Europe Since 1918

by Herbert Adams Gibbons

It is difficult for the professional writer to answer this sort of charge. Although he has as much pride in his accuracy as the college professor, and is fully as careful to base statements on source material personally investigated and tested, the newspaper correspondent is unable to cite his sources and quote his authorities. He deals with history in the making. He must be discreet. He must avoid using names. When he is accused of not knowing what he is talking about and of making sweeping assertions, he has to bide his time.

I was proud of the men of my craft at Paris. The work of the American correspondents was as trustworthy as it was brilliant. Tested by wide knowledge and experience of the field, as well as by training, some of the correspondents were better qualified to acquaint their fellow-Americans with what was going on at Paris than any expert or adviser of the American Commission. For even when they participated in the work of the various committees the American experts had neither the knowledge nor training to appreciate the forces at work that determined the decisions upon the very questions they were deliberating.

Events have fully justified the severe criticism that was made by correspondents upon the Treaty of Versailles while it was being drafted. Actual participants in the inner workings of the Peace Conference have now given us, in narratives and documents, full corroboration of what was cabled day by day from Paris during those fateful months. Of no great conference has there ever been given so complete and faithful a daily picture.

Except in rare instances of anecdote, such as Mr. Lamont’s graphic story of how President Wilson came to agree to include (against the advice of the lawyers on the American Commission) pensions in the reparations, Colonel House’s compilation does not give “What Really Happened at Paris” in a satisfying manner. Now, if the colonel had only written for us the frank and unreserved story of a primary witness instead of editing a volume of testimony of others, the volume would have contained invaluable pages of contemporary history. For Colonel House is the American best qualified, aside from the ex-President himself, to make a contribution to the diplomatic history of America’s participation in the war and Peace Conference.

Mr. Lansing’s book, “The Peace Negotiations,” makes it clear that only Colonel House is qualified to write the inside story of Woodrow Wilson and the world peace. But we do have Mr. Lansing’s contribution, Mr. Baruch’s “The Economic Sections of the Peace Treaty,” and Mr. Ray Stannard Baker’s three volumes, “Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement,” which are indictments of the treaty.

Mr. Lansing was the first of the signers of the Treaty of Versailles to realize that the consequences of the blunders at Paris were too disastrous in human suffering to permit the covering up of mistakes and the glossing over of weaknesses. He told a story that was, in every important particular, what press correspondents saw themselves or were told at the time by creditable witnesses. Mr. Lansing agreed with his predecessors in the State Department, Mr. Root and Mr. Knox, concerning the weaknesses and dangers of the Covenant and its incompatibility with American interests and ideals. He gave the text of the letter sent by General Bliss to President Wilson on April 29, appealing that the great moral principles for which the United States fought be not abandoned. Wrote General Bliss:

If it be right for Japan to annex the territory of an ally, then it cannot be wrong for Italy to retain Fiume taken from the enemy. It can’t be right to do wrong even to make peace. Peace is desirable, but there are things greater than peace—justice and freedom.

Mr. Lansing quotes from a memorandum he wrote on May 8, 1919, when the draft of the treaty was handed to the Germans:

The terms of peace appear immeasurably harsh and humiliating, while many of them seem to me impossible of performance.... Examine the treaty and you will find peoples delivered against their wills into the hands of those whom they hate, while their economic resources are torn from them and given to others.... It may be years before these suppressed peoples are able to throw off the yoke, but as sure as day follows night, the time will come when they will make the effort. This war was fought by the United States to destroy forever the conditions which produced it. Those conditions have not been destroyed. They have been supplanted by other conditions equally productive of hatred, jealousy, and suspicion.... The League of Nations is an alliance of the five great military powers.... Justice is secondary. Might is primary.... We have a treaty of peace, but it will not bring permanent peace because it is founded on the shifting sands of self-interest.

To Mr. Baker were entrusted the private papers, letters, and even minutes of the Council of Ten and the Council of Four, collected by President Wilson. These have been published at President Wilson’s suggestion, with the intention of showing that the Peace Conference was a struggle between the new and the old, the idealism of Mr. Wilson and the sinister forces of Old World diplomacy. In attempting to explain and justify Mr. Wilson’s rôle at Paris, the Baker volumes reveal much—but by no means all—of the sad story of how greed and particular interests triumphed at the Conference from beginning to end. Mr. Baker throws more light upon the inner workings of the conference, thanks to the unrivaled worth of his sources, than any other writer. But his revelations only tend to confirm the fairness of the judgments of General Smuts and Mr. Lansing.