Presidential Address: ‘National Boundaries and Treaties of Peace’

Extract

When first in the early autumn of 1918, it begun to occur to me that at some not very remote date I should once more have the duty and pleasure of delivering my annual address to the Society which has given me the honour of its presidential chair, I had intended to speak on a very academic topic—‘The Mediaeval Conception of History’. But as the months of victory wore on, and the collapse of the enemies of Great Britain became manifest, it grew more and more obvious that the only subject which the Society would wish to discuss at such a moment,—at the end of the greatest War that the world has ever seen,—would be ‘Peace and its Consequences’. I acknowledge myself wholly inadequate to take up such a burden: the brain reels when it tries to visualise as a whole the consequences of the triumph of the Allies.