s hoped and believed
that the Congress would perform its tasks in a short period, but it was
only after nine months' gestation and sore travail that it finally
brought forth its offspring--a mountain of Acts which have been
moldering in dust ever since.

The Wilsonian Covenant, which bound together thirty-two states--a league
intended to be incomparably more powerful than was the Holy
Alliance--will take rank as the most rapid improvisation of its kind in
diplomatic history.

A comparison between the features common to the two international
legislatures struck many observers as even more reassuring than the
contrast between their differences. Both were placed in like
circumstances, faced with bewildering and fateful problems to which an
exhausting war, just ended, had imparted sharp actuality. One of the
delegates to the Vienna Congress wrote:

"Everything had to be recast and made new, the destinies of Germany,
Italy, and Poland settled, a solid groundwork laid for the future, and a
commercial system to be outlined."[7] Might not those very words have
been penned at any moment during the Paris Conference with equal
relevance to its undertakings?

Or these: "However easily and gracefully the fine old French wit might
turn the topics of the day, people felt vaguely beneath it all that
these latter times were very far removed from the departed era and, in
many respects, differed from it to an incomprehensible degree."[8] And
the veteran Prince de Ligne remarked to the Comte de la Garde: "From
every side come cries of Peace, Justice, Equilibrium, Indemnity.... Who
will evolve order from this chaos and set a dam to the stream of
claims?" How often have the same cries and queries been uttered in
Paris?

When the first confidential talks began at the Vienna Congress, the same
difficulties arose as were encountered over a century later in Paris
about the number of states that were entitled to have representatives
there. At the outset, the four Cabinet Ministers of Austria, Russia,
England, and Prussia kept things to themselves, excluding vanquished
France and the lesser Powers. Some time afterward, however, Talleyrand,
the spokesman of the worsted nation, accompanied by the Portuguese
Minister, Labrador, protested vehemently against the form and results of
the deliberations. At one sitting passion rose to white heat and
Talleyrand spoke of quitting the Congress altogether, whereupon a
compromise was struck and eight nat