The Treaty of Versailles, which imposed the terms of peace upon Germany and her Allies after their complete surrender, was the direct cause of all the troubles that beset us after the war. It violated the hopes of all moderate minded people, who believed that the world, after its frightful lesson, was ready for a new chapter of civilisation in which militarism might be overthrown as the greatest curse of life, and in which the common folk of nations might be made secure in their homes and work by a code of international law and arbitration. The statesmen who presided over the Peace Conference—Clemenceau, Wilson, Lloyd George—had the fate of the world in their hands. Waiting for their decisions, their new plan of Europe, was a world of emotionalised men and women, ready and eager then, for a little while, to respond to a generous idealism which would lift all peoples above the morass of hatred and misery into which they had fallen. The German and Austrian peoples, starved and defeated, without a rag of pride left to cover their humiliation, fierce with anger against their war lords—their Junkers and their politicians of the old brutal caste—were ready also, for a little while, to join hands with the world democracy in a new order of life. They were conscience-stricken, ready to make amends, resigned to an awful price of defeat—provided they were given their chance of recovery and the liberty of their national life. They clung desperately to the words of President Wilson who, before their surrender, had in his Fourteen Points and other messages to the world outlined a peace which would be generous to the defeated if they overthrew their old gods, and would be based on justice, the rights of peoples, and the commonwealth of nations rather than upon vengeance and hatred. Fair words, holding out prodigious hopes of a new and better world! But when the terms of the Peace Treaty were made known they struck a knock-out blow not only to German hopes but to all the ideals of people who had looked for something nobler and more righteous by which the peace of the world should be assured. It was a peace of vengeance. It reeked with injustice. It was incapable of fulfilment. It sowed a thousand seeds from which new wars might spring. It was as though the Devil, in a jester’s cap-and-bells, had sat beside Clemenceau in his black gloves, and whispered madness into the ear of Wilson, and leered across the table at Lloyd George, and put his mockery into every clause. In that Hall of Mirrors at Versailles the ideals for which millions of men had fought and died—liberty, fair-play, a war to end war, justice—were mocked and outraged, not by men of evil, but by good men, not by foul design, but with loyalty to national interests. Something blinded them.