Bibliographical Note
The published records of the Paris Conference are limited to the official reports of the plenary sessions and the official text of the treaties, in French and English, with authoritative maps, subject to correction after the frontiers have been fixed on the spot. The proceedings of the Council of Ten and the Council of Five were kept by a regular secretariat, those of the Council of Four less officially and systematically; these minutes were manifolded but not printed. The minutes of the various commissions, while printed, have not been made public.
The German and Austrian treaties and related documents are printed as supplements to the American Journal of International Law since July 1919. The German treaty is also printed as a Senate Document and as a publication of the American Association for International Conciliation. The entire series of treaties is best available in the British Parliamentary Papers, Treaty Series, 1919 and 1920. A bibliographical list of all these treaties by Denys P. Myers is to be published by the World Peace Foundation, League of Nations Series, iii, no. 1. Documents and Statements relating to Peace Proposals and War Aims, December 1916 to November 1918, have been edited by G. Lowes Dickinson (London and New York, 1919).
There is as yet no memoir literature by members of the Conference. Some confidential papers are printed in the Hearings before the Committee on Foreign Relations of the United States Senate (Washington, 1919), but these do not concern territorial problems. Some things touching France will be found in the report of the Barthou committee to the Chamber of Deputies, supplemented by the articles of A. Tardieu in L’Illustration since February 1920. The official German criticisms of the Treaty of Versailles were published in various languages and have been freely reproduced by pro-German writers in other countries. A Kommentar in six volumes has been prepared by one of the German delegates, Walter Schücking.
So far the printed accounts of the Conference are the work of journalists, who from the nature of the proceedings cannot be fully informed. The most direct information was perhaps possessed by Ray Stannard Baker, chief of the American service of publicity, but his volume, What Wilson did at Paris (New York, 1919), is ex parte and very brief. E. J. Dillon, The Inside History of the Peace Conference (New York, 1920), is a diffuse composite of hearsay and newspaper clippings; it is anti-French but in general friendly to small nations. H. Wilson Harris, The Peace in the Making (New York, 1920), is an intelligent account by a fair-minded British Liberal. Sisley Huddleston, Peace-Making at Paris (London, 1919), is more impressionistic. J. M. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (London and New York, 1919), is the brilliant but untrustworthy work of a British financial expert who finally repented of the treaty. Influenced by German propaganda, it is in general anti-French, anti-Belgian, and anti-Polish, and disparages political self-determination in favor of economic frontiers. Of the various critiques which the book has called out, the most searching is that of David Hunter Miller, in the New York Evening Post, February 6 and 10, 1920, and in separate pamphlets.
A volume on the Conference, with an elaborate atlas, is announced by an American territorial expert, Isaiah Bowman; a fuller work is in preparation by British and American experts under the editorship of Harold W. V. Temperley, of Peterhouse, Cambridge.
Of the material collected in France for the Conference, the only systematic publication is the Travaux du Comité d’Etudes, in two volumes with an atlas (Paris, 1919). Most of the British material was printed but not published, a useful exception being C. K. Webster, The Congress of Vienna (Oxford, 1918). The Foreign Office series of Handbooks has now been made public (London, 1920). The most important American publication of the sort is the Atlas of Mineral Resources to be issued by the United States Geological Survey (Washington, 1920).
There is no entirely satisfactory discussion of the general problem of frontiers. T. L. Holdich, Political Frontiers and Boundary Making (London, 1916), is concerned chiefly with ‘natural’ frontiers outside of Europe. For the facts of race, see W. Z. Ripley, The Races of Europe (New York, 1899). Leon Dominian, Frontiers of Language and Nationality in Europe (New York, 1917), is convenient. A more authoritative work on the linguistic side is A. Meillet, Les langues dans l’Europe nouvelle (Paris, 1918). Experience with plebiscites is brought together in Miss Sarah Wambaugh’s elaborate Monograph on Plebiscites (New York, 1920). A. Toynbee, Nationality and the War (London, 1915), is an attempt to state the territorial problems in the early months of the war; L. Stoddard and G. Frank, Stakes of the War (New York, 1918), seeks to sum them up at its close. The relation of certain of these problems to a league of nations is discussed in The League of Nations, edited by Stephen P. Duggan, with references (Boston, 1919); and by Lord Eustace Percy, The Responsibilities of Peace (London and New York, 1920).