FOREWORD (continued 6)

The President of the United States, it was further urged, is a historian, and history tells him that the help given to his country against England neither came from the French people nor was actuated by sympathy for the American cause. It was the vindictive act of one of those kings whose functions Mr. Wilson is endeavoring to abolish. The monarch who helped the Americans was merely utilizing a favorable opportunity for depriving with a minimum of effort his adversary of lucrative possessions. Moreover, the debt which nothing can pay was already due when in the years 1914-16 France was in imminent danger of being crushed by a ruthless enemy. But at that time Mr. Wilson owed his re-election largely to his refusal to extricate her from that peril. Instead of calling to mind the debt that can never be repaid he merely announced that he could not understand what the belligerents were fighting for and that in any case France's grateful debtor was too proud to fight. The motive which finally brought the United States into the World War may be the noblest that ever yet actuated any state, but no student of history will allow that Mr. Wilson has correctly described it.

The fact is that the French delegates and their supporters were consistent and, except in their demand for the Rhine frontier, unbending. They drew up a program and saw that it was substantially carried out. They declared themselves quite ready to accept Mr. Wilson's project, but only on condition that their own was also realized, heedless of the incompatibility of the two. And Mr. Wilson felt constrained to make their position his own, otherwise he could not have obtained the Covenant he yearned for. And yet he must have known that acquiescence in the demands put forward by M. Clemenceau would lower the practical value of his Covenant to that of a sheet of paper.

A blunt American journal, commenting on the handiwork of the Conference, gave utterance to views which while making no pretense to courtly phraseology are symptomatic of the way in which the average man thought and spoke of the Covenant which emanated from the Supreme Council. "We are convinced," it said, "that the elder statesmen of Europe, typified by Clemenceau, consider it a hoax. Clemenceau never before was so extremely bored by anything in his life as he was by the necessity of making a pious pretense in the Covenant when what he wanted was the assurance of the Triple Alliance. He got that assurance, which, along with the French watch on the Rhine, the French in the Saar Valley and in Africa, with German money going into French coffers, makes him tolerably indulgent of the altruistic rhetoricians.

"The English, the intelligent English, we know have their tongues in their cheeks. The Italians are petulant imperialists, and Japan doesn't care what happens to the League so long as Japan says what shall happen in Asia."[300]

Peace was at last signed, not on the basis of the Fourteen Points nor yet entirely on the lines of territorial equilibrium, but on those of a compromise which, missing the advantages of each, combined many of the evils of both and of others which were generated by their conjunction, and laid the foundations of the new state fabric on quick-sands. That was at bottom the view to which Italy, Rumania, and Greece gave utterance when complaining that their claims were being dealt with on the principle of self-denial, whereas those of France had been settled on the traditional basis of territorial guaranties and military alliances. Further, the Treaty failed to lay an ax to the roots of war, did, in fact, increase their number while purporting to destroy them. Far from that: germs of future conflicts not only between the late belligerents, but also between the recent Allies, were plentifully scattered and may sprout up in the fullness of time.

The Paris press expressed its satisfaction with France's share of the fruits of victory. For the provisions of the Treaty went as far as any merely political arrangement could go to check the natural inequality, numerical, economical, industrial, and financial, between the Teuton and French peoples. To many this problem seemed wholly insoluble, because its solution involved a suspension or a corrective of a law of nature. Take the birth-rate in France, for example. Before the war it had long been declining at a rate which alarmed thoughtful French patriots. And, according to official statistics, it is falling off still more rapidly to-day, whereas the increase in other countries is greater than ever before.[301] Thus, whereas in the year 1911 there were 73,599 births in the Seine Department, there were only 47,480 in 1918. Wet nurses, too, are disappearing. Of these, in the year 1911, in the same territory there were 1,363, but in 1918 only 65. The mortality among foundlings rose from 5 per cent. before the war to 40 per cent. in the year 1918.[302] M. Bertillon calculates that for France to increase merely at the same rate as other nations—not to recover the place among them which she has already lost, but only to keep her present one—she needs five hundred thousand more births than are registered at present. A statistical table which he drew up of the birth-rate of four European nations during five decades, beginning with the year 1861, is unpleasant reading[303] for the friends of that heroic and artistic people. France, containing in round numbers 40,000,000 inhabitants, ought to increase annually by 500,000. Before the war the total number of births in Germany was computed at one million nine hundred and fifty thousand, but hardly more than one million of the children born were viable.[304] The general conclusion to be drawn from these figures and from the circumstances that the falling off in the French population still goes on unchecked, is disquieting for those who desire to see the French race continue to play the leading part in continental Europe. One of the shrewdest observers in contemporary Germany—himself a distinguished Semite—commented on this decisive fact as follows:[305] "Within ten years Germany will contain seventy million inhabitants, and in the torrent of her fecundity will drown anemic and exhausted France.... The French nation is dying of exhaustion. There is no reason, however, for the world to get alarmed ... for before the French will have vanished from the earth, other races, virile and healthy, will have come to their country to take their place." That is what is actually happening, and it is impressively borne in upon the visitor to various French cities by the vast number of exotic names over houses of business and in other ways.

With this formidable obstacle, then, the three members of the Supreme Council strenuously coped by exercising to the fullest extent the power conferred on the victors over the vanquished. And the result of their combinations challenged and received the unstinted approval of all those numerous enemies of Teutondom who believe the Germans to be incapable of contributing materially to human progress, unless they are kept in leading-strings by one of the superior races. The Treaty represents the potential realization of France's dream, achieved semi-miraculously by the very statesmen on whom the Teutons were relying to dispel it. Defeated, disarmed, incapable of military resistance, and devoid of friends, Germany thought she could discern her sheet-anchor of salvation in the Wilsonian gospel, and it was the preacher of this gospel himself who implicitly characterized her salvation as more difficult than the passage of a camel through the eye of a needle. The crimes perpetrated by the Teutons were unquestionably heinous beyond words, and no punishment permitted by the human conscience is too drastic to atone for them. How long this punishment should endure, whether it should be inflicted on the entire people as well as on their leaders, and what form should be given to it, were among the questions confronting the Secret Council, and they implicitly answered them in the way we have seen.

People who consider the answer adequate and justified give as their reason that it presupposes and attains a single object—the efficacious protection of France as the sentinel of civilization against an incorrigible arch-enemy. And in this they may be right. But if you enlarge the problem till it covers the moral fellowship of nations, and if you postulate that as a safeguard of future peace and neighborliness in the world, then the outcome of the Treaty takes on a different coloring. Between France and Germany it creates a sea of bitterness which no rapturous exultation over the new ethical ordering can sweeten. The latter nation is assumed to be smitten with a fell moral disease, to which, however, the physicians of the Conference have applied no moral remedy, but only measures of coercion, mostly powerful irritants. The reformed state of Europe is consequently a state of latent war between two groups of nations, of which one is temporarily prostrate and both are naïvely exhorted to join hands and play a helpful part in an idyllic society of nations. This expectation is the delight of cynics and the despair of those serious reformers who are not interested politicians. Heretofore the most inveterate optimists in politics were the revolutionaries. But they have since been outdone by the Paris world-reformers, who tempt Providence by calling on it to accomplish by a miracle an object which they have striven hard and successfully to render impossible by the ordinary operation of cause and effect. Thus the Covenant mars the Treaty, and the Treaty the Covenant.

In Weimar and Berlin the Treaty was termed the death-sentence of Germany, not only as an empire, but as an independent political community. Henceforward her economic efforts, beyond a certain limit, will be struck with barrenness, her industry will be hindered from outstripping or overtaking that of the neighboring countries, and her population will be indirectly kept within definite bounds. For, instead of exporting manufactures, she will be obliged to export human beings, whose intellect and skill will be utilized by such rivals of her own race as vouchsafe to admit them. Already before the Conference was over they began to emigrate eastward. And those who remain at home will not be masters in their own house, for the doors will be open to various foreign commissions.

The assumption upon which the Treaty-framers proceeded is that the abominations committed by the German military and civil authorities were constructively the work of the entire nation, for whose reformation within a measurable period hope is vain. This view predominated among the ruling classes of the Entente peoples with few exceptions. If it be correct, it seems superfluous to constrain the enemy to enter the league of law-abiding nations, which is to be cemented only by voluntary adherence and by genuine attachment to liberty, right, and justice. Hence the Covenant, by being inserted in the Peace Treaty, necessarily lost its value as an eirenicon, and became subsequent to that instrument, and seems likely to be used as an anti-German safeguard. But even then its efficacy is doubtful, and manifestly so; otherwise the reformers, who at the start set out to abolish alliances as recognized causes of war, would not have ended by setting up a new Triple Alliance, which involves military, naval, and aerial establishments, and the corresponding financial burdens inseparable from these. An alliance of this character, whatever one may think of its economic and financial aspects, runs counter to the spirit of the Covenant, but was an obvious corollary of the Allies' attitude as mirrored in the Treaty. And the spirit of the Treaty destroys the letter of the Covenant. For the world is there implicitly divided into two camps—the friends and the enemies of liberty, right, and justice; and the main functions of the League as narrowed by the Treaty will be to hinder or defeat the machinations of the enemies. Moreover, the deliberate concessions made by the Conference to such agencies of the old ordering as the grouping of two or three Powers into defensive alliances bids fair to be extended in time. For the stress of circumstance is stronger than the will of man. At this rate the last state may be worse than the first.

The world situation, thus formally modified, remained essentially unchanged, and will so endure until other forces are released. The League of Nations forfeited its ideal character under the pressure of national interests, and became a coalition of victors against the vanquished. By the insertion of the Covenant in the Treaty the former became a means for the execution of the latter. For even Mr. Wilson, faced with realities and called to practical counsel, affectionately dismissed the high-souled speculative projects in which he delighted during his hours of contemplation. Although the German delegates signed the Treaty, no one can honestly say that he expects them to observe it longer than constraint presses, however solemn the obligations imposed.

In the press organ of the most numerous and powerful political party in Germany one might read in an article on the Germans in Bohemia annexed by Czechoslovakia: "Assuredly their destiny will not be determined for all time by the Versailles peace of violence. It behooves the German nation to cherish its affection for its oppressed brethren, even though it be powerless to succor them immediately. What then can it do? Italy has given it a marvelous lesson in the policy of irredentism, which she pursued in respect of the Trentino and Trieste."[306]

With the Treaty as it stands, nationalist France of this generation has reason to be satisfied. One of its framers, himself a shrewd business man and politician, publicly set forth the grounds for this satisfaction.[307] Alsace and Lorraine reunited to the metropolis, he explained, will assist France materially with an industrious population and enormous resources in the shape of mineral wealth and a fruitful soil. Germany's former colonies, Kamerun and Togoland, are become French, and will doubtless offer a vast and attractive field for the expansion and prosperity of the French population. Morocco, freed from German enterprise, can henceforth be developed by the French population alone and without let or hindrance, for the benefit of the natives and in the true sense of Mr. Wilson's humanitarian ordinances. The potash deposits, to which German agriculture largely owed its prosperity, will henceforward be utilized in the service of French agriculture. "In iron ore the wealth of France is doubled, and her productive capacity as regards pig-iron and steel immensely increased. Her production of textiles is greater than before the war by about a third."[308] In a word, a vast area of the planet inhabited by various peoples will look to the French people for everything that makes their collective life worth living.

The sole arrangement which for a time caused heart-burnings in France was that respecting the sums of money which Germany should have been made to pay to her victorious enemies. For the opinions on that subject held by the average man, and connived at or approved by the authorities, were wholly fantastic, just as were some of the expectations of other Allied states. The French people differ from their neighbors in many respects—and in a marked way in money matters. They will sacrifice their lives rather than their substance. They will leave a national debt for their children and their children's children, instead of making a resolute effort to wipe it out or lessen it by amortization. In this respect the British, the Americans, and also the Germans differ from them. These peoples tax themselves freely, create sinking funds, and make heavy sacrifices to pay off their money obligations. This habit is ingrained. The contrary system is become second nature to the French, and one cannot change a nation's habits overnight. The education of the people might, however, have been undertaken during the war with considerable chances of satisfactory results. The government might have preached the necessity of relinquishing a percentage of the war gains to the state. It was done in Britain and Germany. The amount of money earned by individuals during the hostilities was enormous. A considerable percentage of it should have been requisitioned by the state, in view of the peace requirements and of the huge indebtedness which victory or defeat must inevitably bring in its train. But no Minister had the courage necessary to brave the multitude and risk his share of popularity or tolerance. And so things were allowed to slide. The people were assured that victory would recompense their efforts, not only by positive territorial gains, but by relieving them of their new financial obligations.

That was a sinister mistake. The truth is that the French nation, if defeated, would have paid any sum demanded. That was almost an axiom. It would and could have expected no ruth. But, victorious, it looked to the enemy for the means of refunding the cost of the war. The Finance Minister—M. Klotz—often declared to private individuals that if the Allies were victorious he would have all the new national debt wiped out by the enemy, and he assured the nation that milliards enough would be extracted from Germany to balance the credit and debit accounts of the Republic. And the people naturally believed its professional expert. Thus it became a dogma that the Teuton state was to provide all the cost of the war. In that illusion the nation lived and worked and spent money freely, nay, wasted it woefully.

And yet M. Klotz should have known better. For he was supplied with definite data to go upon. In October, 1918, the French government, in doubt about the full significance of that one of Mr. Wilson's Fourteen Points which dealt with reparations, asked officially for explanations, and received from Mr. Lansing the answer by telegraph that it involved the making good by the enemy of all losses inflicted directly and lawlessly upon civilians, but none other. That surely was a plain answer and a just principle. But, in accordance with the practice of secrecy in vogue among Allied European governments, the nation was not informed of these restrictive conditions, but was allowed to hug dangerous delusions.

But the Ministers knew them, and M. Klotz was a Minister. Not only, however, did he not reveal what he knew, but he behaved as though his information was of a directly contrary tenor, and he also stated that Germany must also refund the war indemnities of 1870, capitalized down to November, 1918, and he set down the sum at fifty milliards of francs. This procedure was not what reasonably might have been expected from the leader of a heroic nation stout-hearted enough to face unpleasant facts. Some of the leading spirits in the country, despite the intensity of their feelings toward Germany, disapproved this kind of bookkeeping, but M. Klotz did not relinquish his method of keeping accounts. He drew up a bill against the Teutons for one thousand and eighty-six milliards of francs.

The Germans at the Conference maintained that if the wealth of their nation were realized and liquid, it would amount at most to four hundred milliards, but that to realize it would involve the stripping of the population of everything—of its forests, its mines, its railways, its factories, its cattle, its houses, its furniture, and its ready money. They further pleaded that the territorial clauses of the Treaty deprived them of important resources, which would reduce their solvency to a greater degree than the Allies realized. These clauses dispossessed the nation of 21 per cent. of the total crops of cereals and potatoes. A further falling off in the quantities of food produced would result from the restrictions on the importation of raw materials for the manufacture of fertilizers. Of her coal, Germany was forfeiting about one-third; three-fourths of her iron ore was also being taken away from her; her total zinc production would be cut down by over three-fifths. Add to this the enormous shortage of tonnage, machinery, and man-power, the total loss of her colonies, the shrinkage of available raw stuffs, and the depreciation of the mark.

At the Conference the Americans maintained their ground. Invoking the principle laid down by Mr. Wilson and clearly formulated by Mr. Lansing, they insisted that reparations should be claimed only for damage done to civilians directly and lawlessly. After a good deal of fencing, rendered necessary by the pledges given by European statesmen to their electors, it was decided that the criteria provided by that principle should be applied. But even with that limitation the sums claimed were huge. It was alleged by the Germans that some of the demands were for amounts that exceeded the total national wealth of the country filing the claim. And as no formula could be devised that would satisfy all the claimants, it was resolved in principle that, although Germany should be obliged to make good only certain classes of losses, the Conference would set no limits to the sums for which she would thus be liable.

At this juncture M. Loucheur suggested that a minimum sum should be demanded of the enemy, leaving the details to be settled by a commission. And this was the solution which was finally adopted.[309] It was received with protests and lamentations, which, however, soon made place for self-congratulations, official and private.

The French Minister of Finances, for example, drew a bright picture in the Chamber of the financial side of the Treaty, so far as it affected his country: "Within two years," he announced, "independently of the railway rolling stock, of agricultural materials and restitutions, we receive a part, still to be fixed, of the payment of twenty milliards of marks in gold; another share, also to be determined, of an emission of bonds amounting to forty milliard gold marks, bearing interest at the rate of 2 per cent.; a third part, to be fixed, of German shipping and dyes; seven million tons of coal annually for a period of ten years, followed by diminishing quantities during the following years; the repayment of the expenses of occupation; the right of taking over a part of Germany's interests in Russia, in particular that of obtaining the payment of pre-war debts at the pre-war rate of exchange, likewise the maintenance of such contracts as we may desire to maintain in force and the return of Alsace-Lorraine free from all incumbrances. Nor is that all. In Morocco we have the right to liquidate German property, to transfer the shares that represent Germany's interests in the Bank of Morocco, and finally the allotment under a French mandate of a portion of the German colonies free from incumbrances of any kind.... We shall receive four hundred and sixty-three milliard francs, payable in thirty-six years, without counting the restitutions which will have been effected. Nor should it be forgotten that already we have received eight milliards' worth of securities stolen from French bearers. So do not consider the Treaty as a misfortune for France."[310]

Soon after the outburst of joy with which the ingathering of the fruits of France's victory was celebrated, clouds unexpectedly drifted athwart the cerulean blue of the political horizon, and dark shadows were flung across the Allied countries. The second-and third-class nations fell out with the first-class Powers. Italy, for example, whose population is almost equal to that of her French sister, demanded compensation for the vast additions that were being made to France's extensive possessions. The grounds alleged were many. Compensation had been promised by the secret treaty. The need for it was reinforced by the rejection of Italy's claims in the Adriatic. The Italian people required, desired, and deserved a fair and fitting field for legitimate expansion. They are as numerous as the French, and have a large annual surplus population, which has to hew wood and draw water for foreign peoples. They are enterprising, industrious, thrifty, and hard workers. Their country lacks some of the necessaries of material prosperity, such as coal, iron, and cotton. Why should it not receive a territory rich in some of these products? Why should a large contingent of Italy's population have to go to the colonies of Spain, France, and Britain or to South American republics for a livelihood? The Italian press asked whether the Supreme Council was bent on fulfilling the Gospel dictum, "Whosoever hath, to him shall be given...."

One of the first demands made by Italy was for the port and town of Djibouti, which is under French sway. It was rejected, curtly and emphatically. Other requests elicited plausible explanations why they could not be complied with. In a word, Italy was treated as a poor and importunate relation, and was asked to console herself with the reflection that she was working in the vineyard of idealism. In vain eminent publicists in Rome, Turin, and Milan pleaded their country's cause. Adopting the principle which Mr. Wilson had applied to France and Britain, they affirmed that even before the war France, with a larger population and fewer possessions, had shown that she was incapable of discharging the functions which she had voluntarily taken upon herself. Tunis, they alleged, owed its growth and thriving condition to Italian emigrants. With all the fresh additions to her territories, the population of the Republic would be utterly inadequate to the task. To the Supreme Council this line of reasoning was distinctly unpalatable. Nor did the Italians further their cause when, by way of giving emphatic point to their reasoning, their press quoted that eminent Frenchman, M. d'Estournelles de Constant, who wrote at that very moment: "France has too many colonies already—far more in Asia, in Africa, in America, in Oceania than she can fructify. In this way she is immobilizing territories, continents, peoples, which nominally she takes over. And it is childish and imprudent to take barren possession of them, when other states allege their power to utilize them in the general interest. By acting in this manner, France, do what she may, is placing herself in opposition to the world's interests, and to those of the League of Nations. In the long run it is a serious business. Spain, Portugal, and Holland know this to their cost. Do what she would, France was not able before the war to utilize all her immense colonial domain ... for lack of population. She will be still less able after the war...."[311]

The discussion grew dangerously animated. Epigrams were coined and sent floating in the heavily charged air. A tactless comparison was made between the French nation and a bon vivant of sixty-five who flatters himself that he can enjoy life's pleasures on the same scale as when he was only thirty. Little arrows thus barbed with biting acid often make more enduring mischief than sledge-hammer blows. Soon the estrangement between the two sister nations unhappily became wider and led to marked divergences in their respective policies, which seem fraught with grave consequences in the future.

The Italy of to-day is not the Italy of May, 1915. She now knows exactly where she stands. When she unsheathed her sword to fight against the allies of the state that declared a treaty to be but a scrap of paper, she was heartened by a solemn promise given in writing by her comrades in arms. But when she had accomplished her part of the contract, that document turned out to be little more than another scrap of paper. Thus it was one of the piquant ironies of Fate, Italian publicists said, that the people who had mostly clamored against that doctrine were indirectly helping it to triumph. Mr. Wilson, unwittingly sapping public faith in written treaties, was held up as one of the many pictures in which the Conference abounded of the delegates refuting their words by acts. The unbiased historian will readily admit that the secret treaties were profoundly immoral from the Wilsonian angle of vision, but that the only way of canceling them was by a general principle rigidly upheld and impartially applied. And this the Supreme Council would not entertain.

With her British ally, too, France had an unpleasant falling out about Eastern affairs, and in especial about Syria and Persia. There was also a demand for the retrocession by Britain of the island of Mauritius, but it was not made officially, nor is it a subject for two such nations to quarrel over. The first rift in the lute was caused by the deposition of Emir Faisal respecting the desires of the Arab population. This picturesque chief, the French press complained, had been too readily admitted to the Conference and too respectfully listened to there, whereas the Persian delegation tramped for months over the Paris streets without once obtaining a hearing. The Hedjaz, which had been independent from time immemorial, was formally recognized as a separate kingdom during the war, and the Grand Sheriff of Mecca was suddenly raised to the throne in the European sense by France and Britain. Since then he was formally recognized by the five Powers. His representatives in Paris demanded the annexation of all the countries of Arabic speech which were under Turkish domination. These included not only Mesopotamia, but also Syria, on which France had long looked with loving eyes and respecting which there existed an accord between her and Britain. The project community would represent a Pan-Arab federation of about eleven million souls, over which France would have no guardianship. And yet the written accord had never been annulled. Palestine was excluded from this Pan-Arabian federation, and Syria was to be consulted, and instead of being handed over to France, as M. Clemenceau demanded, was to be allowed to declare its own wishes without any injunctions from the Conference. Mesopotamia would be autonomous under the League of Nations, but a single mandatory was asked for by the king of the Hedjaz for the entire eleven million inhabitants.

The comments of the French press on Britain's attitude, despite their studied reserve and conventional phraseology, bordered on recrimination and hinted at a possible cooling of friendship between the two nations, and in the course of the controversy the evil-omened word "Fashoda" was pronounced. The French Temps's arguments were briefly these: The populations claimed occupy such a vast stretch of territory that the sovereignty of the Hedjaz could hardly be more than nominal and symbolical. In fact, they cover an area of one-half of the Ottoman Empire. These different provinces would, in reality, be under the domination of the Great Power which was the real creator of this new kingdom, and the monarch of the Hedjaz would be a mere stalking-horse of Britain. This, it was urged, would not be independence, but a masked protectorate, and in the name of the higher principles must be prevented. Syria must be handed over to France without consulting the population. The financial resources of the Hedjaz are utterly inadequate for the administration of such a vast state as was being compacted. Who, then, it was asked, would supply the indispensable funds? Obviously Britain, who had been providing the Emir Faisal with funds ever since his father donned the crown. If this political entity came into existence, it would generate continuous friction between France and Britain, separate comrades in arms, delight a vigilant enemy, and violate a written compact which should be sacred. For these reasons it should be rejected and Syria placed under the guardianship of France.

The Americans took the position that congruously with the high ethical principles which had guided the labors of the Conference throughout, it was incumbent on its members, instead of bartering civilized peoples like chattels, to consult them as to their own aspirations. If it were true that the Syrians were yearning to become the wards of France, there could be no reasonable objection on the part of the French delegates to agree to a plebiscite. But the French delegates declined to entertain the suggestion on the ground that Syria's longing for French guidance was a notorious fact.

After much discussion and vehement opposition on the part of the French delegates an Inter-Allied commission under Mr. Charles Crane was sent to visit the countries in dispute and to report on the leanings of their populations. After having visited forty cities and towns and more than three hundred villages, and received over fifteen hundred delegations of natives, the commission reported that the majority of the people "prefer to maintain their independence," but do not object to live under the mandatory system for fifty years provided the United States accepts the mandate. "Syria desires to become a sovereign kingdom, and most of the population supports the Emir Faisal as king.[312] The commission further ascertained that the Syrians, "who are singularly enlightened as to the policies of the United States," invoked and relied upon a Franco-British statement of policy[313] which had been distributed broadcast throughout their country, "promising complete liberation from the Turks and the establishment of free governments among the native population and recognition of these governments by France and Britain."[314]

The result of the investigation by the Inter-Allied commission reminds one of the story of the two anglers who were discussing the merits of two different sauces for the trout which one of them had caught. As they were unable to agree they decided to refer the matter to the trout, who answered: "Gentlemen, I do not wish to be eaten with any sauce. I desire to live and be free in my own element." "Ah, now you are wandering from the question," exclaimed the two, who thereupon struck up a compromise on the subject of the sauce.

The tone of this long-drawn-out controversy, especially in the press, was distinctly acrimonious. It became dangerously bitter when the French political world was apprised one day of the conclusion of a treaty between Britain and Persia as the outcome of secret negotiations between London and Teheran. And excitement grew intenser when shortly afterward the authentic text of this agreement was disclosed. In France, Italy, Germany, Russia, and the United States the press unanimously declared that Persia's international status as determined by the new diplomatic instrument could best be described by the evil-sounding words "protectorate" and the violation of the mandatory system adopted by the Conference.

This startling development shed a strong light upon the new ordering of the world and its relation to the Wilsonian gospel, complicated with secret negotiations, protectorates without mandates, and the one-sided abrogation of compacts.

Persia is one of the original members of the League of Nations,[315] and as such was entitled, the French argued, to a hearing at the Conference. She had grievances that called for redress: her neutrality had been violated, many of her subjects had been put to death, and her titles to reparation were undeniable. President Wilson, the comforter of small states and oppressed nationalities, having proclaimed that the weakest communities would command the same friendly treatment as the greatest, the Persian delegates repaired to Paris in the belief that this treatment would be accorded them. But there they were disillusioned. For them there was no admission. Whether, if they had been heard and helped by the Supreme Council, they would have contrived to exist as an independent state is a question which cannot be discussed here. The point made by the French was that on its own showing the Conference was morally bound to receive the Persian delegation. The utmost it obtained was that the Persian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Monalek, who was head of the delegation, had a private talk with President Wilson, Colonel House, and Mr. Lansing. These statesmen unhesitatingly promised to help Persia to secure full sovereign rights, or at any rate to enable her delegates to unfold their country's case and file their protests before the Conference. The delegates were comforted and felt sure of the success of their mission. They told the American plenipotentiaries that the United States would be Persia's creditor for this help and that she would invite American financiers to put her money matters in order, American engineers to develop her mining industries, and the American oil firms to examine and exploit her petrol deposits.[316] In a word, Persia would be Americanized. This naïve announcement of the rôle reserved for American benefactors in the land of the Shah might have impressed certain commercial and financial interests in the United States, but was wholly alien to the only order of motives that could properly move the American plenipotentiaries to interpose in favor of their would-be wards.

The promises made by Messrs. Wilson, House, and Lansing came to nothing. For months the Persian envoys lived in hope which was strengthened by the assurances of various members of the Conference that the intervention of Mr. Wilson would infallibly prove successful. But events belied this forecast, whereupon the head of the Persian delegation, after several months of hopes deferred, quitted France for Constantinople, and his country's position among the nations was settled in detail by the new agreement.

That position does undoubtedly resemble very closely Egypt's status before the outbreak of the World War. And Egypt's status could hardly be termed independence. Henceforward Great Britain has a strong hold on the Persian customs, the control of the waterways and carriage routes, the rights of railway construction, the oil-fields—these were ours before—the right to organize the army and direct the foreign policy of the kingdom. And it may fairly be argued that this arrangement may prove a greater blessing to the Persians than the realization of their own ambitions. That, at any rate, is my own personal belief, which for many years I have held and expressed. None the less it runs diametrically counter to the letter and the spirit of Wilsonianism, which is now seen to be a wall high enough to keep out the dwarf states, but which the giants can easily clear at a bound.

Against this violation of the new humanitarian doctrine French publicists flared up. The glaring character of the transgression revolted them, the plight of the Persians touched them, and the right of self-determination strongly appealed to them. Was it not largely for the assertion of that right that all the Allied peoples had for five years been making unheard-of sacrifices? What would become of the League of Nations if such secret and selfish doings were connived at? In a word, French sympathy for the victims of British hegemony waxed as strong as the British fellow-feeling for the Syrians, who objected to be drawn into the orbit of the French. Those sharp protests and earnest appeals, it may be noted, were the principal, perhaps the only, symptoms of tenderness for unprotected peoples which were evoked by the great ethical movement headed by the Conference.

The French further pointed out that the system of Mandates had been specially created for countries as backward and helpless as Persia was assumed to be, and that the only agency qualified to apply it was either the Supreme Council or the League of Nations. The British press answered that no such humiliating assumption about the Shah's people was being made, that the Foreign Office had distinctly disclaimed the intention of establishing a protectorate over Persia, who is, and will remain, a sovereign and independent state. But these explanations failed to convince our indignant Allies. They argued, from experience, that no trust was to be placed in those official assurances and euphemistic phrases which are generally belied by subsequent acts.[317] They further lamented that the long and secret negotiations which were going forward in Teheran while the Persian delegation was wearily and vainly waiting in Paris to be allowed to plead its country's cause before the great world-dictators was not a good example of loyalty to the new cosmic legislation. Had not Mr. Wilson proclaimed that peoples were no longer to be bartered and swapped as chattels? Here the Italians and Rumanians chimed in, reminding their kinsmen that it was the same American statesmen who in the peace conditions first presented to Count Brockdorff-Rantzau made over the German population of the Saar Valley to France at the end of fifteen years as the fair equivalent of a sum of money payable in gold, and that France at any rate had raised no objection to the barter nor to the principle at the root of it. They reasoned that if the principle might be applied to one case it should be deemed equally applicable to the other, and that the only persons or states that could with propriety demur to the Anglo-Persian arrangements were those who themselves were not benefiting by similar transactions.

At last the Paris press, laying due weight on the alliance with Britain, struck a new note. "It seems that these last Persian bargainings offer a theme for conversations between our government and that of the Allies," one influential journal wrote.[318] At once the amicable suggestion was taken up by the British press. The idea was to join the Syrian with the Persian transactions and make French concessions on the other. This compromise would compose an ugly quarrel and settle everything for the best. For France's intentions toward the people of Syria were, it was credibly asserted, to the full as disinterested and generous as those of Britain toward Persia, and if the Syrians desired an English-speaking nation rather than the French to be their mentor, it was equally true that the Persians wanted Americans rather than British to superintend and accelerate their progress in civilization. But instead of harkening to the wishes of only one it would be better to ignore those of both. By this prudent compromise all the demands of right and justice, for which both governments were earnest sticklers, would thus be amply satisfied.

Our American associates were less easily appeased. In sooth there was nothing left wherewith to appease them. Their press condemned the "protectorate" as a breach of the Covenant. Secretary Lansing let it be known[319] that the United States delegation had striven to obtain a hearing for the Persians at the Conference, but had "lost its fight." A Persian, when apprized of this utterance, said: "When the United States delegation strove to hinder Italy from annexing Fiume and obtaining the territories promised her by a secret treaty, they accomplished their aim because they refused to give way. Then they took care not to lose their fight. When they accepted a brief for the Jews and imposed a Jewish semi-state on Rumania and Poland, they were firm as the granite rock, and no amount of opposition, no future deterrents, made any impression on their will. Accordingly, they had their way. But in the cause of Persia they lost the fight, although logic, humanity, justice, and the ordinances solemnly accepted by the Great Powers were all on their side." ... One American press organ termed the Anglo-Persian accord "a coup which is a greater violation of the Wilsonian Fourteen Points than the Shantung award to Japan, as it makes the whole of Persia a mere protectorate for Britain."[320]

Generally speaking, illustrations of the meaning of non-intervention in the home affairs of other nations were numerous and somewhat perplexing. Were it not that Mr. Wilson had come to Europe for the express purpose of interpreting as well as enforcing his own doctrine, one would have been warranted in assuming that the Supreme Council was frequently travestying it. But as the President was himself one of the leading members of that Council, whose decisions were unanimous, the utmost that one can take for granted is that he strove to impose his tenets on his intractable colleagues and "lost the fight."

Here is a striking instance of what would look to the average man very like intervention in the domestic politics of another nation—well-meant and, it may be, beneficent intervention—were it not that we are assured on the highest authority that it is nothing of the sort. It was devised as an expedient for getting outside help for the capture of Petrograd by the anti-Bolshevists. The end, therefore, was good, and the means seemed effectual to those who employed them. The Kolchak-Denikin party could, it was believed, have taken possession of that capital long before, by obtaining the military co-operation of the Esthonians. But the price asked by these was the recognition of their complete independence by the non-Bolshevist government in the name of all Russia. Kolchak, to his credit, refused to pay this price, seeing that he had no powers to do so, and only a dictator would sign away the territory by usurping the requisite authority. Consequently the combined attack on Petrograd was not undertaken. The Admiral's refusal was justified by the circumstances that he was the spokesman only of a large section of the Russian people, and that a thoroughly representative assembly must be consulted on the subject previous to action being taken. The military stagnation that ensued lasted for months. Then one day the press brought the tidings that the difficulty was ingeniously overcome. This is the shape in which the intelligence was communicated to the world: "Colonel Marsh, of the British army, who is representing General Gough, organized a republic in northwest Russia at Reval, August 12th, within forty-five minutes, General Yudenitch being nominally the head of the new government, which is affiliated with the Kolchak government. Northwest Russia opposes the Esthonian government only in principle because it wants guaranties that the Esthonians will not be the stepping-stone for some big Power like Germany to control the Russian outlet through the Baltic. If the Esthonians give such guaranties, the northwestern Russians are perfectly willing to let them become an independent state."[321]

Here then was a "British colonel" who, in addition to his military duties, was, according to this account, willing and able to create an independent republic without any Supreme Council to assist him, whereas professional diplomatists and military men of other nations had been trying for months to found a Rhine republic under Dorten and had failed. Nor did he, if the newspaper report be correct, waste much time at the business. From the moment of its inception until northwestern Russia stood forth an independent state, promulgating and executing grave decisions in the sphere of international politics, only forty-five minutes are said to have elapsed. Forty-five minutes by the clock. It was almost as quick a feat as the drafting of the Covenant of Nations. Further, the resourceful statemaker forged a republic which was qualified to transfer sovereignly Russian territory to unrecognized states without consulting the nation or obtaining authority from any one. More marvelous than any other detail, however, is the circumstance that he did his work so well that it never amounted to intervention.[322]

One cannot affect surprise if the distinction between this amazing exploit of diplomatico-military prestidigitation and intermeddling in the internal affairs of another nation prove too subtle for the mental grasp of the average unpolitical individual.

It is practices like these which ultimately determine the worth of the treaties and the Covenant which Mr. Wilson was content to take back with him to Washington as the final outcome of what was to have been the most superb achievement of historic man. Of the new ethical principles, of the generous renunciation of privileges, of the righting of secular wrongs, of the respect that was to be shown for the weak, which were to have cemented the union of peoples into one pacific if not blissful family, there remained but the memory. No such bitter draught of disappointment was swallowed by the nations since the world first had a political history. Many of the resounding phrases that once foretokened a new era of peace, right, and equity were not merely emptied of their contents, but made to connote their opposites. Freedom of the seas became supremacy of the seas, which may possibly turn out to be a blessed consummation for all concerned, but should not have been smuggled in under a gross misnomer. The abolition of war means, as British and American and French generals and admirals have since told their respective fellow-citizens, thorough preparations for the next war, which are not to be confined, as heretofore, to the so-called military states, but are to extend over all Anglo-Saxondom.[323] "Open covenants openly arrived at" signify secret conclaves and conspirative deliberations carried on in impenetrable secrecy which cannot be dispensed with even after the whole business has passed into history.[324] The self-determination of peoples finds its limit in the rights of every Great Power to hold its subject nationalities in thrall on the ground that their reciprocal relations appertain to the domestic policy of the state. It means, further, the privilege of those who wield superior force to put irresistible pressure upon those who are weak, and the lever which it places in their hands for the purpose is to be known under the attractive name of the protection of minorities. Abstention from interference in the home affairs of a neighboring community is made to cover intermeddling of the most irksome and humiliating character in matters which have no nexus with international law, for if they had, the rule would be applicable to all nations. The lesser peoples must harken to injunctions of the greater states respecting their mode of treating alien immigrants and must submit to the control of foreign bodies which are ignorant of the situation and its requirements. Nor is it enough that those states should accord to the members of the Jewish and other races all the rights which their own citizens enjoy—they must go farther and invest them with special privileges, and for this purpose renounce a portion of their sovereignty. They must likewise allow their more powerful allies to dictate to them their legislation on matters of transit and foreign commerce.[325] For the Great Powers, however, this law of minorities was not written. They are above the law. Their warrant is force. In a word, force is the trump card in the political game of the future as it was in that of the past. And M. Clemenceau's reminder to the petty states at the opening of the Conference that the wielders of twelve million troops are the masters of the situation was appropriate. Thus the war which was provoked by the transformation of a solemn treaty into a scrap of paper was concluded by the presentation of two scraps of paper as a treaty and a covenant for the moral renovation of the world.

FOOTNOTES:

Germany Great Britain Italy France

1861-70 408,333 365,499 183,196 93,515

1871-80 511,034 431,436 191,538 64,063

1881-90 551,308 442,112 307,082 66,982

1891-1900 730,265 430,000 339,409 23,961

1901-10 866,338 484,822 369,959 46,524

XIV

THE TREATY WITH GERMANY

To discuss in detail the peace terms which after many months' desultory talk were finally presented to Count Brockdorff-Rantzau would transcend the scope of these pages. Like every other act of the Supreme Council, they may be viewed from one of two widely sundered angles of survey—either as the exercise by a victorious state of the power derived from victory over the vanquished enemy, or as one of the measures by which the peace of the world is to be enforced in the present and consolidated in the future. And from neither point of view can it command the approval of unbiased political students. At first the Germans, and not they alone, expected that the conditions would be based on the Fourteen Points, while many of the Allies took it for granted that they would be inspired by the resolve to cripple Teutondom for all time. And for each of these anticipations there were good formal grounds.

The only legitimate motive for interweaving the Covenant with the Treaty was to make of the latter a sort of corollary of the former and to moderate the instincts of vengeance by the promptings of higher interests. On this ground, and only on this, did the friends of far-ranging reform support Mr. Wilson in his contention that the two documents should be rendered mutually interdependent. Reparation for the damage done in violation of international law and sound guaranties against its recurrence are of the essence of every peace treaty that follows a decisive victory. But reparation is seldom this and nothing more. The lower instincts of human nature, when dominant as they are during a bloody war and in the hour of victory, generally outweigh considerations not only of right, but also of enlightened egotism, leaving justice to merge into vengeance. And the fruits are treasured wrath and a secret resolve on the part of the vanquished to pay out his victor at the first opportunity. The war-loser of to-day aims at becoming the war-winner of to-morrow. And this frame of mind is incompatible with the temper needed for an era of moral fellowship such as Mr. Wilson was supposed to be intent on establishing. Consequently, a peace treaty unmodified by the principles underlying the Covenant is necessarily a negation of the main possibilities of a society of nations based upon right and a decisive argument against joining together the two instruments.

The other kind of peace which Mr. Wilson was believed to have had at heart consisted not merely in the liquidation of the war, but in the uprooting of its permanent causes, in the renunciation by the various nations of sanguinary conflicts as a means of determining rival claims, and in such an amicable rearrangement of international relations as would keep such disputes from growing into dangerous quarrels. Right, or as near an approximation to it as is attainable, would then take the place of violence, whereby military guaranties would become not only superfluous, but indicative of a spirit irreconcilable with the main purpose of the League. Each nation would be entitled to equal opportunity within the limits assigned to it by nature and widened by its own mental and moral capacities. Thus permanently to forbid a numerous, growing, and territorially cramped nation to possess overseas colonies for its superfluous population while overburdening others with possessions which they are unable to utilize, would constitute a negation of one of the basic principles of the new ordering.

Those were the grounds which seemed to warrant the belief that the Treaty would be not only formally, but substantially and in its spirit an integral, part of the general settlement based on the Fourteen Points.

This anticipation turned out to be a delusion. Wilsonianism proved to be a very different system from that of the Fourteen Points, and its author played the part not only of an interpreter of his tenets, but also of a sort of political pope alone competent to annul the force of laws binding on all those whom he should refuse to dispense from their observance. He had to do with patriotic politicians permeated with the old ideas, desirous of providing in the peace terms for the next war and striving to secure the maximum of advantage over the foe presumptive, by dismembering his territory, depriving him of colonies, making him dependent on others for his supplies of raw stuffs, and artificially checking his natural growth. Nearly all of them had principles to invoke in favor of their claims and some had nothing else. And it was these tendencies which Mr. Wilson sought to combine with the ethical ideals to be incarnated in the Society of Nations. Now this was an impossible synthesis. The spirit of vindictiveness—for that was well represented at the Conference—was to merge and lose itself in an outflow of magnanimity; precautions against a hated enemy were to be interwoven with implicit confidence in his generosity; a military occupation would provide against a sudden onslaught, while an approach to disarmament would bear witness to the absence of suspicion. Thus Poland would discharge the function of France's ally against the Teutons in the east, but her frontiers were to leave her inefficiently protected against their future attacks from the west. Germany was dismembered, yet she was credited with self-discipline and generosity enough to steel her against the temptation to profit by the opportunity of joining together again what France had dissevered. The League of Nations was to be based upon mutual confidence and good fellowship, yet one of its most powerful future members was so distrusted as to be declared permanently unworthy to possess any overseas colonies. Germany's territory in the Saar Valley is admittedly inhabited by Germans, yet for fifteen years there is to be a foreign administration there, and at the end of it the people are to be asked whether they would like to cut the bonds that link them with their own state and place themselves under French sway, so that a premium is offered for French immigration into the Saar Valley.

Those are a few of the consequences of the mixture of the two irreconcilable principles.

That Germany richly deserved her punishment cannot be gainsaid. Her crime was without precedent. Some of its most sinister consequences are irremediable. Whole sections of her people are still unconscious not only of the magnitude, but of the criminal character, of their misdeeds. None the less there is a future to be provided for, and one of the safest provisions is to influence the potential enemy's will for evil if his power cannot be paralyzed. And this the Treaty failed to do.

The Germans, when they learned the conditions, discussed them angrily, and the keynote was refusal to sign the document. The financial clauses were stigmatized as masked slavery. The press urged that during the war less than one-tenth of France's territory had been occupied by their countrymen and that even of this only a fragment was in the zone of combat. The entire wealth of France, they alleged, had been estimated before the war at from three hundred and fifty milliard to four hundred milliard francs, consequently for the devastated provinces hardly more than one-twentieth of that sum could fairly be demanded as reparation, whereas the claim set forth was incomparably more. They objected to the loss of their colonies because the justification alleged—that they were disqualified to administer them because of their former cruelties toward the natives—was groundless, as the Allies themselves had admitted implicitly by offering them the right of pre-emption in the case of the Portuguese and other overseas possessions on the very eve of the war.

But the most telling objections turned upon the clauses that dealt with the Saar Valley. Its population is entirely German, yet the treaty-makers provided for its occupation by the French for a term of fifteen years and its transference to them if, after that term, the German government was unable to pay a certain sum in gold for the coal mines it contained. If that sum were not forthcoming the population and the district were to be handed over to France for all time, even though the former should vote unanimously for reunion with Germany. Count Brockdorff-Rantzau remarked in his note on the Treaty "that in the history of modern times there is no other example of a civilized Power obliging a state to abandon its people to foreign domination as an equivalent for a cash payment." One of the most influential press organs complained that the Treaty "bartered German men, women, and children for coal; subjected some districts with a thoroughly German population to an obligatory plebiscite[326] under interested supervision; severed others without any consultation from the Fatherland; delivered over the proceeds of German industry to the greed of foreign capitalists for an indefinite period; ... spread over the whole country a network of alien commissions to be paid by the German nation; withdrew streams, rivers, railways, the air service, numerous industrial establishments, the entire economic system, from the sovereignty of the German state by means either of internationalization or financial control; conferred on foreign inspectors rights such as only the satraps of absolute monarchs in former ages were empowered to exercise; in a word, they put an end to the existence of the German nation as such. Germany would become a colony of white slaves...."[327]

Fortunately for the Allies, the reproach of exchanging human beings for coal was seen by their leaders to be so damaging that they modified the odious clause that warranted it. Even the comments of the friendly neutral press were extremely pungent. They found fault with the Treaty on grounds which, unhappily, cannot be reasoned away. "Why dissimulate it?" writes the foremost of these journals; "this peace is not what we were led to expect. It dislodges the old dangers, but creates new ones. Alsace and Lorraine are, it is true, no longer in German hands, but ... irredentism has only changed its camp. In 1914 Germany put her faith in force because she herself wielded it. But crushed down under a peace which appears to violate the promises made to her, a peace which in her heart of hearts she will never accept, she will turn toward force anew. It will stand out as the great misfortune of this Treaty that it has tainted the victory with a moral blight and caused the course of the German revolution to swerve.... The fundamental error of the instrument lies in the circumstance that it is a compromise between two incompatible frames of mind. It was feasible to restore peace to Europe by pulling down Germany definitely. But in order to accomplish this it would have been necessary to crush a people of seventy millions and to incapacitate them from rising to their feet again. Peace could also have been secured by the sole force of right. But in this case Germany would have had to be treated so considerately as to leave her no grievance to brood over. M. Clemenceau hindered Mr. Wilson from displaying sufficient generosity to get the moral peace, and Mr. Wilson on his side prevented M. Clemenceau from exercising severity enough to secure the material peace. And so the result, which it was easy to foresee, is a régime devoid of the real guaranties of durability."[328]

The judge of the French syndicalists was still more severe. "The Versailles peace," exclaimed M. Verfeuil, "is worse than the peace of Brest-Litovsk ... annexations, economic servitudes, overwhelming indemnities, and a caricature of the Society of Nations—these constitute the balance of the new policy,"[329] The Deputy Marcel Cachin said: "The Allied armies fought to make this war the last. They fought for a just and lasting peace, but none of these boons has been bestowed on us. We are confronted with the failure of the policy of the one man in whom our party had put its confidence—President Wilson. The peace conditions ... are inacceptable from various points of view, financial, territorial, economic, social, and human."[330]

It is in this Treaty far more than in the Covenant that the principles to which Mr. Wilson at first committed himself are in decisive issue. True, he was wont after every surrender he made during the Conference to invoke the Covenant and its concrete realization—the League of Nations—as the corrective which would set everything right in the future. But the fact can hardly be blinked that it is the Treaty and its effects that impress their character on the Covenant and not the other way round. As an eminent Swiss professor observed: "No league of nations would have hindered the Belgian people in 1830 from separating from Holland. Can the future League of Nations hinder Germany from reconstituting its geographical unity? Can it hinder the Germans of Bohemia from smiting the Czech? Can it prevent the Magyars, who at present are scattered, from working for their reunion?"[331]

These potential disturbances are so many dangers to France. For if war should break out in eastern Europe, is it to be supposed that the United States, the British colonies, or even Britain herself will send troops to take part in it? Hardly. Suppose, for instance, that the Austrians, who ardently desire to be merged in Germany, proclaim their union with her, as I am convinced they will one day, does any statesman believe that democratic America will despatch troops to coerce them back? If the Germans of Bohemia secede from the Czechoslovaks or the Croats from the Serbs, will British armies cross the sea to uphold the union which those peoples repudiate? And in the name of which of the Fourteen Points would they undertake the task? That of self-determination? France's interests, and hers alone, would be affected by such changes. And France would be left to fight single-handed. For what?

It is interesting to note how the conditions imposed upon Germany were appreciated by an influential body of Mr. Wilson's American partizans who had pinned their faith to his Fourteen Points. Their view is expressed by their press organ as follows:[332]

"France remains the strongest Power on the Continent. With her military establishment intact she faces a Germany without a general staff, without conscription, without universal military training, with a strictly limited amount of light artillery, with no air service, no fleet, with no domestic basis in raw materials for armament manufacture, with her whole western border fifty kilometers east of the Rhine demilitarized. On top of this France has a system of military alliances with the new states that touch Germany. On top of this she secured permanent representation in the Council of the League, from which Germany is excluded. On top of that economic terms which, while they cannot be fulfilled, do cripple the industrial life of her neighbor. With such a balance of forces France demands for herself a form of protection which neither Belgium, nor Poland, nor Czechoslovakia, nor Italy is granted."

FOOTNOTES:

XV

THE TREATY WITH BULGARIA

Among all the strange products of the many-sided outbursts of the leading delegates' reconstructive activity, the Treaty with Bulgaria stands out in bold relief. It reveals the high-water mark reached by those secret, elusive, and decisive influences which swayed so many of the mysterious decisions adopted by the Conference. As Bulgaria disposed of an abundant source of those influences, her chastisement partakes of some of the characteristics of a reward. Not only did she not fare as the treacherous enemy that she showed herself, but she emerged from the ordeal much better off than several of the victorious states. Unlike Serbia, Rumania, France, and Belgium, she escaped the horrors of a foreign invasion and she possessed and fructified all her resources down to the day when the armistice was concluded. Her peasant population made huge profits during the campaign and her armies despoiled Serbia, Rumania, and Greek Macedonia and sent home enormous booty. In a word, she is richer and more prosperous than before she entered the arena against her protectors and former allies.

For, owing to the intercession of her powerful friends, she was treated with a degree of indulgence which, although expected by all who were initiated into the secrets of "open diplomacy," scandalized those who were anxious that at least some simulacrum of justice should be maintained. Germany was forced to sign a blank check which her enemies will one day fill in. Austria was reduced to the status of a parasite living on the bounty of the Great Powers and denied the right of self-determination. Even France, exhausted by five years' superhuman efforts, beholds with alarm her financial future entirely dependent upon the ability or inability of Germany to pay the damages to which she was condemned.

But the Prussia of the Balkans, owing to the intercession of influential anonymous friends, had no such consequences to deplore. Although she contracted heavy debts toward Germany, she was relieved of the effort to pay them. Her financial obligations were first transferred[333] to the Allies and then magnanimously wiped out by these, who then limited all her liabilities for reparations to two and a quarter milliard francs. An Inter-Allied commission in Sofia is to find and return the loot to its lawful owners, but it is to charge no indemnity for the damage done. Nor will it contain representatives of the states whose property the Bulgars abstracted. Serbia is allowed neither indemnity nor reparation. She is to receive a share which the Treaty neglected to fix of the two and a quarter milliard francs on a date which has also been left undetermined. She is not even to get back the herds of cattle of which the Bulgars robbed her. The lawgivers in Paris considered that justice would be met by obliging the Bulgars to restore 28,000 head of cattle in lieu of the 3,200,000 driven off, so that even if the ill-starred Serbs should identify, say, one million more, they would have no right to enforce their claim.[334]

Nor is that the only disconcerting detail in the Treaty. The Supreme Council, which sanctioned the military occupation of a part of Germany as a guaranty for the fulfilment of the peace conditions, dispenses Bulgaria from any such irksome conditions. Bulgaria's good faith appeared sufficient to the politicians who drafted the instrument. "For reasons which one hardly dares touch upon," writes an eminent French publicist,[335] "several of the Powers that constitute the famous world areopagus count on the future co-operation of Bulgaria. We shrink in dismay from the perspective thus opened to our gaze."[336]

The territorial changes which the Prussia of the Balkans was condemned to undergo are neither very considerable nor unjust. Rumania receives no Bulgarian territory, the frontiers of 1913 remaining unaltered. Serbia nets some on grounds which cannot be called in question, and a large part of Thrace which is inhabited, not by Bulgars, but mainly by Greeks and Turks, was taken from Bulgaria, but allotted to no state in particular. The upshot of the Treaty, as it appeared to most of the leading publicists on the Continent of Europe, was to leave Bulgaria, whose cruelty and destructiveness are described by official and unofficial reports as unparalleled, in a position of economic superiority to Serbia, Greece, and Rumania. And in the Inter-Allied commission Bulgaria is to have a representative, while Serbia, Greece, and Rumania, a part of whose stolen property the commission has to recover, will have none.

A comparison between the indulgence lavished upon Bulgaria and the severity displayed toward Rumania is calculated to disconcert the stanchest friends of the Supreme Council. The Rumanian government, in a dignified note to the Conference, explained its refusal to sign the Treaty with Austria by enumerating a series of facts which amount to a scathing condemnation of the work of the Supreme Council. On the one hand the Council pleaded the engagements entered into between Japan and her European allies as a cogent motive for handing over Shantung to Japan. For treaties must be respected. And the argument is sound. On the other hand, they were bound by a similar treaty[337] to give Rumania the whole Banat, the Rumanian districts of Hungary and the Bukovina as far as the river Pruth. But at the Conference they repudiated this engagement. In 1916 they stipulated that if Rumania entered the war they would co-operate with ample military forces. They failed to redeem their promise. And they further undertook that "Rumania shall have the same rights as the Allies in the peace preliminaries and negotiations and also in discussing the issues which shall be laid before the Peace Conference for its decisions." Yet, as we saw, she was denied these rights, and her delegates were not informed of the subjects under discussion nor allowed to see the terms of peace, which were in the hands of the enemies, and were only twice admitted to the presence of the Supreme Council.

It has been observed in various countries and by the Allied and the neutral press that between the German view about the sacredness of treaties and that of the Supreme Council there is no substantial difference.[338] Comments of this nature are all the more distressing that they cannot be thrust aside as calumnious. Again it will not be denied that Rumania rendered inestimable services to the Allies. She sacrificed three hundred thousand of her sons to their cause. Her soil was invaded and her property stolen or ruined. Yet she has been deprived of part of her sovereignty by the Allies to whom she gave this help. The Supreme Council, not content with her law conferring equal rights on all her citizens, to whatever race or religion they may belong, ordered her to submit to the direction of a foreign board in everything concerning her minorities and demanded from her a promise of obedience in advance to their future decrees respecting her policy in matters of international trade and transit. These stipulations constitute a noteworthy curtailment of her sovereignty.

That any set of public men should be carried by extrinsical motives thus far away from justice, fair play, and good faith would be a misfortune under any circumstances, but that at a conjuncture like the present it should befall the men who set up as the moral guides of mankind and wield the power to loosen the fabric of society is indeed a dire disaster.

FOOTNOTES:

XVI

THE COVENANT AND MINORITIES

In Mr. Wilson's scheme for the establishment of a society of nations there was nothing new but his pledge to have it realized. And that pledge has still to be redeemed under conditions which he himself has made much more unfavorable than they were. The idea itself—floating in the political atmosphere for ages—has come to seem less vague and unattainable since the days of Kant. The only heads of states who had set themselves to embody it in institutions before President Wilson took it up not only disappointed the peoples who believed in them, but discredited the idea itself.

That a merely mechanical organization such as the American statesman seems to have had in mind, formed by parliamentary politicians deliberating in secret, could bind nations and peoples together in moral fellowship, is conceivable in the abstract. But if we turn to the reality, we shall find that in that direction nothing durable can be effected without a radical change in the ideas, aspirations, and temper of the leaders who speak for the nations to-day, and, indeed, in those of large sections of the nations themselves. For to organize society on those unfamiliar lines is to modify some of the deepest-rooted instincts of human nature. And that cannot be achieved overnight, certainly not in the span of thirty minutes, which sufficed for the drafting of the Covenant. The bulk of mankind might not need to be converted, but whole classes must first be educated, and in some countries re-educated, which is perhaps still more difficult. Mental and moral training must complement and reinforce each other, and each political unit be brought to realize that the interests of the vaster community take precedence over those of any part of it. And to impress these novel views upon the peoples of the world takes time.

An indispensable condition of success is that the compact binding the members together must be entered into by the peoples, not merely by their governments. For it is upon the masses that the burden of the war lies heaviest. It is the bulk of the population that supplies the soldiers, the money, and the work for the belligerent states, and endures the hardships and makes the sacrifices requisite to sustain it. Therefore, the peoples are primarily interested in the abolition of the old ordering and the forging of the new. Moreover, as latter-day campaigns are waged with all the resources of the warring peoples, and as the possession of certain of these resources is often both the cause of the conflict and the objective of the aggressor, it follows that no mere political enactments will meet contemporary requirements. An association of nations renouncing the sword as a means of settling disputes must also reduce as far as possible the surface over which friction with its neighbors is likely to take place. And nowadays most of that surface is economic. The possession of raw materials is a more potent attraction than territorial aggrandizement. Indeed, the latter is coveted mainly as a means of securing or safeguarding the former. On these and other grounds, in drawing up a charter for a society of nations, the political aspect should play but a subsidiary part. In Paris it was the only aspect that counted for anything.

A parliament of peoples, then, is the only organ that can impart viability to a society of nations worthy of the name. By joining the Covenant with the Peace Treaty, and turning the former into an instrument for the execution of the latter, thus subordinating the ideal to the egotistical, Mr. Wilson deprived his plan of its sole justification, and for the time being buried it. The philosopher Lichtenberg[339] wrote, "One man brings forth a thought, another holds it over the baptismal font, the third begets offspring with it, the fourth stands at its deathbed, and the fifth buries it." Mr. Wilson has discharged the functions of gravedigger to the idea of a pacific society of nations, just as Lenin has done to the system of Marxism, the only difference being that Marxism is as dead as a door-nail, whereas the society of nations may rise again.

It was open, then, to the three principal delegates to insure the peace of the world by moral means or by force. Having eschewed the former by adopting the doctrines of Monroe, abandoning the freedom of the seas, and by according to France strategic frontiers and other privileges of the militarist order, they might have enlarged and systematized these concessions to expediency and forged an alliance of the three states or of two, and undertaken to keep peace on the planet against all marplots. I wrote at the time: "The delegates are becoming conscious of the existence of a ready-made league of nations in the shape of the Anglo-Saxon states, which, together with France, might hinder wars, promote good-fellowship, remold human destinies; and they are delighted thus to possess solid foundations on which a noble edifice can be raised in the fullness of time. Tribunals will be created, with full powers to adjudge disputes; facilities will be accorded to litigious states, and even an obligation will be imposed to invoke their arbitration. And the sum total of these reforms will be known to contemporary annals as an inchoate League of Nations. The delegates are already modestly disavowing the intention of realizing the ideal in all its parts. That must be left to coming generations; but what with the exhaustion of the peoples, their aversion from warfare, and the material obstacles to the renewal of hostilities in the near future, it is calculated that the peace will not soon be violated. Whether more salient results will be attained or attempted by the Conference nobody can foretell."[340]

This expedient, even had it been deliberately conceived and skilfully wrought out, would not have been an adequate solution of the world's difficulties, nor would it have commended itself to all the states concerned. But it would at least have been a temporary makeshift capable of being transmuted under favorable circumstances into something less material and more durable. But the amateur world-reformers could not make up their minds to choose either alternative. And the result is one of the most lamentable failures recorded in human history.

I placed my own opinion on record at the time as frankly as the censorship which still existed for me would permit. I wrote: "What every delegate with sound political instinct will ask himself is, whether the League of Nations will eliminate wars in future, and, if not, he will feel conscientiously bound to adopt other relatively sure means of providing against them, and these consist of alliances, strategic frontiers, and the permanent disablement of the potential enemy. On one or other of these alternative lines the resettlement must be devised. To combine them would be ruinous. Now of what practical use is a league of nations devoid of supernational forces and faced by a numerous, virile, and united race, smarting under a sense of injustice, thirsting for the opportunities for development denied to it, but granted to nations which it despises as inferior? Would a league of nations combine militarily against the gradual encroachments or sudden aggression of that Power against its weaker neighbors? Nobody is authorized to answer this question affirmatively. To-day the Powers cannot agree to intervene against Bolshevism, which they deem a scourge of the world, nor can they agree to tolerate it.

"In these circumstances, what compelling motives can be laid before those delegates who are asked to dispense with strategic frontiers and rely upon a league of nations for their defense? Take France's outlook. Peace once concluded, she will be confronted with a secular enemy who numbers some seventy millions to her forty-five millions. In ten years the disproportion will be still greater. Discontented Russia is almost certain to be taken in hand by Germany, befriended, reorganized, exploited, and enlisted as an ally."[341]

Conscious of these reefs and shoals, the French government, which was at first contemptuous of the Wilsonian scheme, discerned the use it might be put to as a military safeguard, and sought to convert it into that. "The French," wrote a Francophil English journal published in Paris, "would like the League to maintain what may be called a permanent military general staff. The duties of this organization would be to keep a hawklike eye on the misdemeanors, actual or threatened, of any state or group of states, and to be empowered with authority to call into instant action a great international military force for the frustration or suppression of such aggression. The French have frankly in mind the possibility that an unrepentant and unregenerate Germany is the most likely menace not only to the security of France, but to the peace of the world in general."[342]

And other states cherished analogous hopes. The spirit of right and justice was to be evoked like the spirit that served Aladdin, and to be compelled to enter the service of nationalism and militarism, and accomplish the task of armies.

The paramount Powers prescribed the sacrifices of sovereignty which membership of the League necessitated, and forthwith dispensed themselves from making them. The United States government maintained its Monroe Doctrine for America—nay, it went farther and identified its interests with the Hay doctrine for the Far East.[343] It decided to construct a powerful navy for the defense of these political assets, and to give the youth of the country a semi-military training.[344] Defense presupposes attack. War, therefore, is not excluded—nay, it is admitted by the world-reformers, and preparations for it are indispensable. Equally so are the burdens of taxation. But if liberty of defense be one of the rights of two or three Powers, by what law is it confined to them and denied to the others? Why should the other communities be constrained to remain open to attack? Surely they, too, deserve to live and thrive, and make the most of their opportunities. Now if in lieu of a misnamed League of Nations we had an Anglo-Saxon board for the better government of the world, these unequal weights and measures would be intelligible on the principle that special obligations and responsibilities warrant exceptional rights. But no such plea can be advanced under an arrangement professing to be a society of free nations. All that can with truth be said is what M. Clemenceau told the delegates of the lesser states at the opening of the Conference—that the three great belligerents represent twelve million soldiers and that their supreme authority derives from that. The rôle of the other peoples is to listen to the behests of their guardians, and to accept and execute them without murmur. Might is still a source of right.

It is fair to say that the disclosure of the true base of the new ordering, as blurted out by M. Clemenceau at that historic meeting, caused little surprise among the initiated. For there was no reason to assume that he, or, indeed, the bulk of the continental statesmen, were converts to a doctrine of which its own apostle accepted only those fragments which commended themselves to his country or his party. Had not the French Premier scoffed at the League in public as in private? Had he not said in the Chamber: "I do not believe that the Society of Nations constitutes the necessary conclusion of the present war. I will give you one of my reasons. It is this: if to-morrow you were to propose to me that Germany should enter into this society I would not consent."[345]

"I am certain," wrote one of the ablest and most ardent champions of the League in France, Senator d'Estournelles de Constant—"I am certain that he [M. Clemenceau] made an effort against himself, against his entire past, against his whole life, against all his convictions, to serve the Society of Nations. And his Minister of Foreign Affairs followed him."[346] Exactly. And as with M. Clemenceau, so it was with the majority of European statesmen; most of them made strenuous and, one may add, successful efforts against their convictions. And the result was inevitable.

"The governments," we read in the organ of syndicalists, who had supported Mr. Wilson as long as they believed him determined to redeem his promises—"the governments have acquiesced in the Fourteen Points.... Hypocrisy. Each one cherished mental reservations. Virtue was exalted and vice practised. The poltroon eulogized heroism; the imperialist lauded the spirit of justice. For the past month we have been picking up ideas about the worth of the adhesions to the Fourteen Points, and never before has a more sinister or a more odious comedy been played. Territorial demands have been heaved one upon the other; contempt of the rights of peoples—the only right that we can recognize—has been expressed in striking terms; the last restraints have vanished; the masks have fallen."[347]

From every country in Europe the same judgment came pitched in varying keys. The Italian press condemned the proceedings of the Conference in language to the full as strong as that of the German or Austrian journals. The Stampa affirmed that those who, like Bissolati, were in the beginning for placing their trust in one of the two coteries at the Conference were guilty of a fatal mistake. "The mistake lay in their belief in the ideal strivings of one of the parties, and in the horror with which the cupidity of the others was contemplated, whereas both of them were fighting for ... their interests.... In verity France was no less militarist or absolutist than Germany, nor was England less avid than either. And the proof is enshrined in the peace treaties which have masked the results of their respective victories. Versailles is a Brest-Litovsk, aggravated in the same proportion as the victory of the Entente over Germany, is more complete than was that of Germany over Russia. Cupidity does not alter its character, even when it seeks to conceal itself under a Phrugian cap rather than wear a helmet."[348]

M. Clemenceau's opening utterance about the twelve million men, and the unlimited right which such formidable armies confer on their possessors to sit in judgment on the tribes and peoples of the planet, was the true keynote to the Conference. After that the leading statesmen trimmed their ship, touched the rudder, and sailed toward downright absolutism.

The effect of such utterances and acts on the minds of the peoples are distinctly mischievous. For they tend to obliterate the sense of public right, which is the main foundation of international intercourse among progressive nations.

And already it had been shaken and weakened by the campaigns of the past fifty years, and in particular by the last war. In the relations of nation to nation there were certain principles—derivatives of ethics diluted with maxims of expediency—which kept the various governments from too flagrant breaches of faith. These checks were the only substitute for morality in politics. Their highest power was connoted by the word Europeanism, which stood for a supposed feeling of solidarity among all the peoples of the old Continent, and for a certain respect for the treaties on which the state-system reposed. But it existed mainly among defeated nations when apprehensive of being isolated or chastised by their victors. None the less, the idea marked a certain advance toward an ethical bond of union.

Now this embryonic sense, together with respect for the binding force of a nation's plighted troth, were numbered by the demoralizing influence of the wars of the last fifty years. And one of the first and peremptory needs of the world was their restoration. This could be effected only by bringing the peoples, not merely of Europe, but of the world, more closely together, by engrafting on them a feeling of close solidarity, and impressing them with the necessity of making common cause in the one struggle worth their while waging—resistance to the forces that militate against human welfare and progress. The feeling was widespread that the way to effect this was by some form of internationalism, by the broadening, deepening, and quickening all that was implied by Europeanism, by co-ordinating the collective energies of all progressive peoples, and causing them to converge toward a common and worthy goal. For the working classes this conception in a restricted form had long possessed a commanding attraction. What they aimed at, however, was no more than the catholicity of labor. They fancied that after the passage of the tidal wave of destructiveness the ground was cleared of most of the obstacles which had encumbered it, and that the forward advance might begin forthwith.

What they failed to take sufficiently into account was the vis inertiæ, the survival of the old spirit among the ruling orders whose members continued to live and move in the atmosphere of use and wont, and the spirit of hate and bitterness infused into all the political classes, to dispel which was a herculean task. It was exclusively to the leaders of those classes that Mr. Wilson confided the realization of the abstract idea of a society of nations, which he may at first have pictured to himself as a vast family conscious of common interests, bent on moral and material self-betterment, and willing to eschew such partial advantages as might hinder or retard the general progress. But, judging by his attitude and his action, he had no real acquaintance with the materials out of which it must be fashioned, no notion of the difficulties to be met, and no staying power to encounter and surmount them. And his first move entailed the failure of the scheme.

As a matter of fact, Mr. Wilson came to the Conference with a home-made charter for the Society of Nations, which, according to the evidence of Mr. Lansing, "was never pressed." The State Secretary added that "the present league Covenant is superior to the American plan." And as for the Fourteen Points, "They were not even discussed at the Conference."[349] Suspecting as much, I wrote at the time:[350] "The President has pinned himself down to no concrete scheme whatever. His method is electric, choosing what is helpful and beneficent in the projects of others, and endeavoring to obtain from the dissentients a renunciation of ideas belonging to the old national currents and adherence to the doctrines he deems salutary. It is, however, already clear that the highest ideal now attainable is not a league of nations as the masses understand it, which will abolish wars and likewise put an end to the costly preparations for them, but only a coalition of victorious nations, which may hope, by dint of economic inducements and deterrents, to draw the enemy peoples into its camp in the not too distant future. This result would fall very short of the expectations aroused by the far-resonant promises made at the outset; but even it will be unattainable without an international compact binding all the members of the coalition to make war simultaneously upon the nation or group of nations which ventures to break the peace. I am disposed to believe that nothing less than such an express covenant will be regarded by the continental Powers of the Entente as an adequate substitute for certain territorial readjustments which they otherwise consider essential to secure them from sudden attack.

"Whether such a condition would prevent future wars is a question that only experience can answer. Personally, I am profoundly convinced, with Mr. Taft, that a genuine league of nations must have teeth in the guise of supernational, not international, forces. In these remarks I make abstraction from the larger question which wholly absorbs this—namely, whether the masses for whose behoof the lavish expenditure of time, energy, and ingenuity is undertaken, will accept a coalition of victorious governments against unregenerate peoples as a substitute for the Society of Nations as at first conceived."

The supposed object of the League was the substitution of right for force, by debarring each individual state from employing violence against any of the others, and by the use of arbitration as a means of settling disputes. This entails the suppression of the right to declare war and to prepare for it, and, as a corollary, a system of deterrents to hinder, and of penalties to punish rebellion on the part of a community. That in those cases where the law is set at naught efficacious means should be available to enforce it will hardly be denied; but whether economic pressure would suffice in all cases is doubtful. To me it seems that without a supernational army, under the direct orders of the League, it might under conceivable circumstances become impossible to uphold the decisions of the tribunal, and that, on the other hand, the coexistence of such a military force with national armaments would condemn the undertaking to failure.

An analysis of the Covenant lies beyond the limits of my task, but it may not be amiss to point out a few of its inherent defects. One of the principal organs of the League will be the Assembly and the Council. The former, a very numerous and mainly political body, will necessarily be out of touch with the peoples, their needs and their aspirations. It will meet at most three or four times a year. And its members alone will be invested with all the power, which they will be chary of delegating. On the other hand, the Council, consisting at first of nine members, will meet at least once a year. The members of both bodies will presumably be appointed by the governments,[351] who will certainly not renounce their sovereignty in a matter that concerns them so closely. Such a system may be wise and conducive to the highest aims, but it can hardly be termed democratic. The military Powers who command twelve million soldiers will possess a majority in the Council.[352] The Secretariat alone will be permanent, and will naturally be appointed by the Great Powers.

Instead of abolishing war, the Conference described its abolition as beyond the power of man to compass. Disarmament, which was to have been one of its main achievements, is eliminated from the Covenant. As the war that was to have been the last will admittedly be followed by others, the delegates of the Great Powers worked conscientiously, as behooved patriotic statesmen, to obtain in advance all possible advantages for their respective countries by way of preparing for it. The new order, which in theory reposes upon right, justice, and moral fellowship, in reality depends upon powerful armies and navies. France must remain under arms, seeing that she has to keep watch on the Rhine. Britain and the United States are to go on building warships and aircraft, besides training their youth for the coming Armageddon. The article of the Covenant which lays it down that "the members of the League recognize that the maintenance of peace requires the reduction of national armaments to the lowest point consistent with national safety,"[353] is, to use a Russian simile, written on water with a fork. Britain, France, and the United States are already agreed that they will combine to repel unprovoked aggression on the part of Germany. That evidently signifies that they will hold themselves in readiness to fight, and will therefore make due preparation. This arrangement is a substitute for a supernational army, as though prevention were not better than cure; that it will prove efficacious in the long run very few believe. One clear-visioned Frenchman writes: "The inefficacy of the organization aimed at by the Conference constrains France to live in continual and increasing insecurity, owing to the falling off of her population."[354] He adds: "It follows from this abortive expedient—if it is to remain definitive—that each member-state must protect itself, or come to terms with the more powerful ones, as in the past. Consequently we are in presence of the maintenance of militarism and the régime of armaments."[355] This writer goes farther and accuses Mr. Wilson of having played into the hands of Britain. "President Wilson," he affirms, "has more or less sacrificed to the English government the society of nations and the question of armaments, that of the colonies and that of the freedom of the seas...."[356] This, however, is an over-statement. It was not for the sake of Britain that the American statesman gave up so much; it was for the sake of saving something of the Covenant. It was in the spirit of Sir Boyle Roche, whose attachment to the British Constitution was such that, to save a part of it, he was willing to sacrifice the whole.