The story of Europe since 1918 gives us furiously to think; for we have seen our statesmen and leaders unable to abandon the traditional rules of the diplomatic game in their efforts to solve post-bellum problems and the great mass of intelligent men and women unwilling to inform themselves about and think constructively upon questions affecting world peace. It was natural that there should have been indulgence in prejudices and passions during the war. Whether in a righteous cause or not, fighting implies the abandonment of the inhibitions of civilized society and a return of the law of the jungle. Violence and the reasoning faculty cannot be used coördinately in the settlement of disputes. The excuse for putting our trust in force was that our opponents would listen to no other argument, and that when we had won we intended to restore the rule of reason. Our methods and our aims were totally different from those of our enemies, so we said, and we were saving civilization while they were trying to destroy it. In fairness to our statesmen it must be recognized that public opinion in all the victorious countries called out for a victors’ peace and that if the world now exhibits symptoms of social disintegration and is for the time being on the down grade, it is because the passions engendered by the war did not die out and because hysterical peoples forgot or disclaimed in the hour of victory the goal that had made them capable of stupendous sacrifices and effort during the war years. The Entente Powers and the United States are beginning to recognize that their failure to agree upon a common policy in Europe and the Near East is condemning them to forego the advantages of their victory in the World War. Protagonists and critics of the Paris peace settlement are still poles apart. On one point, however, all must agree. The Treaty of Versailles, and the other treaties modeled after it and dependent upon it, have failed to bring peace to Europe and the world. It is fruitless to talk about the bad faith of Germany, the abstention of the United States, the disconcertingly long lease of life of Soviet Russia, the imperialism of Great Britain, the militarism of France, and the unreasonableness of small states and subject nationalities; for each of these factors, taken by itself, is a result rather than a cause of the failure of the treaties. If we content ourselves with calling each other bad names and seeking to find in some one unruly national current or attitude the source of our ills, the universal chaos will only increase. It would not be hard to build up a convincing brief against the foreign policy followed by every nation, friend and enemy, since the armistice of November 11, 1918. But we get nowhere unless we are able to show that the present state of affairs is due, not to the errors of statesmen dealing with specific problems, but to fundamentally unsound and irrealizable concepts in the general bases of the treaties.