The President of the United States, it was further urged, is a historian, and history tells him that the help given to his country against England neither came from the French people nor was actuated by sympathy for the American cause. It was the vindictive act of one of those kings whose functions Mr. Wilson is endeavoring to abolish. The monarch who helped the Americans was merely utilizing a favorable opportunity for depriving with a minimum of effort his adversary of lucrative possessions. Moreover, the debt which nothing can pay was already due when in the years 1914-16 France was in imminent danger of being crushed by a ruthless enemy. But at that time Mr. Wilson owed his re-election largely to his refusal to extricate her from that peril. Instead of calling to mind the debt that can never be repaid he merely announced that he could not understand what the belligerents were fighting for and that in any case France's grateful debtor was too proud to fight. The motive which finally brought the United States into the World War may be the noblest that ever yet actuated any state, but no student of history will allow that Mr. Wilson has correctly described it.
The fact is that the French delegates and their supporters were consistent and, except in their demand for the Rhine frontier, unbending. They drew up a program and saw that it was substantially carried out. They declared themselves quite ready to accept Mr. Wilson's project, but only on condition that their own was also realized, heedless of the incompatibility of the two. And Mr. Wilson felt constrained to make their position his own, otherwise he could not have obtained the Covenant he yearned for. And yet he must have known that acquiescence in the demands put forward by M. Clemenceau would lower the practical value of his Covenant to that of a sheet of paper.
A blunt American journal, commenting on the handiwork of the Conference, gave utterance to views which while making no pretense to courtly phraseology are symptomatic of the way in which the average man thought and spoke of the Covenant which emanated from the Supreme Council. "We are convinced," it said, "that the elder statesmen of Europe, typified by Clemenceau, consider it a hoax. Clemenceau never before was so extremely bored by anything in his life as he was by the necessity of making a pious pretense in the Covenant when what he wanted was the assurance of the Triple Alliance. He got that assurance, which, along with the French watch on the Rhine, the French in the Saar Valley and in Africa, with German money going into French coffers, makes him tolerably indulgent of the altruistic rhetoricians.
"The English, the intelligent English, we know have their tongues in their cheeks. The Italians are petulant imperialists, and Japan doesn't care what happens to the League so long as Japan says what shall happen in Asia."[300]
Peace was at last signed, not on the basis of the Fourteen Points nor yet entirely on the lines of territorial equilibrium, but on those of a compromise which, missing the advantages of each, combined many of the evils of both and of others which were generated by their conjunction, and laid the foundations of the new state fabric on quick-sands. That was at bottom the view to which Italy, Rumania, and Greece gave utterance when complaining that their claims were being dealt with on the principle of self-denial, whereas those of France had been settled on the traditional basis of territorial guaranties and military alliances. Further, the Treaty failed to lay an ax to the roots of war, did, in fact, increase their number while purporting to destroy them. Far from that: germs of future conflicts not only between the late belligerents, but also between the recent Allies, were plentifully scattered and may sprout up in the fullness of time.
The Paris press expressed its satisfaction with France's share of the fruits of victory. For the provisions of the Treaty went as far as any merely political arrangement could go to check the natural inequality, numerical, economical, industrial, and financial, between the Teuton and French peoples. To many this problem seemed wholly insoluble, because its solution involved a suspension or a corrective of a law of nature. Take the birth-rate in France, for example. Before the war it had long been declining at a rate which alarmed thoughtful French patriots. And, according to official statistics, it is falling off still more rapidly to-day, whereas the increase in other countries is greater than ever before.[301] Thus, whereas in the year 1911 there were 73,599 births in the Seine Department, there were only 47,480 in 1918. Wet nurses, too, are disappearing. Of these, in the year 1911, in the same territory there were 1,363, but in 1918 only 65. The mortality among foundlings rose from 5 per cent. before the war to 40 per cent. in the year 1918.[302] M. Bertillon calculates that for France to increase merely at the same rate as other nations—not to recover the place among them which she has already lost, but only to keep her present one—she needs five hundred thousand more births than are registered at present. A statistical table which he drew up of the birth-rate of four European nations during five decades, beginning with the year 1861, is unpleasant reading[303] for the friends of that heroic and artistic people. France, containing in round numbers 40,000,000 inhabitants, ought to increase annually by 500,000. Before the war the total number of births in Germany was computed at one million nine hundred and fifty thousand, but hardly more than one million of the children born were viable.[304] The general conclusion to be drawn from these figures and from the circumstances that the falling off in the French population still goes on unchecked, is disquieting for those who desire to see the French race continue to play the leading part in continental Europe. One of the shrewdest observers in contemporary Germany—himself a distinguished Semite—commented on this decisive fact as follows:[305] "Within ten years Germany will contain seventy million inhabitants, and in the torrent of her fecundity will drown anemic and exhausted France.... The French nation is dying of exhaustion. There is no reason, however, for the world to get alarmed ... for before the French will have vanished from the earth, other races, virile and healthy, will have come to their country to take their place." That is what is actually happening, and it is impressively borne in upon the visitor to various French cities by the vast number of exotic names over houses of business and in other ways.
With this formidable obstacle, then, the three members of the Supreme Council strenuously coped by exercising to the fullest extent the power conferred on the victors over the vanquished. And the result of their combinations challenged and received the unstinted approval of all those numerous enemies of Teutondom who believe the Germans to be incapable of contributing materially to human progress, unless they are kept in leading-strings by one of the superior races. The Treaty represents the potential realization of France's dream, achieved semi-miraculously by the very statesmen on whom the Teutons were relying to dispel it. Defeated, disarmed, incapable of military resistance, and devoid of friends, Germany thought she could discern her sheet-anchor of salvation in the Wilsonian gospel, and it was the preacher of this gospel himself who implicitly characterized her salvation as more difficult than the passage of a camel through the eye of a needle. The crimes perpetrated by the Teutons were unquestionably heinous beyond words, and no punishment permitted by the human conscience is too drastic to atone for them. How long this punishment should endure, whether it should be inflicted on the entire people as well as on their leaders, and what form should be given to it, were among the questions confronting the Secret Council, and they implicitly answered them in the way we have seen.
People who consider the answer adequate and justified give as their reason that it presupposes and attains a single object—the efficacious protection of France as the sentinel of civilization against an incorrigible arch-enemy. And in this they may be right. But if you enlarge the problem till it covers the moral fellowship of nations, and if you postulate that as a safeguard of future peace and neighborliness in the world, then the outcome of the Treaty takes on a different coloring. Between France and Germany it creates a sea of bitterness which no rapturous exultation over the new ethical ordering can sweeten. The latter nation is assumed to be smitten with a fell moral disease, to which, however, the physicians of the Conference have applied no moral remedy, but only measures of coercion, mostly powerful irritants. The reformed state of Europe is consequently a state of latent war between two groups of nations, of which one is temporarily prostrate and both are naïvely exhorted to join hands and play a helpful part in an idyllic society of nations. This expectation is the delight of cynics and the despair of those serious reformers who are not interested politicians. Heretofore the most inveterate optimists in politics were the revolutionaries. But they have since been outdone by the Paris world-reformers, who tempt Providence by calling on it to accomplish by a miracle an object which they have striven hard and successfully to render impossible by the ordinary operation of cause and effect. Thus the Covenant mars the Treaty, and the Treaty the Covenant.
In Weimar and Berlin the Treaty was termed the death-sentence of Germany, not only as an empire, but as an independent political community. Henceforward her economic efforts, beyond a certain limit, will be struck with barrenness, her industry will be hindered from outstripping or overtaking that of the neighboring countries, and her population will be indirectly kept within definite bounds. For, instead of exporting manufactures, she will be obliged to export human beings, whose intellect and skill will be utilized by such rivals of her own race as vouchsafe to admit them. Already before the Conference was over they began to emigrate eastward. And those who remain at home will not be masters in their own house, for the doors will be open to various foreign commissions.
The assumption upon which the Treaty-framers proceeded is that the abominations committed by the German military and civil authorities were constructively the work of the entire nation, for whose reformation within a measurable period hope is vain. This view predominated among the ruling classes of the Entente peoples with few exceptions. If it be correct, it seems superfluous to constrain the enemy to enter the league of law-abiding nations, which is to be cemented only by voluntary adherence and by genuine attachment to liberty, right, and justice. Hence the Covenant, by being inserted in the Peace Treaty, necessarily lost its value as an eirenicon, and became subsequent to that instrument, and seems likely to be used as an anti-German safeguard. But even then its efficacy is doubtful, and manifestly so; otherwise the reformers, who at the start set out to abolish alliances as recognized causes of war, would not have ended by setting up a new Triple Alliance, which involves military, naval, and aerial establishments, and the corresponding financial burdens inseparable from these. An alliance of this character, whatever one may think of its economic and financial aspects, runs counter to the spirit of the Covenant, but was an obvious corollary of the Allies' attitude as mirrored in the Treaty. And the spirit of the Treaty destroys the letter of the Covenant. For the world is there implicitly divided into two camps—the friends and the enemies of liberty, right, and justice; and the main functions of the League as narrowed by the Treaty will be to hinder or defeat the machinations of the enemies. Moreover, the deliberate concessions made by the Conference to such agencies of the old ordering as the grouping of two or three Powers into defensive alliances bids fair to be extended in time. For the stress of circumstance is stronger than the will of man. At this rate the last state may be worse than the first.