No Peace Conference has ever undertaken a more stupendous task than that which confronted the delegates of the Allied States in Paris in January, 1919. Central Europe was seething with revolution and slowly dying of starvation. Beyond lay Russia, unknown yet full of portents, more terrible to many timorous souls than ever Germany had been. The war had come to a sudden and unexpected end, and enemy territory had not been invaded save at extremities which were not vital points. The Central Empires and their Allies had collapsed from internal causes. Germany and Austria could not, for the moment, oppose invasion, which had lost all its terrors for distracted populations, who hoped that French and British soldiers would, by their presence, maintain law and order and ensure supplies of food. On the other hand, neither the Serbs nor the Rumanians had had their territorial aspirations satisfied during the progress of the war. Both races had followed the usual Balkan custom by invading the territories they claimed during the armistice; this method, when employed against Hungarians, involved the use of force; it also embittered relations between themselves where, as in the Banat, their claims clashed and overlapped. Further north, the Czecho-Slovaks had proclaimed their independence, and Poland was being resurrected; the frontiers of both these States were vague and undefined, but their appetites were unlimited, and Teschen, with its coalfields, was a pocket in dispute. Not only had the Peace Conference to endeavour to prevent excessive and premature encroachment on enemy territory by Allied States, it had also to compose serious differences between the Western Powers in regard to the Adriatic coast, Syria, and Asia Minor arising out of secret treaties. These considerations, though embarrassing for the representatives of Great Britain, France and Italy, did not affect President Wilson to the same extent; in fact they rather strengthened his position and confirmed the expectation that he would be the real arbiter of the Conference. His speeches had, in the opinion of innumerable men and women, indicated the only solution of the world-problem. The “Fourteen Points” had outlined, without inconvenient precision, a settlement of international questions; he was the head of a State untrammelled by secret treaties, the only State not on the verge of bankruptcy, a State which could furnish both moral and material aid. When M. Albert Thomas said that the choice lay between Wilson and Lenine, he may have been guilty of exaggeration, but he expressed a feeling which was general and real. Whether that feeling was justified, the future alone will show.