“Aren't those all reasonable demands?” asked Alston; and so came another installment of the controversy among the staff. The young captain said the demands might be reasonable enough, taken by themselves, but they were mere camouflage for efforts to overthrow the French government and seize the factories and the banks.
“But why not grant the reasonable demands?” asked Lanny's chief. “Wouldn't that weaken the hands of the agitators and strip off their camouflage?”
“That's outside my province,” replied the other. “My job is to find out who the agitators are and keep track of what they're plotting.”
The stoutish and pugnacious Professor Davisson broke in. “My guess is you'll find they're operating with German gold.”
“That's what we assume,” replied the other. “But it's not easy to prove.”
Said Alston: “My opinion is, you'll find that German gold in the eye of Maurras and his royalists. The French masses are suffering and they have every reason in the world to complain and to agitate.”
Lanny smiled to himself. His chief called himself a “liberal,” and Lanny had been trying to make up his mind just what that meant. He decided that a liberal was a high-minded gentleman who believed the world was made in his own image. But unfortunately only one small part of it was deserving of such trust. He had been looking for such a spot, and the only one he had found was the tiny country of Denmark, whose delegates had come to the conference determined not to take on any racial minorities. Others were trying hard to persuade them to accept a chunk of Germany down to the Kiel canal; but they would have no land of which the population was not preponderantly Danish — and they would insist upon a plebiscite before they took even that. If only the whole of Europe had been “liberal” according to that formula, how simple all the problems would have been!
VII
President Wilson returned to Paris in the middle of March, one month after his leaving. There were no tumultuous receptions this time; the various peoples of the world had learned that he wouldn't give them what they wanted, and couldn't if he would. He came a beaten man; for the expiring Congress had left unpassed three vital appropriation bills, in order to make certain that he would have to summon a special session of the new Congress. He arrived at a Peace Conference which had laid all his Fourteen Points on the shelf, and also its own resolution of seven weeks earlier, whereby the Covenant of the League of Nations was to become a part of the peace treaty.
Wilson set his long Presbyterian jaw and went into a three-hour conference with the two head malefactors, Clemenceau and Lloyd George. When he came out from it he gave out a statement to the effect that the Covenant was a vital part of the treaty and would remain in. Then what a steaming and stewing, a bubbling and boiling of diplomatic kettles! Pichon, French Foreign Minister, issued a declaration to the effect that the Covenant would not have any place in the treaty; and when the reporters asked him about President Wilson's statement, he said he hadn't heard of it. There was a great scandal, and Clemenceau was forced to “throw down” his foreign minister and stop the publication of his communique. Then Lord Robert Cecil gave out a statement supporting Wilson's side, and the clamor of the Tories forced Lloyd George to throw him down. So it went, back and forth; those elderly gentlemen met and argued until they were sick of the sound of one another's voices. The shrill clamor penetrated to the attaches outside, and caused them to look at one another with anxious faces, or perhaps with mischievous grins.