admirable work undone[2] by a band of semi-Bolshevists.

Less than six months later it was rumored that a number of specially prepared bombs from a certain European town had been sent to Moscow for the speedy removal of Lenin. The casual way in which these and kindred matters were talked of gave one the measure of the change that had come over the world since the outbreak of the war. There was nobody left in Europe whose death, violent or peaceful, would have made much of an impression on the dulled sensibilities of the reading public. All values had changed, and that of human life had fallen low.

To follow these swiftly passing episodes, occasionally glancing behind the scenes, during the pauses of the acts, and watch the unfolding of the world-drama, was thrillingly interesting. To note the dubious source, the chance occasion of a grandiose project of world policy, and to see it started on its shuffling course, was a revelation in politics and psychology, and reminded one of the saying mistakenly attributed to the Swedish Chancellor Oxenstjern, "Quam parva sapientia regitur mundus."[3]

The wire-pullers were not always the plenipotentiaries. Among those were also outsiders of various conditions, sometimes of singular ambitions, who were generally free from conventional prejudices and conscientious scruples. As traveling to Paris was greatly restricted by the governments of the world, many of these unofficial delegates had come in capacities widely differing from those in which they intended to act. I confess I was myself taken in by more than one of these secret emissaries, whom I was innocently instrumental in bringing into close touch with the human levers they had come to press. I actually went to the trouble of obtaining for one of them valuable data on a subject which did not interest him in the least, but which he pretended he had traveled several thousand miles to study. A zealous prelate, whose business was believed to have something to do with the future of a certain branch of the Christian Church in the East, in reality held a brief for a wholly different set of interests in the West. Some of these envoys hoped to influence decisions of the Conference, and they considered they had succeeded when they got their points of view brought to the favorable notice of certain of its delegates. What surprised me was the ease with which several of these interlopers moved about, although few of them spoke any language but their own.

Collectivities and religious and political associations, including that of the Bolshevists, were represented in Paris during the Conference. I met one of the Bolshevists, a bright youth, who was a veritable apostle. He occupied a post which, despite its apparent insignificance, put him occasionally in possession of useful information withheld from the public, which he was wont to communicate to his political friends. His knowledge of languages and his remarkable intelligence had probably attracted the notice of his superiors, who can have had no suspicion of his leanings, much less of his proselytizing activity. However this may have been, he knew a good deal of what was going on at the Conference, and he occasionally had insight into documents of a certain interest. He was a seemingly honest and enthusiastic Bolshevik, who spread the doctrine with apostolic zeal guided by the wisdom of the serpent. He was ever ready to comment on events, but before opening his mind fully to a stranger on the subject next to his heart, he usually felt his way, and only when he had grounds for believing that the fortress was not impregnable did he open his batteries. Even among the initiated, few would suspect the rôle played by this young proselytizer within one of the strongholds of the Conference, so naturally and unobtrusively was the work done. I may add that luckily he had no direct intercourse with the delegates.

Of all the collectivities whose interests were furthered at the Conference, the Jews had perhaps the most resourceful and certainly the most influential exponents. There were Jews from Palestine, from Poland, Russia, the Ukraine, Rumania, Greece, Britain, Holland, and Belgium; but the largest and most brilliant contingent was sent by the United States. Their principal mission, with which every fair-minded man sympathized heartily, was to secure for their kindred in eastern Europe rights equal to those of the populations in whose midst they reside.[4] And to the credit of the Poles, Rumanians, and Russians, who were to be constrained to remove all the existing disabilities, they enfranchised the Hebrew elements spontaneously. But the Western Jews, who championed their Eastern brothers, proceeded to demand a further concession which many of their own co-religionists hastened to disclaim as dangerous—a kind of autonomy which Rumanian, Polish, and Russian statesmen, as well as many of their Jewish fellow-subjects, regarded as tantamount to the creation of a state within the state. Whether this estimate is true or erroneous, the concessions asked for were given, but the supplementary treaties insuring the protection of minorities are believed to have little chance of being executed, and may, it is feared, provoke manifestations of elemental passions in the countries in which they are to be applied.

Twice every day, before and after lunch, one met the "autocrats," the world's statesmen whose names were in every mouth—the wise men who would have been much wiser than they were if only they had credited their friends and opponents with a reasonable measure of political wisdom. These individuals, in bowler hats, sweeping past in sumptuous motors, as rarely seen on foot as Roman cardinals, were the destroyers of thrones, the carvers of continents, the arbiters of empires, the fashioners of the new heaven and the new earth—or were they only the flies on the wheel of circumstance, to whom the world was unaccountably becoming a riddle?

This commingling of civilizations and types brought together in Paris by a set of unprecedented conditions was full of interest and instruction to the observer privileged to meet them at close quarters. The average observer, however, had little chance of conversing with them, for, as these foreigners had no common meeting-place, they kept mostly among their own folk. Only now and again did three or four members of different races, when they chanced to speak some common language, get an opportunity of enjoying their leisure together. A friend of mine, a highly gifted Frenchman of the fine old type, a descendant of Talleyrand, who was born a hundred and fifty years too late, opened his hospitable house once a week to the élite of the world, and partially met the pressing demand.

To the gaping tourist the Ville Lumière resembled nothing so much as a huge world fair, with enormous caravanserais, gigantic booths, gaudy merry-go-rounds, squalid taverns, and huge inns. Every place of entertainment was crowded, and congregations patiently awaited their turn in the street, undeterred by rain or wind or snow, offering absurdly high prices for scant accommodation and disheartened at having their offers refused. Extortion was rampant and profiteering went unpunished. Foreigners, mainly American and British, could be seen wandering, portmanteau in hand, from post to pillar, anxiously seeking where to lay their heads, and made desperate by failure, fatigue, and nightfall. The cost of living which harassed the bulk of the people was fast becoming the stumbling-block of governments and the most powerful lever of revolutionaries. The