A just peace, a durable peace, if possible a quick peace, could these ends be secured? The task was one which called for compromise and adjustment, it called also for organization. There is said to have been a plan for quick preliminaries which should end the state of war, followed by the leisurely and expert working out of details. If such a course had been possible, it would probably have been the best. Germany would have accepted terms in January at which she howled in June, while the Allied peoples might thus have avoided the long agony of doubt and postponement which delayed the resumption of normal activities and the rehabilitation of the devastated regions. The world that was malleable after the armistice soon grew cold and hard. It is, however, a matter for serious question whether an agreement upon such preliminaries was possible. The problems were too varied and intricate, the conflict of interests too acute, the new ideas too new, to admit of even provisional adjustment in a few weeks. The Conference seemed long, too long, to the outside world which waited. If it did not dance, like the Congress of Vienna, neither did it always seem to march, like the Congress of Berlin, which had a cut-and-dried programme. At times it was undoubtedly too slow; at times certain special problems, like Fiume, consumed energy altogether out of proportion to their importance; yet the Conference made steady and on the whole rapid progress. It was a hard-working body, and its scanty time was well spent. It will be many years before the history of the Peace Conference can be written. Its work was too vast and too varied; its records are too scattered and too inaccessible, many of them still unwritten. We are still too near for a true perspective. For some time we must be content with fragmentary, partial, provisional, journalistic accounts, and we do well to keep to the main lines of unmistakable fact. The most obvious results of the work of the Conference, though not necessarily the most permanent results, are its territorial decisions, the readjustment of boundaries and sovereignties, the calling of new states into being. These, so far as they go, are clear and definite. They can be expressed on a map, their origin and occasion can be traced, their nature explained. It is these, the territorial results of the Conference, with their consequences and implications, which form the subject of this volume. The treatment is further limited to Europe, omitting the problems of Asia, Africa, and the isles of the Pacific.