good faith) at realising throughout the world the ideal of the bourgeois republic of the Franco-American type.
This is a conservative ideal and it no longer satisfies me.
Nevertheless, despite our personal predilections and our reserves for the future, I believe that the best thing we can do for the moment is to support the action of President Wilson. He alone will be able to curb the greedy appetites, the ambitions, and the fierce instincts, which will seat themselves at the peace banquet. Through his action alone is there any chance of bringing about a modus vivendi in Europe, one which provisionally at least shall be fairly just. This great bourgeois embodies what is purest, most disinterested, most humane, in the mentality of his class.[1] No one is better fitted than he to act as Arbiter.
June, 1919.
- ↑ Subsequent events have shown that this did not amount to much, after all. The moral abdication of President Wilson, abandoning his own principles without having the honesty to admit the fact, signalises the ruin of that lofty bourgeois idealism which, for a century and a half, gave to the ruling class, notwithstanding many mistakes, both strength and prestige. The consequences of such an act are incalculable.
