ces at the Conference to obtain
for them complete autonomy. To this demand M.B. is said to have received
a reply[68] to the effect that the President "is persuaded that this
question will form the subject of a thorough examination by the
competent authorities of the Conference" Corsica, the birthplace of
Napoleon, and as much an integral part of France as the Isle of Man is
of England, seeking to slacken the ties that link it to the Republic and
receiving a promise that the matter would be carefully considered by the
delegates sounds more like a mystification than a sober statement of
fact. The story was sent to the newspapers for publication, but the
censor very wisely struck it out.

These and kindred occurrences enable one better to appreciate the
motives which prompted the delegates to shroud their conversations and
tentative decisions in a decorous veil of secrecy.

It is but fair to say that the enterprise to which they set their hands
was the vastest that ever tempted lofty ambitions since the
tower-builders of Babel strove to bring heaven within reach of the
earth. It transcended the capacity of the contemporary world's greatest
men.[69] It was a labor for a wonder-worker in the pristine days of
heroes. But although to solve even the main problems without residue was
beyond the reach of the most genial representatives of latter-day
statecraft, it needed only clearness of conception, steadiness of
purpose, and the proper adjustment of means to ends, to begin the work
on the right lines and give it an impulse that might perhaps carry it to
completion in the fullness of time.

But even these postulates were wanting. The eminent parliamentarians
failed to rise to the gentle height of average statecraft. They appeared
in their new and august character of world-reformers with all the roots
still clinging to them of the rank electoral soil from which they
sprang. Their words alone were redolent of idealism, their deeds were
too often marred by pettifogging compromises or childish
blunders--constructive phrases and destructive acts. Not only had they
no settled method of working, they lacked even a common proximate aim.
For although they all employed the same phraseology when describing the
objects for which their countries had fought and they themselves were
ostensibly laboring, no two delegates attached the same ideas to the
words they used. Yet, instead of candidly avowing this root-defect and
remedying it, they w