in m THE CONFERENCE 33

Hence sprang those cumulative provisions for thedestruction of highly organised economic life whichwe shall examine in the next chapter.

This is the policy of an old man, whose mostvivid impressions and most lively imagination are ofthe past and not of the future. He sees the issue interms of France and Germany, not of humanity andof European civilisation struggling forwards to anew order. The war has bitten into his conscious-ness somewhat differently from ours, and he neitherexpects nor hopes that we are at the threshold of anew age.

It happens, however, that it is not only an idealquestion that is at issue. My purpose in this bookis to show that the Carthaginian Peace is notpractically right or possible. Although the schoolof thought from which it springs is aware of theeconomic factor, it overlooks, nevertheless, the deepereconomic tendencies which are to govern the future.The clock cannot be set back. You cannot restoreCentral Europe to 1870 without setting up suchstrains in the European structure and letting loosesuch human and spiritual forces as, pushing beyondfrontiers and races, will overwhelm not only you andyour ''guarantees," bub your institutions, and theexisting order of your Society.

By what legerdemain was this policy substitutedfor the Fourteen Points, and how did the Presidentcome to accept it? The answer to these questions

D