But the world to-day, five years after the war, suffering from the consequences of the failure to establish peace at Paris in 1919, is not greatly interested in the host of reasons given for the failure. Nor does the world care enough about the title to fame of any of the actors in the great tragedy to seek to build up a case for or against the European statesmen and their American colleague. What we want to know is just what happened at Paris, without appraising the individual measure of blame. The facts give us all we want just now to help us in solving our present problem. We need only an objective account of the work of the conference, without going into details, without criticizing, without attempting to explain.
The proceedings began informally when the Italians arrived in Paris on January 9 and held a preliminary conference with the French and the Americans. The British arrived on the eleventh, and on January 12 a preliminary session was held at the Quai d’Orsay, in which France proposed that only the representatives of the five great powers should attend all the meetings of the conference, and that the minor states should be represented only when questions immediately affecting them were to be discussed. Among the minor states consideration should be given in allotting representation to the amount of force exerted in the defeat of Germany. After some discussion the basis of representation outlined in the previous chapter was decided upon.
The first plenary session of the conference took place on Saturday, January 18, the day having been especially chosen by the French Government. It was the anniversary of the formal proclamation of the German Empire at Versailles in 1870. President Poincaré declared the conference opened, and M. Clemenceau was elected president on the motion of Mr. Wilson, seconded by Mr. Lloyd George. M. Clemenceau said: “The program of this conference has been laid down by President Wilson. There is no question of territorial or continental peace. The peace we have to make is a peace of peoples. No mere words are required. That program stands upon its own feet. Let us work quickly and well.” With these words the session was closed, the question of the League of Nations having been placed on the agenda for the second sitting.
On January 22, at a meeting of the Supreme War Council, President Wilson proposed that an invitation be sent to all warring factions in Russia to meet at Prinkipo, in the Sea of Marmora, to talk peace and to come into touch with the Paris Conference. The invitation was actually issued, and some of the powers named delegates to meet the Russians at Prinkipo. The factions opposed to the Bolshevists refused to agree to a truce, however, and in this they were heartily supported by the French press. It was the first open criticism of President Wilson.
The American President still dominated the conference at the second plenary session on January 25, when he moved the resolution that would establish a commission to draw up a charter for “a League of Nations created to promote international coöperation.” The second clause in the resolution read: “This League should be treated as an integral part of the general treaty of peace, and should be opened to every civilized nation which can be relied on to promote its objects.” Both parts of this clause proved to be the undoing of the league. At the very beginning it was seen that Mr. Wilson was being manœuvered into a position where he would agree to have the league made an instrument for the enforcement of the treaty. From this group of states Germany and Russia could be indefinitely excluded on the ground that they were not to be “relied on to promote its objects.”
At the second plenary session, on the heels of the passage of the resolution establishing a League of Nations, came an outburst from the minor states that influenced radically the entire work of the conference. M. Hymans of Belgium protested that the organization of the conference put the real power—all the power—in the hands of the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy, and Japan. He demanded representation for Belgium on all the commissions. The delegates of Brazil, Canada, Jugoslavia, Greece, Portugal, Czechoslovakia, and Poland followed with similar protests and demands. Was the world going to be ruled by five powers, which, because of their size, assumed the right to dictate to all the other nations? Had not the war been fought to refute the Prussian belief that might went before right?
M. Clemenceau would allow no debate. He pointed out that the five great powers had won the war. It was their privilege to make the peace. They could have done so without reference to the smaller states. But they had graciously called these smaller states into consultation. The great powers did not purpose to consult the smaller states except in matters in which they were directly interested. Thus was notice served upon the world that nineteenth-century principles of international diplomacy had been adopted for the Paris conference. The peace treaties were going to embody the results of bargains secretly arrived at among the great powers by compromising their own national interests. The smaller states were to be used as pawns in the old game. The program of President Wilson, which M. Clemenceau had said was to be that of the conference, was made impossible of fulfilment by the way the conference was organized.2
The minor states understood the significance of M. Clemenceau’s answer to their protest. M. Clemenceau made it clear that there were to be no “open covenants, openly arrived at”; and his pronouncement was an invitation to the statesmen of minor countries to engage in separate negotiations with the delegates of the great powers, offering a quid pro quo for the big fellow’s support of their interests.
Let us take for example the case of M. Hymans of Belgium and M. Dmowski of Poland. M. Clemenceau was on the friendliest terms with these two men, but they thought they could do better for their country if the interests of Belgium and Poland were advanced and maintained in conference with the delegates of all the powers. But the French Foreign Office had decided that Belgium and Poland were necessary allies for France. Therefore, they were not to treat directly with the powers as a whole. France was to become their spokesman and defender in the inner council. This is what went on throughout the conference in regard to the interests of all the minor states. They were encouraged, or rather forced, by their very exclusion from the council table, to engage in intrigues to advance their interests. After the second plenary session Paris could not help becoming a typical nineteenth-century conference of the great powers.
On the various commissions in which the new map of Europe was being decided upon, the rival claims of the small states were upheld or opposed by the representatives of the Entente Powers not on the merits of the matter in hand but in accordance with orders issued by the respective Governments to their delegates. What these orders were depended upon the tractability of the smaller states in direct and secret negotiations with the foreign offices of the Entente Powers. On the commissions, only the American members, having no interests at stake, were acting judicially; all the others were acting politically. And, where smaller states were represented on the commissions, their votes were frequently influenced by threats and bribes. Questions like the Teschen dispute between Czechoslovakia and Poland, the Banat dispute between Jugoslavia and Rumania, and the Hellenistic ambitions of Greece were highly profitable for this purpose.
Mr. Wilson thought that the regulations, by which the minor states were excluded, had been adopted to make possible a practicable working committee; and he found reasonable, as did every one, M. Clemenceau’s argument that, as the great powers had won the war and would have to be responsible for the enforcement of peace, they must keep in their hands the final decisions. But Mr. Wilson did not know how the game was being played. Few of his colleagues suspected what was going on until the conference entered its fourth month. When Mr. Wilson presided at the sessions of the Commission on the League of Nations and found provision after provision being changed and modified, little did he suspect that the opposition he encountered on the part of some of the members of the commission was due not to conviction but to deals that had been made regarding questions that had nothing to do with the League.
On February 14 the League of Nations Covenant was submitted to a conference at a plenary session, President Wilson reading the text and commenting upon the clauses as he proceeded. The emasculation of the original idea and the alteration of the original drafts had occurred in the committee meetings. So the comment was perfunctory. It was the impression of observers that the plenary session had been convoked, just as had the others before it, as a matter of form. It was “throwing the dog a bone.” I found that many of the delegates felt the same way. One, a man of great power and influence in his own country, said to me as we were leaving the Quai d’Orsay: “I do not know why I should feel