They all worked terribly hard, both by day and by night. They sat in council for two and a half hours in the mornings and two and a half hours again in the afternoons. They went out little into society. In the evenings they read their piles of documents or saw important witnesses. Yet no one was satisfied. What is the reason? The chief reason is that the Conference worked throughout by process of compromise: and compromise has no lovers. It was in the main a compromise between three points of view—the French, the American, and the British. Hateful to strenuous souls! To yield nothing and to gain everything is to them the only statesmanship. But let us remember the other side. The war was not won alone; the peace could not be made alone. The armies had to combine for victory; the peace had to be combined too. No Great Power could have a peace entirely of its own, either in material gain or ideal aims. The American aim, as shaped by their remarkable President and voiced in his splendid oratory, was for a peace of final world-conciliation.[128] He held up the “banner of the ideal.” The French aim was a peace of security. The British aim lay somewhere between the two, a practical peace combining conciliation and security, punishing Germany without crushing it, improving the world but not seeking all at once to achieve the Millennium. Clemenceau was an honest nationalist. But he did not seek so much to exalt France as to depress Germany. The idea of Foch was to stand guard over Germany with a flaming sword. The aim of the French Chauvinists was to break Germany up and disable her permanently. Clemenceau did not share these extreme views. He rebuked Foch for the interview in which he claimed that Germany should retire beyond the Rhine. He was too much of a statesman to believe that a modern nation could be permanently crushed. But he sought to weaken her to the ground for the next fifty years; and then he hoped for security in the new Alliance with America and Great Britain. The part that Mr. Lloyd George played at Paris during those strenuous months was often that of conciliator between these two points of view—the French and the American. Such a conciliator was wanted: for the clash could not be concealed. “President Wilson has Fourteen Points,” mocked Clemenceau; “the good God was content with Ten.” “Every morning,” he said on another occasion, “I repeat to myself—‘I believe in the League of Nations!’”[129] It was difficult to achieve harmony between such a spirit and the lofty faith and austere hopes of the great Crusader from across the seas.