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settlement could be found, the curse of the minority problem
 
must be once and for all renoved from the European scene. He
 
said that steps which might appear cruel such as the steps which
 
he himself had taken in the Upper Adige must be taken, because
 
the ultimate good was far greater than the immediate hardships 
 
occasioned certain peoples.
 
He said that he did not believe that Europe could ever go
 
back to the kind of illusory security which had been promised but
 
never granted by the League of Nations. He envisioned a new
 
kind of Europe resulting from a federation of greater powers,
 
guaranteeing the integrity and independent life of those smaller
 
powers which, were in reality logically and justly entitled to
 
independent existence as proven nationalities. He felt that only
 
through the creation of such a system could real disarmament 
 
become effective, and the peoples of Europe be freed from the 
 
intolerable burden of armament and from the equally intolerable
 
fear of constant aggression.
 
     He said that Europe could not to-day stand the outbreak of
 
a "real" war. Europe could not undergo recurrent great wars
 
every twenty years.
 
     He then brought back the conversation to the question of
 
an immediate agreement upon territorial and political readjust.
 
merits of the nature indicated and stated that he believed that
 
in any agreement which might be reached, what he repeatedly
 
termed a "just political peace" was the indispensable first
 
point. I then asked him very frankly, how he felt the Allied 
 
powers could conceivably undertake to reach such an agreement 
 
as a first step, and without prior guaranteed security,
 
when during the course of the last four years every
 
agreement with Germany which had been officially
 
and solemnly entered into, had been in a few
 
months openly violated by Germany. I said, "What assurance
 
                                   could