With every day the numbers in Paris grew who had come to help—to get a hearing—to help in the group at the top—to be heard by principals. They failed. Disappointment, wounded vanity, the sense that they were somebody, had something to contribute, stirred them to resentment. They would serve, and they were rejected. There was, to be sure, one thing that those who resented this apparent unconsciousness of their importance by those charged with the conduct of things might have done—one surely useful thing, and that was, casting an eye about and seeing the multitude of problems that shrieked for solution, master one, little as it might be:—the case of Teschen, of the Banat of Tamesvar, the history of a boundary, the need of a coal mine here or there—and working, really working, on this particular problem, produce some sound presentation, something that men could not get around. The whole bubbling pot of trouble called for such cooling drops of real, carefully considered work.
But this demanded self-direction, poise, a willingness to make a very small contribution, to have no pretense of being called into council, to trust to the gods and your own knowledge of what really counts in solving complications. It called for going aside, of not pretending to be on the inside. Minds were too troubled, vanity was too keen. You eased your mind and poulticed your vanity by talk—talk at dinner tables, over restaurant coffee, over tea—and talk in endless articles.
One of the banes of the Paris Peace Conference was that there were so many men and women on the field under contract to write, to produce so many words every day or every week. There was no contract that these words should add something to the knowledge of the many things about which it was so necessary for men and women to learn—no contract that they should contribute by ever so little to the great need of control on every side, that they should comfort, soften hates, stimulate common sense. Writers covered up their ignorance of things doing by prophecies, by shrieks of despair, by poses of intimacy with the great, by elaborately spun-out theories. And they built up superstitions. They created things—absolutely created superstitions that may never be dispelled from the minds of those who read them back home.