been doing, even at the last moment he was in, a position to have
recovered lost ground and to have achieved some very considerable
successes. But the President was set. His arms and legs had been spliced
by the surgeons to a certain posture, and they must be broken again
before they could be altered. To his horror, Mr. Lloyd George, desiring
at the last moment all the moderation he dared, discovered that he could
not in five days persuade the President of error in what it had taken
five months to prove to him to be just and right. After all, it was
harder to de-bamboozle this old Presbyterian than it had been to
bamboozle him; for the former involved his belief in and respect for
himself.

Thus in the last act the President stood for stubbornness and a refusal
of conciliations.

FOOTNOTES:

[6] He alone amongst the Four could speak and understand both
languages, Orlando knowing only French and the Prime Minister and
President only English; and it is of historical importance that Orlando
and the President had no direct means of communication.

CHAPTER IV

THE TREATY

The thoughts which I have expressed in the second chapter were not
present to the mind of Paris. The future life of Europe was not their
concern; its means of livelihood was not their anxiety. Their
preoccupations, good and bad alike, related to frontiers and
nationalities, to the balance of power, to imperial aggrandizements, to
the future enfeeblement of a strong and dangerous enemy, to revenge, and
to the shifting by the victors of their unbearable financial burdens on
to the shoulders of the defeated.

Two rival schemes for the future polity of the world took the
field,--the Fourteen Points of the President, and the Carthaginian Peace
of M. Clemenceau. Yet only one of these was entitled to take the field;
for the enemy had not surrendered unconditionally, but on agreed terms
as to the general character of the Peace.

This aspect of what happened cannot, unfortunately, be passed over with
a word, for in the minds of many Englishmen at least it has been a
subject of very great misapprehension. Many persons believe that the
Armistice Terms constituted the first Contract concluded between the
Allied and Associated Powers and the German Government, and that we
entered the Conference with our hands, free, except so far as these
Armistice Terms might bind us. This was not the case. To make the
position plain, it is necessary briefly to re