A Treaty of the character of that Versailles would never have been possible if men had not been able to justify it to themselves on the ground of its punitive justice. The greeds expressed in the annexation of alien territory, and the violation of the principle of nationality, would never have been possible but for the plea of the sacred egoism of patriotism; our country before the enemy's, our country right or wrong. The assertion of sheer immoralism embodied in this last slogan can be made into the garments of righteousness if only our idealism is instinctive enough. Some of the worst crimes against justice have been due to the very fierceness of our passion for righteousness--a passion so fierce that it becomes undiscriminating and unseeing. It was the passion for what men believed to be religious truth which gave us the Inquisition and the religious wars; it was the passion for patriotism which made France for so many years, to the astonishment of the world, refuse justice to Dreyfus; it is a righteous loathing for negro crime which has made lynching possible for half a century in the United States, and which prevents the development of an opinion which will insist on its suppression. It is 'the just anger that makes men unjust.' The righteous passion that insists on a criminal's dying for some foul crime, is the very thing which prevents our seeing that the crime was not committed by him at all. It was something akin to this that made the Treaty of Versailles possible. That is why merely to appeal to idealism and feeling will fail, unless the defect of vision which makes evil appear good is corrected. It is not the feeling which is at fault; it is the defective vision causing feeling to be misused, as in the case of our feeling against the man accused on what seem to us good grounds, of a detestable offence. He is loathsome to our sight, because the crime is loathsome. But when some one else confesses to the crime, our feeling against the innocent man disappears. The direction it took, the object upon which it settled, was due to a misconception. Obviously that error may occur in politics. Equally certainly something worse may happen. With some real doubt in our mind whether this man is the criminal, we may yet, in the absence of any other culprit, stifle that doubt because of our anger, and our vague desire to have some victim suffer for so vile a crime. Feeling will be at fault, in such a case, as well as vision. And this thing happens, as many a lynching testifies. ('The innocence of Dreyfus would be a crime,' said a famous anti-Dreyfusard.) Both defects may have played their part in the tragedy of Versailles. In making our appeal to idealism, we assume that it is there, somewhere, to be aroused on behalf of justice; we must assume, consequently, that if it has not been aroused, or has attached itself to wrong purposes, it is because it has not seen where justice lay.