The man who had arrived in Paris as the bearer of a message whose echoes had filled the world with hope, left France the bearer of a “scrap of paper.” He returned to find his authority lessened. Before, he had stood alone; he came back to take his place as one of the “Big Four.” It is given to few men to act as well as to affirm.
Mr. Lloyd George was unable to help the President; his election speeches had been the reverse of a moral exposition of the issues, and the Parliamentary majority they had helped to create allowed no lapses into Liberalism. More than a year had passed since the Prime Minister of Great Britain had stated that the British people were not fighting “a war of aggression against the German people ... or to destroy Austria-Hungary, or to deprive Turkey of its capital or of the rich and renowned lands of Asia Minor and Thrace which are predominantly Turkish in race.” Teschen had not been heard of then, and the demands of Italy and M. Venizelos were either forgotten or ignored. Mr. Lloyd George’s native sense and insight would have avoided many pitfalls; the Bullit revelations did no more than bare justice to his acumen in regard to Russia, but he was terrorized by a section of the British Press, which held him relentlessly to vote-catching pledges, however reckless or extravagant.
The Prime Minister of the French Republic was pre-occupied with revenging past humiliations, with retrieving the fortunes of his country and making it secure. He did lip-service to the “League of Nations,” but talked of it with sardonic humour, and did it infinite harm. A dominating personality and a prodigious intellect enriched by wide experience were lost to the cause of human progress. No rare occurrence, when the possessors of these gifts are old.
With the progress of the Conference, M. Clemenceau’s influence became stronger. He had made fewer public speeches than his colleagues, and perhaps that simplified his task. “Certain it is that words, as a Tartar’s bow, do shoot back upon the understanding of the wisest, and mightily entangle and pervert the judgment.”
While precious months were being devoted to framing the draft covenant of the League of Nations, Commissions appointed by the Peace Conference had been busy preparing reports on multifarious points of detail. These reports were the work of experts, and could not fail to influence the final decisions of the Supreme Council; as a matter of fact, they were followed textually in some of the weightiest decisions reached. The men who prepared them were in no sense statesmen, they were trammelled by official routine and exposed to all manner of outside influences. The whole tone of life in Paris was inimical to an objective attitude. Clamours for vengeance distorted the natural desire of honest men in France and Belgium for security against future aggression by a resuscitated Germany. The big industrial interests wanted to stifle German trade and at the same time exact a huge indemnity; they exploited the expectation of the working classes that, as a result of victory, Allied industry would be given a fair start in future competition with the enemy States.
In the absence of any higher guidance, either moral or informed, statecraft was entirely lacking in the proceedings of the Conference, yet the situation was such that, if adroitly handled, measures were possible which would have contributed powerfully to the security of France and Belgium, by attenuating and dissipating reactionary elements in the German Empire. Advantage might have been taken of the distrust inspired by Prussia in the other German States, to create autonomous and neutral zones in the Palatinate and the territory formerly comprised in the Hanseatic League, to assist Bavaria to shake off Prussian hegemony, and become a component with German Austria of a new Catholic State in South-Eastern Europe, where conflicting national aims and unruly populations needed a counterweight.
No such measures were taken. The Conference was obsessed with details. Every conceivable question was discussed before the one that was most urgent—the conclusion of some form of peace which would let the world resume its normal life. A state of affairs was protracted which encouraged the greedy and unscrupulous, which checked any expression of opinion by the “plain people” of President Wilson’s speeches, which gave an opening to militarists, jingo journalists, and politicians, whose ideas were those of German Junkers and who still believed in war.
Jungle law reasserted itself. In an allegoric sense, the Conference was like a jungle through which a forest fire had passed, destroying the scanty verdure it had once possessed, leaving bare, blackened stumps too hard to burn. Some of the larger, fiercer beasts had been expelled; a few remained, and they, too, had been changed. A solitary eagle had descended from his distant eyrie and, like a parrot, screeched incessantly. “Fiume, Fiume, Fiume”—a chuckle followed, it said—“Fourteen Points” but this was an obvious aside. The performance was disappointing; polished and well-turned phrases had been expected from so great a bird. The lion’s majestic mien had altered somewhat, his movements were uncertain; from time to time his eyes sought, furtively, a pack of jackals, who should have hunted with him, but, of late, they had grown insolent to their natural leader and reviled him in a high-pitched, daily wail. An old and wounded tiger roamed about the jungle; his strength, so far from being impaired, had become almost leonine; sometimes the jackals joined his own obedient cubs, and then he snarled contentedly while the lion roared with jealousy and rage. The bear was absent; he had turned savage through much suffering, and the wolves who prowled around the outskirts of the jungle prevented him from entering; they howled with terror whenever he approached, and wanted the lion and the tiger to help to kill this dangerous type of bear. A yellow dragon moaned in the far distance, but was unheeded; he was no more a peril and had little left for the other beasts to steal. Jubilant and shrill, the crowing of a cock was heard above the babel of the jungle, announcing, to all who cared to listen, the dawn of fifteen years of liberty in the valley of the Saar.
The Peace Treaties promulgated by the Conference at Paris are impregnated with the atmosphere in which they were drawn up—an atmosphere charged with suspicion and hatred, fear and greed; not one of them is in the spirit of the League of Nations. The Treaty with Germany, in particular, discloses the predominance of French influence in Allied councils. An old French nobleman once remarked, “Les Bourgeois sont terribles lors qu’ils ont eu peur.” The conditions imposed on a democratized and utterly defeated Germany are terrible indeed, but curiously ineffective; they are a timid attempt to modify vindictiveness by a half-hearted application of President Wilson’s ethical principles; they satisfy no one; this is their one redeeming feature, since it shows that they might have been even more vindictive and still more futile for the achievement of their purpose, which was, presumably, a lasting peace. Militarists and reactionaries could not conceive a state of peace which did not repose on force and the military occupation of large tracts of German territory. They were twenty years behind the time. They did not realize that armies in democratic countries consist of human beings who observe and think, who cannot be treated as machines, and bidden to subordinate their reasoning faculties to the designs of a few selfish and ambitious men. Liberal thinkers, on the other hand, were shocked at Treaties which inflamed the hearts of seventy million German-speaking people with hatred and a desire for revenge, which cemented German unity, which aroused a widespread irredentism and gave an incentive to industrious, efficient populations to devote their time and efforts to preparations for a future war and not to the arts of peace. Such men were neither visionaries nor sentimentalists, they were practical men of affairs, who foresaw that security could not be attained by visiting the sins of outworn mediaeval Governments on the heads of their innocent victims throughout Central Europe; that by the employment of such methods the “League of Nations” was turned into a farce; that exasperation would foster and provoke recalcitrance; that Germany would be a magnet to every dissatisfied State; that other leagues and combinations might be formed, on which it would be impossible to enforce a limitation of their armaments. They pointed out that the imposition of fabulous indemnities was two-edged, that payment of nine-tenths of the sums suggested would have to be made in manufactured goods or raw materials, a mode of payment which, in the end, might be more profitable to those that paid than to the peoples who received.
Inaugurated in an idealism which may have been exaggerated but was none the less sincere, the Peace Conference has blighted the hope and faith of “plain people” everywhere, and has consecrated cant. Respectability has been enthroned amid circumstances of wealth and power; in its smug and unctuous presence morality has found no place. The foundations of a clearer, better world have not been laid; the apex has been placed on a pyramid of errors, on which nothing can be built.