phatically he may dissent from it, cannot ignore. He said:
"All the smaller communities are greedy and insatiable. If the chiefs of
the World Powers had understood their temper and ascertained their
aspirations in 1914, much that has passed into history since then would
never have taken place. During the war these miniature countries were
courted, flattered, and promised the sun and the moon, earth and heaven,
and all the glories therein. And now that these promises cannot be
redeemed, they are wroth, and peevishly threaten the great states with
disobedience and revolt. This, it is true, they could not do if the
latter had not forfeited their authority and prestige by allowing their
internal differences, hesitations, contradictions, and repentances to
become manifest to all. To-day it is common knowledge that the Great
Powers are amenable to very primitive incentives and deterrents. If in
the beginning they had been united and said to their minor brethren:
'These are your frontiers. These your obligations,' the minor brethren
would have bowed and acquiesced gratefully. In this way the boundary
problems might have been settled to the satisfaction of all, for each
new or enlarged state would have been treated as the recipient of a free
gift from the World Powers. But the plenipotentiaries went about their
task in a different and unpractical fashion. They began by recognizing
the new communities, and then they gave them representatives at the
Conference. This they did on the ground that the League of Nations must
first be founded, and that all well-behaved belligerents on the Allied
side have a right to be consulted upon that. And, finally, instead of
keeping to their program and liquidating the war, they mingled the
issues of peace with the clauses of the League and debated them
simultaneously. In these debates they revealed their own internal
differences, their hesitancy, and the weakness of their will. And the
lesser states have taken advantage of that. The general results have
been the postponement of peace, the physical exhaustion of the Central
Empires, and the spread of Bolshevism."

It should not be forgotten that this mixture of the general and the
particular of the old order and the new was objected to on other
grounds. The Italians, for example, urged that it changed the status of
a large number of their adversaries into that of highly privileged
Allies. During the war they were enemies, before the peace discussi