The Inside Story of the Peace Conference

by Emile Joseph Dillon

Among the many epigrammatic sayings current in Paris about the Conference, the most original was ascribed to the Emir Faissal, the son of the King of the Hedjaz. Asked what he thought of the world's areopagus, he is said to have answered: "It reminds me somewhat of one of the sights of my own country. My country, as you know, is the desert. Caravans pass through it that may be likened to the armies of delegates and experts at the Conference—caravans of great camels solemnly trudging along one after the other, each bearing its own load. They all move not whither they will, but whither they are led. For they have no choice. But between the two there is this difference: that whereas the big caravan in the desert has but one leader—a little ass—the Conference in Paris is led by two delegates who are the great Ones of the earth." In effect, the leaders were two, and no one can say which of them had the upper hand. Now it seemed to be the British Premier, now the American President. The former scored the first victory, on the freedom of the seas, before the Conference opened. The latter won the next, when Mr. Wilson firmly insisted on inserting the Covenant in the Treaty and finally overrode the objections of Mr. Lloyd George and M. Clemenceau, who scouted the idea for a while as calculated to impair the value of both charters. There was also a moment when the two were reported to have had a serious disagreement and Mr. Lloyd George, having suddenly quitted Paris for rustic seclusion, was likened to Achilles sulking in his tent. But one of the two always gave way at the last moment, just as both had given way to M. Clemenceau at the outset. When the difference between Japan and China cropped up, for example, the other delegates made Mr. Wilson their spokesman. Despite M. Clemenceau's resolve that the public should not "be apprized that the head of one government had ever put forward a proposal which was opposed by the head of another government," it became known that they occasionally disagreed among themselves, were more than once on the point of separating, and that at best their unanimity was often of the verbal order, failing to take root in identity of views. To those who would fain predicate political tact or statesmanship of the men who thus undertook to set human progress on a new and ethical basis, the story of these bickerings, hasty improvisations, and amazing compromises is distressing. The incertitude and suspense that resulted were disconcerting. Nobody ever knew what was coming. A subcommission might deliver a reasoned judgment on the question submitted to it, and this might be unanimously confirmed by the commission, but the Four or Three or Two or even One could not merely quash the report, but also reverse the practical consequences that followed. This was done over and over again.

And there were other performances still more amazing. When, for example, the Polish problem became so pressing that it could not be safely postponed any longer, the first delegates were at their wits' ends. Unable to agree on any of the solutions mooted, they conceived the idea of obtaining further data and a lead from a special commission. The commission was accordingly appointed. Among its members were Sir Esmé Howard, who has since become Ambassador in Rome, the American General Kernan, and M. Noulens, the ex-Ambassador of France in Petrograd. These envoys and their colleagues set out for Poland to study the problem on the spot. They exerted themselves to the utmost to gather data for a serious judgment, and returned to Paris after a sojourn of some two months, legitimately proud of the copious and well-sifted results of their research. And then they waited. Days passed and weeks, but nobody took the slightest interest in the envoys. They were ignored. At last the chief of the commission, M. Noulens, taking the initiative, wrote direct to M. Clemenceau, informing him that the task intrusted to him and his colleagues had been achieved, and requesting to be permitted to make their report to the Conference. The reply was an order dissolving the commission unheard.

Once when the relations between Messrs. Wilson and Lloyd George were somewhat spiced by antagonism of purpose and incompatibility of methods, a political friend of the latter urged him to make a firm stand. But the British Premier, feeling, perhaps, that there were too many unascertained elements in the matter, or identifying the President with the United States, drew back. More than once, too, when a certain delegate was stating his case with incisive emphasis Mr. Wilson, who was listening with attention and in silence, would suddenly ask, "Is this an ultimatum?" The American President himself never shrank from presenting an ultimatum when sure of his ground and morally certain of victory. On one such occasion a proposal had been made to Mr. Lloyd George, who approved it whole-heartedly. But it failed to receive the placet of the American statesman. Thereupon the British Premier was strongly urged to stand firm. But he recoiled, his plea being that he had received an ultimatum from his American colleague, who spoke of quitting France and withdrawing the American troops unless the point were conceded. And Mr. Wilson had his way. One might have thought that this success would hearten the President to other and greater achievements. But the leader who incarnated in his own person the highest strivings of the age, and who seemed destined to acquire pontifical ascendancy in a regenerated world, lacked the energy to hold his own when matters of greater moment and high principle were at stake.

These battles waged within the walls of the palace on the Quai d'Orsay were discussed out-of-doors by an interested and watchful public, and the conviction was profound and widespread that the President, having set his hand to the plow so solemnly and publicly, and having promised a harvest of far-reaching reforms, would not look back, however intractable the ground and however meager the crop. But confronted with serious obstacles, he flinched from his task, and therein, to my thinking, lay his weakness. If he had come prepared to assert his personal responsibility, to unfold his scheme, to have it amply and publicly discussed, to reject pusillanimous compromise in the sphere of execution, and to appeal to the peoples of the world to help him to carry it out, the last phase of his policy would have been worthy of the first, and might conceivably have inaugurated the triumph of the ideas which the indolent and the men of little faith rejected as incapable of realization. To this hardy course, which would have challenged the approbation of all that is best in the world, there was an alternative: Mr. Wilson might have confessed that his judgment was at fault, mankind not being for the moment in a fitting mood to practise the new tenets, that a speedy peace with the enemy was the first and most pressing duty, and that a world-parliament should be convened for a later date to prepare the peoples of the universe for the new ordering. But he chose neither alternative. At first it was taken for granted that in the twilight of the Conference hall he had fought valiantly for the principles which he had propounded as the groundwork of the new politico-social fabric, and that it was only when he found himself confronted with the insuperable antagonism of his colleagues of France and Britain that he reluctantly receded from his position and resolved to show himself all the more unbending to the envoys of the lesser countries. But this assumption was refuted by State-Secretary Lansing, who admitted to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the President's Fourteen Points, which he had vowed to carry out, were not even discussed at the Conference. The outcome of this attitude—one cannot term it a policy—was to leave the best of the ideas which he stood for in solution, to embitter every ally except France and Britain, and to scatter explosives all over the world.

To this dwarfing parliamentary view of world-policy Mr. Lloyd George likewise fell a victim. But his fault was not so glaring. For it should in fairness be remembered that it was not he who first preached the advent of the millennium. He had only given it a tardy and cold assent, qualified by an occasional sally of keen pleasantry. Down to the last moment, as we saw, he not only was unaware that the Covenant would be inserted in the Peace Treaty, but he was strongly of the opinion, as indeed were M. Pichon and others, that the two instruments were incompatible. He also apparently inclined to the belief that spiritual and moral agencies, if not wholly impotent to bring about the requisite changes in the politico-social world, could not effect the transformation for a long while to come, and that in the interval it behooved the governments to fall back upon the old system of so-called equilibrium, which, after Germany's collapse, meant an informal kind of Anglo-Saxon overlordship of the world and a pax Britannica in Europe. As for his action at the Conference, in so far as it did not directly affect the well-being of the British Empire, which was his first and main care, one might describe it as one of general agreement with Mr. Wilson. He actually threw it into that formula when he said that whenever the interests of the British Empire permitted he would like to find himself at one with the United States. It was on that occasion that the person addressed warned him against identifying the President with the people of the United States.

In truth, it was difficult to follow the distinguished American idealist, because one seldom knew whither he would lead. Neither, apparently, did he himself. Some of his own countrymen in Paris held that he had always been accustomed to follow, never to guide. Certainly at the Conference his practice was to meet the more powerful of his contradictors on their own ground and come to terms with them, so as to get at least a part of what he aimed at, and that he accepted, even when the instalment was accorded to him not as such, but as a final settlement. So far as one can judge by his public acts and by the admissions of State-Secretary Lansing, he cannot have seriously contemplated staking the success of his mission on the realization of his Fourteen Points. The manner in which he dealt with his Covenant, with the French demand for concrete military guaranties and with secret treaties, all afford striking illustrations of his easy temper. Before quitting Paris for Washington he had maintained that the Covenant as drafted was satisfactory, nay, he contended that "not even a period could be changed in the agreement." The Monroe Doctrine, he held, needed no special stipulation. But as soon as Senator Lodge and others took issue with him on the subject, he shifted his position and hedged that doctrine round with defenses which cut off a whole continent from the purview of the League, which is nothing if not cosmic in its functions.[115] Again, there was to be no alliance. The French Premier foretold that there would be one. Mr. Wilson, who was in England at the time, answered him in a speech declaring that the United States would enter into no alliance which did not include all the world: "no combination of power which is not a combination of all of us." Well, since then he became a party to a kind of triple alliance and in the judgment of many observers it constitutes the main result of the Conference. In the words of an American press organ: "Clemenceau got virtually everything he asked. President Wilson virtually dropped his own program, and adopted the French and British, both of them imperialistic."[116]

Again, when the first commission of experts reported upon the frontiers of Poland, the British Premier objected to a section of the "corridor," on the ground that as certain districts contained a majority of Germans their annexation would be a danger to the future peace and therefore to Poland herself, and also on the ground that it would run counter to one of Mr. Wilson's fundamental points; the President, who at that time dissented from Mr. Lloyd George, rose and remarked that his principles must not be construed too literally. "When I said that Poland must be restored, I meant that everything indispensable to her restoration must be accorded. Therefore, if that should involve the incorporation of a number of Germans in Polish territory, it cannot be helped, for it is part of the restoration. Poland must have access to the sea by the shortest route, and everything else which that implies." None the less, the British Premier, whose attitude toward the claims of the Poles was marked by a degree of definiteness and persistency which could hardly be anticipated in one who had never even heard of Teschen before the year 1919, maintained his objections with emphasis and insistence, until Mr. Wilson and M. Clemenceau gave in.

Or take the President's way of dealing with the non-belligerent states. Before leaving Paris for Washington, Mr. Wilson, officially questioned by one of his colleagues at an official sitting as to whether the neutrals would also sign the Covenant, replied that only the Allies would be admitted to affix their signatures. "Don't you think it would be more conducive to the firm establishment of the League if the neutrals were also made parties to it now?" insisted the plenipotentiary. "No, I do not," answered the President. "I think that it would be conferring too much honor on them, and they don't deserve it." The delegate was unfavorably impressed by this reply. It seemed lacking in breadth of view. Still, it was tenable on certain narrow, formal grounds. But what he could not digest was the eagerness with which Mr. Wilson, on his return from Washington, abandoned his way of thinking and adopted the opposite view. Toward the end of April the delegates and the world were surprised to learn that not only would Spain be admitted to the orthodox fold, but that she would have a voice in the management of the flock with a seat in the Council. The chief of the Portuguese delegation[117] at once delivered a trenchant protest against this abrupt departure from principle, and as a jurisconsult stigmatized the promotion of Spain to a voice in the Council as an irregularity, and then retired in high dudgeon.

Thus the grave reproach cannot be spared Mr. Wilson of having been weak, vague, and inconsistent with himself. He constituted himself the supreme judge of a series of intricate questions affecting the organization and tranquillity of the European Continent, as he had previously done in the case of Mexico, with the results we know. This authority was accorded to him—with certain reservations—in virtue of the exalted position which he held in a state disposing of vast financial and economic resources, shielded from some of the dangers that continually overhang European nations, and immune from the immediate consequences of the mistakes it might commit in international politics. For every continental people in Europe is in some measure dependent on the good-will of the United States, and therefore anxious to deserve it by cultivating the most friendly relations with its chief. This predisposition on the part of his wards was an asset that could have been put to good account. It was a guaranty of a measure of success which would have satisfied a generous ambition; it would have enabled him to effect by a wise policy what revolution threatened to accomplish by violence, and to canalize and lead to fruitful fields the new-found strength of the proletarian masses.

The compulsion of working with others is often a wholesome corrective. It helps one to realize the need of accommodating measures to people's needs. But Mr. Wilson deliberately segregated himself from the nations for whose behoof he was laboring, and from some of their authorized representatives. And yet the aspirations and conceptions of a large section of the masses differed very considerably from those of the two statesmen with whom he was in close collaboration. His avowed aims were at the opposite pole to those of his colleagues. To reconcile internationalism and nationalism was sheer impossible. Yet instead of upholding his own, taking the peoples into his confidence, and sowing the good seed which would certainly have sprouted up in the fullness of time, he set himself, together with his colleagues, to weld contradictories and contributed to produce a synthesis composed of disembodied ideas, disintegrated communities, embittered nations, conflicting states, frenzied classes, and a seething mass of discontent throughout the world.