This was not done. The draft of the treaty was given to the Austrians at St.-Germain on June 2. After lengthy exchange of notes some concessions were made in the economic clauses, and an amended treaty was handed to the Austrians on July 20. Negotiations were protracted, not on account of the Austrians, who were powerless, but because the interests of Italy had to be acknowledged, and because the small states had to be appeased and bullied. The Treaty of St.-Germain was signed on September 10. By that time, however, all interest in it had died down, and, as far as its economic clauses were concerned, it was universally recognized to be more absurd and impossible of fulfilment than the Treaty of Versailles. The Bulgarians were handed their treaty on September 19, and they signed it at Neuilly on November 27. The Hungarian and Turkish treaties had been drawn up at the same time as the others. But there was no stable government in Hungary to sign the treaty, and the Entente Powers were at loggerheads over the Turkish treaty. Before the treaties of Trianon and Sèvres were presented to the Hungarians and Turks, the Paris Peace Conference had gone out of existence, and was succeeded by the three Entente premiers, who held a series of continuation conferences frequently from January, 1920, to January, 1923. It may be felt that I have written an unsympathetic account of the Paris Conference. But how can one write otherwise concerning an inglorious failure? It would be possible to explain plausibly, convincingly, why it failed. But the chronicler of contemporary history must pass on to an examination of the treaties, and then to judge them by the only criterion he has the right to use: What has happened to the world because of them? Did they bring us peace? Have they proved to be practicable? Were they the beginning of a new order? Has the League of Nations filled the rôle expected of it by those who said that its birth alone justified the Paris peace settlement and would prove its corrective? CHAPTER IV THE MAIN FEATURES OF THE TREATY OF VERSAILLES The principal Allied and Associated Powers, who took upon themselves the entire responsibility for imposing and securing the execution of the Treaty of Versailles, sent an exhaustive reply to the German counter-proposals on June 16, in which, as we have seen, some concessions were made in details, modifying the draft treaty. But these were slight. In this reply they said: