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