the Covenant as would not bind them to an obnoxious principle or commit
their electorates to any irksome sacrifice, that the peace treaty with
Germany and the liquidation of the war were postponed. This delay caused
profound dissatisfaction in continental Europe, but it had the
incidental advantage of bringing home to the victorious nations the
marvelous recuperative powers of the German race. It also gave time for
the drafting of a compact so admirably tempered to the human weaknesses
of the rival signatory nations, whose passions were curbed only by sheer
exhaustion, that all their spokesmen saw their way to sign it. There was
something almost genial in the simplicity of the means by which the
eminent promoter of the Covenant intended to reform the peoples of the
world. He gave them credit for virtues which would have rendered the
League unnecessary and displayed indulgence for passions which made its
speedy realization hopeless, thus affording a _superfluous_ illustration
of the truth that the one deadly evil to be shunned by those who would
remain philanthropists is a practical knowledge of men, and of the
truism that the statesman's bane is an inordinate fondness for abstract
ideas.

One of the decided triumphs of the Paris Peace Conference over the
Vienna Congress lay in the amazing speed with which it got through the
difficult task of solving offhandedly some of the most formidable
problems that ever exercised the wit of man. One of the Paris journals
contained the following remarkable announcement: "The actual time
consumed in constituting the League of Nations, which it is hoped will
be the means of keeping peace in the world, was thirty hours. This
doesn't seem possible, but it is true."[6]

How provokingly slowly the dawdlers of Vienna moved in comparison may
be read in the chronicles of that time. The peoples hoped and believed