Book Description

Excerpt from The Great Peace When I was asked last August to prepare a book on the terms of peace, I consented to have it ready by March, 1919. My publishers thought that it should be ready by February first if it was to anticipate the march of events. The writing was completed in October, but even so, events have gotten ahead. It is some consolation to know that the whole world shares in this miscalculation. Neither the peoples nor their governments, the knowing ones who had all the inside information, were prepared for this headlong precipitancy. A letter from one of the staff of the Department of State at Washington expresses the surprise, not to say the consternation, of the government at this sudden development for which we were so eager and yet so utterly unprepared. It was in anticipation of this unpreparedness that the book was written, and yet I too am caught among the unprepared. Naturally I have considered carefully whether any change should be made in the text as the proofs pass through my hands, but save for a few footnotes and minor changes, I have left it as it was written. The difficulty in the phraseology, - all of it appropriate to the situation of last September, - is pervasive. Adaptation to the situation of today would mean re-writing. But it is only the phraseology that the armistice has rendered out of date. The problems remain, - not one of them settled despite confident and contradictory newspaper assertion. Even the signing of the treaty of peace, an event for which we must perhaps long wait in patience, will bring to most of them no immediate solution. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.