The Peace Treaties promulgated by the Conference at Paris are impregnated with the atmosphere in which they were drawn up--an atmosphere charged with suspicion and hatred, fear and greed; not one of them is in the spirit of the League of Nations. The Treaty with Germany, in particular, discloses the predominance of French influence in Allied councils. An old French nobleman once remarked, “Les Bourgeois sont terribles lors qu’ils ont eu peur.” The conditions imposed on a democratized and utterly defeated Germany are terrible indeed, but curiously ineffective; they are a timid attempt to modify vindictiveness by a half-hearted application of President Wilson’s ethical principles; they satisfy no one; this is their one redeeming feature, since it shows that they might have been even more vindictive and still more futile for the achievement of their purpose, which was, presumably, a lasting peace. Militarists and reactionaries could not conceive a state of peace which did not repose on force and the military occupation of large tracts of German territory. They were twenty years behind the time. They did not realize that armies in democratic countries consist of human beings who observe and think, who cannot be treated as machines, and bidden to subordinate their reasoning faculties to the designs of a few selfish and ambitious men. Liberal thinkers, on the other hand, were shocked at Treaties which inflamed the hearts of seventy million German-speaking people with hatred and a desire for revenge, which cemented German unity, which aroused a widespread irredentism and gave an incentive to industrious, efficient populations to devote their time and efforts to preparations for a future war and not to the arts of peace. Such men were neither visionaries nor sentimentalists, they were practical men of affairs, who foresaw that security could not be attained by visiting the sins of outworn mediaeval Governments on the heads of their innocent victims throughout Central Europe; that by the employment of such methods the “League of Nations” was turned into a farce; that exasperation would foster and provoke recalcitrance; that Germany would be a magnet to every dissatisfied State; that other leagues and combinations might be formed, on which it would be impossible to enforce a limitation of their armaments. They pointed out that the imposition of fabulous indemnities was two-edged, that payment of nine-tenths of the sums suggested would have to be made in manufactured goods or raw materials, a mode of payment which, in the end, might be more profitable to those that paid than to the peoples who received.