Once the articles were signed the golden age would begin.
[Footnote: For Sully's grand Design compare the interesting article of Sir Geoffrey Butler in the Edinburgh Review, October 1919.] It is not to our present purpose to comment on this plan which the author with his characteristic simplicity seriously pressed upon the attention of statesmen.

It is easy to criticise it in the light of subsequent history, and to see that, if the impossible had happened and the experiment had been tried and succeeded, it might have caused more suffering than all the wars from that day to this.

For it was based on a perpetuation of the political status quo in Europe.

It assumed that the existing political distribution of power was perfectly satisfactory and conformable to the best interests of all the peoples concerned.

It would have hindered the Partition of Poland, but it would have maintained the Austrian oppression of Italians.