at least of the cloud of misery and suffering that weighed down upon Europe. In some elusive, intangible way the knowledge of the work he was doing shot like a purifying ray through the fog that enveloped the endeavours and the impotence of the Conference.

O

CHAPTER VI

NEW MAPS FOR OLD

NE of the chief tasks of the Conference was to make new maps. The face of Europe and Asia was to be changed. Everyone who was anyone wanted something different. France wanted Alsace-Lorraine and the Saar Valley and the left bank of the Rhine and Syria and part of the Cameroons; Great Britain wanted Mesopotamia and German East Africa and Southwest Africa and some South Pacific Islands and possibly Palestine, and ought to have wanted a regularised title to Egypt; Italy wanted the Trentino and Trieste and the Tyrol and Dalmatia and Fiume and parts of Albania and a foothold at Adalia; Japan wanted Shantung and some North Pacific Islands; Greece wanted extensions in Epirus and Macedonia and the return of the Dodecanese and considerable holdings round Smyrna; Belgium wanted parts of German East Africa and various concessions at the expense of Holland; Poland wanted independence; so did Czecho-Slovakia and Jugo-Slavia and the border states of Russia; Rumania wanted Transylvania and Bessarabia. America, grotesquely unversed in the enterprising diplomacy of Europe, wanted nothing at all.

Claims of that order threw into the limelight one definite principle-the principle of acquisition. Quite a lot might be said for and against that, but at any rate it was not the principle laid down in President Wilson's Fourteen Points and his subsequent addresses. What students of those addresses had a right to look for when the Conference opened was a rearrangement of the map of the world determined by one principle above any other the right of peoples to choose their own governors and governments. The world was for the first time to be, so to speak, town-planned, with regard to no consideration whatever but the soundness and justice of the plan. Imperialist desires and designs were irrelevant. The world had risen to a level above the old bad order to which they essentially belonged.

Those hopes and beliefs did not survive many days of the Conference. The principles on which they rested were not banished from the Council chamber. President Wilson saw to that, if no one else did. But instead of the general and tacit acceptance to which they were entitled they gained merely a theoretical recognition, except at moments when some delegate suddenly invoked them as serviceable supports to an argument based essentially on quite different and quite material considerations. The Conference in short was a battle-ground on which the new conflicted with the old. The contest swayed doubtfully, and each in turn was uppermost. On balance it can hardly be claimed that the victory was with the new.