Since the close of the war internationalism was in the air, and the labor movement intensified it.  It stirred the thought and warmed the imagination alike of exploiters and exploited.  Reformers and pacifists yearned for it as a means of establishing a well-knit society of progressive and pacific peoples and setting a term to sanguinary wars.  Some financiers may have longed for it in a spirit analogous to that in which Nero wished that the Roman people had but one neck.  And the Conference chiefs seemed to have pictured it to themselves—­if, indeed, they meditated such an abstract matter—­in the guise of a pax Anglo-Saxonica, the distinctive feature of which would lie in the transfer to the two principal peoples—­and not to a board representing all nations—­of those attributes of sovereignty which the other states would be constrained to give up.  Of these three currents flowing in the direction of internationalism only one—­that of finance—­appears for the moment likely to reach its goal....

FOOTNOTES: 

[36] L’Humanite, March 6 and 18, 1919.

[37] Cf. L’Humanite, April 10,1919.

[38] The sentence was subsequently commuted.

[39] La Gazette de Lausanne, May 26, 1919.

[40] 128th Division.

[41] It was reproduced by the French Syndicalist organ, L’Humanite of July 7, 1919.

[42] R. de Saussure.  Cf. Journal de Geneve, August 18, and also May 26, 1919.

[43] d, r, t, l, g (partly) and p, except at the beginning of a word.

[44] Cf. the French papers generally for the month of May—­also Bonsoir, July 26, 1919.

[45] Walther Rathenau has dealt with this question in several of his recent pamphlets, which are not before me at the moment.

III

THE DELEGATES

The plenipotentiaries, who became the world’s arbiters for a while, were truly representative men.  But they mirrored forth not so much the souls of their respective peoples as the surface spirit that flitted over an evanescent epoch.  They stood for national grandeur, territorial expansion, party interests, and even abstract ideas.  Exponents of a narrow section of the old order at its lowest ebb, they were in no sense heralds of the new.  Amid a labyrinth of ruins they had no clue to guide their footsteps, in which the peoples of the world were told to follow.  Only true political vision, breadth of judgment, thorough mastery of the elements of the situation, an instinct for discerning central issues, genuine concern for high principles of governance, and the rare moral courage that disregards popularity as a mainspring of action—­could have fitted any set of legislators to tackle the complex and thorny problems that pressed for settlement and to effect the necessary preliminary changes.  That the delegates of the