Harper's Pictorial Library of the World War, Volume XII

by Unknown

Finally the Covenant was adopted in a preliminary way and made public late in February. It was subject to amendment, and those who drafted the document welcomed amendments and urged that they be offered. An especial effort was made to secure suggestions from various Republican statesmen. No amendments, so far as I have been able to learn, were offered by any of the Republican Senators, but ex-President Taft suggested certain changes, some of which were adopted. President Lowell of Harvard contributed one or two which were taken over almost verbatim. Ex-Senator Elihu Root also made valuable suggestions, some of which were utilized in the final drafting of the Covenant, made public early in April.

ESSENCE AND SPIRIT OF THE LEAGUE

Roughly, as the situation developed, the purpose of the League of Nations became two-fold. The initial purpose, of course, was to set up the machinery for a body, representative of the nations, keeping in such close contact and guided by such general principles as would tend to make it impossible for one nation to begin war upon another. Elsewhere in this volume ex-Attorney General Wickersham has described in detail the clauses of the Covenant; but even in this brief allusion it is proper to set down the essence and spirit of the League. It is this: No two peoples, if they come to know each other and each other's motives sufficiently well, and if by certain machinery they are maintained in close personal and ideal contact, can conceivably fly at each other's throats. Now no machinery can be devised that will absolutely prevent war, but a carrying out of the spirit and principles set forth in the present Covenant ought to make war well-nigh impossible. The machinery that was thus set up at Paris was deemed at the time to be of course imperfect and subject to constant improvement.

The second purpose of the League was to act as the binder, and in a way, the administrative force of the present existing Treaty. That is to say, we found as time went on there were many situations so complex that human wisdom could not devise an immediate formula for their solution. Hence, it became necessary for the Peace Conference to establish certain machinery which, if necessary, should function over a series of years, and thus work out permanently the problems involved. Therefore, as it fell out, there were established under the Treaty, almost a score of Commissions, most of them to act under the general supervision of a League of Nations. Here, then, is another great function that the League of Nations is immediately called upon to fulfil.

WORK OF THE COMMISSIONS

With the Covenant of the League of Nations more or less complete, the next business of the Conference was the setting up of the Treaty proper. The method for this work was roughly as follows: About the first of February there was appointed a large number of special Commissions, made up of members of the various delegations. These Commissions, which were each to treat of separate topics, having arrived at a solution of the special subject, were then to draft their reports in such language that they could readily be embodied in the final Treaty of Peace itself. Thus, for instance, there was appointed a Commission on Reparations, a Commission on Economic Phases of the Treaty, a Commission on Finance, a Commission on Boundaries, a Commission on Military and Naval Armament, a Commission on German Colonies, a Commission on the Saar Basin Coal Fields, a Commission on Inland Waterways, and so on to the number of perhaps twenty. These Commissions immediately organized, and if the subject were particularly complex and many-sided, resolved themselves into sub-commissions. These sub-commissions in turn organized, each with its chairman and vice-chairman, its secretariat, and its interpreters, together with experts called into attendance.

DELAYS TO THE TREATY

The sittings of all these Commissions began, as I say, about February 1st, and at that time the plan was that the work of the Commissions should be concluded in the form of a report to the Supreme Council six weeks later, or about March 15th. The plan, further, was for the Supreme Council to pass upon these various reports, amend them if need be, and then have them drafted in such form as together would go to make up the Treaty, which, under this scheme, would be presented to the Germans on or about April 1st. The Germans would presumably sign within a fortnight, and we should all be going home about April 15th. As a matter of fact, the Germans signed the Treaty at Versailles at three o'clock on the afternoon of June 28th, two and one-half months later than the time originally planned.

This delay was, however, not at all unreasonable, if one stops to consider the number of questions involved, their magnitude, and the difficulty of dealing with them promptly. In the first place, each Commission was supposed to present the Supreme Council a unanimous report. The Council had ruled that the Commissions should not report by majority vote, for if in any given instance the majority overruled the minority, the minority might have such bitter complaint that there would be left in the situation the seed for future trouble. Therefore the Council determined that in the case of divergence of opinion in the same Commission, the two or more groups in the Commission should make separate reports to the Council, each having its own day in court. The Council would act as judges of the last resort, and no delegation would go away feeling that it had not had ample opportunity to present its case. Inevitable and sharp differences of opinion did arise, so that at least half the reports, I should say, as presented to the Big Four had to be thrashed out there in considerable detail.

The second handicap to rapid progress, of course, lay in the composition of the various Commissions. Each of the large five powers had to be represented on each Commission, and in most instances smaller powers also demanded representation. On some of the important Commissions the larger powers had two or more delegates sitting. Owing to the fact that Paris was full of influenza, each delegate had to have his alternate so as to keep the ball rolling. When they first met these delegates were not well acquainted with each other. They did not know how to get along together. It took weeks for them to shake down, so as to understand each other's methods and points of view; so as to be prepared to make the necessary give and take, certain meetings of views which are always essential where people are gathered from the four corners of the earth with a single aim, but with vastly different ideas for attaining it.