The fume and spume of idealism is oratory, sermonizing, talk about morality, duty, patriotism, rights, and noble purposes. All such gushing rhetoric is no more the thing itself than foam is the ocean. But, like smoke, there is seldom much of it without cause. Men and women who were abroad in 1918 must reflect curiously on the, shall we say, wearisome prevalence of the moralistic, idealistic note in American speech and writing in contrast to its restraint and frequent absence in France and England. When an Englishman orated upon the war to stop war he was usually talking for American consumption. This does not mean that Great Britain and France were sordid, we sincere; on the contrary, it is proof of a tincture of the sentimental in our idealism, to which I shall later return. But it is additional testimony to the quantity and the popularity of American idealism in those months. The tone of the press at that crucial time was evidence of the tone of the people that read and responded. And while many a sounding speech and impassioned editorial are now, as one reads them, a little faded, faintly absurd, like tattered war posters on a rural bill-board, yet no one can doubt the flood of patriotic idealism that created them, few will doubt that our war idealism was a virtue in 1914-1918. It seemed a virtue then, but was it not already diseased? When we entered the war, the vast majority of Americans publicly and privately committed themselves to certain general principles, and, whatever else they fought for, believed that they were fighting for them. A square deal all around was one, the consent of the governed to their government was another, a third was the substitution, at all costs, of justice for violence in the ruling of the world. We all assented to these principles, most of us assumed them voluntarily as an article of faith, and the average man took them as seriously as he is able to take abstractions. Peace came, the armistice, the stages of the treaty. Nothing could be clearer or more to be expected than that sometimes in spirit, often in detail, and most seriously in ultimate purpose, the treaty in scores of instances ran counter to the faiths we had accepted and made commonplaces of speech and thinking. I am neither criticizing nor justifying the treaty and its included covenant. No one, I suppose, but a sentimental optimist could have expected a work of logical art in exact conformity with the principles and conditions of a new epoch that has scarcely begun, no one at least who had ever read history, or studied the politics of Sonnino, Clemenceau, and the Unionist party. It was bound to have inconsistencies; to reflect as many views as there were strong minds in the conference, to be experimental, to be a compromise. This is not what is astonishing; it is the attitude of the typical American mind toward the treaty negotiations.