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 app