The new states, Czechoslovakia and Poland, the aggrandized states, Rumania, Serbia, and Greece, and countries that had not been belligerents but expected the conference to decide their future, such as Egypt, Armenia, Persia, the Caucasus republics, Ukrainia, Lithuania, Latvia, Esthonia, and Finland, were not bound, before the conference, by special agreements with any of the great powers. They furnished the most hopeful field for the application of the Wilsonian principles. President Wilson, with his personally selected delegates, experts, and secretaries, arrived in Paris more than a month before the conference met. Mr. Wilson received an enthusiastic reception, which was repeated in England and Italy during the holiday season. His aides and advisers were men of great ability, who had prepared themselves in the minutest details for their task. The President did not lack well informed and well balanced collaborators. They organized their offices in such a way that the peace delegation had available not only the data compiled in America but also accurate information concerning conditions, as they developed during the conference, in Europe and the Near East. But the principal asset of success was lacking. The United States had failed to make her coöperation in the war contingent upon the acceptance by her associates of certain facts and well defined principles. None of them was pledged to us. All of them were pledged to one another in ways that were going to make futile the work that President Wilson purposed to accomplish. The Peace Conference was not going to bring to us “the moral leadership of the world.” None cared for our leadership at the beginning; and during the conference, instead of President Wilson’s imposing his ideals upon the other statesmen, they imposed theirs upon him. CHAPTER III THE PEACE CONFERENCE AT PARIS Books about the famous conference of 1919 have multiplied so rapidly that a man must have much space to shelve them all, and he can hope to do little else if he has decided to read them thoroughly, with what the critics have to say about them. For most of the cooks in the Paris broth, after spoiling it, were unable to control the impulse to tell the world why it was not their particular fault. Coming back to America after the conference, I began to collect material about it, documents, books, reports of speeches and debates, magazine articles, newspaper cuttings of reviews of books and of letters about books and about the criticisms of them. The material mounted alarmingly. And yet I kept on reading. The general impression that comes from trying to get every angle of criticism concerning the conference is not at all confused. On the contrary, it is clear. The Paris Peace Conference, in retrospect, has few defenders of its methods or its work. It is on record, convicted by those who participated in it, as one of the most tragic and monumental failures of history.