It is not too much to say that the main lines of the future treaty with Germany were settled by the verdict of the British election. Mr. Lloyd George and his associates, against their own better judgment and convictions, appealed to the passions and prejudices of the masses to secure a parliamentary majority. Since both Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Bonar Law have repeatedly repudiated by acts, speeches, and written statements their own policies and arguments advanced in December, 1918, there could be no doubt of the fairness and accuracy of this assertion.
On December 10 Mr. Lloyd George summed up the Coalition program in the following points of treaty policy: (1) trial of the Kaiser; (2) punishment of those responsible for atrocities; (3) fullest indemnities from Germany. Speaking at Bristol the next day Mr. Lloyd George, on the eve of the election, declared that “we propose to demand the whole cost of the war from Germany,” that this was “an absolute right,” and that a financial committee appointed by the British Cabinet believed that all the costs of the war could be extracted from Germany. After his triumphant return to power Mr. Lloyd George explained that the sole guilt and responsibility of Germany for the war was to be the basis of the peace treaty, and not Mr. Wilson’s principles. Nearly a year after the Treaty of Versailles was signed (in May, 1920) he repeated that the Treaty of Versailles was built upon the assumption of Germany’s sole guilt and had no other jurisdiction. The practicability of trying the Kaiser and of extracting from Germany the total expenses of the war was not questioned by responsible British statesmen of the Coalition party until long after the Treaty of Versailles had been made.
Italy’s entrance into the war in 1915 had been prompted by considerations of national self-interest, safeguarded in the secret Treaty of London, and recognized in the zones of occupation, provided for in the armistice of November 3, 1918, that had been the death-warrant of the Hapsburg Empire. But Italy was not satisfied with all that had been offered her to abandon her neutrality. The propaganda for the possession of Fiume and for rendering Greater Serbia innocuous, economically and militarily, had already assumed formidable proportions before the Peace Conference met. Italy did not consider that the pre-armistice agreement with Germany affected in any way her claims, which were signally at variance with President Wilson’s ideas. She had been in the war two years longer than the United States, and the Treaty of London constituted a sacred international obligation. Had not the Allies gone to war to fight for the sanctity of treaties? Similarly, Rumania’s intervention had been bought by definite promises of territorial expansion, set down in a treaty. Japan had no secret understanding with the other Entente Powers until 1917. But when the Japanese Government realized that the United States was going to become a belligerent, its diplomats at the Entente capitals secured a written agreement giving Japan full rights to be considered Germany’s heir in China.
In regard to the German colonies and Italy’s claims in the Tyrol and the Adriatic coastlands, the four Entente Powers had a better argument even than secret treaties to anticipate the decisions of the Peace Conference. They were in possession! Great Britain, France, and Japan had conquered Germany’s colonies and had ensconced themselves in them.
Nor was the future of the Ottoman Empire going to be decided by the Peace Conference in accordance with Mr. Wilson’s ideas. Great Britain and France had arranged their claims under the Sykes-Picot agreement in 1916, and Entente spheres of influence had been definitely outlined in 1915 and 1916. Great Britain had conquered Mesopotamia and Palestine, and she had annexed Cyprus and proclaimed a protectorate over Egypt (both of which countries she had occupied for forty years) at the outbreak of the war in 1914. France took possession of Syria and Cilicia immediately after the armistice with Turkey. The Entente Powers were in joint occupation of Constantinople. The British had gone into the Caucasus and Persia. A desultory war was being carried on against Soviet Russia, in which the United States had become involved. There were all sorts of agreements and understandings and intrigues in eastern Europe to prevent the formulation of a common policy toward Russia, which, as President Wilson put it, was to be “the acid test of our sincerity.”
The new states, Czechoslovakia and Poland, the aggrandized states, Rumania, Serbia, and Greece, and countries that had not been belligerents but expected the conference to decide their future, such as Egypt, Armenia, Persia, the Caucasus republics, Ukrainia, Lithuania, Latvia, Esthonia, and Finland, were not bound, before the conference, by special agreements with any of the great powers. They furnished the most hopeful field for the application of the Wilsonian principles. President Wilson, with his personally selected delegates, experts, and secretaries, arrived in Paris more than a month before the conference met. Mr. Wilson received an enthusiastic reception, which was repeated in England and Italy during the holiday season. His aides and advisers were men of great ability, who had prepared themselves in the minutest details for their task. The President did not lack well informed and well balanced collaborators. They organized their offices in such a way that the peace delegation had available not only the data compiled in America but also accurate information concerning conditions, as they developed during the conference, in Europe and the Near East.
But the principal asset of success was lacking. The United States had failed to make her coöperation in the war contingent upon the acceptance by her associates of certain facts and well defined principles. None of them was pledged to us. All of them were pledged to one another in ways that were going to make futile the work that President Wilson purposed to accomplish. The Peace Conference was not going to bring to us “the moral leadership of the world.” None cared for our leadership at the beginning; and during the conference, instead of President Wilson’s imposing his ideals upon the other statesmen, they imposed theirs upon him.
CHAPTER III
THE PEACE CONFERENCE AT PARIS
Books about the famous conference of 1919 have multiplied so rapidly that a man must have much space to shelve them all, and he can hope to do little else if he has decided to read them thoroughly, with what the critics have to say about them. For most of the cooks in the Paris broth, after spoiling it, were unable to control the impulse to tell the world why it was not their particular fault. Coming back to America after the conference, I began to collect material about it, documents, books, reports of speeches and debates, magazine articles, newspaper cuttings of reviews of books and of letters about books and about the criticisms of them. The material mounted alarmingly. And yet I kept on reading. The general impression that comes from trying to get every angle of criticism concerning the conference is not at all confused. On the contrary, it is clear. The Paris Peace Conference, in retrospect, has few defenders of its methods or its work. It is on record, convicted by those who participated in it, as one of the most tragic and monumental failures of history.
M. André Tardieu is the only writer of authority who believes that the conference was conducted along proper lines and achieved results inherently right and of a permanent nature. Against this virtually solitary voice, the British premier, who signed the Treaty of Versailles, and the Italian premier, who ordered his representatives to sign it, have clamored to be heard on the other side, repudiating, denouncing, ridiculing their own work. Other outstanding signatories, notably Secretary Lansing, of the United States; Mr. Barnes, of Great Britain; Minister of Justice Doherty, of Canada; General Smuts of South Africa; Minister of Justice Vandervelde, of Belgium; and Premier Bratiano of Rumania, have criticized the Paris settlement severely. General Smuts protested against the treaty at the time he signed it, and said later in the South African Parliament: “Frankly I did not think that the treaty, even in its modified form, conformed to our pre-armistice pledges.” Speaking for Mr. Wilson, Mr. Ray Stannard Baker summed up the failure of Paris in the statement that there was “no willingness to sacrifice anything, therefore no possibility of securing real and just settlements based on coöperation. And this did not apply only to France and Great Britain; it applied also to America.”
Most of the books written on the Peace Conference by those who had a part in it offer, for the difficulties in the way of settlement, explanations so elaborate and painstaking—and withal so true—that one feels the