In the winter and spring of 1919, while the world was burning, while the principles we had shouted for were at last in actual settlement, this enormous American idealism slept, forgot its fine phrases, forgot its pledges to see the thing through, was bored because some Americans felt that it was our duty to see the thing through. We are an uncritical nation despite our occasional vehemence of criticism, but we have never been so uncritical of major issues as in 1919, when the terms of world settlement were of acute interest to all but Americans. We are an easy-going nation, but we have never been so easy-going as in 1919, when not one man in a thousand as much as read the abstract of the treaty to see whether the things he had said he fought for were safeguarded in it. The only real fire-spitting fervor struck out in this country since the armistice has been in defense of our right to let Europe stew in her own juice, and our privilege to tell general principles to go hang. And this is an emotion almost too narrow to be attributed, even by the generous minded, to idealism. One answers, of course, that such a decline from overheated virtue into indifferentism is only human nature at its old tricks, the collapse after the New Year’s resolution, the weariness of being too good, symptoms, in short, of content with having “licked the Hun,” and a desire to get back to work. And the reply is, of course this is true. But Europe is not thus functioning. There has been a striking contrast in the years since the war between British and American attitudes toward treaty negotiations. In England, exhausted by war as we never were, deep in the lassitude of rest after struggle, men and women have leaped into criticism and defense of the ideals embodied in the settlement. Peace has seemed to them as vital a battle-ground of ideas as war. By and large, the plodding mass of us who make money and public opinion have been cold to the contest, uninterested. The press of Great Britain has fiercely attacked and fiercely defended the morale of the treaty; ours has reported it with little real criticism and little interest except where the league was concerned. Their universities have supplied men and parties to fight through the principles for which we fought; ours have been intent upon how much scholastic credit should be given returned soldiers and who should get an honorary degree. They forced an easy-going premier to stand for a victory that was more than conquest; we grudged our President the attempt to carry through in Paris what in 1917 we were all agreed upon; let our dislike of his methods outweigh our deep interest in his ends. If it had not been for the great issue of the League of Nations, which, forcing Americans to act, forced them to remember (some with difficulty) what they had believed in and what they had learned in 1917 of the dangers of selfish aloofness from world problems, if it