In the House of Commons on May 9, 1923, Mr. Edward Wood, a member of the Bonar Law Cabinet, who presided over the meeting of the Council of the League in April, 1923, told how the Council had virtually washed its hands of the Saar. The Commission consisted of a French president, with four assistants, a Belgian, a Dane with a French name, a Canadian, and a representative of the Saar population. The Canadian sided with the local representative in trying to prevent the oppression of the people, who were being ruled in a way that provoked them to appeal for redress to the Council. The President of the Commission had explained to the Council that the decrees, adopted by the majority of the Commission, were “not illegal” and were justified on the ground that they were adopted “to meet exceptional circumstances.” It developed in the debate that one of the decrees imposed penalties of imprisonment and fine for certain “crimes,” without hearing or trial or resort to appeal. Among the “crimes” was casting discredit on the Treaty of Versailles. The inhabitants of the Saar are not allowed to discuss publicly the régime that governs them or their future. Sir John Simon told the Commons that this measure was a “most astounding abuse of legislative power,” and Mr. Asquith called it a “monstrous and ridiculous decree” for the like of which “one might ransack the annals of despotism in the worst days of Russia’s oppression of Finland without finding a more monstrous specimen of despotic legislation or one more suppressive of the elementary rights of free citizenship.” Lord Robert Cecil, just back from his American tour in favor of the League of Nations, declared that the action was worthy of militarism at its worst, and that he had always had grave doubts of the wisdom of making the League responsible for the Saar régime.
The cession of Malmédy and Eupen to Belgium was clearly against the wishes of the inhabitants of those regions. During the peace negotiations I visited these places, and I visited them afterward, just as I did the Saar. The people told me that they were Germans and wanted to remain Germans. They were not given the opportunity, any more than the people of the Saar were, to vote upon their detachment from Germany. The treaty provided for registers at Malmédy and Eupen, in which, within a fixed time, any inhabitant of these regions could write down his desire to return to German sovereignty. The defenders of the treaty, by virtue of this curious provision, declared that the people had a chance to decide. Did they? Any one who dared to sign those registers was expelled and his property confiscated. After two or three examples of this sort, nothing more was done. It was like the right of our negroes to vote in the South. In these cases I have the facts, names, dates, and particulars of each instance.
The plebiscite for Upper Silesia contained a joker that was afterward invoked, when the decision went against Poland, by reason of which the Entente Powers were at liberty to disregard the vote if it seemed best to do so. No opportunity was given to the inhabitants of the Polish corridor, separating East and West Prussia, to vote on their own destinies. Mr. Lloyd George had secured a modification of the original draft, by which plebiscites were allowed for the Marienwerder and Allenstein regions. Although the commission on Polish frontiers at the Paris Conference had recommended the detachment of these regions from Germany, declaring that they were “predominantly Polish,” they voted 98 per cent and 95 per cent respectively to remain with Germany, and this under Allied military occupation and supervision! There is little doubt that if a fair plebiscite had been held everywhere, as had been promised, there would have been no corridor, and Poland would have received a much more limited frontier in Posen than she got. I was in Kattowitz, in Upper Silesia, when that city, despite its vote for Germany was allotted to Poland. A prominent citizen told me: “You have created another open sore, which will be healed only by a new war.”
If the Paris Conference was actuated by the desire to secure the fulfilment of the ideals for which we fought, rather than the triumph of the principle that might makes right, in taking away Trieste and Fiume from Austria and Hungary, these ideals were violated by taking away Danzig and Memel from Germany. I have found no apologist for the Treaty of Versailles who, when confronted with the deadly parallel here, has not admitted that different weights and different measures were applied in these cases. There is no more striking proof than Danzig and Memel, as opposed to Trieste and Fiume, of the judgment passed upon the Treaty of Versailles by Mr. Ray Stannard Baker in his recent defense of President Wilson, that the treaty was a piece of hasty patchwork, imposed at the point of a bayonet, whose terms were simply and solely due to the national interests of the victors.
In the provisions of the treaty relating to countries other than Germany, the principle of self-determination was ignored in regard to China, Morocco, and Egypt. The Chinese arguments about Shantung were not answered. The Egyptians sent a delegation, representing their National Assembly, to protest against the recognition of the British protectorate. But they were not given a hearing, and this provision, although there had been wide-spread riots in Egypt against the British military occupation, was put into the treaty.
The Elimination of Germany from Cultural and Economic Participation in the Development of the World. For more than a hundred years before the World War, the European nations had come to realize that their prosperity depended upon contacts with the extra-European world. These contacts they had established at the cost of great sacrifices, through colonial wars, wars with one another, and the gradual building up of investments, banks, shipping, and trading companies in all parts of the world. Because of her later unification and slower industrial development, Germany was a late comer in world politics. She struggled under great handicaps in finding a large part of the world already preëmpted when she began to look for colonies, coaling-stations, and fields for investment and economic development. But her progress in the few decades preceding the World War had been marvelous, and her whole economic structure was built, like that of England, upon foreign trade. Her population had gone beyond the number that could be sustained by home markets.
The greatest blow to Germany in the Treaty of Versailles was the ban it placed upon her contacts with the outside world. She was compelled to give up her colonies; to renounce her commercial treaties and concessions in every country in the world except a few South American countries that had not declared war upon her; and to surrender everything that she had built up in the way of import and export markets, by the confiscation of her shipping, foreign investments, banking and commercial establishments, concessions, privileges, etc. The aim of the treaty was to eliminate Germany as a competitor in world markets, and to make it impossible for German capital to accomplish anything in the future in Africa and Asia. Germany was called upon, also, to renounce her treaties and private concessions, her loans, and everything else that she had acquired in her relations with her former allies. Her nationals were barred from Turkey, from former German colonies, and from French and British protectorates in Africa and Asia. Her mission work in foreign countries was to be given up entirely and not renewed. Her missionaries, Catholic and Protestant, were never again to return to their field. Provisions were inserted in the treaty by which the victors had the right to bar German newspapers and magazines and books, as well as German goods, without reciprocity. Some one at Paris—I forget which of the outstanding figures it was—said that in the Treaty of Versailles we had reverted to the law of the jungle. The papal nuncio, Monsignor Ceretti, told me that the devil at his worst could hardly have conceived so thorough a destruction of the soul of mankind.
In connection with the various clauses throughout the treaty, which, in their ensemble, cut Germany off from the rest of the world and make her a pariah for ever among nations, an interesting dilemma faces those who hope to profit by the treaty. If they are able to enforce its provisions, do they still expect to have large reparations from a Germany bound hand and foot in the matter of her foreign trade, while enjoying the advantages in their