EUROPE SINCE 1918

BOOKS BY
HERBERT ADAMS GIBBONS

THE FOUNDATION OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

THE NEW MAP OF EUROPE

THE NEW MAP OF AFRICA

THE NEW MAP OF ASIA

THE BLACKEST PAGE IN MODERN HISTORY

THE RECONSTRUCTION OF POLAND AND THE NEAR EAST

AN INTRODUCTION TO WORLD POLITICS

EUROPE SINCE 1918

VENIZELOS (in the Modern Statesmen Series)

A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE WORLD WAR

THE LITTLE CHILDREN OF THE LUXEMBOURG

SONGS FROM THE TRENCHES

PARIS REBORN

RIVIERA TOWNS

FRANCE AND OURSELVES

PORTS OF FRANCE

EUROPE SINCE 1918

BY
HERBERT ADAMS GIBBONS
Author of “The New Map of Europe,” “An Introduction to World Politics,” etc.

THE CENTURY CO.
New York and London

Copyright, 1923, by
The Century Co.

PRINTED IN U. S. A.

TO
HENRY MORGENTHAU

Who does not share my lack of faith in the Versailles Covenant and whose judgments of men and events are less harsh and sweeping than mine, because he is older and wiser than the writer and because he has not allowed the dark clouds of these days to obscure his vision of the goal.

FOREWORD

The world of 1914, as we see it now, reminds us of Humpty Dumpty. Having climbed upon its wall with difficulty, to keep from being involved in every petty quarrel between nations and coalitions, the world had somehow managed to sit there for a hundred years. The status quo was revised here and there occasionally by violence. But the violence did not set back the hands of the clock, defy economic laws, or, with the exception of Alsace-Lorraine, make for international political instability. The developments of the nineteenth century were a logical growth, the result of the working out of economic laws, which means that thoughtful men and strong men led virile national groups successfully because they knew how to adapt their foreign policies to, and shape them by, changing political, economic, and social world conditions.

None was satisfied with Humpty Dumpty, but, for fear of the consequences, all bolstered him up and steadied him whenever he showed signs of toppling. When he did fall, the first dismay gave way to rejoicing. Now was our chance to make him over again into what we wanted him to be.

We forgot our nursery-rime. A new world order became our battle-cry. The Central Empires stood for the old order; the Entente Allies were determined to make a clean sweep of the international conditions that caused wars. Glibly repeated from mouth to mouth “A war to end war” was the phrase that appealed to our imagination. How? By emancipating subject races, by resurrecting submerged nations, by guaranteeing collectively the independence of weak states and the sanctity of treaties and international law.

We forgot our nursery-rime, I say. Some of us had no intention of actually letting Humpty Dumpty fall to pieces, and all of us thought we could put him together again according to our own plan and in a way that would suit us. But when we entered the fray idealistic principles and formulæ became weapons and not goals. Before November 11, 1918, we used our principles solely to break down the morale of our enemies; and since the defeat of Germany instead of making peace we have continued to juggle with our ideals as we did in war-time. So the world is still actually at war. The treaties forced upon the vanquished enemies have not been taken seriously. One of them has already come up for drastic revision and the others are not being fully enforced.

In justification of their unwillingness to apply in making peace the principles they had solemnly pledged themselves to use as the basis of the treaties, Entente statesmen had no grounds for claiming either (a) that the American President and his nation, late comers in the war, wrongly interpreted and formulated the Entente war aims, or (b) that the fulfilment of their promises was contingent upon American coöperation. Self-determination, the resurrection of subject nations, the rectification of frontiers to satisfy irredentist aspirations, may have been doctrines promulgated in a small measure as a gallery appeal to public opinion at home and abroad; but the main reason was to break down the internal military unity of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey. These doctrines were not inspired by President Wilson or other American ideologues, nor were they proclaimed with the idea that the United States would help to carry them out.

It was not intended that they should be carried out. But the new forces set loose were too strong to control. Peoples all over the world clamored for rights and privileges that it was the purpose to grant only to peoples that had been subject to the vanquished powers. To this cause of confusion, unrest, conspiracy, and open rebellion, were added the falling out of the victors over the spoils of war and the determination of France and some of the smaller nations to apply the law of retaliation to their now defenseless oppressors.

These are the three reasons why Europe since 1918 has not found peace. The League of Nations is impotent, with or without the United States as a member, to restore Europe to peace until the three Furies—Vanity, Greed, and Revenge—cease raging.

After the World War the movement in the United States to induce the American people to underwrite the Paris peace settlement did not succeed. The overwhelming rejection of their panacea for the ills of the world did not discourage the supporters of the Versailles Covenant. After four years they are returning to the campaign for American participation in the Versailles League. Since they cannot disguise the seriousness of conditions in Europe as the fourth year of the functioning of the League of Nations draws to a close, the earnest League propagandists, to get away from the remorseless logic of “By their fruits ye shall know them,” now assert that Europe’s troubles are our fault. We refused to ratify the treaty and enter the League of Nations; ergo, all these things have happened.

The writer, an observer and student of European affairs for fifteen years, has never had an ax to grind or theories and national causes to advance and champion. In the Near East during the years leading up to the World War, in Paris during the World War and the Peace Conference, and following the aftermath of the war since the treaties were signed, his sole ambition has been to record what he has observed. He is not pro-anything. He feels, as he did when he wrote “The New Map of Europe” in 1914, “The New Map of Africa” in 1916, and “The New Map of Asia” in 1919, that a host of people are seeking an unbiased presentation of contemporary events, so that sentimentality will not obscure common sense in forming their opinion on the important problem of America’s place in the world and America’s duty toward the world. We must know how things actually are in order that we may help effectively to make them what they ought to be.

Herbert Adams Gibbons.

Princeton, September, 1923.

CONTENTS

EUROPE SINCE 1918

The great World War, which has just closed, was born of the feeling on the part of the Germans that they had not been given their share of the world’s loot. So far as it is possible to see, the struggle has taught us nothing, and we are to go on sowing dragons’ teeth.

Melville E. Stone.
General Manager of The Associated Press,
in “Collier’s Weekly,” March 26, 1921.

The war was not a deliberate crime. It was something that flowed out of the conditions of European life. The Treaty of Versailles was a voluntary destruction of civilization. French civilization depends upon European civilization, and there will be no civilization in Europe until the Treaty of Versailles is revised.

Anatole France.

Undoubtedly we shall from this time forward have a much more adequate conception of the essential unity of the whole story of mankind, and a keener realization of the fact that all its factors must be weighed and appraised if any of them are to be accurately estimated and understood. I feel strongly that such a broader view of history, if it can be planted in the community’s mind through the efforts of educators and writers, will contribute greatly to uphold the hands and strengthen the efforts of those who have to deal with the great problems of human destiny, particularly with those of preserving peace and outlawing war.

Warren G. Harding.

EUROPE SINCE 1918

CHAPTER I
THE ARMISTICE OF NOVEMBER 11, 1918

October, 1918, brought a sweeping and unexpected change in the fortunes of Germany. In London and Paris it was not believed that the crash would come so soon. British and French political and journalistic circles were discussing the all-absorbing subject of Foch’s forward movement on the western front. During the war, already lasting over four years, there had been so little of military victories to record and comment upon that none seemed to be thinking of the inevitable day of Germany’s collapse. The armistices with Bulgaria, Turkey, and Austria-Hungary were regarded as military agreements, and the newspapers were silent about post-armistice events in southeastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire.

Public opinion, therefore, was unprepared for Germany’s direct and definite demand for an armistice based upon the acceptance by all belligerents of President Wilson’s peace program.

The speech of President Wilson at the opening of the Fourth Liberty Loan Campaign on September 27 was made the day after the collapse of Bulgaria. The superiority of numbers had already begun to tell against Germany on the western front. The President of the United States weighed fully every word uttered on that occasion. It was clear that the enemies of Germany had reached no understanding as to their attitude in case Germany should express the willingness to lay down her arms and confess that she was beaten. When, two days later, Bulgaria signed an armistice, and the Germans knew they could no longer hope for a drawn battle, it was excellent strategy to make the request for peace in the form of a direct appeal to President Wilson in which the Imperial German Government expressed its willingness to make peace “on the basis of President Wilson’s Fourteen Points and subsequent discourses, notably that of September 27.”

When the news of this appeal was published in Paris, a French statesman who had been at the head of the Government at one time during the war said to me: “France is as unprepared for peace as she was for war. In 1914 we had no definite understanding with any other nation than Russia. You remember how nervous we were about England’s attitude during those awful first three days. In 1918, with the military victory ours, we and our numerous allies have no terms of peace, agreed upon in common by us all, to impose upon our enemies. It looks as if we shall soon have power to dictate peace, but we are not ready to state to the enemy—and to our own people, for that matter—what terms we propose to dictate. Nor is there any overwhelming public sentiment to guide us. The speeches of your Wilson have had a splendid effect in demoralizing the Germans. For this reason, it would have been folly for any French or British statesman to differ publicly with Mr. Wilson. We must not give German statesmen and generals ammunition to use in fighting the demoralization that is so evident on their front as well as in their rear. On the other hand, because of this silence, we are in danger of being stampeded into agreeing to accept Mr. Wilson’s ideas of peace, which are altogether ridiculous.”

Unpreparedness for peace was not due to lack of foresight on the part of Entente statesmen. Up to the end, Germany was a redoubtable enemy who hoped for a military stalemate through lack of harmony among the members of the coalition. She knew that the nations banded against her had only one common interest, her defeat. The Entente Powers themselves realized that they were not going to think alike about terms of peace, as they were interested in the war in varying degrees and for different reasons. So they wisely stuck by the old adage, “First catch your hare!” In order to catch the hare, the enemies of Germany had been going the limit in abandonment of prejudices, sacrifice of pride, change of national habits, and repression of national instincts. Mutual forbearance was taxed to the uttermost in keeping up and coördinating the military effort. Loans were arranged without discussion as to interest charges and method of amortization. The coalition would not have stood the additional test of having to try to agree upon a common peace policy.

The demand for the armistice came too soon after the tide had turned. With the danger of weakening or disrupting military effort by frictions and misunderstanding scarcely behind them, the members of the Supreme Council at Versailles were suddenly confronted with the problem of making an armistice that contained definite obligations as to the general tenor of the peace settlement. The Allies had had no time to work out a common program to present to the conquered foes. The embarrassment at Versailles was great. Every one was willing to end the war immediately to save further bloodshed and expense. But none was willing to connect the question of an armistice with that of peace. And yet the inquiry in Germany’s demand for an armistice could not be ignored!

The Turkish and Bulgarian armistices had been imposed without involving the principles of the peace settlement. They were concluded without the participation of the United States. But in the Austro-Hungarian and German armistices we entered directly. Numerous questions arose which compromised the interests or admitted the pretensions of each of the Allies. How make an armistice with Austria-Hungary without taking into consideration Italia Irredenta and the conflicting aspirations of the nations we had promised to free from the Hapsburg yoke? How make an armistice with Germany without defining our attitude toward British naval and colonial ambitions and French contentions as to adequate guarantees and reparations?

These considerations put the American delegates at Versailles in an unenviable and delicate position. The general lines of American policy were already announced. When we entered the war, President Wilson drew a distinction between the German Government and the German people, a distinction heartily approved at the time by the major portion of the American press and by American public opinion. In official speeches and official notes, specific statements had been made, reiterated, and elaborated concerning the objects for which we were fighting and the principles we intended to follow in reëstablishing peace. It could not be argued that new conditions had arisen to change our attitude. The United States came into the war a long time after its issues were clearly defined. From the beginning we had recognized that Germany and Austria-Hungary were the aggressors. We were aware of their violations of international law, of their cruelties on land and sea, of the martyrdom imposed by them upon Belgium, Northern France, and Serbia. We knew all about the destruction wrought by their armies, airplanes, and submarines. We had been stirred with indignation by the Armenian massacres. We knew their ideas of peace, had they been victorious. For the treaties of Bucharest and Brest-Litovsk had been signed and published.

No argument or explanation that has been brought to bear to justify the treaties imposed upon our enemies at Paris is built upon facts that have come to light since the armistice. The responsibility of Germany and the heinousness of her crimes were known and felt by the members of the Supreme Council at Versailles, to whom President Wilson referred Germany’s request for an armistice. To the Supreme Council Mr. Wilson left the decision. Were the Entente Powers willing to grant Germany an armistice with the understanding that after she had rendered herself defenseless peace would be concluded “on the basis of the Fourteen Points and President Wilson’s subsequent discourses, notably that of September 27, 1918”? It was not the American Government that had suggested this understanding as to the nature of the peace. Nor did the American Government attempt to influence the decision of the Supreme Council. Marshal Foch and his advisers had it in their power to reject the German plea unconditionally and continue the war. Of all the armies in the field that of the United States was the least willing to quit. Or the Supreme Council could have declared openly its inability to agree upon an eventual peace treaty along Wilsonian lines. This need not have been done baldly. Diplomatic formulæ could have been found to make the rejection noncommittal, thus avoiding a frank declaration of disagreement with American ideals.

Colonel House and General Bliss, enjoying the confidence of President Wilson, were in a position to point out to their colleagues what they all knew, that during eighteen months the will and energy of a hundred million Americans had been concentrated upon bringing Germany to her knees, and that it was because of the American effort that Germany was suing for peace. The events of October, 1918, were not a miracle. They were not due to an unexpected turn in the fortunes of battle. For until the American armies in France had passed the million mark Germany was able to help her allies and at the same time to hold the position she had established in France and Belgium in 1914. Were not the defection of Bulgaria, Turkey, and Austria-Hungary and the retreat of the German army from France and Belgium the result primarily of the uninterrupted growth of the American Expeditionary Force? Was it not also true that President Wilson had simply taken Entente statesmen at their word, relying upon the sincerity of their own definition of their objects in the war, when he elaborated his Fourteen Points? What was more natural, then, than that the German demand for an armistice should come through Washington and be coupled with the condition that peace be made in conformity with the avowed common ideals of the victors?

But our delegates at Versailles showed admirable tact and diplomatic correctness. It was true that American intervention had turned the scales in favor of the Entente. But it was equally true that our associates had born the brunt of the battle for three years without our military aid, holding the Central Empires in check by sacrificing the best of their blood. Countries invaded and ravaged, civilian population maltreated, cities and factories and mines destroyed, debts beyond belief—all this had been suffered to make possible the common victory. The popular resentment against Germany was as great in the United States as in Europe. We were holding no brief for Germany. If the Supreme Council should be of the opinion that it would be best to continue the war and go to Berlin, the United States would not stand in the way. It was intimated that we were willing to do our part. No pressure of any kind, direct or indirect, was exercised by the American Government or its representatives at Versailles to induce the Entente Powers to grant Germany’s plea.

The accusations that have since been freely made to the effect that the United States provoked and encouraged the German demand for an armistice and insisted that the Wilsonian program be adopted as a basis of the Paris settlement in the pre-armistice negotiations are unsupported by any evidence. Volumes have been written to defend or explain the armistice with Germany. It is popularly regretted as premature and as due to a mistaken idealism inspired by Americans. The factors in the decision of the Supreme Council are not obscure. Italy did not want the war to go on any longer; her objectives had been gained by the antecedent armistice of November 3 with Austria-Hungary, and her statesmen were bent upon using all their troops to occupy “unredeemed Italy” and the Dalmatian islands and coast. Great Britain and France were more exhausted, materially and morally, than they cared to admit. If Germany accepted the naval and military clauses of the armistice they had in mind to propose, it would be foolish to continue to exhaust themselves.

Given the attitude of Italy, with which it was impossible to find fault, British and French statesmen and generals were virtually unanimous in believing that, if they could get what they wanted by the terms of the armistice, carrying the war into Germany would be a game not worth the candle. For they were not at all sure that a speedy military victory was possible. Another winter of fighting would involve tremendous sacrifices. Discontent in the rear had to be reckoned with. And, above all, it might happen that the final act in the great drama would find the American army holding the center of the stage. This would be disastrous to French and British prestige and would give President Wilson the upper hand in formulating the peace treaties. As one eminent Englishman put it when I was talking over the situation with him the first week of November: “There is that parable about the laborers in the vineyard. We know well enough that Berlin ought to be the end of the day. But if we work till nightfall, you, who came in at the eleventh hour, would get the same reward as the rest of us—perhaps all the pennies!”[1]

The pre-armistice agreement was carefully considered. There was nothing hasty about the action of the Supreme Council. The British and French knew just what they were doing. The British excluded Mr. Wilson’s point on the freedom of the seas. This we agreed to. The French and Belgians insisted upon a definition of the stipulation that “the invaded territories must be restored as well as evacuated and freed.”

On November 5, 1918, the Entente Powers sent to Washington the following message:

The Allied Governments have given careful consideration to the correspondence which has passed between the President of the United States and the German Government.

Subject to the qualifications which follow, they declare their willingness to make peace with the Government of Germany on the terms of peace laid down in the President’s Address to Congress of January 8, 1918, and the principles of settlement enunciated in his subsequent Addresses. They must point out, however, that Clause 2, relating to what is usually described as the freedom of the seas, is open to various interpretations, some of which they could not accept. They must, therefore, reserve to themselves complete freedom on this subject when they enter the Peace Conference.

Further, in the conditions of peace laid down in his Address to Congress of January 8, 1918, the President declared that the invaded territories must be restored as well as evacuated and freed, and the Allied Governments feel that no doubt ought to be allowed to exist as to what this provision implies. By it they understand that compensation will be made by Germany for all damage done to the civilian population of the Allies, and their property, by the aggression of Germany by land, by sea, and from the air.

This answer was immediately communicated to Germany by the United States. In an accompanying note, Mr. Lansing said:

I advised you that the President had transmitted his correspondence with the German authorities to the Governments with which the Government of the United States is associated as a belligerent, with the suggestion that, if those Governments were disposed to effect peace upon the terms and principles indicated, their military advisers and the military advisers of the United States be asked to submit to the Governments associated against Germany the necessary terms of such an armistice as would fully protect the interest of the peoples involved, and ensure to the associated Governments the unrestricted power to safeguard and enforce the details of the peace to which the German Government had agreed, provided they deemed such an armistice possible from the military point of view.

I am instructed by the President to say that he is in agreement with the interpretation set forth in the last paragraph of the memorandum above quoted.

I am further instructed by the President to request you [he was writing to the Swiss Minister at Washington through whom the negotiations were carried on] to notify the German Government that Marshal Foch has been authorized by the Government of the United States and the Allied Governments to receive properly accredited representatives of the German Government, and to communicate to them the terms of an armistice.

On November 6 an armistice commission was appointed by Germany, which received the Allied military conditions at the Allied General Headquarters on November 8. Seventy-two hours were given for acceptance or rejection. At 5 A. M. on November 11 the armistice that ended the World War was signed at Rethondes in the Forest of Compiègne.

The armistice provided for the cessation of hostilities at eleven o’clock on the day of signature; the evacuation of Belgium, northern France, Luxemburg, and Alsace-Lorraine in fifteen days; repatriation of civilian and military prisoners; abandonment of a large quantity of artillery and airplanes; evacuation of the left bank of the Rhine, with three bridge-heads on the right bank, within a month; evacuation of the countries occupied in eastern and southeastern Europe; annulment of the treaties of Bucharest and Brest-Litovsk; evacuation of German forces in East Africa; reparation of damages; restitution of money and securities taken from Belgium; surrender of Russian and Rumanian gold to the Allies; delivery of all submarines and most of the German Navy in Allied ports; release of Russian war-ships and all merchant-ships; and cancellation of restrictions placed upon neutral shipping and trade by the German Government and private German firms. Two additional stipulations of prime importance in bringing pressure to bear upon Germany were that the blockade of Germany be maintained throughout the Peace Conference and that there be no reciprocity in the liberation of prisoners of war.

The acceptance of the armistice terminated the hostilities and prevented the invasion of Germany. It left Germany defenseless. Under no circumstances would she be able to renew the war. For the sake of avoiding worse evils the German Government signed these humiliating conditions. On the other hand, the Germans felt that they gained the assurance of a peace such as President Wilson had outlined, in which, to use the President’s own words, “the impartial justice meted out must involve no discrimination between those to whom we wish to be just and those to whom we do not wish to be just: it must be a justice that plays no favorites and knows no standard but the equal rights of the several peoples concerned.”

What the Germans failed to grasp was the fact that the long and bitter struggle had drawn their enemies down to their level, and that their own faithlessness was going to be met by a desire for revenge on the part of those who had originally drawn the sword in the defense of the pledged word among nations.

CHAPTER II
THE PRELIMINARIES OF THE PEACE CONFERENCE

When the wild joy of the armistice celebration had spent itself, public opinion in the victorious countries reacted against the terms of the armistice, against the very fact that an armistice had been signed. It was recognized that there had been no clean-cut, unquestioned military victory, such as generally decides the fortunes of a war. The enemy’s front was unbroken: he was still on the soil of France and had not been driven out of Belgium. The armistice conditions provided for a gradual withdrawal from France, Belgium, and Alsace-Lorraine, and the gradual occupation by the victors of the Rhine provinces and bridge-heads. The German army retired with artillery and arms and other war material, and the method of advance of the victors deprived the armies of appearing dramatically as liberators and conquerors. And then there were too many victors! The details of the advance were as meticulously arranged among allies as between the allies and the enemy.

It was felt that Germany, after four years of being the top dog, had suddenly managed to “get out from under” before the storm broke that would give her army and her people a taste of the medicine they had been administering in big doses ever since 1914. Consequently there was a determination that crying “Kamerad!” was not going to enable Germany to avoid the disagreeable consequences of losing the war. There was far more hatred, bitterness, resentment, than there would have been had the Allied armies beaten the Germans in the field, chased them back to their own country, and secured an unconditional surrender on German soil. The very fact of so much hatred after the armistice indicated that the military superiority of the victors had not been sufficiently demonstrated. For hatred is born of fear and nourished by fear. After a fight to the finish, the sane man with normal instincts simply cannot hate. If he knows that he has knocked out his opponent, his natural instinct is to extend a hand good-naturedly to help the other fellow to his feet. No matter what the opponent may have done, he is considered to have paid the penalty by the punishment he received in the losing fight.

The trouble with the world in November, 1918, was that there had been no knock-out. More than that, Germany had been worsted by a coalition which was doomed to disruption after the fighting was over, unless all its members should be willing to continue to grant to one another equal opportunities and privileges and assume for one another equal burdens and responsibilities, just as they had done during the war.

When the clamor arose to make Germany pay, Entente statesmen rode with the tide of hysterical indignation instead of trying to stem it. They did not point out from the beginning, as they should have done, that Germany had not made an unconditional surrender, throwing herself upon the mercy of her conquerors. However ignoble the motive that prompted it, her submission had been contingent upon the definite promise that a certain kind of peace, very clearly defined, would be made with her. In return for the pre-armistice concessions, the Allies had transformed suddenly a potential into an actual victory without having to shed further blood for the liberation of France and Belgium or to wrest Alsace-Lorraine from Germany. When Germany threw up the sponge, allowed portions of her territory to be occupied, surrendered most of her naval and much of her military equipment, and agreed to release prisoners of war without reciprocity, she thought that she was letting the victors discount their future military triumph by waiving their right to a victors’ peace. Wilsonian ideas had spread all over Germany and had helped to break down the morale of the army.

The world was so weary of war that strong men in Allied countries, men with vision and a sense of honor, might have been able to carry public opinion with them in favor of a durable world peace. But there were no such men in Europe in positions of authority, and by going personally to the Peace Conference President Wilson sacrificed the prestige and influence which, exercised from afar, might have enabled him to become and remain master of the situation.

Two months elapsed between the armistice and the opening of peace negotiations. During that time the victorious powers worked out the details of the military occupation of German territory. The French took over Alsace-Lorraine as an integral part of France, restoring, so far as the Germans and the outside world were concerned, the status quo of 1870. The victors had agreed to allow France a free hand in reannexing her “lost provinces.” What problems France had to face were to be solved as a purely internal French affair, and so the French went ahead to change the régime without waiting for a treaty of peace. The details of the military occupation of German territory, with the three bridge-heads on the right bank of the Rhine, were worked out among British and French and Americans, who established their headquarters respectively at Cologne, Mainz, and Coblenz. The German Government had no part in arranging for the Allied occupation. It was a military affair, and all orders were given directly to the local authorities in each of the zones.

Allied prisoners of war were released. The Germans surrendered their fleet. Allied commissions, to watch over the fulfilment of the armistice terms, were sent to all the defeated countries. For general questions affecting Germany, an Armistice Commission was created, with headquarters at Spa in Belgium.

Allied statesmen began to study the question of securing the confidence of the electorates and parliaments of their respective countries, without which they would be unable to act as plenipotentiaries. This was an essential consideration; for the executive power in Europe, unlike that of the United States, has no fixed tenure of office and is always dependent upon a parliamentary vote of confidence. In the two months between the armistice and the conference, the statesmen of the European powers, large and small, had to secure a parliamentary mandate, approving their general policy at the approaching conference.

As soon as the military terms of the armistice were fulfilled, so that the defeated peoples were no longer in a position to renew the war, an uncompromising attitude was adopted toward the Germans and their allies. The pre-armistice agreement was ignored. The five enemy states were told that they would have no part in the Peace Conference. The victors were to decide upon the terms of the treaties, which would then be communicated to the vanquished. In the meantime the food blockade was to be maintained and enemy prisoners of war held. The only dealings between the governments of the victors and of the vanquished were in connection with the measures decided upon to carry out the conditions of the armistices. The peace negotiations were to take the form simply of adjusting and harmonizing the conflicting ideas and ambitions and programs of the victorious powers, and were to be no concern of the defeated nations. Our enemies were regarded as criminals, to be arraigned and sentenced by men acting simultaneously as judges, jurors, prosecutors, and jailers. Right to counsel and right of appeal were alike denied.

Austrians and Hungarians were in a different situation from that of Germans, Bulgarians, and Turks. The two countries of the Dual Monarchy, in which they had been the dominant peoples, were separated at the time of the armistice. Far-reaching decisions had already been made before the Peace Conference met. The treaties dealing with the future of the Hapsburg dominions would take into account faits accomplis: (1) the political separation of Austria and Hungary; (2) the annexation to Italy of regions defined in the secret Treaty of London of 1915; (3) the resurrection of Poland; (4) the creation of Czechoslovakia; (5) the aggrandizement of Serbia and Rumania. De facto recognition of independence was granted to Poland and Czechoslovakia, and also to the Hedjaz, detached from the Ottoman Empire. These three new states, whose belligerency had been recognized as a war measure before the end of hostilities, although boundaries were not defined, were invited to participate in the Peace Conference.

The organization of the conference was undertaken by the four Entente Powers, France, Great Britain, Japan, and Italy (who had signed the Pact of London, obligating themselves not to make a separate peace), in agreement with the United States. It was decided to make a distinction between the “powers with general interests” and the “powers with particular interests.” The former were the United States, the British Empire, France, Italy, and Japan; and the latter were Belgium, Brazil, the British Dominions and India, China, Cuba, Greece, Guatemala, Haiti, Hedjaz, Honduras, Liberia, Nicaragua, Panama, Poland, Portugal, Rumania, Serbia, Siam, and Czechoslovakia. The great powers were to have five delegates; Belgium, Brazil, and Serbia, three; China, Greece, Hedjaz, Poland, Portugal, Rumania, Siam, and Czechoslovakia, two; Cuba, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Liberia, Nicaragua, and Panama, one; while the British Dominions and India were allowed two delegates, with the exception of New Zealand, which was to have one. Four powers that had broken off diplomatic relations with Germany, Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, and Uruguay, were granted one delegate each “in the sittings at which questions concerning them are discussed.” Provision was made for the possibility of admitting Montenegro, but the question of Russia was left to be determined by the conference.

The most important of the preliminary measures was the one which proposed to limit the decision upon the matters of settlement to a central commission, on which the “five powers with general interests” were alone represented. The various details were to be studied by commissions of fifteen, two members each for the great powers and five members representing all the other powers together, which were to report to the central commission. The Supreme War Council at Versailles, under Marshal Foch, was to continue to meet during the Peace Conference to deal with the enforcement of the armistices and with military problems concerning the enemy powers and the regions whose status the Peace Conference was to settle.

There was something to be said both for the exclusion of enemy powers from the Peace Conference and for the exclusion of the “powers with particular interests” from the central commission. The victors of the World War realized only too well that they would have great difficulty in reconciling their own ambitions and in agreeing upon any common program of peace, and they did not purpose to have Germany repeating the rôle of France in the Conference of Vienna a hundred years earlier. With delegates from thirty countries, some of which were parts of the British Empire and other states that had only a technical right to be represented, it was reasonable to expect that the organizers of the conference would adopt regulations to make it a feasible working body.

Signs were not lacking to indicate that it was going to be hard enough for the great powers to agree upon peace terms, even if they should be free from the influence of enemy intrigues pitting one against another and from being constantly hampered and blocked by the exaggerated and rival claims of the smaller states, especially those created or greatly enlarged by the war. And Paris, which had suffered so greatly for more than four years under the constant menace of German bombardments (and even of capture), was a poor place to hold a conference called together to establish a durable world peace. The atmosphere was surcharged with bitterness and prejudices. The burnt child continued to dread the fire after the fire had been extinguished. French internal politics centered in Paris, which was also the home of France’s economic interests and of the French army.

Before the conference met, no effort had been made to create a judicial attitude toward the great problems of peace. Posters on the walls as well as the newspapers kept the French keyed up to a degree of bitterness, tinged with apprehension, that made logical and constructive thinking impossible. This state of mind was natural, when one considers what the French had gone through and that complete victory over Germany came as a miracle to the hard-pressed French and their allies. But it was not conducive to the triumph of what Mr. Wilson called the American Government’s “interpretation of its own duty with regard to peace: First, the impartial justice meted out must involve no discrimination between those to whom we wish to be just and those to whom we do not wish to be just. It must be a justice that plays no favorites and knows no standards but the equal rights of the several peoples concerned.”

The demands of France against Germany and her allies had been outlined in the first year of the war as follows: (1) punishment of those responsible for the war; (2) reparation for losses during the war; (3) guaranties against future aggression on the part of Germany and her allies. In addition to these war aims, French statesmen consistently announced the determination of France to support similar demands by France’s allies and to sign no treaty of peace that did not emancipate the nationalities subject to the enemies of France. In the course of the war the French Government entered into agreements with several of the Allies, justifying these as measures that seemed necessary to bring the war to a successful conclusion. After the Russian revolution the French Government promised the people to safeguard French investments in Russia, which amounted to over four billions of dollars, almost all representing little investments of peasants and tradespeople. In preliminary discussions with President Wilson, Premier Clemenceau declared the willingness of France to adopt the American program in its entirety, including the society of nations; but he made it clear that this willingness should not be construed as the abandonment of the threefold program: “sanctions, réparations, garanties.” Nor could France go back upon her signature to treaties and her promise to her own people.

Believing that an idealistic program for peace, such as President Wilson outlined, must be subordinated to the two considerations of security and prosperity for their exhausted country, Premier Clemenceau and Foreign Secretary Pichon warned President Wilson, in speeches before the Chamber of Deputies in the last week of December, that they were going into the Peace Conference with definite obligations, first toward their own people, and then toward their allies—obligations that transcended the Wilsonian principles when conflict arose. France had no intention of subordinating her particular national interests to what Mr. Wilson called general world interests. Bound by definite pledges, she could not do so if she wanted to. Did not Mr. Wilson realize how greatly France had suffered? Neither then nor later has any French statesmen admitted that the idealism of President Wilson might have had as its justification the literal acceptance of their own declarations and promises during the war. Nor has any French statesmen admitted the validity of the pre-armistice agreement with Germany. From the moment the war ended down to the present time the French attitude has been that the victors were amply justified in whatever steps they took because, had Germany been victorious, she would have done the same.

Discarding entirely the Wilsonian principles as the basis for peace, Premier Clemenceau told the Chamber of Deputies that he was still a partisan of the “balance of power” to be maintained by alliances, and that if the nations banded against Germany had been allies in 1914 Germany would not have dared to attack France. He admitted frankly that he could not discuss with the Chamber the Government’s peace ideas because he had a maximum and a minimum program and was going into the conference to get for France all he could. This was an answer—a gauntlet of defiance thrown down, if you will—to Mr. Wilson’s Manchester speech four days earlier, when the American President declared that the “balance of power” was an exploded theory, that the United States would enter into no alliance which was not an alliance of all nations for common good, and that the creation of a new world required new methods of making peace.

M. Clemenceau did not have to appeal to the people. As the principal artisan of victory, who had deserved well of the republic, he was the national hero. Despite wide-spread dissatisfaction among the politicians over matters of internal administration, the people were so united in their demand for a punitive peace, which “the Tiger” embodied, that no party leader dared contest his position.

It was otherwise in England. Mr. Lloyd George had come into power during the war by deserting his old chief, Premier Asquith, and forming a coalition cabinet, dependent upon a combined Liberal and Conservative parliamentary majority. The coalition had been a war measure, born of the feeling that the Asquith Government had been making a mess of the conduct of the war, despite Mr. Asquith’s inclusion in his cabinet of Conservatives and Laborites. Immediately the war was over, it was necessary to go to the country for a new parliament. For a British delegation could not have represented Great Britain adequately in the Peace Conference with Parliament in so confused a state as to party lines. By common agreement Parliament was dissolved on November 25, and December 14 was fixed as polling-day. Mr. Lloyd George, Mr. Bonar Law, and Mr. Barnes, representing the three parties, decided to stand together and ask the country to return Coalition members at the General Election. The Labor Party, however, did not agree with Mr. Barnes. They demanded a peace of justice, not a peace of revenge. A group of Liberals, headed by Mr. Asquith, decided to put candidates in the field, in opposition to the Coalition.

The British electorate was asked to choose between two programs for the Peace Conference: a victor’s peace, which was supported by the Conservatives and Coalition Liberals; and a Wilsonian peace, which was supported by the Independent Liberals and the Laborites.

It is not too much to say that the main lines of the future treaty with Germany were settled by the verdict of the British election. Mr. Lloyd George and his associates, against their own better judgment and convictions, appealed to the passions and prejudices of the masses to secure a parliamentary majority. Since both Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Bonar Law have repeatedly repudiated by acts, speeches, and written statements their own policies and arguments advanced in December, 1918, there could be no doubt of the fairness and accuracy of this assertion.

On December 10 Mr. Lloyd George summed up the Coalition program in the following points of treaty policy: (1) trial of the Kaiser; (2) punishment of those responsible for atrocities; (3) fullest indemnities from Germany. Speaking at Bristol the next day Mr. Lloyd George, on the eve of the election, declared that “we propose to demand the whole cost of the war from Germany,” that this was “an absolute right,” and that a financial committee appointed by the British Cabinet believed that all the costs of the war could be extracted from Germany. After his triumphant return to power Mr. Lloyd George explained that the sole guilt and responsibility of Germany for the war was to be the basis of the peace treaty, and not Mr. Wilson’s principles. Nearly a year after the Treaty of Versailles was signed (in May, 1920) he repeated that the Treaty of Versailles was built upon the assumption of Germany’s sole guilt and had no other jurisdiction. The practicability of trying the Kaiser and of extracting from Germany the total expenses of the war was not questioned by responsible British statesmen of the Coalition party until long after the Treaty of Versailles had been made.

Italy’s entrance into the war in 1915 had been prompted by considerations of national self-interest, safeguarded in the secret Treaty of London, and recognized in the zones of occupation, provided for in the armistice of November 3, 1918, that had been the death-warrant of the Hapsburg Empire. But Italy was not satisfied with all that had been offered her to abandon her neutrality. The propaganda for the possession of Fiume and for rendering Greater Serbia innocuous, economically and militarily, had already assumed formidable proportions before the Peace Conference met. Italy did not consider that the pre-armistice agreement with Germany affected in any way her claims, which were signally at variance with President Wilson’s ideas. She had been in the war two years longer than the United States, and the Treaty of London constituted a sacred international obligation. Had not the Allies gone to war to fight for the sanctity of treaties? Similarly, Rumania’s intervention had been bought by definite promises of territorial expansion, set down in a treaty. Japan had no secret understanding with the other Entente Powers until 1917. But when the Japanese Government realized that the United States was going to become a belligerent, its diplomats at the Entente capitals secured a written agreement giving Japan full rights to be considered Germany’s heir in China.

In regard to the German colonies and Italy’s claims in the Tyrol and the Adriatic coastlands, the four Entente Powers had a better argument even than secret treaties to anticipate the decisions of the Peace Conference. They were in possession! Great Britain, France, and Japan had conquered Germany’s colonies and had ensconced themselves in them.

Nor was the future of the Ottoman Empire going to be decided by the Peace Conference in accordance with Mr. Wilson’s ideas. Great Britain and France had arranged their claims under the Sykes-Picot agreement in 1916, and Entente spheres of influence had been definitely outlined in 1915 and 1916. Great Britain had conquered Mesopotamia and Palestine, and she had annexed Cyprus and proclaimed a protectorate over Egypt (both of which countries she had occupied for forty years) at the outbreak of the war in 1914. France took possession of Syria and Cilicia immediately after the armistice with Turkey. The Entente Powers were in joint occupation of Constantinople. The British had gone into the Caucasus and Persia. A desultory war was being carried on against Soviet Russia, in which the United States had become involved. There were all sorts of agreements and understandings and intrigues in eastern Europe to prevent the formulation of a common policy toward Russia, which, as President Wilson put it, was to be “the acid test of our sincerity.”

The new states, Czechoslovakia and Poland, the aggrandized states, Rumania, Serbia, and Greece, and countries that had not been belligerents but expected the conference to decide their future, such as Egypt, Armenia, Persia, the Caucasus republics, Ukrainia, Lithuania, Latvia, Esthonia, and Finland, were not bound, before the conference, by special agreements with any of the great powers. They furnished the most hopeful field for the application of the Wilsonian principles. President Wilson, with his personally selected delegates, experts, and secretaries, arrived in Paris more than a month before the conference met. Mr. Wilson received an enthusiastic reception, which was repeated in England and Italy during the holiday season. His aides and advisers were men of great ability, who had prepared themselves in the minutest details for their task. The President did not lack well informed and well balanced collaborators. They organized their offices in such a way that the peace delegation had available not only the data compiled in America but also accurate information concerning conditions, as they developed during the conference, in Europe and the Near East.

But the principal asset of success was lacking. The United States had failed to make her coöperation in the war contingent upon the acceptance by her associates of certain facts and well defined principles. None of them was pledged to us. All of them were pledged to one another in ways that were going to make futile the work that President Wilson purposed to accomplish. The Peace Conference was not going to bring to us “the moral leadership of the world.” None cared for our leadership at the beginning; and during the conference, instead of President Wilson’s imposing his ideals upon the other statesmen, they imposed theirs upon him.

CHAPTER III
THE PEACE CONFERENCE AT PARIS

Books about the famous conference of 1919 have multiplied so rapidly that a man must have much space to shelve them all, and he can hope to do little else if he has decided to read them thoroughly, with what the critics have to say about them. For most of the cooks in the Paris broth, after spoiling it, were unable to control the impulse to tell the world why it was not their particular fault. Coming back to America after the conference, I began to collect material about it, documents, books, reports of speeches and debates, magazine articles, newspaper cuttings of reviews of books and of letters about books and about the criticisms of them. The material mounted alarmingly. And yet I kept on reading. The general impression that comes from trying to get every angle of criticism concerning the conference is not at all confused. On the contrary, it is clear. The Paris Peace Conference, in retrospect, has few defenders of its methods or its work. It is on record, convicted by those who participated in it, as one of the most tragic and monumental failures of history.

M. André Tardieu is the only writer of authority who believes that the conference was conducted along proper lines and achieved results inherently right and of a permanent nature. Against this virtually solitary voice, the British premier, who signed the Treaty of Versailles, and the Italian premier, who ordered his representatives to sign it, have clamored to be heard on the other side, repudiating, denouncing, ridiculing their own work. Other outstanding signatories, notably Secretary Lansing, of the United States; Mr. Barnes, of Great Britain; Minister of Justice Doherty, of Canada; General Smuts of South Africa; Minister of Justice Vandervelde, of Belgium; and Premier Bratiano of Rumania, have criticized the Paris settlement severely. General Smuts protested against the treaty at the time he signed it, and said later in the South African Parliament: “Frankly I did not think that the treaty, even in its modified form, conformed to our pre-armistice pledges.” Speaking for Mr. Wilson, Mr. Ray Stannard Baker summed up the failure of Paris in the statement that there was “no willingness to sacrifice anything, therefore no possibility of securing real and just settlements based on coöperation. And this did not apply only to France and Great Britain; it applied also to America.”

Most of the books written on the Peace Conference by those who had a part in it offer, for the difficulties in the way of settlement, explanations so elaborate and painstaking—and withal so true—that one feels the force of the old French proverb: “Qui s’excuse s’accuse.”

But the world to-day, five years after the war, suffering from the consequences of the failure to establish peace at Paris in 1919, is not greatly interested in the host of reasons given for the failure. Nor does the world care enough about the title to fame of any of the actors in the great tragedy to seek to build up a case for or against the European statesmen and their American colleague. What we want to know is just what happened at Paris, without appraising the individual measure of blame. The facts give us all we want just now to help us in solving our present problem. We need only an objective account of the work of the conference, without going into details, without criticizing, without attempting to explain.

The proceedings began informally when the Italians arrived in Paris on January 9 and held a preliminary conference with the French and the Americans. The British arrived on the eleventh, and on January 12 a preliminary session was held at the Quai d’Orsay, in which France proposed that only the representatives of the five great powers should attend all the meetings of the conference, and that the minor states should be represented only when questions immediately affecting them were to be discussed. Among the minor states consideration should be given in allotting representation to the amount of force exerted in the defeat of Germany. After some discussion the basis of representation outlined in the previous chapter was decided upon.

The first plenary session of the conference took place on Saturday, January 18, the day having been especially chosen by the French Government. It was the anniversary of the formal proclamation of the German Empire at Versailles in 1870. President Poincaré declared the conference opened, and M. Clemenceau was elected president on the motion of Mr. Wilson, seconded by Mr. Lloyd George. M. Clemenceau said: “The program of this conference has been laid down by President Wilson. There is no question of territorial or continental peace. The peace we have to make is a peace of peoples. No mere words are required. That program stands upon its own feet. Let us work quickly and well.” With these words the session was closed, the question of the League of Nations having been placed on the agenda for the second sitting.

On January 22, at a meeting of the Supreme War Council, President Wilson proposed that an invitation be sent to all warring factions in Russia to meet at Prinkipo, in the Sea of Marmora, to talk peace and to come into touch with the Paris Conference. The invitation was actually issued, and some of the powers named delegates to meet the Russians at Prinkipo. The factions opposed to the Bolshevists refused to agree to a truce, however, and in this they were heartily supported by the French press. It was the first open criticism of President Wilson.

The American President still dominated the conference at the second plenary session on January 25, when he moved the resolution that would establish a commission to draw up a charter for “a League of Nations created to promote international coöperation.” The second clause in the resolution read: “This League should be treated as an integral part of the general treaty of peace, and should be opened to every civilized nation which can be relied on to promote its objects.” Both parts of this clause proved to be the undoing of the league. At the very beginning it was seen that Mr. Wilson was being manœuvered into a position where he would agree to have the league made an instrument for the enforcement of the treaty. From this group of states Germany and Russia could be indefinitely excluded on the ground that they were not to be “relied on to promote its objects.”

At the second plenary session, on the heels of the passage of the resolution establishing a League of Nations, came an outburst from the minor states that influenced radically the entire work of the conference. M. Hymans of Belgium protested that the organization of the conference put the real power—all the power—in the hands of the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy, and Japan. He demanded representation for Belgium on all the commissions. The delegates of Brazil, Canada, Jugoslavia, Greece, Portugal, Czechoslovakia, and Poland followed with similar protests and demands. Was the world going to be ruled by five powers, which, because of their size, assumed the right to dictate to all the other nations? Had not the war been fought to refute the Prussian belief that might went before right?

M. Clemenceau would allow no debate. He pointed out that the five great powers had won the war. It was their privilege to make the peace. They could have done so without reference to the smaller states. But they had graciously called these smaller states into consultation. The great powers did not purpose to consult the smaller states except in matters in which they were directly interested. Thus was notice served upon the world that nineteenth-century principles of international diplomacy had been adopted for the Paris conference. The peace treaties were going to embody the results of bargains secretly arrived at among the great powers by compromising their own national interests. The smaller states were to be used as pawns in the old game. The program of President Wilson, which M. Clemenceau had said was to be that of the conference, was made impossible of fulfilment by the way the conference was organized.[2]

The minor states understood the significance of M. Clemenceau’s answer to their protest. M. Clemenceau made it clear that there were to be no “open covenants, openly arrived at”; and his pronouncement was an invitation to the statesmen of minor countries to engage in separate negotiations with the delegates of the great powers, offering a quid pro quo for the big fellow’s support of their interests.

Let us take for example the case of M. Hymans of Belgium and M. Dmowski of Poland. M. Clemenceau was on the friendliest terms with these two men, but they thought they could do better for their country if the interests of Belgium and Poland were advanced and maintained in conference with the delegates of all the powers. But the French Foreign Office had decided that Belgium and Poland were necessary allies for France. Therefore, they were not to treat directly with the powers as a whole. France was to become their spokesman and defender in the inner council. This is what went on throughout the conference in regard to the interests of all the minor states. They were encouraged, or rather forced, by their very exclusion from the council table, to engage in intrigues to advance their interests. After the second plenary session Paris could not help becoming a typical nineteenth-century conference of the great powers.

On the various commissions in which the new map of Europe was being decided upon, the rival claims of the small states were upheld or opposed by the representatives of the Entente Powers not on the merits of the matter in hand but in accordance with orders issued by the respective Governments to their delegates. What these orders were depended upon the tractability of the smaller states in direct and secret negotiations with the foreign offices of the Entente Powers. On the commissions, only the American members, having no interests at stake, were acting judicially; all the others were acting politically. And, where smaller states were represented on the commissions, their votes were frequently influenced by threats and bribes. Questions like the Teschen dispute between Czechoslovakia and Poland, the Banat dispute between Jugoslavia and Rumania, and the Hellenistic ambitions of Greece were highly profitable for this purpose.

Mr. Wilson thought that the regulations, by which the minor states were excluded, had been adopted to make possible a practicable working committee; and he found reasonable, as did every one, M. Clemenceau’s argument that, as the great powers had won the war and would have to be responsible for the enforcement of peace, they must keep in their hands the final decisions. But Mr. Wilson did not know how the game was being played. Few of his colleagues suspected what was going on until the conference entered its fourth month. When Mr. Wilson presided at the sessions of the Commission on the League of Nations and found provision after provision being changed and modified, little did he suspect that the opposition he encountered on the part of some of the members of the commission was due not to conviction but to deals that had been made regarding questions that had nothing to do with the League.

On February 14 the League of Nations Covenant was submitted to a conference at a plenary session, President Wilson reading the text and commenting upon the clauses as he proceeded. The emasculation of the original idea and the alteration of the original drafts had occurred in the committee meetings. So the comment was perfunctory. It was the impression of observers that the plenary session had been convoked, just as had the others before it, as a matter of form. It was “throwing the dog a bone.” I found that many of the delegates felt the same way. One, a man of great power and influence in his own country, said to me as we were leaving the Quai d’Orsay: “I do not know why I should feel so humiliated and annoyed when I come to one of these sessions. They are such farces—we ought to laugh. But the thinly veiled insult rankles.”

When the armistice was renewed on February 16, the Germans were required to evacuate the greater part of the province of Posen, thus foreshadowing an important territorial decision months before the treaty was signed. Mr. Wilson and Mr. Lloyd George returned home for visits. When Mr. Wilson arrived back in France on March 13, he discovered that during his absence there had been an effort to separate the League of Nations scheme from the actual treaty. The reason given for this was the impatience that was being felt over the delay in imposing peace terms on Germany. Mr. Wilson saved the League, but at the price of agreeing to finish the discussion and decisions in secret meetings with the three Entente premiers. So the Council of Ten, composed of two delegates from each of “the five principal Allied and Associated Powers,” was replaced by a Council of Four.

From this moment, Mr. Wilson was lost altogether. At first he fought valiantly for his peace program, but he gradually yielded on this point and on that until there was nothing left of his Fourteen Points, which were supposed to be the basis upon which peace was to be built. He justified his concessions to practical international politics by the expression of his firm belief in the corrective power of the League of Nations. Whether Mr. Wilson acted wisely or was justified in his sublime faith in the League Covenant are not questions that enter into this narrative. The aftermath of one of his most criticized yieldings to expediency, that of Shantung, has seemingly vindicated this compromise. But there can be no question that the conference did not use President Wilson’s “Fourteen Points and subsequent discourses, notably that of September 27, 1918,” as the guiding principles of the treaties.

The session of the Council of Four continued week after week, not always harmoniously. Secrecy could not be maintained, for example, in regard to Mr. Lloyd George’s refusal to accept the recommendation of the Commission on Eastern Frontiers of Germany, which recommended that large districts whose population was more than 90 per cent. German be given to Poland. President Wilson was not interested in self-determination for the Germans.[3] But he became a champion of the Jugoslavs, opposed bitterly the Italian solution of the Adriatic question, and finally attempted to appeal to the people of Italy on the Fiume question over the head of their Government. This led to the withdrawal of the Italian delegation.

Great Britain and France were bound to Italy by the treaty of 1915. While Fiume was not included in the rewards promised Italy by that treaty, northern Dalmatia was. The British and French advised the Italians not to press all their claims, but declared that they were ready to stand by their treaty engagements. Similarly, Mr. Wilson found himself isolated when the question of Shantung came up. He made himself the champion of China, but was confronted with the pledges given by the three Entente Powers to Japan. Mr. Wilson later explained he had not known of the existence of these treaties or of the agreements relating to the Ottoman Empire. But they had been published as early as 1917!

Between the middle of January and the end of April there were only five plenary sessions of the conference, three of them devoted to the League of Nations and one to international labor. No important question of peace had been brought before the conference as a whole, and most of the delegates knew only what the newspapers printed concerning the character of the treaty to be handed to the Germans. The delegates of the nations vitally interested knew little or nothing about the terms of the other treaties. The Council of Ten, and then the Big Four, had assumed authority and responsibility. They had made the decisions on all important questions: reparations, punishments, boundary-lines, disarmament, transportation, and various economic matters. Far East and Near East, the Pacific islands and Africa, as well as the various questions of Europe, had passed in review before the three Entente premiers and President Wilson. Details had been worked out by commissions, but these in turn reflected the foreign policies of the Entente powers. Only the League Covenant was given publicity and submitted in its various stages to the delegates as a whole.

The sixth plenary session was a private one, held on May 5, when the draft of the Treaty of Versailles was submitted to those who were supposed to have made it. There were protests on minor points. The major protest came from the Chinese, who declared that they could not sign the treaty if it contained the Shantung provisions, and from Marshal Foch, who announced that he considered the security given to France inadequate from the military point of view. The representatives of the smaller states were not asked, however, to approve the draft treaty. It was simply communicated to them in the same way that it was to be communicated to the Germans.

At three o’clock on the afternoon of May 7, 1919, the terms of the treaty were delivered to the German delegation, which had been summoned for that purpose to Versailles. M. Clemenceau said that any observations would have to be made in writing within fifteen days, and would be answered promptly.

The head of the German delegation, Count von Brockdorff-Rantzau, replied with heat and force to M. Clemenceau’s implication that Germany was a prisoner in the dock, solely responsible for the war and its horrors. He declined the invitation to admit the unilateral responsibility of Germany and the sole guilt of Germany for crimes during the war. He reproached the Allies for having taken six months to communicate their peace terms, during which they had maintained the food blockade, which had cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of German non-combatants. He reminded us that a pre-armistice agreement, binding upon both parties to the war, existed, and that a peace which could not be defended as just before the whole world would in the end cause resistance to the terms imposed. “Nobody will be capable of subscribing to it with a good conscience, for it will not be possible of fulfilment. Nobody would be able to take upon himself the guarantee of its execution which ought to lie in the signature.” Cold silence greeted the count’s speech. M. Clemenceau arose, and the meeting ended. But many who were present felt that they had not been witnessing the beginning of an era of peace. The chill presentiment of a more horrible war than the one that had just ended filled us.

On May 8 the press published a brief summary of the draft treaty. As if there was something to be ashamed of, the document in full was not printed, and it was impossible for public opinion to pass judgment upon the practicability and wisdom, if not the justice, of its terms. The folly of this rigorous censorship became apparent when German and neutral newspapers published the full text in instalments. I went to Frankfort ten days after the treaty was communicated to the Germans and bought copies of the complete document in French and English at a hotel newsstand. When I returned to Paris next day, I found that it was considered lese-majesty at the American headquarters for a private individual to have this document in his possession. Why? No answer has ever been given to this question. Nor has it been explained why President Wilson attached importance to keeping from the American press—even from the Senate—a document that was being freely circulated in European countries other than France. During the weeks between the communication of the treaty and its signature, the press published synopses of German observations and Allied replies. But how was public opinion to understand this correspondence and approve the Allied replies when it had not been informed exactly what the document under discussion contained?

The Germans handed in voluminous notes. They contended that the territorial provisions violated President Wilson’s Fourteen Points, and declared that it would be a physical impossibility for Germany to fulfil the economic clauses. Their experts wrote out an argument to show that the failure to name a definite sum would jeopardize the authority of the new German Government, would mean economic slavery for the vanquished, and would involve all central Europe in ruin. They pointed out that the tentative sums demanded exceeded the convertible wealth of Germany, and that if the treaty were signed, with such obligations forced upon them, default would be inevitable. They presented a brief on the question of the responsibilty of the war, which they were asked to acknowledge, pleading that such a matter should be left to experts, with all the documents before them from the official archives of the several countries involved. They asserted that it would be impossible to force upon the German people international control of waterways and other means of transportation without reciprocity. They asked that alleged violations of the laws of war should be tried before a neutral tribunal, and asserted that they had a list of Allied war criminals against whom they could submit evidence as damning as the Allies could submit against German officers and soldiers.

At the end of May they made counter-proposals, agreeing to disarmament clauses, to the reduction of their army to one hundred thousand men, and also to the abolition of their navy. They agreed that Dantzig should be a free port, but rejected some of the territorial clauses and the penal stipulations. They refused to confess their sole responsibility for the war. They asked for plebiscites in territories taken from them by the treaty. They agreed to pay for reparations a total sum not exceeding 100,000,000,000 gold marks.

The Allies answered the German notes, one by one, in writing. No honest effort was made to justify in detail the terms to which the Germans objected by bringing arguments to refute the German arguments. The attitude of the Allies, in every answer, was that the Germans forgot that they had lost the war, a war for which they were solely responsible and which had brought upon the world endless misery. They were reminded of the fact that they had done more wrong than the most unfavorable terms could atone for, and that the damages due to their invasions of other countries and their diabolical destruction of cities, factories, and mines had put them beyond the pale of civilization. They ought to be glad that the terms were not harder. The terms could easily have been made harder. In none of the Allied replies was attention paid to the German claim that there had been a pre-armistice agreement, and that the Allies were using exactly opposite principles in deciding different points, invoking self-determination to justify detaching territory from Germany where there were alien majorities, and assigning historic and strategic reasons where the majorities were German. In the replies nothing was said about the unfairness of unilateral transport advantages in time of peace.

After five years, a careful reading of the Allied replies to the German observations on the Treaty of Versailles will convince one that the attitude of mind of the victors toward the vanquished was unstatesmanlike, to put it mildly. Many of the German arguments were poor, and could have been refuted; others were sound, and should have been ignored only if the victors felt that they could count upon remaining united and ready to make use of their military superiority, which was due only to their union, throughout the period of the execution of the treaty.

Owing to the insistence of Mr. Lloyd George, certain modifications were made in the proposed frontier with Poland, and plebiscites were provided for Upper Silesia, Marienwerder, and Allenstein. The arrangement for German repurchase of the Saar region was also modified. The final concessions were given to the Germans on June 16, subject to a five-day term for acceptance or rejection of the treaty in its entirety. This led to the downfall of the German Government and the withdrawal of von Brockdorff-Rantzau and his associates from Versailles. A new Government, composed of elements that had never before had the upper hand in Germany, was formed. Its chancellor, Herr Bauer, won the support of the National Assembly in a submission policy. The upper classes and the intellectuals in Germany were solidly opposed to signing a treaty which, they said, would only keep central Europe in turmoil indefinitely and lead to a war of revenge. They felt that the best course for Germany to pursue would be to allow the victors to denounce the armistice and occupy all of Germany.

This the victors were quite ready to do. The Allied armies on the Rhine were held in readiness. But the Bauer Government, supported by a demoralized and hunger-stricken people, succeeded in getting two men who were willing to go to Versailles and put their names to the treaty. On June 23 the German Government notified the Allies that it was ready to sign.

The event that ought to have marked a new era for Europe and the world took place in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles on Saturday afternoon, June 28, on the spot where the German Empire had been proclaimed in 1870. Had the treaty been really based on Mr. Wilson’s program, as it purported to be, had it contained a League of Nations Covenant along the lines of the noble conception of its advocates, had one weight and one measure been applied to all alike, there would have been some hope of a European and world peace born in the hearts of men that day. And, whether just or not, the treaty would have been practicable and would have ushered in a new era had those who framed it been bound together by common interests in its enforcement. But the great powers were divided; and the small powers, not having had any part in the treaty-making, did not consider it as theirs. Most of the people in the room had had no opportunity to study the treaty, and many of them had not been able to get hold of a copy to read it. But all who knew what was in it realized the futility of the performance.

Most of the Frenchmen present had expressed in no uncertain terms their idea that the treaty was not drastic enough, and that M. Clemenceau had betrayed his country’s interests. The English, on the other hand, thought it was too drastic. The Americans were divided, but I think the majority shared the British sentiment. The Italians and Japanese and most of the small powers had no particular interest in the treaty. Fearing to be assassinated if they returned home after having put China’s name to such a document, the Chinese at the last minute refused to sign. Of the smaller states only the Belgians, Poles, and Czechoslovaks were vitally interested, and none of these was satisfied. Denmark received back Schleswig, but she had had to remonstrate vehemently with the Allies to prevent them from giving her more than she wanted! Russia, whose consent and coöperation were essential for the enforcement in future years of a treaty of this character, especially the supplementary Polish treaty, was not only absent but had made it known that she considered the treaty null and void.

The ceremony was like a funeral; for a consciousness of failure was present among the signatories. And among some was a consciousness of shame. I talked to two of the principal signatories on the eve of the ceremony, and they told me that they felt they were going to do something dishonorable. Another signatory, representing one of the British dominions, told me on the evening of June 28 that it had been the saddest day of his life.

But the only delegate who protested openly was General Smuts of South Africa. As I write I hold in my hand his mimeographed statement, which was distributed at the moment he appended his signature. This copy was given to me by Sir George Riddell as General Smuts got up to walk to the table where the treaty lay. Said the general:

I feel that in the treaty we have not yet achieved the real peace to which our peoples were looking, and I feel that the real work of making peace will only begin after this treaty has been signed.... The promise of the new life, the victory of the great human ideals, for which the peoples have shed their blood and their treasure without stint, the fulfillment of their aspirations towards a new international order, and a fairer, better world, are not written in this treaty.... A new spirit of generosity and humanity, born in the hearts of the peoples in this great hour of common suffering and sorrow, can alone heal the wounds which have been inflicted on the body of Christendom.... There are territorial settlements which in my humble judgment will need revision. There are guarantees laid down, which we all hope will soon be found out of harmony with the new peaceful temper and unarmed state of our former enemy. There are punishments foreshadowed, over most of which a calmer mood may yet prefer to pass the sponge of oblivion. There are indemnities stipulated, which cannot be exacted without grave injury to the industrial revival of Europe, and which it will be in the interests of all to render more tolerable and moderate. There are numerous pin-pricks which will cease to pain under the healing influence of the new international atmosphere.

The real peace of the peoples ought to follow, complete, and amend the peace of the statesmen.... The enemy peoples should at the earliest possible date join the League, and in collaboration with the Allied peoples learn to practice the great lesson of this war, that not in separate ambitions or in selfish domination, but in common service for the great human causes, lies the true path of national progress. This joint collaboration is especially necessary to-day for the reconstruction of a ruined and broken world.

President Wilson also issued a statement after the signing of the treaty, in which he asserted that it contained many things that others failed to find in it. He spoke of it as “a great charter for a new order of affairs.” From this time Mr. Wilson became an ardent champion and defender of the treaty, taking in regard to it the attitude that literal inspirationists take in regard to the Bible. He set forth the theory on June 28, 1919, that the important feature of the Treaty of Versailles was the League of Nations, which he believed would immediately assume the dominant position in the conduct of international affairs. Because of the Treaty of Versailles, declared Mr. Wilson,

“backward nations, populations which have not yet come to political consciousness, and peoples who are ready for independence but not yet quite prepared to dispense with protection and guidance, shall no more be subjected to the domination and exploitation of a stronger nation, but shall be put under the friendly direction and afforded the helpful assistance of governments which undertake to be responsible to the opinion of mankind in the execution of their task by accepting the direction of the League of Nations.”

Despite his seven months of daily contact with European statesmen, Mr. Wilson had preserved his optimism, and was willing to go on record as prophesying that the Entente Powers were going to interpret their mandate trusteeships in this way.

While the Treaty of Versailles was being prepared, drafts were made also of the proposed treaties with Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey. It was intended that the five treaties be part of the same general settlement, each beginning with the League of Nations Covenant, and employing as far as possible the same order and the same phraseology. What France and Belgium had suffered at the hands of the Germans, the smaller allies had suffered at the hands of Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey. Germany’s accomplices had been guilty of as great devastation in their invasions, and of infinitely greater atrocities and wrongs inflicted upon subject peoples. This was especially true of Turkey. If a harsh treaty was just, on moral grounds, when Germany was the culprit, there was greater justification in imposing harsh treaties on the other countries that had helped Germany in her formidable assault upon civilization.

But unanimity was harder to secure in the case of the other treaties. There was some reason for allowing France to have the principal voice in the treaty with Germany, and France’s interests were identical with those of Belgium. The Treaty of Versailles involved only the creation of one new state, Poland, which France powerfully godfathered. The conflicting interests of the powers in the enforcement of the Treaty of Versailles did not arise until after the Peace Conference.

The other treaties were a different matter. Here from the beginning interests clashed, those of Italy and Jugoslavia in the treaty with Austria; those of Jugoslavia, Rumania, Czechoslovakia, and Poland in the treaty with Hungary; those of Jugoslavia and Greece in the treaty with Bulgaria; and those of Greece and Italy, and of Italy, France, and Great Britain, in the treaty with Turkey. The delegates of the other enemy powers had all been summoned to Paris before the Treaty of Versailles was signed, but the Allies were not ready for them.

It was felt, however, that the draft of the Austrian treaty, although incomplete, should be given to the Austrians before the Treaty of Versailles was signed. For the two treaties contained a similar important provision forbidding the union of Austria with Germany. And Austria, like Germany, was to make a large territorial contribution to the resurrection of Poland. Then, too, the treaty with Austria was as important to Italy as the treaty with Germany to France.

But the delegates of the states whose future was to be decided by the treaties with Austria and Hungary had been showing much impatience during May over the fact that they were having no part in making the draft of the treaty. They did not know what the terms were to be! Two of the Balkan premiers told me that the Conference of Paris, as far as the Danubian states and the Balkan states were concerned, was simply a repetition of the Conference of Berlin. The great powers were drawing up the treaty with due regard to their own interests, and their own interests alone. The smaller states were expected to gather up gratefully the crumbs that fell from the rich man’s table. Was Italy going to have her own way with Austria, disregarding Jugoslavic claims? Italy had a voice in the secret conclaves; Jugoslavia did not. Were the great powers going to write the economic clauses of the treaties according to their own interests, and to give themselves privileges on the Danube that were being denied to Germany on her own internal waterways? During the last fortnight of May I was put in possession of information that indicated beyond the shadow of a doubt the moral bankruptcy of the conference and the mental weariness of President Wilson.

What I had been told was confirmed in the last three days of the month. Plenary sessions were held on May 29 and 31 to discuss the Austrian draft treaty. It had been the intention of the Big Three (no longer Big Four, because Signor Orlando had gone home in a huff) to make the proceedings as meaningless and formal as those of the previous plenary sessions. They had hoped to communicate an incomplete draft treaty, for Italy had not yet been appeased, and to present it without further delay to the Austrians, who were waiting at St.-Germain. But on May 29 Premier Bratiano and the other premiers of Succession and Balkan states had annoyingly insisted upon being given a chance to read and study the document in drafting which they were supposed to have collaborated and which they would be expected to indorse and sign. They pointed out the fact that the treaties with the remnants of the Hapsburg Empire were vital to them. They wanted to have a voice in the political and economic engagements they were to undertake. With bad grace, they were allowed forty-eight hours.

The historic eighth plenary session was held on the afternoon of May 31. Opening the proceedings, M. Clemenceau, speaking with an air of weariness and impatience, intimated that the Big Three were ready to listen to observations. Premier Bratiano of Rumania was the first speaker. He complained that the text of the treaty had been communicated only at six o’clock the evening before, and that there had not been twenty-four hours to study it. He was interrupted immediately by M. Clemenceau, who asked him to read what the Rumanians had to say. M. Bratiano made a straightforward protest against the minority clauses proposed, declaring that Rumania was ready to agree to any regulations for the protection of minorities that all the members of the League of Nations might adopt, but that the intervention of foreign countries in her internal affairs could not be tolerated. If the League of Nations was a reality and not a farce he argued that this body could be relied upon to protect minorities by common agreement in all the states members of the League. As the League existed, and as all powers were to have equal rights and to be treated alike, why did “the principal Allied and Associated Powers” arrogate to themselves the right to intervene in the internal affairs of Rumania, coupled with economic privileges of a special character?

M. Clemenceau answered that the powers were in a hurry to give the draft treaty to the Austrians, but that he was in agreement with M. Bratiano on the minorities question. Of course the League of Nations could attend to this matter, and France was willing to submit to any control the League proposed. M. Bratiano returned to the charge. He pointed out to M. Clemenceau that the text of the treaty entrusted the protection of minorities to the great powers and not to the League. Admitting this, now that he was cornered, M. Clemenceau said that there was nothing humiliating in the proposition that Rumania receive “friendly counsels” from the Entente Powers and the United States.

M. Bratiano answered that the war had been fought to establish the equality of states, irrespective of size, and that the Big Four had disregarded this principle and had established different classes of states, with varying degrees of sovereignty. This Rumania could not admit. Messrs. Paderewski for Poland, Kramar for Czechoslovakia, and Trumbich for Jugoslavia vigorously supported the thesis of M. Bratiano.

To the surprise and astonishment of every one, it was the American President who came to the rescue of Old World diplomacy. Feeling that his authority and judgment had been attacked, and not seeing the “nigger in the wood-pile” (the desire for exclusive economic privileges which had inspired his colleagues, not defense of minorities), Mr. Wilson pointed out that it is force which is the final guarantee of public peace. Mr. Wilson assumed that the United States and the Entente Powers—not the League of Nations—were to stand together indefinitely to guarantee the maintenance of the treaties that formed the Paris settlement. According to the official minutes of this session, which were passed upon and approved by the American delegation, Mr. Wilson said:

If the world finds itself again troubled, if the conditions that we all regard as fundamental are put in question, the guarantee which is given you means that the United States will bring to this side of the ocean their army and their fleet. Is it surprising that in these conditions they desire to act in such a way that the regulation of the different problems appear to them entirely satisfactory?[4]

M. Bratiano told Mr. Wilson that he had missed the point, and repeated his declaration, in which the other interested states concurred, that the equality of all states, small and large, had been the corner-stone of Mr. Wilson’s own principles and of the sword drawn in defense of Serbia and Belgium. He pointed out that if the League of Nations were entrusted with the task of protecting minorities in all countries, the states interested in the Austrian treaty would be glad to submit to a control that played no favorites. Then M. Bratiano asked Mr. Wilson point-blank why Italy was not included in giving definite minority pledges along with the other states who were to be successors of the Hapsburg Empire. Are there degrees of sovereignty according to size? Have large nations rights and privileges small nations do not possess? If this was the idea of the Americans as well as of the other major Allies, the statements they had made during the war were false. They were not defending Serbia and Belgium; they were fighting for their own interests, using the cause of these two small nations as a smoke-screen for selfishness. But I am afraid that in the last two sentences I have strayed from the minutes of the eighth plenary session! I have put down what M. Bratiano told me he wanted to say in his answer to the President.

The last to speak at this memorable session, M. Venizelos, suggested that the legitimate anxieties of the states immediately affected by the treaty with Austria ought to be considered, before the treaty was presented to the Austrian delegation, in a special joint meeting of the Big Four and the representatives of these states.

This was not done. The draft of the treaty was given to the Austrians at St.-Germain on June 2. After lengthy exchange of notes some concessions were made in the economic clauses, and an amended treaty was handed to the Austrians on July 20. Negotiations were protracted, not on account of the Austrians, who were powerless, but because the interests of Italy had to be acknowledged, and because the small states had to be appeased and bullied. The Treaty of St.-Germain was signed on September 10. By that time, however, all interest in it had died down, and, as far as its economic clauses were concerned, it was universally recognized to be more absurd and impossible of fulfilment than the Treaty of Versailles.

The Bulgarians were handed their treaty on September 19, and they signed it at Neuilly on November 27. The Hungarian and Turkish treaties had been drawn up at the same time as the others. But there was no stable government in Hungary to sign the treaty, and the Entente Powers were at loggerheads over the Turkish treaty. Before the treaties of Trianon and Sèvres were presented to the Hungarians and Turks, the Paris Peace Conference had gone out of existence, and was succeeded by the three Entente premiers, who held a series of continuation conferences frequently from January, 1920, to January, 1923.

It may be felt that I have written an unsympathetic account of the Paris Conference. But how can one write otherwise concerning an inglorious failure? It would be possible to explain plausibly, convincingly, why it failed. But the chronicler of contemporary history must pass on to an examination of the treaties, and then to judge them by the only criterion he has the right to use: What has happened to the world because of them? Did they bring us peace? Have they proved to be practicable? Were they the beginning of a new order? Has the League of Nations filled the rôle expected of it by those who said that its birth alone justified the Paris peace settlement and would prove its corrective?

CHAPTER IV
THE MAIN FEATURES OF THE TREATY OF VERSAILLES

The principal Allied and Associated Powers, who took upon themselves the entire responsibility for imposing and securing the execution of the Treaty of Versailles, sent an exhaustive reply to the German counter-proposals on June 16, in which, as we have seen, some concessions were made in details, modifying the draft treaty. But these were slight. In this reply they said:

They [the victors] believe that it is not only a just settlement of the great war, but that it provides the basis upon which the peoples of Europe can live together in friendship and equality. At the same time it creates the machinery for the peaceful adjustment of all international problems by discussion and consent, whereby the settlement of 1919 itself can be modified from time to time to suit new facts and new conditions as they arise. It is frankly not based upon a general condonation of the events of 1914–1918. It would not be a peace of justice if it were. But it represents a sincere and deliberate attempt to establish “that reign of law, based upon the consent of the governed, and sustained by the organized opinion of mankind,” which was the agreed basis of the peace. As such the treaty in its present form must be accepted or rejected.

In the light of these words, uttered by the Big Four at a solemn moment, we must examine the main features of this treaty. And lest it be thought that the American President did not approve of the treaty as signed, but agreed to it, as General Smuts did, only in the hope of its immediate and radical revision by the League of Nations, it is fair to quote the opening paragraph of Mr. Wilson’s speech at Kansas City on September 6, 1919. He said:

I came back from Paris, bringing one of the greatest documents of human history. One of the things that made it great was that it was penetrated throughout with the principles to which America has devoted her life. Let me hasten to say that one of the most delightful circumstances of the work on the other side of the water was that I discovered that what we called American principles had penetrated to the heart and to the understanding, not only of the great peoples of Europe, but to the hearts and understandings of the great men who were representing the peoples of Europe.

The Treaty of Versailles, containing 440 articles, with annexes, constitutes a large sized volume. Its first twenty-six articles contain the Covenant of the League of Nations. Then follow the boundaries of Germany; political clauses for Europe; German rights and interests outside Germany; military, naval, and air clauses; prisoners of war and graves; penalties; reparation; financial clauses; economic clauses; aërial navigation; ports, waterways, and railways; labor; guarantees; miscellaneous provisions.

The underlying idea of the treaty is that the Germans are a guilty and vanquished people, who are indefinitely compelled, without appeal, to put at the mercy of the conquerors their lives, their property, their territory. A reading of the treaty will convince the fair-minded man that its many “jokers” are so cleverly scattered through the treaty as to nullify what provisions it does contain for setting dates for the termination of the penalties and limitations imposed upon Germany. I saw many of these “jokers” when I read the treaty. They were patent. But a clever lawyer would find many more.

The late Senator Philander C. Knox, who had read the treaty through, told me in the autumn of 1919 that, from a legal point of view, there was no hope whatever of Germany’s being able to fulfil the obligations placed upon her. He brushed the economic questions aside, and showed me how Germany was trussed by the treaty in such a way that no matter what she did towards fulfilment she would still be in default. “With all the power and authority and good will in the world,” said our former secretary of state, “no nation on earth could ever acquit herself of the obligations of such a treaty. If Germany were a small nation, and her enemies bound together permanently by common interests, central Europe, under this treaty, would become within a decade a huge region inhabited by millions of slaves. As it is, the treaty indicts those who drew it up. It is a crime against civilization.” This comment was provoked when I was trying to argue with the senator that the treaty ought to be ratified with reservations.

Eight months later, on May 5, 1920, Senator Knox said publicly, addressing the Senate:

The Treaty of Versailles is almost universally discredited in all its parts. The majority of its negotiators concede this. Its economic terms are impossible; its League of Nations is an aggravated imitation of the worst features of the ill fated and foolish holy alliance of a century ago. It promises little but mischief unless recast on such radical lines as will entirely obliterate its identity.... We must proceed in accordance with the established beneficent and enlightened rules and principles of international law as they have heretofore obtained between civilized Christian nations.

The principal features of the Treaty of Versailles are the exclusion of Germany from the League of Nations; the failure to establish or promise reciprocity in any of its provisions that would otherwise have been for the common good of the world; the violation of the principle of self-determination where it was to the interest of the victors to ignore it; the elimination of Germany from cultural and economic participation in the development of the world; and the consecration of the principle of the right of the victors in a war to confiscate the private property of the vanquished. Let us take up these features one by one, with examples.

The Exclusion of Germany from the League of Nations. Article IV of the Covenant provides for a council of nine members, five of whom are permanent “representatives of the principal Allied and Associated Powers.” The four minority members “shall be selected by the Assembly from time to time in its discretion.” It is true that the Council “may name additional members of the League whose representatives shall always be members of the Council,” and that new members of the League may be admitted on a two thirds vote of the Assembly. But the jokers that exclude Germany from membership in the League as well as in the Council are the qualifying clauses providing that a new member “shall give effective guarantees of its sincere intention to observe its international obligations” and that each member of the Council possesses an absolute veto. It is easily seen that these jokers put the admission of Germany entirely in the hands of France, who can be sole judge of Germany’s worthiness. This same handicap holds in regard to Russia. And no student of world affairs believes that the League of Nations can become anything else than the subservient tool of the Entente powers, unable to move in anything against their interests or wishes, unless Germany and Russia are permanent members of the Council.

The Failure to Establish or Promise Reciprocity in Any of Its Provisions That Would Otherwise Have Been for the Common Good of the World. The Treaty of Versailles contains many good points, such as its penalties; the restoration of plunder taken from other countries during previous wars as well as during the recent war; the military, naval, and air clauses; the resurrection of Poland; the erection of mixed arbitral tribunals; aërial navigation clauses; ports, waterways and railways clauses; labor clauses; and other minor points. But all these features, good in themselves, are not written in the treaties for the purpose of establishing improved international relations but as additional means of crippling and punishing Germany. None of them are contractual, in the ordinary sense; that is, they bind only one party. Reciprocity is not provided for, even in the future. The result is not only to put Germans in a position of inferiority to citizens of neighboring nations for the time being but to give them no hope that this condition will ever be remedied. For the numerous jokers take away the effectiveness of the time-limits provided in some instances for withholding reciprocity.

It is inconceivable that officers and men of Allied armies had not been guilty of violations of international law during more than four years of fighting. But only Germans were to be tried, and the German Government bound itself to hand over for trial before Allied tribunals all whose names should be handed in. This impossible provision in itself put Germany in hopeless default from the moment her representatives signed the treaty. Only if the Germans had been an uncivilized tribe of savages could such provisions have been executed. Similarly, the trial of Kaiser Wilhelm, too, before an impartial tribunal would have been a splendid measure. But the treaty bound the Germans to an unheard-of thing in international relations. They were obliged to confess their rulers’ guilt and their own, as a people, before the trial! And the treaty gave no promise, as it should have done, that the question of the responsibility for the war would be fairly gone into by a court of justice, with all the evidence before it. If the purpose of the men who made the Treaty of Versailles was not vindictiveness but a desire to get at the truth, they would have coupled their demand for the trial of the Kaiser with a guarantee that all the documentary evidence on both sides should be brought into court. Only in this way could a fair trial have been had. The penalties clauses of the treaty, therefore, violate the accepted principles of law as well as the dictates of fair play and common sense.

If the treaty had limited itself to the restoration of the loot of the recent war, no exception could have been taken. But Germany was summoned to give up art treasures and other plunder of the long ago. Was this done because the restitution was a matter of justice or to remove ancient grievances that stood in the way of the reconciliation of peoples? If so, the victors should have promised to give back to one another and to neutral nations—and in many instances to the vanquished—the more notorious examples of loot in their own national galleries and museums. This was a trifling matter, but it showed the spirit of the treaty.

Permanent peace could never come from a one-sided application of the principle of disarmament, especially when it was coupled with the guarantees clauses. History does not record an instance where a great people, deprived of its means of defense, with portions of its territory under military occupation and neighboring enemy countries still armed to the teeth, did not find some means, internally or through alliances, to break the grip of its enemies. In 1870, by annexing Alsace-Lorraine, Bismarck made an armed camp of Europe. In 1919, by occupying the Rhine and disarming Germany without promising themselves to disarm, the Allies, in the Treaty of Versailles, laid the foundation for a greater and more dangerous unrest than Europe has known in modern times. Lack of reciprocity in the military, naval, and aërial clauses was practicable only (a) if the enemies of Germany were ready to form a permanent alliance and keep several million men under arms, or (b) if they were willing to kill indefinitely all male children born in Germany—and also the existing male population under twenty-five.

The resurrection of Poland could have been a glorious and blessed result of the Paris settlement had it been conceived and carried out in the interests of the Poles. But the resurrection of Poland, as provided for in the Treaty of Versailles and the supplementary treaty, was an attempt to create an artificial state for old-fashioned “balance of power” purposes. The real interests of the Poles were not considered at all. Their only hope of succeeding in rebuilding their national life lay in having boundaries that would not in the future create against them fatal antagonism on the part of their two powerful neighbors, Germany and Russia. Had Polish and not French interests been considered in writing the Treaty of Versailles, the new Poland would not have been saddled with the Danzig corridor, and Upper Silesia would have remained German territory. A combination of fear and greed, without statesmanlike vision, made a Poland that can never last. The frontiers of Poland, as drawn in the Treaty of Versailles, heralded war and not peace. They were a perpetuation of the worst evil from which Europe had been suffering. The corridor and the “free port of Danzig” were declared to be necessary in order to give Poland an outlet to the sea, despite the fact that Danzig is an indisputably German city. But the same men at the same time took away Trieste and Fiume from Austria and Hungary, despite the dependence of their hinterland upon them, invoking the argument of the population of the ports, the validity of which was hotly denied by them when Germany invoked it!

The erection of mixed arbitral tribunals for adjustment of war claims of private citizens put a premium upon the appeal to force. What it meant was that, if your country was successful in fighting, you had a valid claim against a citizen of a defeated country, and that your claim would be adjusted by arbiters appointed by your own country. The important thing, then, according to the Treaty of Versailles, was not the sanctity of private contracts entered into between individuals of different nations, but citizenship in a winning nation.

In aërial navigation and in ports, waterways, and railways, the right of the victors to transit across and privileges on German soil were affirmed without reciprocity. Not only were the Germans denied the right of transport by air and water and rail, on equal terms with other nations, outside their own country, but they were required to open up Germany to Allied control and to concede special privileges in waterways and ports, to facilitate the passage over their territory of international trains—all this without reciprocity. The time-limits set gave no reasonable hope of a change; for the removal of disabilities depended upon the integral observance of all the other treaty obligations.

The Violation of the Principle of Self-Determination Where It Was to the Interest of the Victors to Ignore It. On the ground that Alsace-Lorraine had been forcibly taken from France against the will of the inhabitants in a previous war, it was altogether just that France should receive back her “lost provinces” without a plebiscite. Even had one been taken, the result would not have been in doubt. France would have won by an overwhelming vote. It was just also to stipulate the return to Denmark of indisputably Danish territory, with a plebiscite for doubtful border districts. The other territorial provisions were open to question.

The most flagrant violation of the principle of self-determination was in the matter of the detachment for fifteen years (with a plebiscite at the end of that time) of the Saar Valley from Germany. This wholly German district of over half a million souls was put under the League of Nations, but really given to France to run, as compensation for the destruction of coal-mines in northern France. That the treaty of peace should have contained provisions for adequate compensation—ton-to-ton replacement—for the French losses in coal was to be expected. But the Saar arrangement was political and not economic,[5] and, as far as the inhabitants of the region were concerned, its practical application meant for them what the Treaty of Frankfort had meant for Alsatians nearly half a century earlier. The Saar clauses constitute a shameful betrayal of the high ideals for which the war was fought. Confirmation of this statement is easily obtained. Let the reader go to the Saar and talk with the people. Violence has been done to their most sacred sentiments. Two wrongs do not make a right.

In the House of Commons on May 9, 1923, Mr. Edward Wood, a member of the Bonar Law Cabinet, who presided over the meeting of the Council of the League in April, 1923, told how the Council had virtually washed its hands of the Saar. The Commission consisted of a French president, with four assistants, a Belgian, a Dane with a French name, a Canadian, and a representative of the Saar population. The Canadian sided with the local representative in trying to prevent the oppression of the people, who were being ruled in a way that provoked them to appeal for redress to the Council. The President of the Commission had explained to the Council that the decrees, adopted by the majority of the Commission, were “not illegal” and were justified on the ground that they were adopted “to meet exceptional circumstances.” It developed in the debate that one of the decrees imposed penalties of imprisonment and fine for certain “crimes,” without hearing or trial or resort to appeal. Among the “crimes” was casting discredit on the Treaty of Versailles. The inhabitants of the Saar are not allowed to discuss publicly the régime that governs them or their future. Sir John Simon told the Commons that this measure was a “most astounding abuse of legislative power,” and Mr. Asquith called it a “monstrous and ridiculous decree” for the like of which “one might ransack the annals of despotism in the worst days of Russia’s oppression of Finland without finding a more monstrous specimen of despotic legislation or one more suppressive of the elementary rights of free citizenship.” Lord Robert Cecil, just back from his American tour in favor of the League of Nations, declared that the action was worthy of militarism at its worst, and that he had always had grave doubts of the wisdom of making the League responsible for the Saar régime.

The cession of Malmédy and Eupen to Belgium was clearly against the wishes of the inhabitants of those regions. During the peace negotiations I visited these places, and I visited them afterward, just as I did the Saar. The people told me that they were Germans and wanted to remain Germans. They were not given the opportunity, any more than the people of the Saar were, to vote upon their detachment from Germany. The treaty provided for registers at Malmédy and Eupen, in which, within a fixed time, any inhabitant of these regions could write down his desire to return to German sovereignty. The defenders of the treaty, by virtue of this curious provision, declared that the people had a chance to decide. Did they? Any one who dared to sign those registers was expelled and his property confiscated. After two or three examples of this sort, nothing more was done. It was like the right of our negroes to vote in the South. In these cases I have the facts, names, dates, and particulars of each instance.

The plebiscite for Upper Silesia contained a joker that was afterward invoked, when the decision went against Poland, by reason of which the Entente Powers were at liberty to disregard the vote if it seemed best to do so. No opportunity was given to the inhabitants of the Polish corridor, separating East and West Prussia, to vote on their own destinies. Mr. Lloyd George had secured a modification of the original draft, by which plebiscites were allowed for the Marienwerder and Allenstein regions. Although the commission on Polish frontiers at the Paris Conference had recommended the detachment of these regions from Germany, declaring that they were “predominantly Polish,” they voted 98 per cent and 95 per cent respectively to remain with Germany, and this under Allied military occupation and supervision! There is little doubt that if a fair plebiscite had been held everywhere, as had been promised, there would have been no corridor, and Poland would have received a much more limited frontier in Posen than she got. I was in Kattowitz, in Upper Silesia, when that city, despite its vote for Germany was allotted to Poland. A prominent citizen told me: “You have created another open sore, which will be healed only by a new war.”

If the Paris Conference was actuated by the desire to secure the fulfilment of the ideals for which we fought, rather than the triumph of the principle that might makes right, in taking away Trieste and Fiume from Austria and Hungary, these ideals were violated by taking away Danzig and Memel from Germany. I have found no apologist for the Treaty of Versailles who, when confronted with the deadly parallel here, has not admitted that different weights and different measures were applied in these cases. There is no more striking proof than Danzig and Memel, as opposed to Trieste and Fiume, of the judgment passed upon the Treaty of Versailles by Mr. Ray Stannard Baker in his recent defense of President Wilson, that the treaty was a piece of hasty patchwork, imposed at the point of a bayonet, whose terms were simply and solely due to the national interests of the victors.

In the provisions of the treaty relating to countries other than Germany, the principle of self-determination was ignored in regard to China, Morocco, and Egypt. The Chinese arguments about Shantung were not answered. The Egyptians sent a delegation, representing their National Assembly, to protest against the recognition of the British protectorate. But they were not given a hearing, and this provision, although there had been wide-spread riots in Egypt against the British military occupation, was put into the treaty.

The Elimination of Germany from Cultural and Economic Participation in the Development of the World. For more than a hundred years before the World War, the European nations had come to realize that their prosperity depended upon contacts with the extra-European world. These contacts they had established at the cost of great sacrifices, through colonial wars, wars with one another, and the gradual building up of investments, banks, shipping, and trading companies in all parts of the world. Because of her later unification and slower industrial development, Germany was a late comer in world politics. She struggled under great handicaps in finding a large part of the world already preëmpted when she began to look for colonies, coaling-stations, and fields for investment and economic development. But her progress in the few decades preceding the World War had been marvelous, and her whole economic structure was built, like that of England, upon foreign trade. Her population had gone beyond the number that could be sustained by home markets.

The greatest blow to Germany in the Treaty of Versailles was the ban it placed upon her contacts with the outside world. She was compelled to give up her colonies; to renounce her commercial treaties and concessions in every country in the world except a few South American countries that had not declared war upon her; and to surrender everything that she had built up in the way of import and export markets, by the confiscation of her shipping, foreign investments, banking and commercial establishments, concessions, privileges, etc. The aim of the treaty was to eliminate Germany as a competitor in world markets, and to make it impossible for German capital to accomplish anything in the future in Africa and Asia. Germany was called upon, also, to renounce her treaties and private concessions, her loans, and everything else that she had acquired in her relations with her former allies. Her nationals were barred from Turkey, from former German colonies, and from French and British protectorates in Africa and Asia. Her mission work in foreign countries was to be given up entirely and not renewed. Her missionaries, Catholic and Protestant, were never again to return to their field. Provisions were inserted in the treaty by which the victors had the right to bar German newspapers and magazines and books, as well as German goods, without reciprocity. Some one at Paris—I forget which of the outstanding figures it was—said that in the Treaty of Versailles we had reverted to the law of the jungle. The papal nuncio, Monsignor Ceretti, told me that the devil at his worst could hardly have conceived so thorough a destruction of the soul of mankind.

In connection with the various clauses throughout the treaty, which, in their ensemble, cut Germany off from the rest of the world and make her a pariah for ever among nations, an interesting dilemma faces those who hope to profit by the treaty. If they are able to enforce its provisions, do they still expect to have large reparations from a Germany bound hand and foot in the matter of her foreign trade, while enjoying the advantages in their own foreign trade of having her no longer for a competitor? And, if so, will not the example of a Germany without colonies, army, fleet, political and economic contacts with Asia and Africa, paying not only her own expenses but a huge surplus for reparations, refute the time-worn argument of economic imperialism, that a nation must have all these things to live? The answer to the former question is an economic one, difficult to explain and uphold, whether you say yes or no. The answer to the second question, if in the affirmative, proves that the greater part of our national expenditures are money wasted, and, if in the negative, that the Treaty of Versailles was a sentence of death passed upon a great nation, affecting not so much those guilty of the war as their progeny and an unborn generation.

The Consecration of the Principle of the Right of the Victors in a War to Confiscate the Private Property of the Vanquished. It is impossible to deny that the Treaty of Versailles infringes upon the age-old principle of the sanctity of private property. A study of its reparations and economic clauses reveals that the greatest damage done to the world during the riot of ungoverned passions at Paris was the attack made in the treaty upon the fundamental bases of society. The Treaty of Versailles assumes the dangerous doctrine that the state is all-powerful and has the right to dispose of the property of its citizens, and that a government can not only levy taxes on capital and property of a confiscatory character but is able to give a clear title to the confiscation by others of its subjects’ property.

I am sure that I have not exaggerated, or stated unfairly or extremely, this feature of the Treaty of Versailles. During the last five years I have had the opinion of a dozen international lawyers, French and British and American, who are agreed that this feature of the Treaty of Versailles, if applied, would lead to departures in existing notions of property and the rôle of the state so startling as to be subversive of the existing social order. The boomerang is evident. If Germany has a right to confiscate or assent to the confiscation of private property for the purposes of reparation, if the assent and carte blanche of the German Government to confiscation by the Allies gives a valid title, if taxes on capital can be levied by the German Government—all this without ruining industry in Germany—why are not these measures legal and practicable against private property and capital in other countries?

The heart of the Treaty of Versailles lay in its reparations clauses. A Reparations Commission was created, which, like the armies of occupation, was to be maintained at the expense of Germany. Not until May, 1921, was it to decide upon the amount Germany owed and could pay. The commission was given sweeping powers over Germany’s finances, internal and external. It would fix the amounts in money and kind of German reparations deliveries. Against the amounts fixed the German Government had no appeal. If it did not do as the Reparations Commission ordered, the commission had the power, by a majority vote, to declare Germany in default on reparations. Then the treaty provided that the victors could take what measures they decided upon to penalize Germany for the default and to collect their claims. Since no appeal or arbitration was provided for, the Treaty of Versailles gave no protection to the debtor against the rapacity and vindictiveness of the creditors. Sums due were not agreed upon by mutual consent; they were fixed by the victors. There was no protection in the treaty against possible abuse of this privilege, and no definition of the measures to be taken after default. The Treaty of Versailles thus put Germany at the absolute mercy of her conquerors, without appeal, legal or otherwise. By taking away the security of German territory, the treaty made impossible the revival of German prosperity and the fulfilment of the obligations of the treaty.

Last of all, the most curious feature of the treaty was its failure to provide the machinery for its enforcement. The Germans had been able during more than four years to withstand their enemies. And it is certain that the Entente powers could not have dictated a victors’ treaty without the coöperation of the United States. Germany signed the treaty because she was forced to do so. And, as it was a one-sided and humiliating treaty, giving the Germans no hope whatsoever for the future as an encouragement to fulfil its terms, the victors ought to have realized the necessity of providing, jointly, for the permanent maintenance of a huge standing army to keep the Germans in submission. A document of the nature of the Treaty of Versailles was worthless unless coercion, permanent coercion, was provided for. As events have proved, the assumption of the Paris peacemakers, i. e., that they would stick together, was wrong. What other result could be expected, then, from the Treaty of Versailles than that the Germans would obey the treaty only in so far as force was employed? The spirit of the treaty is not peace but war. The Germans were to be considered permanently as enemies. They were not to be allowed to become friends.

When you have an enemy, you do not have peace.

When you cannot count upon remaining friends with one another, and you are confronted with an unknown factor like Russia, you read over again the Treaty of Versailles and say to yourself: “If I ever believed that any good could come of it, I must have been of unbalanced judgment, owing to the passions of the moment. Certainly those who made the treaty were!”

CHAPTER V
THE FAILURE OF THE TREATY OF VERSAILLES TO WIN POPULAR APPROVAL

From the moment of its signature, the Treaty of Versailles had “a bad press” throughout the world. Ratification by the parliaments of most of the contracting nations seemed assured, but in no country did those who favored ratification support their case by any other argument than that of expediency. It was an inadequate treaty, disappointing along practical as well as idealistic lines, its supporters admitted; but what else was there to do than to make it, imperfect as it was, the foundation of peace? After all, the compromises among the Entente Powers left them with substantial gains; and Belgium and Poland were decidedly the winners. The weak features of the treaty could be remedied in later conferences. And yet, despite the reasonableness of this argument, to all nations that participated in the conference except Great Britain and China it was a problem, what attitude they should adopt toward the Treaty of Versailles.

China solved the problem by not accepting the treaty at all. Her delegates refused to sign the document that put millions of their fellow-citizens of the sacred and historic province of Shantung into the hands of Japan. At the command of the President of the United States, the American Minister to China had formally invited the Chinese to participate in the World War for the triumph of certain definite principles which had been clearly set forth in detail by the President, who said he spoke on behalf of the American people. Believing in President Wilson’s good faith, the Chinese came into the war. When they discovered that in the councils of the Big Four their confidence had been betrayed, they would have nothing to do with the Treaty of Versailles. In his spectacular trip west to defend the treaty, when it was before the Senate, President Wilson tried to explain away the Shantung arrangements. But he could not do it to the satisfaction of China.

The British Parliament ratified the treaty without debate. Naturally. For, like the Treaty of Vienna a hundred years earlier, it added greatly to Great Britain’s already overwhelming world power. The continental powers were weak and disrupted, incapable of threatening in the near future “the peace of the world” as Downing Street understands that term; that is, of contesting with the mistress of the seas extra-European markets and intercontinental carrying-trade. German naval power was destroyed. German colonial and commercial ambitions had received a serious setback. Russia was no longer a menace to British supremacy in Asia. The Treaty of Versailles established new safeguards to India by recognizing the British protectorate over Egypt, by ignoring the plea of Persia to be a signatory or at least a beneficiary of the treaty, by making no provision for the future of Asiatic and Transcaucasian Russia, and by giving international sanction to British secret treaties, no matter what unknown provisions those treaties might contain. It made Great Britain the dominant power in Africa. It accepted the right of the British cabinet to speak, and sign, for the 300,000,000 inhabitants of India. Above all, it provided that the United States should underwrite the aggrandized British Empire, with a self-governing population of only 60,000,000, by entering a League of Nations in which the British were to have six votes and the United States, with its self-governing population of 100,000,000, one vote. It was not until later that British public opinion began to realize the danger of a weak Germany in Europe—the danger to prosperity, through disorganization of trade, and the danger to security, through the looming up of another would-be dominant power in Europe.

The Treaty of Versailles was subject to long and penetrating criticism in the French Senate and Chamber of Deputies. Clear-headed and far-sighted men did not cease to protest against the treaty on the same ground as American senators: (1) fear that national interests had been sacrificed to questionable international advantages; (2) uncertainty as to the adequacy of the means of enforcing the provisions in the treaty; (3) dissatisfaction with the League of Nations Covenant as it stood in the treaty; (4) doubt as to the wisdom of having incorporated in one document the solution of two different questions, imposing peace upon Germany and setting up the machinery of a new world order.

During the Conference of Paris I had the privilege of coming into intimate contact with all classes of Frenchmen. They did not deceive themselves. They knew well enough where they would have been after a few months of war, had they been facing Germany alone. Now that Germany was temporarily disabled, they wanted either a free hand to take strategic precautions against a renewal of German aggression, which meant the Rhine frontier, or a new defensive alliance in place of the Russian alliance. They had no faith whatever in the League of Nations. M. Clemenceau had been persuaded to give up the Rhine frontier in exchange for an agreement by the terms of which Great Britain and the United States were to come to the aid of France in case of German aggression. At the best, owing to the geographical position of the new proposed defenders, the Anglo-American guarantee was not a very certain one. After the American Senate began to attack Article X of the League of Nations Covenant, the French saw that they had been deceived. The Anglo-American guarantee was an illusion. The Treaty of Versailles, in itself, provided no permanent security for France.

In Belgium I found ratification of the treaty regarded as a painful necessity. There was no enthusiasm for it, and no hope that a new order would be born of it. The prime ministers of Greece and Rumania told me that the Versailles Treaty could not be pronounced either good or bad by their countries until the other treaties with enemy countries were included. But they both felt that not peace but a series of new wars was likely to be the result of the secret pourparlers among the Big Four that gave birth to the Treaty of Versailles. The minister of foreign affairs of another small nation expressed to me his belief that the incorporation of the League of Nations in the Treaty of Versailles killed the League’s chances of success.

“How could international machinery for righting injustice and establishing a new international morality belong in a document that furnishes numerous instances of just the sort of thing the League of Nations was created to abolish?” he cried. I can see him now as he walked up and down the room, shaking both arms with elbows bended, and saying, “Pooling of interests, renunciation of special privileges, refusal to transfer territories from one sovereignty to another without consulting their inhabitants, recognition of the right of self-determination—bah! bah! BAH!” The poor man had just been shown a draft of the clauses relating to his country that were to be put into the Treaty of St.-Germain.

The statesmen of most of the smaller countries, including the neutrals invited to become charter members of the League, were afraid that the inclusion of the League of Nations in the Treaty of Versailles would make their position in this organization embarrassing. For Mr. Wilson had succeeded in his determination to connect the league inextricably with the treaty. Here was a punitive treaty, imposed upon a defeated nation, which gave great advantages to a few countries. But many countries—in fact, almost all the countries of the world—were supposed to join in the responsibility of enforcing the Treaty of Versailles, in whose advantages and loot they were not sharing. Some of them had not even been enemies of Germany. Several of them, like Holland, Denmark, and Switzerland, had common boundaries with Germany and did most of their business with her. Others, like Sweden, Finland, and Lithuania, not only had closer cultural relations with Germany than with the Entente Powers, but also were vitally interested in not having Germany remain in the position of economic serfdom to which the Treaty of Versailles doomed her. When the draft treaty was published, the press in all the countries neighboring on Germany, which for the most part had been unsympathetic or even actually hostile during the war, pronounced its terms impracticable and war-breeding.

In Italy the spirit of revolt against the League of Nations and a punitive treaty imposed upon Germany had begun before the Treaty of Versailles was signed. Signor Orlando was replaced in the premiership by Signor Nitti while the Germans were still debating whether they should sign or not. Italian public opinion was inflamed over the injustice of denying to Italy “sacred treaty rights,” when Japan and Poland and France (there was much talk in Italy about the Saar Valley) were granted territorial gains in defiance of the principle of self-determination. But Italy could not have Fiume! And yet the British could have Egypt! Italian newspapers declared that Italy was coming out at the small end of the horn. The Treaty of Versailles recognized and guaranteed in every way all British demands and selfish interests, and in almost every way French demands and selfish interests. What Japan wanted she got in defiance of Wilsonian principles. Why should Italy ratify a treaty so much to the advantage of the other Entente nations before she was sure that the Treaty of St.-Germain and the other treaties were going to give her as much loot as Great Britain, France, and Japan received from the Treaty of Versailles?

Japan was profoundly dissatisfied. It was certain that the United States, put into a hole by Mr. Wilson’s compromise, would try to wring a definite promise of restitution of Shantung to China, with a date set. But the Japanese people did not attach vital importance to the Shantung clauses of the Treaty of Versailles. They blamed their negotiators for not having made the promise of willingness to give Shantung back to China contingent upon the surrender by European Powers of footholds, concessions, and special economic and political privileges in China. What was good for the goose was good for the gander. If there was to be an open door in China, said the Japanese press, let it be really open. Morally speaking, the Treaty of Versailles, with its emasculated League of Nations Covenant, was a deception to the Japanese. They suffered in their pride by our refusal to recognize racial equality. But the worst feature of the Treaty of Versailles was the continued mortgaging it consecrated of the colonizable areas of the world by the white race. They had little hope that the League of Nations, as it was conceived in the treaty, would bring about a world-wide state of peace. For it begged the question of recognizing the world-wide rights of peoples to reciprocal and equal privileges and opportunities. The whole spirit of the Treaty of Versailles made the Japanese feel that Asiatic peoples would never get a square deal without fighting Europe for it.

Among Latin American delegates at Paris two strong currents were battling for mastery. Ought the Treaty of Versailles, giving birth to the League of Nations, to be welcomed in Central and South America and the West Indies as the document by which the other states of the western hemisphere were emancipated from Yankee overlordship? Or ought the Latin-American republics to fear the abandonment of the Monroe Doctrine by their entry into a world federation built upon European ideals and European atmosphere?

The League might prove a means of resisting Yankee imperialism. On the other hand, it might open the doors to something worse. The transplanting to America of the doctrine of European eminent domain would be deadly to the self-respect and prosperity of weak non-European nations. A distinguished South American jurist said to me at Paris: “I think you do not need to be worried about our taking this League of Nations business too seriously. For the first time in my life, since I have been sitting in this conference, I have been made to feel that I represent what Kipling calls the ‘lesser breeds without the law.’ It frightens me!”

The modified form of Article XXI of the Covenant, inserted to preserve the Monroe Doctrine, was an ambiguous sop thrown to American public opinion to quiet the apprehensions born of our traditional instincts.[6] The belief, expressed several times by President Wilson in his speeches justifying the Treaty of Versailles, that the United States would have the leadership in the League was not shared by the representatives of Latin America. They could not take home with them any such curious notion. For they saw how the United States, with all the personal prestige of Mr. Wilson, had no real influence in the conference. Proof of this statement will be found in comparing Mr. Wilson’s war speeches with the Treaty of Versailles. Had we reason to think that our influence, after our army was disbanded and we were sitting at Geneva, would be greater than immediately after a victory won because of our aid? If the Treaty of Versailles was the result of what American prestige at its zenith was able to accomplish in leading the world morally, how could any thinking man suppose that we were going to lead the world along paths of peace in later years?

It was never true that the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles without reservation by the United States would have brought peace to Europe. It was never true that “the heart of the world” was yearning for the kind of a League of Nations that was established by the Treaty of Versailles. Our associates in the World War were eager to have a real ally in the United States, whose continued military and financial support would have enabled them to put into execution the Treaty of Versailles. For our moral leadership they cared nothing. They were not thinking about being “morally led” by any one.

General Sir Ian Hamilton, in the Manchester “Guardian” and the historian, Signor G. Ferrero, in the Rome “Secolo,” have pointed out the fallacy of considering the League of Nations of the Versailles Treaty a bona fide effort toward international organization and coöperation. General Hamilton believes that “the abstention of the United States is less damaging to the decisions of the so-called League of Nations than the exclusion of Germany; what Europe should have quickly is a true League of European nations, where a German can state his case and then cast his vote.” Signor Ferrero is of the opinion that the present League of Nations is doomed because of its partizan character, which its connection with the Treaty of Versailles makes it impossible to shake off. Signor Ferrero writes:

The Treaty of Versailles subjects Germany to the collective protectorate of Italy, France, and England. To imagine that the nation which, up to November, 1918, was the most powerful in the world may be thrust over night under the guardianship of three powers, each weaker than itself, is to imagine not along the lines of political realism, but of political futurism. The truth of this statement is apparent in the fact that four years after the armistice France and Belgium are caught in the snarl of this impossible protectorate and involved in coercive measures that will ruin Germany without saving her enemies.

It was a sad and startling fact that the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles and the merits of the proposed League of Nations became a party question immediately after the return of Mr. Wilson. Administration and anti-administration forces were pitted against each other in the Senate. Most senators voted on party lines. The Republican opponents of unreserved ratification and advocates of rejection charged that the obligations imposed upon us by the treaty were incompatible with the Constitution. President Wilson answered that the Republicans were Bolshevists, narrow-minded, out of tune with the world of to-day, contemptible quitters, German sympathizers, betrayers of the trust put in them by our soldiers, provokers of new wars to draw our boys across seas, and unconscious but none the less responsible agents of Armenian massacres, who should be “hanged high as Haman.” Denouncing the Senate for performing its duty under the Constitution; imputing unworthy motives to every senator who did not show an inclination to accept the treaty without examination, discussion, or investigation; ridiculing the members of our upper house; threatening or attempting to influence them by an appeal to their constituents; insinuating that opponents of immediate and unqualified ratification were pro-German—all this campaign of passion detracted singularly from the solemnity and spirit of earnestness that should have surrounded the choice of the people of the United States to abandon or to preserve unbroken the traditions that had been maintained since the birth of the republic.

Of course treaty ratification became the issue in the Presidential Campaign a year later. President Wilson announced that the election of 1920 should be a solemn referendum. The result was an overwhelming victory for the Republican party, despite the efforts of some eminent Republicans to defend the League of Nations. The new Congress terminated war with Germany and Austria by resolution, which was signed by President Harding on July 2, 1921. Six weeks later a brief peace treaty was signed in Berlin, in which Germany agreed to give the United States all the rights and advantages stipulated in the Treaty of Versailles, with the exception of certain portions specifically mentioned as excluded at the volition of the United States. The repudiated portions were: the Covenant of the League of Nations; the boundaries of Germany; the political clauses for Europe; the sections concerning German rights outside Germany, with the exception of the cession of the German colonies “in favor of the Principal Allied and Associated Powers”; and the provisions concerning the organization of labor. By these omissions the United States dissociated itself from the other signatories of the treaty in regard to the responsibility of the war, the trial of war criminals, and the guarantees for the fulfilment of the treaty. The right was reserved to be represented on the Reparations Commission or any other commission established under the Treaty of Versailles. But “the United States is not bound to participate in any such commission unless it shall elect to do so.”

The defection of the United States was an accepted fact in Paris when the Senate failed to ratify the treaty in November, 1919, a year before the presidential election put the stamp of popular approval upon this action. So when the Peace Conference broke up the United States was already counted out of European affairs. We did not enter at all into the other treaties.

There were three serious consequences of the failure of the United States to ratify the Treaty of Versailles: destroying the authority of the treaty as the basis of a new political and economic order; reducing the League of Nations to impotence as a tool of the Entente Powers; and making the French people realize that the Anglo-American guarantee of security, proposed as the alternative to the Rhine frontier, was worthless. Of the Rhine frontier we shall speak in a later chapter; for the problem of the security of France has dominated all other considerations in post-bellum Europe. At this point we have only to consider the effect upon public opinion throughout the world of the abstention of the United States from any part in enforcing the Treaty of Versailles.

The war could not have been won without the aid of the United States. The treaty could not have been imposed upon Germany without the aid of the United States. Could the treaty be enforced without the aid of the United States? Thinking men everywhere realized that the logical result of the failure of the American Senate to ratify the Treaty of Versailles would be the scrapping of the treaty. British public opinion, which had begun to turn against the treaty because of its heavy responsibilities and its supposed connection with British unemployment, clamored for revision of the treaty and the League, drastically if need be, in order to get the United States back into European affairs. French public opinion demanded that the French Government be prepared to use its army to collect reparations and destroy the unity of Germany, a policy which should end in a new treaty, directly between France and Germany, in which France was to dictate the terms mistakenly abandoned or modified during the Paris Conference.

CHAPTER VI
NEW LIGHT ON THE TRAGEDY OF PARIS

The events of the past four years in Europe and Asia, coupled with the final decision of the American people not to enter the League of Nations, give us the right to call the six months of blasted hopes in 1919 the tragedy of Paris. For an astonishingly long time the Peace Conference and the treaties framed by it had their defenders, especially in the United States, where a group of what the French would call intellectuels declared that critics of the treaties and the League Covenant were unreasonable and uninformed. Colonel Edward M. House organized in Philadelphia a series of lectures on the Treaty of Versailles by experts and Presidential advisers attached to the American Commission to Negotiate Peace. The lectures were valuable contributions to Peace Conference literature. They told much, and told it well. They were accurate and comprehensive. But some of these gentlemen directly, and others by inference, said that the American public had been misled by correspondents whose judgments were based on gossip and rumor rather than on knowledge of what actually happened.

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.

The only other writer who has had access to unpublished and inaccessible material is M. André Tardieu, Clemenceau’s right-hand man and one of the signers of the treaty. M. Tardieu reveals that France’s policy had been from the beginning to make the Rhine the western frontier of Germany, and have all the Rhine bridges permanently occupied by interallied military forces. The chief advocate of the extreme French forward policy was Marshal Foch, who urged that the military occupation of the left bank of the Rhine was essential to the safety of France and Belgium, but he was not supported in this stand by the King of the Belgians. The compromise was arranged in April, Wilson being won over on the twentieth and Lloyd George on the twenty-second. The evacuation after fifteen years was to be dependent upon two conditions, the complete fulfilment of the treaty by Germany, and also the agreement among the Allies that “the guarantees against unprovoked aggression by Germany are considered sufficient by the Allied and Associated Governments.” These two jokers nullify the fifteen-year provision, and make the occupation dependent upon the will of France.

The Lansing, Baker and Tardieu books confirm the impression one had at the time, that Mr. Wilson gradually abandoned position after position, that disastrous expedients and compromises were adopted in a spirit of panic, and that the American president refused to stand with the British premier at the last minute in an effort to rid the final draft of the treaty of some of its injustices and absurdities.

The economic clauses of the treaty are ably discussed by Mr. Keynes, British expert; Mr. Baruch, American expert; and former Premier Nitti of Italy, one of the greatest European economists. These three men write from first hand, and are agreed that the economic terms imposed upon Germany were not only impossible of fulfilment but also ruinous to the European economic structure. Premier Lloyd George and Sir George Foster, who signed the treaty for Canada, have openly indorsed this position, declaring that the reparations terms were impossible from the beginning and imposed upon Germany a burden that no nation could possibly carry.

New light on the tragedy of Paris has also come from debates in the American Senate, the British House of Commons and House of Lords, and the South African Parliament. The testimony is concordant. The more light we get the more we realize that the Treaty of Versailles was not a treaty of peace, and that even those who made it were convinced that it would not and could not bring peace to the world.

CHAPTER VII
THE TREATIES OF ST.-GERMAIN AND TRIANON

Seeking a mitigation of the peace terms, the Germans at Versailles reminded their victors of the repeated assurance given the German people that the Allied and Associated Powers were making war against the Imperial German Government. The distinction had been clearly drawn by President Wilson on several occasions. The pre-armistice correspondence reiterated the difference between a government of the people and a government of the Kaiser. Had not the Germans, by a revolution, rid themselves of their discredited rulers, down to the most insignificant princeling? M. Clemenceau answered, in the name of the victors, that the German people had willed the war and had sustained it; therefore, they could not escape the responsibility for it. And, if the terms of peace were severe, it was not only because justice must be satisfied, but also because reasonable precautions must be taken against an outlaw people, still over sixty million strong.

There was much force in M. Clemenceau’s contention, applied to powerful Germany, with her industrial machinery intact, and enjoying a peculiarly advantageous strategic position in central Europe. But this same explanation cannot be given to excuse similar terms imposed upon six million Austrians and seven million Hungarians. As peoples, their responsibility certainly was much less. As new nations, shorn of much of their territory, heavy indemnities were absurd; and refusing the right to ethnographic frontiers on the plea of guarantees for the future was without justification. The Treaty of Versailles, had it only been practicable, was a punishment fitting a crime. The Treaties of St.-Germain and Trianon are indefensible from every point of view.

“We have Balkanized all that part of Europe,” said Mr. Lloyd George ruefully. He was right. But ineptitude is none the less blameworthy because it is admitted!

“If the Hapsburg Empire did not exist, it would have to be invented,” a Russian diplomat once said. He was a political realist. His statement was a wise one from the political point of view. The developments of the last half-century have proved that it is wiser still from the economic point of view. But there was no broad statesmanship at the Paris Conference, looking to the future, and no sound economic generalship, setting limits to the greed and fantasies of those who divided the spoils. Fools rushed in where angels would have feared to tread. The economic evolution of the nineteenth century was disregarded. The Hapsburg Empire was partitioned in such a way as to do more violence to the will of its inhabitants than had been done under the old scheme of the Dual Monarchy, with none of the economic compensations of the destroyed political organism. New irredentisms were created, much more dangerous than the old ones. In 1914, Alsace-Lorraine was unique among European problems: it was the only instance of a people forcibly detached against their will from a country in which they had enjoyed the privilege of taking a full and conscious part in the national life. The Treaties of St.-Germain and Trianon did violence on a far greater scale than the Treaty of Frankfort had done to the national sentiments of peoples. Half a dozen new Alsaces were brought to life and half a dozen new danger-zones established in Europe. When the terms of the Treaty of Versailles were made known, students of international affairs had their misgivings. When the terms of the Treaties of St.-Germain and Trianon were published, we realized that “the war to end war” was resulting in the creation of causes for new wars.

Of course the problem before the peacemakers was exceedingly difficult from many angles. The Hapsburg spoils were enormous. There were claims and counter-claims. There were promises already made. There were faits accomplis to take into consideration.

The peril of insisting upon a reasonable decision as to frontiers, a decision in accordance with principles, was demonstrated by the storm Mr. Wilson caused when he tried to defend the South Slavs against Italy. Italy had her secret treaty with the other Entente Powers. The Treaty of London, signed in 1915, had been the price paid for Italian intervention. In their desperate need the Entente Powers secretly sold out Serbia, the nation in whose defense they had begun the war, to Italy; and Italy had taken the precaution of occupying militarily what she had been promised more than three years earlier, when the armistice with Vienna was signed. In addition Italy claimed Fiume, which had been outside of the 1915 agreement. But this seemed reasonable to her, in view of modifications of that agreement elsewhere. President Wilson was given clearly to understand that his principles had nothing whatever to do with the Austrian treaty. Similarly, Rumania had her secret intervention bargain, made with the Entente Powers in 1916. And France sponsored the most extreme claims of Poles, Czechs, and Rumanians, because she intended to form of these peoples a bloc to take the place of Russia in the new alliance against Germany. In making the Treaties of St.-Germain and Trianon, therefore, border districts were bartered with no regard whatever either for the wishes or economic necessities of their inhabitants.

By these treaties Czechoslovakia was created; Poland, Rumania, and Serbia were made as large as possible and given contiguous frontiers and direct railway communications; and Italy did unto the Austrians and South Slavs what she had for half a century been complaining of the Austrians doing unto her. The result is a patchwork of states, none satisfied, and all reduced to political unrest and economic chaos. The two formerly dominant peoples of the Hapsburg Empire, the Austrians and the Hungarians, were given a large dose of the medicine they had long been prescribing to their subject peoples.

Invoking the sacred principle of nationality, Italy triumphantly completed her unification by adding the “unredeemed Italians” of the Hapsburg Empire. But with them she insisted on incorporating in Greater Italy hundreds of thousands of Austrians and South Slavs. The principles invoked here were historical and strategical. The Adriatic must become an Italian lake. To accomplish this and to have a strategic frontier, nearly 300,000 Austrians of the Tyrol were separated from their compatriots, and a like number of Slovenes, Croats, and Dalmatians were prevented from joining the Greater Serbia of their dreams.

To make a strong Czechoslovakia the Paris conference asserted the validity of the historical argument against Germany and Austria, and chose a boundary-line for the new state which left nearly three million Germans subject to less than twice as many Czechs. When a delegation of Germans from Bohemia protested against this decision, Mr. Lloyd George reminded them that their ancestors had followed conquering armies to settle in Bohemia, and that they had the privilege of going back where they came from if they wanted to. The Peace Conference, he said, was righting historical wrongs. They answered that they were three times as numerous as the Scotch who had gone to Ireland, and had been in Bohemia two centuries longer than the inhabitants of the Belfast region. If this solution was a just one, why was not the Ulster problem to be solved in the same way by a return of the North Irelanders to Scotland? But that was different! It all came back to the old principle of vae victis—woe to the conquered. The Czechs were given also a bit of Upper Silesia; the Hungarian town of Poszony or Pressburg (renamed Bratislava), for an outlet on the Danube, with half a million Hungarians along the Danube, so that the frontier of the new states would separate Vienna from Budapest and come within thirty-five miles of Budapest; and half a million Ruthenians, so that Czechoslovakia would dominate Hungary from the Carpathians.

To Poland was allotted Galicia. The eastern part of this province contains more than three million Ruthenians, in territory contiguous to Ukrainia, which is inhabited by a people of the same blood and language. This manifest injustice was covered in the Treaty of St.-Germain by making Eastern Galicia a separate territory, under Polish mandate, with a plebiscite after twenty years. But the Poles have already managed to remove the flaw in their title.

The additions to Rumania freed several million Rumanians from Hungarian rule, but put about an equal number of Hungarians, Germans, Serbs, and people of other races in Greater Rumania. Hungary was deprived of her iron and coal. Greater Serbia was allotted one of the finest towns of Hungary, Szabadka (Maria-theresiopel), an overwhelmingly Hungarian city, now cut off by the Serbian boundary from the farming country it had prospered in serving. The excuse for this glaring injustice was that Serbia needed to control the railway line passing from Croatia to the territories detached from Hungary for the benefit of Rumania. There are several instances of this sort of thing in the treaties.

But while the treaties of St.-Germain and Trianon limited Austria and Hungary to frontiers well within what the application of the principle of self-determination would have given them, even the non-German and non-Magyar elements in border regions felt that they, too, were sacrificed to the exigencies of international politics. Poles and Czechs were dissatisfied with the Silesian frontier and came to blows over it; Ruthenians received no recognition whatever of their right to nationhood; Slovaks suffered on economic grounds through separation from Hungary; Rumania and Serbia both claimed the Banat of Temesvár; and Jugoslavs had to be content with partial liberation, because in many regions the Jugoslavs simply changed masters, being turned over by the peace conference to Italy.

Plebiscites were provided for in two border regions only; and in these instances the motive was not that of vindicating the principle of self-determination. The district of Klagenfurt remained with Austria after its inhabitants had voted against Serbia. This was done because its possession by the Jugoslavs would have embarrassed Italy. A slice of West Hungary was awarded to Austria for the obvious purpose of making bad blood between the two enemy peoples.

Hungary, because of the richness of her soil, was able to live in the limits imposed by the Treaty of Trianon. But the Treaty of St.-Germain reduced Austria to a little state of six million souls, more than a third of whom lived in the city of Vienna. Upon the Austrians was saddled a huge indemnity. Not only was the indemnity impossible to maintain, but the existence even of such a country as was provided for the Austrians to live in was questioned by economists. The Austrians were reduced to dire poverty in the city of Vienna, and condemned to a hopeless future by the provision of the treaty forbidding them to unite with Germany. The Treaty of St.-Germain is the most striking example in history of vengeance wreaked upon defenseless people. Never had the tables been so suddenly and completely turned.

And yet the Austrians were only one of several peoples in the Hapsburg Empire who had made common cause with Germany. Statesmen and generals in highest places throughout the war had been Czechs, Poles, and Jugoslavs. With the exception of the Czechs, all the peoples of the Dual Monarchy had fought well throughout the war. It is patent that Austria-Hungary could never have gone through four years of war had not the landed aristocracy, the bankers, and the manufacturers of all the peoples of the empire supported and coöperated with the Vienna Government until the game was clearly up. But, as soon as the armistice was signed, the liberated peoples received immunity, doffed their uniforms and decorations, and asserted that they had been forced to fight against their liberators. This was not true of the great majority of them. The Jugoslavs were always bitter against the Italians. Until the latter part of 1917 the Poles had no kindly feeling for the allies of Russia, while the Austrians were their best friends. The Rumanians, like the Italians, had hesitated about abandoning their neutrality until the bribe had been made sufficiently attractive. At Vienna and Budapest throughout the war the upper classes of subject peoples were heart and soul (or at least acted as if they were!) with the cause of the Central Empires. Only the Czechs—and not the majority of them—had shown themselves disloyal.

This was natural. The Dual Monarchy was a system, a complicated system; and the picture painted for us of Germans and Magyars, less than twenty millions; lording it brutally over more than thirty millions of other races is hardly half true. The national antagonism between German and Czech was largely local, and was not remedied by the Treaty of St.-Germain. The Poles were very well off under Austrian rule. Jugoslavs preferred the Germans to the Italians. The great mass of Rumanians in Hungary were better educated, further advanced in self-government, and much more independent economically than the Rumanians in Rumania. The truth is that, with the exception of the Czechs, the various peoples of the Hapsburg Empire were aware of their common economic interests, and saw the advantages of belonging to a great country. Worked upon by irredentist propaganda from the outside, there had been the struggle between culture and pocketbook, with a victory for the latter up to the time of the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire.

If the Paris Conference had had at heart the best interests of the peoples of Austria-Hungary, they would have maintained the organism that united these peoples with common interests under some new program of federation. The Treaties of St.-Germain and Trianon are inspired by British, French, and Italian interests, and not by a desire to make a better world to live in along the Danube. Under the nose of President Wilson, these interests were amicably adjusted by compromises and bargains. The question was never debated as to whether it would not be best for the peoples concerned to keep some form of a union, in which Austrian and Hungarian domination would no longer prevail.

The Entente Powers had their reasons for wanting to break up the Hapsburg dominions. Italy entered the war for this purpose. If the old political organism had been readjusted, Slavic predominance would have appeared to the Italians as a greater menace to their security than the old arrangement of Austrian and Hungarian joint hegemony. Great Britain and France were determined that Germany should never again have the Danubian countries as a reservoir from which to draw for armies to support her schemes. The dissolution of the empire blocked forever Germany’s Drang nach Osten. The Treaties of St.-Germain and Trianon cut Germany off from the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire. France had in mind a cordon of allies, separating Russia from Germany, and opening up the path to France from the North Sea to the Black Sea. Most important of all, the disappearance of Austria-Hungary removed the formidable commercial rivalry possible when fifty million people lived under a united government in a common customs area.

The only danger foreseen was the possibility of Austria joining Germany. This the Entente Powers thought they had taken care of by denying to the Germans the political unity achieved by all the other peoples of Europe.

The logical alternatives confronting the peacemakers were either establishing a new Danubian federation or allowing free rein to the national instinct as opposed to economic expediency. Blinded by the extent of their victory, and betrayed into the fallacy of believing that some national movements could be encouraged and approved and others discouraged and stamped out, the Entente Powers forgot economic and political laws. They chose neither alternative. They believed that they could use the power the victory gave them for the furtherance of their own selfish interests. But they forgot that this power was theirs because they were united, and that treaties inspired by their own interests and imposed by force would remain in vigor only so long as they remained united.

In the Treaties of St.-Germain and Trianon the Entente Powers departed farther than in the Treaty of Versailles from the ideals so nobly proclaimed during the war. In his speech of January 5, 1917, Mr. Lloyd George had anticipated Mr. Wilson when he told the House of Commons:

Equality of right among nations, small as well as great, is one of the fundamental issues that this country and her allies are fighting to establish in this war.... We feel that government by consent of the governed must be the basis of any territorial settlement.... A territorial settlement must be secured, based on the right of self-determination or the consent of the governed.

CHAPTER VIII
THE BALKAN SETTLEMENT AND ITS EFFECT UPON BULGARIA AND ALBANIA

If the Paris Conference had in mind a durable peace, no problem ought to have received more careful and judicial attention than that of the Balkan settlement. Since the first revolts against Turkish rule in Serbia and the War of Greek Independence, a hundred years of unsettled political condition in southeastern Europe had passed. It had become a truism that the conflicts among the powers began in the Balkans. Serbia’s difficulties with Austria-Hungary had precipitated the World War. But the causes of the war went back deep into the roots of Balkan history, long before either Germany or Italy played leading rôles in the councils of the great powers. What the Balkan peoples had sorely needed, in their bloody struggle for freedom from the Ottoman yoke, was non-interference of the great powers in their internal affairs and their relations among themselves. But this they had never enjoyed.

Disinterested friendship was not shown to the Balkan peoples in their fight for emancipation. They were encouraged to seek backing from powerful European states, and then, when they had done this, they provoked the enmity of the powers who were rivals of their actual or supposed backers. In the game for political and economic influence in the Balkans, the great powers were accustomed to use the little Balkan peoples as pawns. Thus they were set against each other. When they became independent states their boundaries were not fixed by mutual compromises but by the great powers. Thus they were not allowed a normal political evolution. It was hoped that the World War had taught the powers a lesson, and that they would have become converted to the idea of a “live and let live” policy for the Balkans, attainable only by a “hands off” policy on the part of the great powers.

Experts in Balkan affairs knew that the three great problems of the Balkans—Thrace, Macedonia, and Albania—had not been solved by the Balkan wars and the Treaties of London and Bucharest. The Turks were still in Thrace. Macedonia had not been equitably divided. The frontiers of Albania had not been fixed. It was hoped that the bitter experiences of the World War would demand of the peacemakers a courageous and far-seeing solution of these problems.

But from the moment the armistice was signed the attitudes of the powers toward Turkey became divergent; the sufferings of the Armenians and Greeks were forgotten; and Italy was given a free hand in Albania in the hope that she would not demand too much in Asia Minor or anything at all in Africa at the expense of French and British ambitions. As for Bulgaria, it was decided to impose upon her a punitive peace, following the lines of the treaties imposed upon Germans, Austrians, and Hungarians.

Eastern Thrace, to the Maritza River line, was all that had been left of the Ottoman Empire in Europe after the two Balkan wars. Western Thrace, with a stretch of sea-coast from the mouth of the Maritza west for sixty miles, had remained Bulgarian by the Treaty of Bucharest. In answer to President Wilson at the beginning of 1917, the Entente Powers had declared their intention of driving the Turks definitely out of Europe. Seemingly living up to this promise, the Big Four decided to take Eastern Thrace away from Turkey. But at the same time they took Western Thrace from Bulgaria, thus cutting her off from exit to the sea. The Treaty of Neuilly provided that transit and port facilities be granted Bulgaria. But this provision has not been executed.

The reason for separating Western Thrace from Bulgaria was the same as for separating Eastern Thrace from Turkey, that the two nations had joined the Central Empires in a war of aggression and were unworthy to rule over these provinces. But, later, Eastern Thrace was given back to Turkey. When the Bulgarians begged for the return of Western Thrace, on the ground that it was their outlet to the sea, the plea was rejected. It is clear, then, that the reasons invoked, punishment for a war of aggression and unfitness to rule over minorities in the ceded territories, were simply subterfuges. The rearrangement, like the arrangement, was made in the interests of the Entente Powers, without consideration for the wishes of the inhabitants or the economic needs of Bulgaria.

All the world knows that Macedonia has been for more than forty years the great bone of contention among Bulgarians, Serbians, and Greeks, who have been pitted against one another in this region by the Turks and the great powers alike. The Balkan alliance came to grief over the question of the partition of Macedonia. The crying injustice of the Treaty of Bucharest was what gave Germany her most powerful argument to induce Bulgaria to join the Central Empires. The bribe offered Bulgaria by Germany was the same as the bribe offered Italy and Rumania by the Entente Powers, the emancipation of “unredeemed” provinces. Because there had not been a fair partition of Macedonia in the Treaty of Bucharest, Bulgaria joined the Central Empires, and was able to do tremendous mischief to the cause of the Entente Powers. Germany had her bridge through to the Ottoman Empire. She was enabled to go to the aid of the Turks, attacked at Gallipoli. The war was probably prolonged by two years because of the Macedonian question!

But the Treaty of Neuilly, far from providing a solution of the Macedonian question, only made it worse by depriving Bulgaria of still more territory inhabited by Bulgarians. The new line between Serbia and Bulgaria was drawn still more to the advantage of Serbia than in 1913; and Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, was brought nearer the frontier, and placed at the mercy of armies advancing along the railway lines from the northwest and the southwest. In vain did experts on the Balkans bring to the attention of the Peace Conference the fact that the frontiers of the Treaty of Neuilly would tend to increase and not diminish causes for a new war in the Balkans. Bulgaria, cut off from the Ægean Sea by the loss of Western Thrace, excluded still more rigorously from Macedonia, and put in an indefensible military position as regards her capital, would have economic, ethnographic, and strategic reasons to take the first opportunity to get rid of the inequalities imposed upon her and the discriminations against her normal national development.

The Treaty of Neuilly presupposed, as did the other treaties of the Paris settlement, the complete encirclement of the victim by neighbors bound together by the common interest of keeping her permanently in a position of inferiority. It did not take into account, moreover, two possibilities: the intervention of Russia and the drifting apart of Rumania, Serbia, and Greece. A patchwork peace, a peace based on expediency, could ignore these possibilities. A durable peace would have to take them into account. Already we have seen the Turks back in Eastern Thrace, with a common frontier once more with Bulgaria. We have seen Greece, strong in 1920, grievously weakened, internally and internationally, in 1923. Greater Serbia and Greater Rumania are not really friends. They still claim against each other the Banat of Temesvár. Greater Serbia is not at the end of her difficulties with Italy. Greater Rumania holds Bessarabia in defiance of Russia. If Italians and Serbians, or Russians and Rumanians, come to blows, the aid of Bulgaria would once more be solicited by great powers. If the war between Greece and Turkey is renewed, Turkey, perhaps with Russia behind her, will once more solicit the aid of Bulgaria in a war that would be bound to spread to western Europe. Instead of saying that the Bulgarians would be foolish to try for the third time to change their luck in a war, is it not wiser and saner, in view of the mischief Bulgaria could still accomplish, to insist upon a peace of justice, so that Bulgaria could not again be tempted?

We cannot get rid of the latent power of any of our former enemies simply by damning them, the Bulgarians least of all. Their progress during the last half-century has been remarkable. They were the last of the Balkan peoples to be allowed to establish a separate national life, free from Turkish interference. Despite this handicap, Bulgaria has developed more rapidly than her neighbors in literacy, communications, cultivation of the land, and peasant ownership of farms. Out of every hundred inhabitants thirteen children go regularly to school, while Greece counts but six, Rumania five, and Serbia four. Among European countries Bulgaria is second only to France in distribution of the ownership of land. The World War did not seriously affect the prosperity of the people, and the crushing defeat of their hope made slight, if any, difference in their productive energy. Since the war they have forged ahead fast; their Government has succeeded in maintaining its stability against great odds; and in the spring of 1923 Bulgaria, first of all the vanquished, was able to make definite and satisfactory reparations arrangements with the victors.

This is only partly due, however, to the innate sobriety and habits of work of the Bulgarian people. They have enjoyed the advantage of not having a large industrial population, herded together in cities, and dependent for prosperity upon ability to compete on equal terms in world markets. And no sooner was the ink dry on the Treaty of Neuilly than the Entente Powers began once more secretly at Sofia to win a favorite position, as they had done in the past. All wanted to do business with the Bulgarians. Great Britain and France were anxious to keep Sofia from a rapprochement with Moscow. This meant everything to Rumania, also. France thought Bulgaria might some day be useful against Greece, and Italy needed a revived Bulgaria with which to threaten Greece and Serbia.

If only Greece and Serbia can be properly “managed” by their supporters of 1919, it is within the possibility of Entente diplomacy to expect to see the Treaty of Neuilly modified, in its political as well as its economic clauses, within the near future. Greece has already had that experience in regard to Turkey. If the Entente Powers feel that it is to their interest to do so, they will not hesitate to offer Bulgaria, at the expense of Greece and Serbia, what they took away from her in 1919, to the profit of Greece and Serbia. There is already talk of Rumania modifying her southern frontier in the Dobrudja in favor of Bulgaria. An offer of this sort Rumania will certainly make if she is threatened with invasion by Russia.

The dominant rôle in post-bellum Bulgaria has been played by Premier Stambulisky, who owed his position to the confidence he won several years ago and has maintained up to the Revolution in the Agrarian party. His remarkable hold upon the Bulgarian peasantry was due to his cleverness in saving this largest element in the country from feeling the financial consequences of losing the war. He has deliberately catered to the peasants, frankly basing his power upon their support and as frankly shaping his attitude toward problems as they arose by the desire to keep the favor of the peasants. In defiance of the Nationalists, Stambulisky came to an agreement with the Reparations Commission to give them powers over Bulgarian revenues in return for low taxation of the peasants. This hastened his downfall.

A grave source of internal danger is the Macedonian League, which is extremely active, and which cannot be controlled because the army is far too small to patrol effectively the Serbian frontier. At least three hundred thousand Macedonian refugees, among them people of wealth and influence, are living in Bulgaria, and they form a third of the population of the capital. From highest to lowest they work to foment the Macedonian revolutionary movement, and this makes serious trouble with the Serbian Government in its new territories, which can be held only by martial law. Bands are formed in Bulgarian territory, make raids, and then return to Bulgaria for refuge. This condition the Bulgarian Government is powerless to remedy. The Treaty of Neuilly, by proscribing conscription, makes it impossible for Bulgaria to raise troops. King Boris told me in the summer of 1922 that of the thirty-three thousand allowed by the treaty he had been able to get only fifty-five hundred. I found on personal investigation that most of the volunteers for the army came from the dregs of the population, men who could make a living in no other way.

On April 22, 1923, Premier Stambulisky won a sweeping victory in the General Election. Out of 246 seats in the Sobranje (Parliament) the Peasant Party won 213. In the previous Parliament he had had only 110 followers. The 50 Communists of the 1920 Parliament dropped to 15. The Bourgeois, united, carried only 12 seats, electing three former premiers, Malinoff, Theodoroff, and Daneff, and two former ministers, Madjarlow and Dankaloff, who were in prison charged with high treason for having misled Bulgaria during the World War.

M. Stambulisky stood for the loyal execution of the peace treaty, on the ground that Bulgaria’s real interests lie in economic and international political rehabilitation, and not in more military adventures. He did not conceal the hope that the establishment of friendly relations with the Entente Powers and Serbia would lead to a radical revision of the Treaty of Neuilly, especially in regard to Western Thrace.

Bulgaria demonstrates the fact that a nation in defeat is not necessarily “down and out.” The country is not going to smash, no matter what burdens are laid upon the people and no matter how harsh may be the fetters forged to keep Bulgaria behind her neighbors. Four years after the war, Bulgaria had completed the deliveries of animals exacted by the Treaty of Neuilly, and yet the country was entirely under cultivation, with a surplus of cereal of more than a million tons for export; and the export had begun again of hides, beef on the hoof, and sheep. Above the reparations coal sent annually to Serbia, Bulgaria was mining enough for her needs and exporting a surplus. With the country in this condition, Bolshevism could be discounted.

This hope was disappointed. At the end of May it was announced at Lausanne that Venizelos had come to an agreement with Ismet Pasha which involved the cession to Turkey of a strip on the left bank of the Maritza around Karagatch, so that Turkey would have control of the railway station of Adrianople and be better able to protect that city. From the Greek point of view this was a diplomatic triumph. It was the slight price paid for Turkey’s renunciation of a war indemnity. But it made more hopeless than ever the fulfilment of the promise to Bulgaria in the Treaty of Neuilly, that she should be guaranteed a free exit to the Ægean Sea. It pointed also to the great moral of the World War, that if one possessed the force one could do in this world what one pleased. The Turks resisted the Treaty of Sèvres. Immediately the Entente Powers released them from all the inconveniences and disadvantages of having been on the losing side in the war. Why, then, should Bulgaria tamely submit to do the bidding of the Entente Powers, especially when being good meant being still further penalized?

Added to the unpopularity of Stambulisky’s foreign policy of abject surrender—so different from the example given by Mustafa Kemal Pasha in similar circumstances—was his domestic policy of running Bulgaria solely in the economic interest of the agrarian population. A few days after the news of Turkey’s crowning Thracian success at Lausanne reached Bulgaria, the bourgeois of Sofia, supported by former army officers and the Macedonian party, overthrew the Stambulisky Government. Stambulisky was pursued and killed. Professor Zankoff, of the University of Sofia, formed a revolutionary government, and Bulgaria entered upon a new Nationalist era which is bound to result eventually in a radical modification of the Treaty of Neuilly.

As part of the price of Italian intervention, the Entente Powers agreed to give Italy the foothold in the Balkans she had so long coveted, offering her full sovereignty over Valona, the island of Sasseno, “and surrounding territory of sufficient extent to assure defense of these points.” Italy, on her side, consented to the eventual division of northern and southern Albania between Montenegro, Serbia, and Greece. But the Albanians proved themselves able to vindicate by arms their right to survive as an independent country. The treatment of Albania is an example of the cynicism of the protestation of “the rights of small nations” as a war aim of the Entente Powers, and an illustration of the necessity for every people to rely ultimately upon its own strength to vindicate its rights.

Throughout the World War Albania was a battle-field of the opposing groups. After the downfall of Serbia, in the autumn of 1915, the Austro-Hungarians occupied northern and central Albania. In November, 1916, the Italians landed at Valona. The Greeks had already occupied Epirus, but were succeeded by the Italians and French. On June 3, 1917, Italy proclaimed the independence of all Albania under Italian protection, and formed a cabinet of marionettes, which sent a delegation, under Italian guidance, to the Peace Conference. In the meantime the French tried to checkmate the Italian scheme, while the Serbians, when the Austrians finally retreated, seized Mount Tarabosh, dominating Scutari.

At Paris an effort was made to adjust the rival claims of Italy, Serbia, and Greece; and no attention was paid to the claim of the Albanians that they were a nation, very much alive, and not disposed to be partitioned. Were the victorious powers going to resurrect Poland, on the ground that her partition had been a horrible crime, and then go ahead and do the same thing themselves? This pointed question was answered on January 14, 1920, when Great Britain, France, and Italy decreed anew the complete partition of Albania among Italians, Serbians, and Greeks. President Wilson sent a formal note to the three Governments, declaring the opposition of the United States to any such scheme. The Entente statesmen explained that they did not mean to do what they had announced, and then went on with their plans. The Albanians protested without avail to the League of Nations. Then they decided to fight. In June, 1920, began a five weeks’ struggle with Italy. The Italians were defeated everywhere and were literally driven into the sea, being compelled to evacuate even Valona. The Serbs, who had advanced on Tirana, were driven back to the lowlands.

These successes decided the fate of Albania. Italy signed an agreement on August 2, 1920, recognizing Albania’s independence, and promising to withdraw what troops she had left in the north. Albania was invited to join the League of Nations, and was formally admitted in January, 1921. Because she retained arms in hand while negotiating with Serbia, Albania was able to secure, through the League of Nations, a compromise frontier.

One Balkan state, however, was not able to escape the fate of suppression of its nationhood, as Albania had done. Montenegro was refused a seat at the Peace Conference, and has been forcibly incorporated into Greater Serbia.

CHAPTER IX
THE PROPOSED DEVOLUTION OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

If a new Rip Van Winkle had gone to sleep at any time in the nineteenth century and awoke to-day, one column in the morning newspaper would afford him no sensation and surprise. Were his eye to fall first upon a despatch from Constantinople, he would read it without discovering his long sleep. Metternich and Castlereagh and Talleyrand, Palmerston and Napoleon III, Bismarck and Disraeli and Waddington would find history repeating itself with a vengeance on the Bosphorus.

Throughout the World War and during the period of equal duration that followed the collapse of Turkey, European diplomacy ran true to form in the Near East. None can study the history of the great powers in relation to the Balkans and Turkey and maintain that the crisis of 1914–23 shows a difference of spirit and methods from the crises of 1801–15, 1821–30, 1833–40, 1851–56, 1875–78, 1885–86, 1893–1903, and 1908–13. This is a peculiarly distressing and hopeless statement to make more than four years after the creation of the League of Nations. But the truth does not set us free unless we know the truth.

Some who believe that the world was regenerated by reason of our victory over the Germans, and that the high principles of President Wilson are triumphing in international affairs because “after all we have the League of Nations,” declare that the Near Eastern situation is simply one failure which should not discredit the peace settlement as a whole. One hears them argue on the platform and one sees their articles—especially “letters to the editor”—flooding the press. We cannot expect perfection, they say, and the United States should be ashamed to have failed joining our comrades-in-arms to inaugurate a new era in world affairs. Differences of opinion among the Entente Powers? Friction in the Near East? Inability to agree upon a common policy to adopt toward Turkey? These are minor matters. The great fact is that the League of Nations is functioning!

The Near Eastern situation, however, is not a minor matter, and insisting upon having a hand in it would have been the first move of the League of Nations, had that organization been capable of tackling the problems to meet and provide a solution for which it was ostensibly created. The bloody wars of the nineteenth century had their origin in international rivalry in the Near East. The inability of Turkey to retain her European provinces made inevitable the recent World War. The war began in the Balkans, and there was no hope of its ending until a decisive victory had been won in the Balkans. Nor is there any hope of world peace until peace is made in the Balkans. The future of Constantinople has been the dominating factor in setting the great powers against one another since the World War precisely as before the World War. The elimination of Germany from the group of contestants does not seem to make any difference. When there is a bone, one dog less does not mean the end of the fight.

The armistice of Mudros, signed on October 30, 1918, gave the Entente Powers control of Constantinople and the Straits and stipulated the evacuation of the Russian Transcaucasian provinces by the Turks. Mesopotamia, Palestine, and Syria were already in Allied hands by conquest. Immediately after the armistice the British pressed forward into Cilicia. Three days before the armistice with Germany, Great Britain and France issued a joint declaration in the Near East, announcing that they had no designs upon these countries but were there simply as liberators, with the intention of helping the oppressed non-Turkish elements of the Ottoman Empire to attain complete independence.

But the Entente Powers, separately and together, were already bound by secret agreements which contained their real intentions concerning the devolution of the Ottoman Empire. In March, 1915, the British and French Governments agreed that Russia was to have Constantinople and the European hinterland up to a line drawn from Enos on the Ægean to Midia on the Black Sea; the islands in the Sea of Marmora; Imbros and Tenedos outside the Dardanelles; and the coast of Asia Minor from the Bosphorus to the mouth of the Sakaria River across to the Gulf of Ismid. In exchange, Russia assented to the giving of the middle neutral zone of Persia to Great Britain and to the proclamation of the independence of Arabia. This agreement was enlarged, after Italy entered the war, to give Russia all of Armenia as a sphere of influence.

On April 26, 1915, Great Britain, France, and Russia, among the bribes offered in the secret Treaty of London, promised Italy full sovereignty over the Dodecanese Islands and the port of Adalia, in the southwestern corner of Asia Minor, with the strategic hinterland. This was afterward enlarged to include a generous quarter or more of Asia Minor, going north to include Smyrna and east to include Konia in the Italian sphere of influence.

In May, 1916, France and Great Britain, to whom had been left by Russia and Italy the non-Turkish-speaking portions of the empire as spoils, concluded the Sykes-Picot agreement, by which France was to have Syria and Cilicia with the hinterland to Mosul, while Great Britain was to take Mesopotamia and Palestine.

Beginning in the summer of 1915, British emissaries began to treat with Sherif Hussein of Mecca to induce him to revolt against the Turks. Negotiations were carried on for a year. The revolution broke out at the beginning of June, 1916, when Hussein proclaimed himself independent of Ottoman rule. In December, 1916, Great Britain, France, and Italy recognized the Hedjaz as an independent kingdom, with Hussein for sovereign. The support of the Arabs being vital to the British both in the Mesopotamian and Palestinian expeditions, the British Government made secret promises to King Hussein of territorial arrangements which conflicted with their earlier promises to the French. This was revealed at the Peace Conference when Emir Feisal, the king’s son, presented the claims of his country to the Council of Ten. The Hedjaz signed the peace treaty and became a member of the League of Nations. The English were involved also in promises given to the Arab tribes of Mesopotamia and the Yemen, made when the situation was desperate, and to the Egyptians. Adding to the embarrassing conflicts in these promises, on December 2, 1917, the British Government, by what is known as the Balfour Declaration, promised to make Palestine a “home-land” for the Jews!

The defection of Russia reopened the most thorny problem of all, the control of Constantinople and the Straits. When the war was over, British, French and Italians occupied Constantinople, not very harmoniously, while their statesmen, still less harmoniously, wrangled and bargained over the disposition of the city.

When the Peace Conference opened, the French aim was to become the dominant power in the eastern Mediterranean. Frenchmen of the old school and young illuminati alike had never forgiven Great Britain for grabbing Cyprus and doing France out of the Suez Canal and Egypt. Even the Frenchmen most in sympathy with the British were nervous, realizing that the forte of Great Britain after every war was to reap where she had sown not. When a peace treaty was signed after a war—any war—the choicest bits of spoils were found to have entered into the joy of the pax britannica. After this war, the first one with extra-European spoils in which the French had been on the winning side—that is, Britain’s side—they determined to have a different deal. Canada and India, Egypt and many islands, were past history. The Near East had been culturally French since the crusades. From Saloniki to Beirut, France was determined to reign supreme. Palestine represented the very last concession it was possible for the French to make. Of course, they did not hope to possess Constantinople, but they were not going to let the British settle themselves on the Bosphorus as they had done at Gibraltar and Port Said. This would mean British domination of the Mediterranean and Black Seas, and for British capital and goods the priority in markets that had been traditionally French.

Up to the time of the armistice, and afterward until the collapse of Baron Wrangel, France hoped for the miracle of the regeneration of Russia. This would have solved the Constantinople question. And as long as Venizelos was in power in Greece the French did not despair of preventing Greece from becoming infeudated to Great Britain. But aspirations in the eastern Mediterranean had to be subordinated to the more important aspiration of controlling the Rhine.

The British Foreign Office saw this from the very beginning of the Peace Conference and indicated to Mr. Lloyd George the successive moves in a skilful game. The British premier balked every time his French colleagues wanted to speak firmly to Germany—balked on the Rhine occupation, the Saar Valley, the entry into Frankfort, the taking over of the Ruhr basin, the Upper Silesian settlement, the amount and method of payment of the German indemnity, the trial of war prisoners, and the enforcement of German disarmament. Much of the opposition was sincere and based on common sense. But every time Mr. Lloyd George gave in to the French it was a case of do ut des; one after the other the French aims in the Near East suffered dimunition at the expense of British aims. It was not through intrigues and superior skill in working out policies in the Near East that the British gradually gained control of Constantinople, and extended the frontiers of Mesopotamia and Palestine beyond the Sykes-Picot line, but by agreeing to back the French in some new demand upon Germany!

French and British diplomacy, in considering the devolution of the Ottoman Empire, agreed on two points only: the necessity of using the Greeks to prevent Italy’s scheme of monopolizing the commerce of Asia Minor through control of Smyrna; and the passing of the buck to the United States to take over the vast bleak mountains of Armenia, so that we could become benefactors of the helpless and policemen to guard against the infiltration of Bolshevism, while the rich and fertile parts of the empire were being exploited by themselves.[7]

With all these conflicting aims, motives, and treaty entanglements, is it any wonder that the Peace Conference year brought no agreement as to the terms of the treaty to be imposed upon Turkey? When the Treaty of Versailles and the other treaties were imposed, Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Bulgaria were compelled to sign a blank check, agreeing beforehand to whatever disposition of the Ottoman Empire the Principal Allied and Associated Powers might make. So they were out of it! But these treaties did contain a very definite provision for the peoples of Turkey. Article XXII of the League of Nations Covenant provides a mandatory government “to those colonies and territories which as a consequence of the late war have ceased to be under the sovereignty of states which formerly governed them and which are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world.” The “well-being and development of such people form a sacred trust of civilization,” so the Covenant declared, and they were divided into three classes. The first dealt with the liberated regions of the Ottoman Empire. The text is explicit:

Certain communities formerly belonging to the Turkish Empire have reached a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognized subject to the rendering of administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatory until such time as they are able to stand alone. The wishes of these communities must be a principal consideration in the selection of the Mandatory.

The mandatory idea was seized upon by General Smuts as a way of overcoming Mr. Wilson’s strenuous objection to the fait accompli of the distribution of Germany’s colonies. The American President accepted this in good faith, and agreed to present to the American people the proposal that the United States assume the Armenian mandate. Taking for granted the sincerity of his colleagues, he proposed that an international commission be sent to the Ottoman Empire to ascertain “the wishes of these communities” in regard to the selection of mandatory powers. His colleagues agreed; but they did not send their delegates. The Americans went alone, and brought back a report quite at variance with the mandate distribution as arranged among the Entente Powers.

What Mr. Wilson did not appreciate was the fact that the moot questions had been settled long before the war ended by secret compacts, and that the object of the Paris Conference was not to draw up terms of peace, in the interest of the peoples and regions concerned, but to arrive at a satisfactory adjustment of interests among the victors. The Turkish treaty was not drafted in 1919 simply because the Entente premiers could not agree upon a satisfactory compromise. They paid no attention to the Covenant, with its mandatory provision. It was too much to ask of them the fulfilment of this promise when they were unable to reconcile their previous commitments.

For instance, Article XII could not be carried out either in Palestine or Syria. Ninety per cent of the Palestinians, including thousands of its Jewish population, were bitterly opposed to the Balfour Declaration. Mr. Wilson’s mandate commission discovered that the great bulk of the Syrians were hostile to the French mandate. When Emir Feisal took over Damascus, in conformity with the Anglo-Hedjaz agreement and the undoubted wishes of its inhabitants, the French sent an army against him, drove him out, and hanged “for treason” many of his followers. In vain the Hedjaz invoked Articles XIII, XV, XVI, and XVII of the Covenant, which were supposed to make impossible such an event as the French expedition against Damascus. The inhabitants of Palestine, also, have tried for more than four years to get a hearing from the League of Nations, which has consistently ignored Article XXII. The Arabs of Mesopotamia were unable to secure the recognition of their rights until they had succeeded in driving the British almost entirely out of their country. The French formed the Armenians of Cilicia into regiments, told them that they were fighting for their independence, and then deserted them when French interests seemed to make it advantageous to betray the Armenians and hand Cilicia back to the Turks.

The Conference of Paris adjourned without having come to an agreement upon three vital questions: the terms of the treaty with Turkey, the adoption of a common policy toward Russia, and an understanding as to the means to be employed to compel Germany to fulfil the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. These problems led to a series of continuation conferences from 1920 to 1923, without reaching understandings of even a quasi-permanent nature. The continuation conferences as a whole are discussed in another chapter. Here we shall limit ourselves to the Conference of San Remo, in April, 1920, which endeavored to settle the devolution of the Ottoman Empire by drafting a treaty with Turkey. The results of its deliberations were the ill fated Treaty of Sèvres and the demonstration of two facts: that the three great problems cited above could not be dissociated; and that the Entente premiers believed that the League of Nations could not help in the solution of any one of them.

Had Czarist Russia survived the war, she would have installed herself at Constantinople. There would have been no question of international control of the Straits, an independent Armenia, or the satisfaction of Greek national aspirations. When the three premiers met at San Remo, almost a year after Premier Venizelos had been invited at Paris by Great Britain, France, and the United States to occupy Smyrna, they had to reckon with electorates weary of war and taxes and unwilling to engage in further military ventures in the Near East. Outside of Constantinople, held under the guns of battle-ships, the only forces available for compelling respect of their decisions were the Greek armies in Western Thrace and Smyrna. It was a case either of surrendering the fruits of the victory over Turkey or of recognizing, in a measure at least, Greek claims.

The first alternative was dismissed. Russia seemed to be behind Turkish nationalism, and the Entente Powers feared that a capitulation of Turkey would not bring peace, but rather the spread of Bolshevism in western Asia, the stirring up again of Bulgaria, the weakening of Rumania and Poland, and the encouragement of nationalist movements throughout the Mohammedan world. It seemed the lesser of two evils to allow the Greeks to defend Thrace and the Smyrna region against the Turks by granting the titles Venizelos claimed. Lloyd George faced the breakdown of the attempt to make the Caucasus a barrier to Bolshevism, and Millerand knew that the French army in the Orient was not strong enough to hold the positions it had occupied confidently the year before. In fact, the Nationalists under Mustafa Kemal Pasha had already defeated the French and driven them out of several cities, and it was only a question of time when General Gouraud would be compelled to ask the Turks for an armistice in Syria. Premier Nitti had withdrawn the Italian forces from Konia, and had adopted the policy of encouraging the Nationalists against the Greeks. The Greek army might be able to create such a diversion in Thrace and the hinterland of Smyrna as to save French prestige and prevent the whole-hearted coöperation of Turks with Russians.

In regard to Turkey, three decisions were necessary: what territories to detach, how to force the Turks to give them up, and what to do with them. The premiers were no more ready to make these decisions in April, 1920, than they had been the year before, but there always must be an end to a transitory period. The delay was affecting the prestige of the Entente Powers, was giving encouragement to Germany, and was threatening the harmonious relations among the visitors in the World War.

The compromise of San Remo, embodied in the treaty to be presented to the Turks at Sèvres, followed the lines of the other treaties. Its principal conditions were: (1) open Straits in peace and war to all ships; (2) control of the Straits by an international commission; (3) demolition of fortifications, and demilitarization within a zone twelve miles inland from the coast on both sides of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles, thus excluding the Turks from Gallipoli peninsula; (4) cession of Thrace up to the defenses of Constantinople to Greece; (5) limitations in the Turkish sovereignty over Constantinople; (6) Greek protectorate over Smyrna, with a generous hinterland; (7) Italian protectorate over Adalia; (8) acceptance of a boundary in the east to be communicated later, beyond which Armenia would be independent; (9) and cession to Great Britain and France of all the Arabic-speaking portions of the empire.