The Inside Story of the Peace Conference

by Emile Joseph Dillon

Financially it was proposed that the Teutons should be forced to indemnify France, Belgium, and the other countries for all the damage they had inflicted upon them; to pay the entire cost of the war, as well as the pensions to widows, orphans, and the mutilated. And the military occupation of their country should be maintained until this huge debt is wholly wiped out.

A Nationalist organ,[298] in a leading article, stated with brevity and clearness the prevailing view of Germany's obligations. Here is a characteristic passage: "She is rich, has reserves derived from many years of former prosperity; she can work to produce and repair all the evil she has done, rebuild all the ruins she has accumulated, and restore all the fortunes she has destroyed, however irksome the burden." After analyzing Doctor Helfferich's report published six years ago, the article concluded, "Germany must pay; she disposes of the means because she is rich; if she refuses we must compel her without hesitation and without ruth."

As France, whose cities and towns and very soil were ruined, could not be asked to restore these places at her own expense and tax herself drastically like her allies, the Americans and British, the prior and privileged right to receive payment on her share of the indemnity should manifestly appertain to her. Her allies and associates should, it was argued, accordingly waive their money claims until hers were satisfied in full. Moreover, as France's future expenditure on her army of occupation, on the administration of her colonies and of the annexed territories, must necessarily absorb huge sums for years to come, which her citizens feel they ought not to be asked to contribute, and as her internal debt was already overwhelming, it is only meet and just that her wealthier partners should pool their war debts with hers and share their financial resources with her and all their other allies. This, it was argued, was an obvious corollary of the war alliance. Economically, too, the Germans, while permitted to resume their industrial occupations on a sufficiently large scale to enable them to earn the wherewithal to live and discharge their financial obligations, should be denied free scope to outstrip France, whose material prosperity is admittedly essential to the maintenance of general peace and the permanence of the new ordering. In this condition, it is further contended, our chivalrous ally was entitled to special consideration because of her low birth-rate, which is one of the mainsprings of her difficulties. This may permanently keep her population from rising above the level of forty million, whereas Germany, by the middle of the century, will have reached the formidable total of eighty million, so that competition between them would not be on a footing of equality. Hence the chances should be evenly balanced by the action of the Conference, to be continued by the League. Discriminating treatment was therefore a necessity. And it should be so introduced that France should be free to maintain a protective tariff, of which she had sore need for her foreign trade, without causing umbrage to her allies. For they could not gainsay that her position deserved special treatment.

Some of the Anglo-Saxon delegates took other ground, feeling unable to countenance the postulate underlying those demands, namely, that the Teuton race was to be forever anathema. They looked far enough ahead to make due allowance for a future when conditions in Europe will be very different from what they are to-day. The German race, they felt, being numerous and virile, will not die out and cannot be suppressed. And as it is also enterprising and resourceful it would be a mistake to render it permanently hostile by the Allies overstepping the bounds of justice, because in this case neither national nor general interests would be furthered. You may hinder Germany, they argued, from acquiring the hegemony of the world, but not from becoming the principal factor in European evolution. If thirty years hence the German population totals eighty million or more, will not their attitude and their sentiment toward their neighbors constitute an all-important element of European tranquillity and will not the trend of these be to a large extent the outcome of the Allies' policy of to-day? The present, therefore, is the time for the delegates to deprive that sentiment of its venomous, anti-Allied sting, not by renouncing any of their countries' rights, but by respecting those of others.

That was the reasoning of those who believed that national striving should be subordinated to the general good, and that the present time and its aspirations should be considered in strict relation to the future of the whole community of nations. They further contended that while Germany deserved to suffer condignly for the heinous crimes of unchaining the war and waging it ruthlessly, as many of her own people confessed, she should not be wholly crippled or enthralled in the hope that she would be rendered thereby impotent forever. Such hope was vain. With her waxing strength her desire of vengeance would grow, and together with it the means of wreaking it. She might yet knead Russia into such a shape as would make that Slav people a serviceable instrument of revenge, and her endeavors might conceivably extend farther than Russia. The one-sided resettlement of Europe charged with explosives of such incalculable force would frustrate the most elaborate attempts to create not only a real league of nations, but even such a rough approximation toward one as might in time and under favorable circumstances develop into a trustworthy war preventive. They concluded that a league of nations would be worse than useless if transformed into a weapon to be wielded by one group of nations against another, or as an artificial makeshift for dispensing peoples from the observance of natural laws.

At the same time all the governments of the Allies were sincere and unanimous in their desire to do everything possible to show their appreciation of France's heroism, to recognize the vastness of her sacrifices, and to pay their debt of gratitude for her services to humanity. All were actuated by a resolve to contribute in the measure of the possible to compensate her for such losses as were still reparable and to safeguard her against the recurrence of the ordeal from which she had escaped terribly scathed. The only limits they admitted to this work of reparation were furnished by the aim itself and by the means of attaining it. Thus Messrs. Wilson and Lloyd George held that to incorporate in renovated France millions or even hundreds of thousands of Germans would be to introduce into the political organism the germs of fell disease, and on this ground they firmly refused to sanction the Rhine frontier, which the French were thus obliged to relinquish. The French delegates themselves admitted that if granted it could not be held without a powerful body of international troops ever at the beck and call of the Republic, vigilantly keeping watch and ward on the banks of the Rhine and with no reasonable prospect of a term to this servitude. For the real ground of this dependence upon foreign forces is the disproportion between the populations of Germany and France and between the resources of the two nations. The ratio of the former is at present about six to four and it is growing perceptibly toward seven to four. The organizing capacity in commerce and industry is said to be even greater. If, therefore, France cannot stand alone to-day, still less could she stand alone in ten or fifteen years, and the necessity of protecting her against aggression, assuming that the German people does not become reconciled to its status of forced inferiority, would be more urgent and less practicable with the lapse of time. For, as we saw, it is largely a question of the birth-rate. And as neither the British nor the American people, deeply though they are attached to their gallant comrades in arms, would consent to this arrangement, which to them would be a burden and to the Germans a standing provocation, their representatives were forced to the conclusion that it would be the height of folly to do aught that would give the Teutons a convenient handle for a war of revenge. Let there be no annexation of territory, they said, no incorporation of unwilling German citizens. The Americans further argued that an indefinite occupation of German territory by a large body of international troops would be a direct encouragement to militarism.

The indemnities for which the French yearned, and on which their responsible financiers counted, were large. The figures employed were astronomical. Hundreds of milliards of francs were operated with by eminent publicists in an offhand manner that astonished the survivor of the expiring budgetary epoch and rejoiced the hearts of the Western taxpayers. For it was not only journalists who wrote as though a stream of wealth were to be turned into these countries to fertilize industry and commerce there and enable them to keep well ahead of their pushing competitors. Responsible Ministers likewise hall-marked these forecasts with their approval. Before the fortune of war had decided for the Allies, the finances of France had sorely embarrassed the Minister, M. Klotz, of whom his chief, M. Clemenceau, is reported to have said: "He is the only Israelite I have ever known who is out of his element when dealing with money matters." Before the armistice, M. Klotz, when talking of the complex problem and sketching the outlook, exclaimed: "If we win the war, I undertake to make both ends meet, far though they now seem apart. For I will make the Germans pay the entire cost of the war." After the armistice he repeated his promise and undertook not to levy fresh taxation.

Thus, despite fitful gleams of idealism, the atmosphere of the Paris Conclave grew heavy with interests, passions, and ambitions. Only people in blinkers could miss the fact that the elastic formulas launched and interpreted by President Wilson were being stretched to the snapping-point so as to cover two mutually incompatible policies. The chasm between his original prospects and those of his foreign associates they both conscientiously endeavored to ignore, and after a time they hit upon a tertium quid between territorial equilibrium and a sterilized league tempered by the Monroe Doctrine and a military compact. This composite resultant carried with it the concentrated evils of one of these systems and was deprived of its redeeming features by the other. At a conjuncture in the world's affairs which postulated internationalism of the loftiest kind, the delegates increased and multiplied nations and states which they deprived of sovereignty and yoked to the first-class races. National ambitions took precedence of larger interests; racial hatred was raised to its highest power. In a word, the world's state system was so oddly pieced together that only economic exhaustion followed by a speedy return to militarism could insure for it a moderate duration.

Territorial self-sufficiency, military strength, and advantageous alliances were accordingly looked to as the mainstays of the new ordering, even by those who paid lip tribute to the Wilsonian ideal. The ideal itself underwent a disfiguring change in the process of incarnation. The Italians asked how the Monroe Doctrine could be reconciled with the charter of the League of Nations, seeing that the League would be authorized to intervene in the domestic affairs of other member-states, and if necessary to despatch troops to keep Germany, Italy, and Poland in order; whereas if the United States were guilty of tyrannical aggression against Brazil, the Argentine Republic, or Mexico, the League, paralyzed by that Doctrine, must look on inactive. The Germans, alleging capital defects in the Wilsonian Covenant, which was adjusted primarily to the Allies' designs, went to Paris prepared with a substitute which, it must in fairness be admitted, was considerably superior to that of their adversaries, and incidentally fraught with greater promise to themselves.

It is superfluous to add that the continental view prevailed, but Mr. Wilson imagined that, while abandoning his principles in favor of Britain, France, and Bulgaria, he could readjust the balance by applying them with rigor to Italy and exaggerating them when dealing with Greece. He afterward communicated his reasons for this belief in a message published in Washington.[299] The alliance—he was understood to have been opposed to all partial alliances on principle—which guarantees military succor to France, he had signed, he said, in gratitude to that country, for he seriously doubted whether the American Republic could have won its freedom against Britain's opposition without the gallant and friendly aid of France. "We recently had the privilege of assisting in driving enemies, who also were enemies of the world, from her soil, but that does not pay our debt to her. Nothing can pay such a debt." His critics retorted that that is a sentimental reason which might with equal force have been urged by France and Britain in justification of their promises to Italy and Rumania, yet was rejected as irrelevant by Mr. Wilson in the name of a higher principle.