Moreover, the foreign offices of the British, the French, and the Italians were haunted by traditional schemes of aggression entirely incompatible with the new ideas. A League of Nations that is to be of any appreciable value to mankind must supersede imperialisms; it is either a super-imperialism, a liberal world-empire of united states, participant or in tutelage, or it is nothing; but few of the people at the Paris Conference had the mental vigour even to assert this obvious consequence of the League proposal. They wanted to be at the same time bound and free, to ensure peace for ever, but to keep their weapons in their hands. Accordingly the old annexation projects of the Great Power period were hastily and thinly camouflaged as proposed acts of this poor little birth of April 28th. The newly born and barely animate League was represented to be distributing, with all the reckless munificence of a captive pope, “mandates” to the old imperialisms that, had it been the young Hercules we desired, it would certainly have strangled in its cradle. Britain was to have extensive “mandates” in Mesopotamia and East Africa; France was to have the same in Syria; Italy was to have all her holdings to the west and southeast of Egypt consolidated as mandatory territory. Clearly, if the weak thing that was being nursed by its Secretary in its cradle at Geneva into some semblance of life, did presently succumb to the infantile weakness of all institutions born without passion, all these “mandates” would become frank annexations. Moreover, all the powers fought tooth and nail at the Conference for “strategic” frontiers—the ugliest symptom of all. Why should a state want a strategic frontier unless it contemplates war? If on that plea Italy insisted upon a subject population of Germans in the southern Tyrol and a subject population of Yugo-Slavs in Dalmatia, and if little Greece began landing troops in Asia Minor, neither France nor Britain was in a position to rebuke these outbreaks of pre-millennial method.
We will not enter here into any detailed account of how President Wilson gave way to the Japanese and consented to their replacing the Germans at Kiau Chau, which is Chinese property, how the almost purely German city of Dantzig was practically, if not legally, annexed to Poland, and how the powers disputed over the claims of the Italian imperialists, a claim strengthened by these instances, to seize the Yugo-Slav part of Fiume and deprive the Yugo-Slavs of a good Adriatic outlet. Nor will we do more than note the complex arrangements and justifications that put the French in possession of the Saar valley, which is German territory, or the entirely iniquitous breach of the right of “self-determination” which practically forbade German Austria to unite—as it is natural and proper that she should unite—with the rest of Germany. These burning questions of 1919-20, which occupied the newspapers and the minds of statesmen and politicians, and filled all our waste paper baskets with propaganda literature, may seem presently very incidental things in the larger movement of these times. All these disputes, like the suspicions and tetchy injustices of a weary and irritated man, may lose their importance as the tone of the world improves, and the still inadequately apprehended lessons of the Great War and the Petty Peace that followed it begin to be digested by the general intelligence of mankind.
It is worth while for the reader to compare the treaty maps we give with what we have called the natural political map of Europe. The new arrangements do approach this latter more closely than any previous system of boundaries. It may be a necessary preliminary to any satisfactory league of peoples, that each people should first be in something like complete possession of its own household.
It is absurd to despair of mankind because of these treaties, or to regard them as anything more than feeble first sketches of a world settlement. To do so would be to suppose that there is nothing in France—that land of fine imaginations—better than M. Clemenceau, nothing in America stronger and wiser than President Wilson, and nothing in Britain to steady the Keltic traits of Mr. Lloyd George. The attention we have given to these three personalities in this Outline is intended less to enhance their importance than to emphasize their unimportance, and to make it clear to the reader how provisional and incidental all that they did must be in the world’s affairs. On no statesmen, on no particular men or groups of men, on no state or organization indeed, and on no Covenant or Treaty, does the future of our race now depend. The year 1919 was not a year of creation and decision, it was just the first cheerless dawn of a long day of creative effort. The conferences of the Ten, of the Four, of the Big Three, had no trace of creative power; there was no light in the men of Versailles; the dawn was manifest rather as a grey light of critical disapproval that broke through the shutters and staled the guttering candles of the old diplomacy as the conference yawned and drawled to its end. Creation was not there. But a great process of thought spreads throughout the world; many thousands of men and women, in every country, for the most part undistinguished and unknown people, are awakening to their responsibility, are studying, thinking, writing, and teaching, getting together, correcting false impressions, challenging foolish ideas, trying to find out and tell the truth; and upon them it is that we must rest our hope, such hope as we can entertain, of a saner plan to take the place of this first flimsy League and this patched and discomforting garment of treaties that has been flung for a while over the naked distresses of our world.
§ 14
The failure to produce a more satisfactory world settlement in 1919-20 was, we have suggested, a symptom of an almost universal intellectual and moral lassitude, resulting from the overstrain of the Great War. A lack of fresh initiative is characteristic of a fatigue phase; everyone, from sheer inability to change, drifts on for a time along the lines of mental habit and precedent.