Either from vanity or jealousy, the four heads of the Governments of the Allied and Associated States appointed themselves as principal delegates at the Conference, in spite of the fact that their presence was essential in their respective countries, where a host of measures dealing with social legislation were already long overdue. Further, their incompetence and unsuitability for the task before them were manifest, and yet, beyond their decisions, there could be no appeal. Each of the Big Four had, at one time or another, reached place and power as a tribune of the people, but when they met in Paris they had undergone a change. Mr. Lloyd George had sold his soul for a mess of pottage, in the shape of a Parliamentary majority secured by truckling to reactionaries and the vulgar clamour of the Jingo Press. Mr. Wilson failed to make good his eloquent professions as an apostle of democracy; he succumbed to the atmosphere of Paris, and only succeeded in irritating Italy without establishing the principles for which he was supposed to stand. With two such men in charge of Anglo-Saxon policy, the triumph of M. Clemenceau[49] was not left long in doubt. He could count in advance on the support of capitalist elements in Great Britain and the United States; and thus, the power and wealth of the British Empire and America were used by an aged Frenchman as a stick to beat helpless, starving peoples and to slake a Latin craving for revenge. A shameful rôle, indeed, for a race which has never known ultimate defeat and has always been magnanimous in the hour of victory. Mr. Lloyd George and President Wilson took back to their respective countries a settlement of European questions of which no sensible English-speaking citizen could possibly approve. It was at best a liquidation of the war and marked an intermediate phase. The Austro-Hungarian Empire, as an administrative and economic unit, has been destroyed, but no serious attempt was made to put anything practical in its place; Eastern and Central Europe have been Balkanized, and in the Balkans the evils of the Treaty of Bucharest have been consummated; frontiers and disabilities have been imposed upon the German people which have aroused a widespread irredentism and cannot be maintained; the policy of intervention against the Soviet Government in Russia has been immoral and inept, while the vacillation in regard to Turkey cannot fail to have serious repercussion throughout the whole Mohammedan world.