April — undated — probably 22, 1919

A busy week, but as far as I can see nothing, or next to nothing, has been accomplished. In the matter of prestige, and nothing can be more important, I fear the Supreme Council has lost out. Germany refused to let Haller and the new Polish army disembark in Danzig and the Council did not insist—although it blustered and said it would. It ordered the Poles and the Ukrainians to stop their destructive and most uncivilized warfare, and yet it goes on tragically. It is now apparent that Smuts went to Budapest to urge upon Bela Kun the advisability of withdrawing from the shrine of good St. Stephen, offering to ease him out in a comfortable and orderly manner; indeed he was invited to come to the Conference, but the little “piker” refused to budge and the Rumanians are pushing ahead and apparently are giving the Hungarian putsztas a taste of fire and sword with which they have had no experience since the days of the Turkish Horde. And the Russian Kolchak? Well, he has acknowledged with thanks the rifles and the many supplies he has received from the Allies, but as yet no official answer is forthcoming to the eight questions concerning his future policy which the Supreme Council submitted to him. Little wonder then that many here are saying, paraphrasing the mot of the Prince de Ligne in Vienna, 1815, “the Conference talks but accomplishes nothing.” At least we do not dance.

And I am afraid those men who the sailors call my “wild tribes” are not making any particular headway. The Greeks of the Euxine Pontus have been in several times and have talked again in a fascinating way of the glories of those ancient Greek cities of Trebizond, of Samsoun, and of Tripoli (in Syria). They want an Asiatic republic of Black Sea Greeks attached to the Athens government by some loose form of dominion status, but even Venizelos, venturesome as he is where Thrace and the Smyrna vilayets are concerned, shrinks from this responsibility.

The Albanians saw the President on the seventeenth; at least Essad Pasha did, and his hopes are high although he admits that the President was noncommittal. Essad insists on complete independence and claims the support of all the Albanians in the United States. Unfortunately the Albanians at home are far from unanimous. A very stately gentleman named Turkhan Pasha has arrived and he brings a petition which indicates that his people want Italian protection but nevertheless are violently opposed to an Italian protectorate!

In one direction, at least, the atmosphere has been cleared by a forthright statement from Clemenceau of what I fear is an ugly fact. Always constituting himself the champion of the lesser states, who he thinks are not getting their rights, M. Hymans of Belgium drew from the Tiger the remark, “After all, the rights of the Great Powers have to be considered. Indeed, we who put twelve million men in the field are the arbiters of the world, and no one more than M. Hymans should gratefully acknowledge our power and responsibility.”