Far beyond the more immediate and necessary tasks of the Conference rose the dreams of those who looked for the dawning of a new age of peace and justice, a new social and economic era. The downtrodden and the oppressed looked toward Paris. Visions of peace were confused with visions of the millennium. “We were told,” said a Scotch mill-worker, later in the winter, “that the peace would bring in the New Jerusalem. We want some of that New Jerusalem.” The day President Wilson sailed for Brest, a worker at the Twenty-third Street Ferry, speaking for the early crowd hurrying to their long hours in New York sweatshops, pointed to Hoboken and said, “There goes the man who is going to change all this for us.” Beautiful, extravagant, heart-breaking hopes were centred on the Conference at Paris, most of all on the leader of the American delegation and his programme. And such hopes were in large measure inevitably doomed to disappointment. The congress could not create a new heaven and a new earth; it could at best only make some short advance on the road thither and show the way along which further advance lay. Renan tells of a devout soul, who, seeing so much evil about him, was periodically afflicted with doubts concerning the goodness of an all-powerful God. “Perhaps,” his parish priest would answer, “you have too high an idea of God and what he can do.” “It was an old world,” writes Mommsen of the age which just preceded the Christian era, “and even Caesar could not make it young again.”