parently insuperable odds, the policy of handling nations as composites of the qualities found in all men, women and children, the policy that understood human nature however ignorant it might be of its devices and machines, the policy that reckoned on feeling no less than on pure reason.

After the war came the peace. After the fighting came the talking, after the battlefield the conference table. The captains and the kings departed but the tumult and the shouting concentrated about the Salle d'Horloge in the Quai d'Orsay and the Press Room at the Hotel Crillon in Paris. It is certain that the art of Lloyd George usually at its best in conference, was less effective here than it had been in the war. There are two reasons for this. Other shrewd statesmen had seen the virtues of and hastened to imitate his method; and his broad, impressionistic strokes were less effective in those narrow rooms than they had been across the continents and the seas of war.

He had won the war with a brass band and its rousing blare irritated ears attuned for chamber music. During the war the band had blared harmoniously to drown out a single enemy. Now every player in the band from double bass to piccolo had a separate tune to play and tried to make of himself a whole and independent band. Every national interest, every domestic political jealousy had its loud echo

in Paris and at other meeting places during these long days of 1919, 1920, 1921, and 1922, while the endless treaties and agreements of Versailles, Neuilly. St. Germain, Rapallo, London, Brussels, San Remo, Spa, Cannes, and Genoa were discussed and framed. It is barely time to judge the war. It is yet too early to judge the peace, or the peaces. Let this confession be added to the evidence, for what it is worth, however. As a newspaper reporter condemned to send a daily report of the progress of these talks for four years over the insatiable cable I plead guilty many times to an unconquerable impatience with their inconsequentiality. But as I look back over their scope, as I think of the various brass bands that filled our ears here and there, as I remember the "crisis that will come tomorrow" and tomorrow and tomorrow, I marvel that so much has really been done.

In January, 1922, Lloyd George, on the eve of the conferences at Washington and at Genoa was addressing a party meeting of his followers in London. His leadership at home was being seriously challenged and one of the grounds of that challenge was the ineffectiveness of his foreign policy as reflected in the results of the conferences. Speaking of the coming Washington conference he said: "It is establishing peace in the great West, and I am looking forward to the Genoa Conference to establish peace in the

East. They will be like the two wings of an angel hovering over the world. Interchange of views and removal of prejudices are all-important. Four-fifths of the difficulties of the world come from suspicions; most quarrels are bred in suspicion which could be removed by sensible interchange of opinions. Much has been accomplished, and I am hopeful of much more. Nothing has ever done so much to restore a good understanding between the United States of America and ourselves, and the peace of the world largely depends upon that foundation.

"There are those who would go back to the old diplomacy. You cannot argue with a dispatch, you cannot reason with a diplomatic message. We must come face to face. I have a profound faith in the ultimate reason of man. I believe my fellow men made in the image of God. It shocks me when people want to return to the old diplomacy, because the results of it have been devastation.

"If we had had a conference under the new methods we would not now have ten provinces in France awaiting repair. Men who hate conferences are men who dislike realities. There is a conference to be held in Genoa. It will be the greatest international conference ever held. All the nations of Europe have been invited, because we want to end

wars and the rumors of wars. You cannot build up business on the rocking foundations of earthquakes. "The gibers say 'Another conference? Forty-five delegates and a thousand experts-what extravagance!' Yes, a thousand experts-financial, diplomatic and economic. They are cheaper than military experts.. There has just been an argument between the same nations lasting for four and one-half horrible years. There were 30,000,000 men engaged in the controversy. Ten millions were left dead. Ten more millions were left mutilated. Fifty thousand millions was the expense.

Face to face with men over a problem at the conference table there can have been few men in history Lloyd George's equal. He knows this and he has used this power throughout his career. There must have been many liberals of the early days of this century ill at ease with the Lloyd Georgian fiscal doctrines. But he carried that great party and its great leader, Mr. Asquith, with him to victory in the budget fight. Not long ago I heard Lord Younger, whip of the Conservative Party, admit that in those days he, too, had many conferences with "the little Welshman."

"And what a charming fellow he is," Lord Younger added in his fashion of restrained Scottish whimsy.

He went on to boast, in his same restrained fashion that he got more out of the conferences than Lloyd

George did. And that represents both the strength and the weakness of the man and his method. Conference invariably leads to compromise. Those are not lacking to charge that compromise was the great weakness of the Allied conduct of the war and the Allied conduct of the peace. It was compromise that eventually led to the polite break between England and France over reparations. True, Lloyd George had gone from power when it came. Perhaps if he had remained Prime Minister he would still have been trying to compromise with M. Poincaré, ill adapted to adaptability as that statesman may be.

But the break had its orgins in the compromises Lloyd George had charmed out of M. Briand. The two men were ideally suited to such a method. Once when J. H. Thomas, the leader of British railway labor, was tearing the air with oratory in a conference with Lloyd George the Prime Minister cut in suddenly with, "Now, that's all very well for the heathenbut remember I'm a Welshman, too."

He might have, he probably did say the same thing to M. Briand during one of the many meetings they had during three years in almost every pleasant place up and down the continent of Europe and the islands off its coasts, Briand was born in Brittany where the national flower is the onion. He began life as an anarchist to wind up as a rich and witty bourgeois.