It is interesting to note how the conditions imposed upon Germany were appreciated by an influential body of Mr. Wilson's American partizans who had pinned their faith to his Fourteen Points. Their view is expressed by their press organ as follows:[332]
"France remains the strongest Power on the Continent. With her military establishment intact she faces a Germany without a general staff, without conscription, without universal military training, with a strictly limited amount of light artillery, with no air service, no fleet, with no domestic basis in raw materials for armament manufacture, with her whole western border fifty kilometers east of the Rhine demilitarized. On top of this France has a system of military alliances with the new states that touch Germany. On top of this she secured permanent representation in the Council of the League, from which Germany is excluded. On top of that economic terms which, while they cannot be fulfilled, do cripple the industrial life of her neighbor. With such a balance of forces France demands for herself a form of protection which neither Belgium, nor Poland, nor Czechoslovakia, nor Italy is granted."
FOOTNOTES:
[ [326] One of the three districts of Schleswig. A curious phenomenon was this zeal of the Supreme Council for Denmark's interests, as compared with Denmark's refusal to profit by it, the champions of self-determination urging the Danes to demand a district, as Danish, which the Danes knew to be German!
[ [327] Das Berliner Tageblatt, June 4, 1919.
[ [328] Le Journal de Genève, June 24, 1919.
[ [329] Cf. L'Echo de Paris, May 12, 1919.
[ [330] Ibidem.
[ [331] In a monograph entitled Plus Jamais.
[ [332] Cf. The New Republic, August 13, 1919, p. 43.