Inaugurated in an idealism which may have been exaggerated but was none the less sincere, the Peace Conference has blighted the hope and faith of “plain people” everywhere, and has consecrated cant. Respectability has been enthroned amid circumstances of wealth and power; in its smug and unctuous presence morality has found no place. The foundations of a clearer, better world have not been laid; the apex has been placed on a pyramid of errors, on which nothing can be built. * * * * * Versailles was chosen as the setting for a historic ceremony--the signature of the Peace Treaty with what was still the German Empire, though the imperial throne was vacant and a workman presided at the councils of an Imperial Government. The choice was not without significance. Democracy had triumphed, and, in the hour of victory, had followed the example of autocratic rulers when making peace with other autocrats. It was therefore only fitting that this Peace Treaty, whose terms are inspired by the spirit of the past, should be signed in a palace of the Kings of France. A palace on an artificial eminence, where once had been flat marshes and wild forest land, built by a monarch to whom nothing was impossible, and for the indulgence of whose whims no cost was deemed excessive, either in money or in human lives. Viewed from the west on misty autumn evenings, it seems an unearthly fabric; the exquisite harmony of its line crowns and completes the surrounding landscape, floating, as by enchantment, above the tree tops, as light in texture as the clouds. A palace such as children dream of, when fairy stories haunt their minds, peopling the world with princes young and valiant, princesses beautiful and wayward, whose parents are virtuous Kings and Queens and live in palaces like Versailles. Below the terraces, a broad alley stretches westward and meets the horizon at two poplars. Beyond these isolated trees an empty sky is seen. The poplars stand like sentinels guarding the confines of a vast enclosure, where art and nature have conspired to shut out the ugly things in life. A French Abbé, whose cultured piety ensures him a welcome in this world and admission to the next, said that the royalty of France had passed between and beyond those poplars--into nothingness. Amid a galaxy of statues of monarchs, statesmen, warriors, goddesses and nymphs, only one piece of sculpture serves as a reminder that a suffering world exists--the face of a woman of the people, graven in bass-relief upon the central front. An old and tragic face, seamed with deep wrinkles, sullen, inscrutable, one can imagine it hunched between shoulders bowed by toil and shrunk by joyless motherhood. The eyes of stone, to which a sculptor’s art has given life, are hard and menacing, hopeless but not resigned; beneath their steadfast gaze has passed all that was splendid in a bygone age, the greatest autocrats on earth and women of quite a different sort.