About March 19th the Inter-Allied commission gave Erzberger twenty-four hours in which to ratify the convention between Germany and Poland and to carry out the conditions of the armistice. But Erzberger declined to ratify it and the Allies were unable or unwilling to impose their will on him. From this state of things the Rumanian delegates drew the obvious corollary. Exasperated by the treatment they received, they quitted the Conference, pursued their own policy, occupied Budapest, presented their own peace conditions to Hungary, and relegated, with courteous phrases and a polite bow to the Council, the directions elaborated for their guidance to the region of pious counsels. In these ways the well-meant and well-advertised endeavors to substitute a moral relationship of nations for the state of latent warfare known as the balance of power were steadily wasted. On the one side the subtle skill of Old World diplomacy was toiling hard and successfully to revive under specious names its lost and failing causes, while on the other hand the New World policy, naïvely ignoring historical forces and secular prejudices, was boldly reaching out toward rough and ready modes of arranging things and taking no account of concrete circumstances. Generous idealists were thus pitted against old diplomatic stagers and both secretly strove to conclude hastily driven bargains outside the Council chamber with their opponents. As early as the first days of January I was present at some informal meetings where such transactions were being talked over, and I afterward gave it as my impression that "if things go forward as they are moving to-day the outcome will fall far short of reasonable expectations. The first striking difference between the transatlantic idealists and the Old World politicians lies in their different ways of appreciating expeditiousness, on the one hand, and the bases of the European state-system, on the other hand. A statesman when dealing with urgent, especially revolutionary, emergencies should never take his eyes from the clock. The politicians in Paris hardly ever take account of time or opportunity. The overseas reformers contend that the territorial and political balance of forces has utterly broken down and must be definitely scrapped in favor of a league of nations, and the diplomatists hold that the principle of equilibrium, far from having spent its force, still affords the only groundwork of international stability and requires to be further intensified."[104]