The Consecration of the Principle of the Right of the Victors in a War to Confiscate the Private Property of the Vanquished. It is impossible to deny that the Treaty of Versailles infringes upon the age-old principle of the sanctity of private property. A study of its reparations and economic clauses reveals that the greatest damage done to the world during the riot of ungoverned passions at Paris was the attack made in the treaty upon the fundamental bases of society. The Treaty of Versailles assumes the dangerous doctrine that the state is all-powerful and has the right to dispose of the property of its citizens, and that a government can not only levy taxes on capital and property of a confiscatory character but is able to give a clear title to the confiscation by others of its subjects’ property.
I am sure that I have not exaggerated, or stated unfairly or extremely, this feature of the Treaty of Versailles. During the last five years I have had the opinion of a dozen international lawyers, French and British and American, who are agreed that this feature of the Treaty of Versailles, if applied, would lead to departures in existing notions of property and the rôle of the state so startling as to be subversive of the existing social order. The boomerang is evident. If Germany has a right to confiscate or assent to the confiscation of private property for the purposes of reparation, if the assent and carte blanche of the German Government to confiscation by the Allies gives a valid title, if taxes on capital can be levied by the German Government—all this without ruining industry in Germany—why are not these measures legal and practicable against private property and capital in other countries?
The heart of the Treaty of Versailles lay in its reparations clauses. A Reparations Commission was created, which, like the armies of occupation, was to be maintained at the expense of Germany. Not until May, 1921, was it to decide upon the amount Germany owed and could pay. The commission was given sweeping powers over Germany’s finances, internal and external. It would fix the amounts in money and kind of German reparations deliveries. Against the amounts fixed the German Government had no appeal. If it did not do as the Reparations Commission ordered, the commission had the power, by a majority vote, to declare Germany in default on reparations. Then the treaty provided that the victors could take what measures they decided upon to penalize Germany for the default and to collect their claims. Since no appeal or arbitration was provided for, the Treaty of Versailles gave no protection to the debtor against the rapacity and vindictiveness of the creditors. Sums due were not agreed upon by mutual consent; they were fixed by the victors. There was no protection in the treaty against possible abuse of this privilege, and no definition of the measures to be taken after default. The Treaty of Versailles thus put Germany at the absolute mercy of her conquerors, without appeal, legal or otherwise. By taking away the security of German territory, the treaty made impossible the revival of German prosperity and the fulfilment of the obligations of the treaty.
Last of all, the most curious feature of the treaty was its failure to provide the machinery for its enforcement. The Germans had been able during more than four years to withstand their enemies. And it is certain that the Entente powers could not have dictated a victors’ treaty without the coöperation of the United States. Germany signed the treaty because she was forced to do so. And, as it was a one-sided and humiliating treaty, giving the Germans no hope whatsoever for the future as an encouragement to fulfil its terms, the victors ought to have realized the necessity of providing, jointly, for the permanent maintenance of a huge standing army to keep the Germans in submission. A document of the nature of the Treaty of Versailles was worthless unless coercion, permanent coercion, was provided for. As events have proved, the assumption of the Paris peacemakers, i.e., that they would stick together, was wrong. What other result could be expected, then, from the Treaty of Versailles than that the Germans would obey the treaty only in so far as force was employed? The spirit of the treaty is not peace but war. The Germans were to be considered permanently as enemies. They were not to be allowed to become friends.
When you have an enemy, you do not have peace.
When you cannot count upon remaining friends with one another, and you are confronted with an unknown factor like Russia, you read over again the Treaty of Versailles and say to yourself: “If I ever believed that any good could come of it, I must have been of unbalanced judgment, owing to the passions of the moment. Certainly those who made the treaty were!”
CHAPTER V
THE FAILURE OF THE TREATY OF VERSAILLES TO WIN POPULAR APPROVAL
From the moment of its signature, the Treaty of Versailles had “a bad press” throughout the world. Ratification by the parliaments of most of the contracting nations seemed assured, but in no country did those who favored ratification support their case by any other argument than that of expediency. It was an inadequate treaty, disappointing along practical as well as idealistic lines, its supporters admitted; but what else was there to do than to make it, imperfect as it was, the foundation of peace? After all, the compromises among the Entente Powers left them with substantial gains; and Belgium and Poland were decidedly the winners. The weak features of the treaty could be remedied in later conferences. And yet, despite the reasonableness of this argument, to all nations that participated in the conference except Great Britain and China it was a problem, what attitude they should adopt toward the Treaty of Versailles.
China solved the problem by not accepting the treaty at all. Her delegates refused to sign the document that put millions of their fellow-citizens of the sacred and historic province of Shantung into the hands of Japan. At the command of the President of the United States, the American Minister to China had formally invited the Chinese to participate in the World War for the triumph of certain definite principles which had been clearly set forth in detail by the President, who said he spoke on behalf of the American people. Believing in President Wilson’s good faith, the Chinese came into the war. When they discovered that in the councils of the Big Four their confidence had been betrayed, they would have nothing to do with the Treaty of Versailles. In his spectacular trip west to defend the treaty, when it was before the Senate, President Wilson tried to explain away the Shantung arrangements. But he could not do it to the satisfaction of China.
The British Parliament ratified the treaty without debate. Naturally. For, like the Treaty of Vienna a hundred years earlier, it added greatly to Great Britain’s already overwhelming world power. The continental powers were weak and disrupted, incapable of threatening in the near future “the peace of the world” as Downing Street understands that term; that is, of contesting with the mistress of the seas extra-European markets and intercontinental carrying-trade. German naval power was destroyed. German colonial and commercial ambitions had received a serious setback. Russia was no longer a menace to British supremacy in Asia. The Treaty of Versailles established new safeguards to India by recognizing the British protectorate over Egypt, by ignoring the plea of Persia to be a signatory or at least a beneficiary of the treaty, by making no provision for the future of Asiatic and Transcaucasian Russia, and by giving international sanction to British secret treaties, no matter what unknown provisions those treaties might contain. It made Great Britain the dominant power in Africa. It accepted the right of the British cabinet to speak, and sign, for the 300,000,000 inhabitants of India. Above all, it provided that the United States should underwrite the aggrandized British Empire, with a self-governing population of only 60,000,000, by entering a League of Nations in which the British were to have six votes and the United States, with its self-governing population of 100,000,000, one vote. It was not until later that British