a military and naval staff to plan out the armed co-operation needed to keep the peace of the world. The French representative in the League of Nations Commission, M. Leon Bourgeois, insisted lucidly and repeatedly on the logical necessity of such powers. As a speaker he was rather copious and lacking in "spice" of the Clemenceau quality . The final scene in the plenary session of April 28th, before the adoption of the Covenant, is described compactly by Mr. Wilson Harris, the crowded Banqueting Hall at the Quai d'Orsay, with its "E" of tables for the delegates, with secretaries and officials lining the walls and a solid mass of journalists at the lower end of the room. "At the head of the room the 'Big Three' diverted themselves in undertones at the expense of the worthy M. Bourgeois, now launched, with the help of what must have been an entirely superfluous sheaf of notes, on the fifth rendering of his speech in support of his famous amendments."
They were so often "diverting themselves in undertones," those three men whom God had mocked with the most tremendous opportunity in history. Keynes (op. cit.) gives other instances of the levities, vulgarities, disregards, inattentions, and inadequacies of these meetings.
This poor Covenant arrived at in this fashion returned with President Wilson to America, and there it was subjected to an amount of opposition, criticism, and revision which showed, among other things, how relatively unimpaired was the mental energy of the United States. It was manifest that the people of America had no mind to a compact that was virtually little more than a league of allied imperialisms for mutual insurance. The Senate refused to ratify the covenant, and the first meeting of the League Council was held therefore without American representatives. The close of 1919 and the opening months of 1920 saw a very curious change come over American feeling after the pro-French and pro-British enthusiasms of the war period. The peace negotiations reminded the Americans, in a confused and very irritating way, of their profound differences in international outlook from any European power that the war had for a time helped them to forget. They felt they had been "rushed" into many things without due consideration. They experienced a violent revulsion towards that policy of isolation that had broken down in 1917. The close of
