our backs to the wall, because the enemy—the old Devil—is prevailing against us. I have just come over from Paris, and I don't mind telling you that what I saw during the Peace Conference has made me doubt the power of goodness over evil."
"Tell me," I said.
Daddy Small's story was not pleasant to hear. It was the story of the betrayal, one by one, of every ideal for which simple men had fought and died, a story of broken pledges, of hero-worship dethroned, and of great peoples condemned to lingering death. The Peace Treaty, he said, would break the heart of the world and prepare the way for new, more dreadful, warfare.
"How about Wilson?" I asked.
The little doctor raised his hands like a German crying, "Kamerad!"
"Wilson was not big enough. He had the future of civilisation in his hands, but his power was filched from him, and he never knew until the end that he had lost it. He was like a simple Gulliver among the Lilliputians. They tied him down with innumerable threads of cotton while he slept in self-complacency with a sense of righteousness. He was slow-thinking among quick-witted people. He stated a general principle and they drafted out clauses which seemed to fulfil the principle while violating it in every detail. They juggled with facts and figures so that black seemed white through his moral spectacles, and he said Amen to their villainy, believing that God had been served by righteousness. Bit by bit they broke his pledges and made a jigsaw puzzle of them, so artfully that he believed they were uncracked. Little by little they robbed him of his honour, and he was unaware of the theft. In preambles and clause-headings and interpretations they gave lip-service to the Fourteen Points upon which the Armistice was granted, and to
