This was part of a speech delivered by E Phelan, a British civil servant in the Ministry of Labour and later the director of the International Labour Organization (ILO) (1941–1948), in support of the creation of the ILO. For Mr Phelan, inserting ‘labour’ in the Treaty of Versailles was a success so wonderful that it could only be fathomed through the realm of the mystical and the fantastic. For the first time, and through the ILO, workers would be represented as voting members of an international institution through the innovation of tripartism. Almost like the anthropomorphic characters of Alice in Wonderland, the working class, at least theoretically, came to have a voice in the machineries of international labour policy.