bolshevism turn out to be Jews--to the dismay and disgust of the bulk of their own community--and the ingenuity they displayed in spreading their corrosive tenets in Poland may not have been without effect upon the energy of M. Dmowski's attitude toward the demand of the Polish Jews to be placed in the privileged position of wards of the League of Nations. But the principle of the protection of minority--Jewish or Gentile--is assailable on grounds which have nothing to do with race or religion." Some of the most interesting and characteristic incidents at the Conference had the Polish statesman for their principal actor, and to him Poland owes some of the most solid and enduring benefits conferred on her at the Conference.

Of a different temper is M. Paderewski, who appeared in Paris to plead his country's cause at a later stage of the labors of the Conference. This eminent artist's energies were all blended into one harmonious whole, so that his meetings with the great plenipotentiaries were never disturbed by a jarring note. As soon as it was borne in upon him that their decisions were as irrevocable as decrees of Fate, he bowed to them and treated the authors as Olympians who had no choice but to utter the stern fiat. Even when called upon to accept the obnoxious clause protecting religious and ethnic minorities against which his colleague had vainly fought, M. Paderewski sunk political passion in reason and attuned himself to the helpful role of harmonizer. He held that it would have been worse than useless to do otherwise. He was grieved that his country must acquiesce in that decree, he regretted intensely the necessity which constrained such proven friends of Poland as the Four to pass what he considered a severe sentence on her; but he resigned himself gracefully to the inevitable and thanked Fate's executioners for their personal sympathy. This attitude evoked praise and admiration from Messrs. Lloyd George and Wilson, and the atmosphere of the conclave seemed permeated with a spirit that induced calm satisfaction and the joy of elevated thoughts. M. Paderewski made a deep and favorable impression on the Supreme Council.

Belgium sent her most brilliant parliamentarian, M. Hymans, as first plenipotentiary to the Conference. He was assisted by the chief of the Socialist party, M. Vandervelde, and by an eminent authority on international law, M. Van den Heuvel. But for reasons which elude analysis, none of the three delegates hit it off with the duumvirate who were spinning the threads of the world's destinies. M. Hymans, however, by his warmth, sincerity, and courage impressed the representatives of the lesser states, won their confidence, became their natural spokesman, and blazed out against all attempts--and they were numerous and deliberate--to ignore their existence. It was he who by his direct and eloquent protest took M. Clemenceau off his guard and elicited the amazing utterance that the Powers which could put twelve million soldiers in the field were the world's natural arbiters. In this way he cleared the atmosphere of the distorting mists of catchwords and shibboleths.

How decisive a role internal politics played in the designation of plenipotentiaries to the Conference was shown with exceptional clearness in the case of Rumania. That country had no legislature. The Constituent Assembly, which had been dissolved owing to the German invasion, was followed by no fresh elections. The King, with whom the initiative thus rested, had reappointed M. Bratiano Chief of the Government, and M. Bratiano was naturally desirous of associating his own historic name with the aggrandizement of his country. But he also desired to secure the services of his political rival, M. Take Jonescu, whose reputation as a far-seeing statesman and as a successful negotiator is world-wide. Among his qualifications are an acquaintanceship with European countries and their affairs and a rare facility for give and take which is of the essence of international politics. He can assume the initiative in pourparlers, however uncompromising the outlook; frame plausible proposals; conciliate his opponents by showing how thoroughly he understands and appreciates their point of view, and by these means he has often worked out seemingly hopeless negotiations to a satisfactory issue. M. Clemenceau wrote of him, "C'est un grand Européen."

M. Bratiano's bid for the services of his eminent opponent was coupled with the offer of certain portfolios in the Cabinet to M. Jonescu and to a number of his parliamentary supporters. While negotiations were slowly proceeding by telegraph, M. Jonescu, who had already taken up his abode in Paris, was assiduously weaving his plans. He began by assuming what everybody knew, that the Powers would refuse to honor the secret treaty with France, Britain, and Russia, which assigned to Rumania all the territories to which she had laid claim, and he proposed first striking up a compromise with the other interested states, then compacting Rumania, Jugoslavia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Greece into a solid block, and asking the Powers to approve and ratify the new league. Truly it was a genial conception worthy of a broad-minded statesman. It aimed at a durable peace based on what he considered a fair settlement of claims satisfactory to all, and it would have lightened the burden of the Big Four. But whether it could have been realized by peoples moved by turbid passions and represented by trustees, some of whom were avowedly afraid to relinquish claims which they knew to be exorbitant, may well be doubted.