The Executive Council, RICHARD MÜLLER, FRITZ PROLAT. CHAPTER VI THE TREATY OF VERSAILLES Coming back from Germany to Great Britain one finds oneself in the position of an explorer returned from a new world. For our Edwardian England knows to-day as little of the real conditions in Central Europe as Elizabethan England knew of Central Africa. And our Press cartoonists and Propaganda caricaturists have filled the blank spaces of our mental maps with fancy pictures of monsters whom they label Boches and Bolsheviks, Huns and Spartacists, just as did the old cartographers. Whereas these fancy pictures are no more like the real wild beasts of Europe than the Unicorns and Behemoths of the old maps were like the rhinoceroses and hippopotamuses of Africa; and anyway are about as important an element in the problems of Central Europe to-day as the hippopotamuses are in those of Central Africa. The difficulty is that our natural intuitions of policy and our natural instincts of humanity have been for five years persistently perverted and distorted. We do not know that we are seeing everything as in a glass darkly, and that we are being prevented from coming face to face with real facts and forces. That is why in this summer of 1919, as in that summer of five years ago, appeals to our conscience and common sense are useless. We are letting ourselves be hurried hopelessly and helplessly into the worst of peaces, as we then let ourselves be hurried into the worst of wars. But with this difference; that five years ago the principal criminals were the Junkers and War Lords of Germany; to-day they are the Jingoes and Peace Delegates of the Entente. The Germans have paid, or are paying, the penalty of trusting their War Lords; both those Germans who passively submitted to that folly and those who actively protested against it. We, too, shall all have to pay for putting our trust in our Princes of the Peace. We are paying--many of my old corps have already paid with their lives--for the mistakes of our diplomatists with the Russian Revolution. We shall pay for their mistakes with the German Revolution when we too come face to face with realities again.