Part 14

On April 27th.

Bonsoir, June 21, 1919.

The New York Herald, May 15. 1919.

The New York Herald (Paris edition), May 3,1919.

The New York Herald, June 6, 1919.

Cf. Le Matin, July 9, 1919. The chief speakers alluded to were MM. Renaudel, Deshayes, Lafont, Paul Meunier, Vandame.

The New York Herald (Paris edition), April 29, 1919.

Quoted in the Paris Temps of March 28,1919.

This explanation deals exclusively with the first advance of the Rumanian army into Hungary.

Cabled to The Public Ledger of Philadelphia, April 20,1919.

Bonsoir, June 21, 1919.

Cf. The Daily News, July 5,1919. L'Humanité, July 8, 1919.

Cf. The New York Herald (Paris edition), April 4, 1919.

The Chicago Tribune (Paris edition), July 31, 1919.

AIMS AND METHODS

The policy of the Anglo-Saxon plenipotentiaries was never put into words. For that reason it has to be judged by their acts, despite the circumstance that these were determined by motives which varied greatly at different times, and so far as one can conjecture were not often practical corollaries of fundamental principles. From these acts one may draw a few conclusions which will enable us to reconstruct such policy as there was. One is that none of the sacrifices imposed upon the members of the League of Nations was obligatory on the Anglo-Saxon peoples. These were beyond the reach of all the new canons which might clash with their interests or run counter to their aspirations. They were the givers and administrators of the saving law rather than its observers. Consequently they were free to hold all that was theirs, however doubtful their title; nay, they were besought to accept a good deal more under the mandatory system, which was molded on their own methods of governance. It was especially taken for granted that the architects would be called to contribute naught to the new structure but their ideas, and that they need renounce none of their possessions, however shady its origin, however galling to the population its retention. It was in deference to this implicit doctrine that President Wilson withdrew without protest or discussion his demand for the freedom of the seas, on which he had been wont to lay such stress.

Another way of putting the matter is this. The principal aim of the Conference was to create conditions favorable to the progress of civilization on new lines. And the seed-bearers of true, as distinguished from spurious, civilization and culture being the Anglo-Saxons, it is the realization of their broad conceptions, the furtherance of their beneficent strivings, that are most conducive to that ulterior aim. The men of this race in the widest sense of the term are, therefore, so to say, independent ends in themselves, whereas the other peoples are to be utilized as means. Hence the difference of treatment meted out to the two categories. In the latter were implicitly included Italy and Russia. Unquestionably the influence of Anglo-Saxondom is eminently beneficial. It tends to bring the rights and the dignity as well as the duties of humanity into broad day. The farther it extends by natural growth, therefore, the better for the human race. The Anglo-Saxon mode of administering colonies, for instance, is exemplary, and for this reason was deemed worthy to receive the hall-mark of the Conference as one of the institutions of the future League. But even benefits may be transformed into evils if imposed by force.

That, in brief, would seem to be the clue--one can hardly speak of any systematic conception--to the unordered improvisations and incongruous decisions of the Conference.

I am not now concerned to discuss whether this unformulated maxim, which had strong roots that may not always have reached the realm of consciousness, calls for approval as an instrument of ethico-political progress or connotes an impoverishment of the aims originally propounded by Mr. Wilson. Excellent reasons may be assigned why the two English-speaking statesmen proceeded without deliberation on these lines and no other. The matter might have been raised to a higher plane, but for that the delegates were not prepared. All that one need retain at present is the orientation of the Supreme Council, inasmuch as it imparts a sort of relative unity to seemingly heterogeneous acts. Thus, although the conditions of the Peace Treaty in many respects ran directly counter to the provisions of the Covenant, none the less the ultimate tendency of both was to converge in a distant point, which, when clearly discerned, will turn out to be the moral guidance of the world by Anglo-Saxondom as represented at any rate in the incipient stage by both its branches. Thus the discussions among the members of the Conference were in last analysis not contests about mere abstractions. Beneath the high-sounding principles and far-resonant reforms which were propounded but not realized lurked concrete racial strivings which a patriotic temper and robust faith might easily identify with the highest interests of humanity.

When the future historian defines, as he probably will, the main result of the Conference's labors as a tendency to place the spiritual and political direction of the world in the hands of the Anglo-Saxon race, it is essential to a correct view of things that he should not regard this trend as the outcome of a deliberate concerted policy. It was anything but this. Nobody who conversed with the statesmen before and during the Conference could detect any sure tokens of such ultimate aims, nor, indeed, of a thorough understanding of the lesser problems to be settled. Circumstance led, and the statesmen followed. The historian may term the process drift, and the humanitarian regret that such momentous issues should ever have been submitted to a body of uninformed politicians out of touch with the people for whose behoof they claimed to be legislating. To liquidate the war should have been the first, as it was the most urgent, task. But it was complicated, adjourned, and finally botched by interweaving it with a mutilated scheme for the complete readjustment of the politico-social forces of the planet. The result was a tangled skein of problems, most of them still unsolved, and some insoluble by governments alone. Out of the confusion of clashing forces towered aloft the two dominant Powers who command the economic resources of the world, and whose democratic institutions and internal ordering are unquestionably more conducive to the large humanitarian end than those of any other, and gradually their overlordship of the world began to assert itself. But this tendency was not the outcome of deliberate endeavor. Each representative of those vast states was solicitous in the first place about the future of his own country, and then about the regeneration of the human race. One would like to be able to add that all were wholly inaccessible to the promptings of party interests and personal ambitions.

Planlessness naturally characterized the exertions of the Anglo-Saxon delegates from start to finish. It is a racial trait. Their hosts, who were experts in the traditions of diplomacy, had before the opening of the Conference prepared a plan for their behoof, which at the lowest estimate would have connoted a vast improvement on their own desultory way of proceeding. The French proposed to distribute all the preparatory work among eighteen commissions, leaving to the chief plenipotentiaries the requisite time to arrange preliminaries and become acquainted with the essential elements of the problems. But Messrs. Wilson and Lloyd George are said to have preferred their informal conversations, involving the loss of three and a half months, during which no results were reached in Paris, while turmoil, bloodshed, and hunger fed the smoldering fires of discontent throughout the World.

The British Premier, like his French colleague, was solicitous chiefly about making peace with the enemy and redeeming as far as possible his election pledges to his supporters. To that end everything else would appear to have been subordinated. To the ambitious project of a world reform he and M. Clemenceau gave what was currently construed as a nominal assent, but for a long time they had no inkling of Mr. Wilson's intention to interweave the peace conditions with the Covenant. So far, indeed, were they both from entertaining the notion that the two Premiers expressly denied--and allowed their denial to be circulated in the press--that the two documents were or could be made mutually interdependent. M. Pichon assured a group of journalists that no such intention was harbored. Mr. Lloyd George is understood to have gone farther and to have asked what degree of relevancy a Covenant for the members of the League could be supposed to possess to a treaty concluded with a nation which for the time being was denied admission to that sodality. And as we saw, he was incurious enough not to read the narrative of what had been done by his own American colleagues even after the Havas Agency announced it.

To President Wilson, on the other hand, the League was the magnum opus of his life. It was to be the crown of his political career, to mark the attainment of an end toward which all that was best in the human race had for centuries been consciously or unconsciously wending without moving perceptibly nearer. Instinctively he must have felt that the Laodicean support given to him by his colleagues would not carry him much farther and that their fervor would speedily evaporate once the Conference broke up and their own special aims were definitely achieved or missed. With the shrewdness of an experienced politician he grasped the fact that if he was ever to present his Covenant to the world clothed with the authority of the mightiest states, now was his opportunity. After the Conference it would be too late. And the only contrivance by which he could surely reckon on success was to insert the Covenant in the Peace Treaty and set before his colleagues an irresistible incentive for elaborating both at the same time.

He had an additional motive for these tactics in the attitude of a section of his own countrymen. Before starting for Paris he had, as we saw, made an appeal to the electorate to return to the legislature only candidates of his own party to the exclusion of Republicans, and the result fell out contrary to his expectations. Thereupon the oppositional elements increased in numbers and displayed a marked combative disposition. Even moderate Republicans complained in terms akin to those employed by ex-President Taft of Mr. Wilson's "partizan exclusion of Republicans in dealing with the highly important matter of settling the results of the war. He solicited a commission in which the Republicans had no representation and in which there were no prominent Americans of any real experience and leadership of public opinion."

The leaders of this opposition sharply watched the policy of the President at the Conference and made no secret of their resolve to utilize any serious slip as a handle for revising or rejecting the outcome of his labors. Seeing his cherished cause thus trembling in the scale, Mr. Wilson hit upon the expedient of linking the Covenant with the Peace Treaty and making of the two an inseparable whole. He announced this determination in a forcible speech to his own countrymen, in which he said, "When the Treaty comes back, gentlemen on this side will find the Covenant not only in it, but so many threads of the Treaty tied to the Covenant that you cannot dissect the Covenant from the Treaty without destroying the whole vital structure." This scheme was denounced by Mr. Wilson's opponents as a trick, but the historian will remember it as a maneuver, which, however blameless or meritorious its motive, was fraught with lamentable consequences for all the peoples for whose interests the President was sincerely solicitous. To take but one example. The misgivings generated by the Covenant delayed the ratification of the Peace Treaty by the United States Senate, in consequence of which the Turkish problem had to be postponed until the Washington government was authorized to accept or compelled to refuse a mandate for the Sultan's dominions, and in the meanwhile mass massacres of Greeks and Armenians were organized anew.

A large section of the press and the majority of the delegates strongly condemned the interpolation of the Covenant. What they demanded was first the conclusion of a solid peace and then the establishment of suitable international safeguards. For to be safeguarded, peace must first exist. "A suit of armor without the warrior inside is but a useless ornament," wrote one of the American journals.

But the course advocated by Mr. Wilson was open to another direct and telling objection. Peace between the belligerent adversaries was, in the circumstances, conceivable only on the old lines of strategic frontiers and military guaranties. The Supreme Council implied as much in its official reply to the criticisms offered by the Austrians to the conditions imposed on them, making the admission that Italy's new northern frontiers were determined by considerations of strategy. The plan for the governance of the world by a league of pacific peoples, on the other hand, postulated the abolition of war preparations, including strategic frontiers. Consequently the more satisfactory the Treaty the more unfavorable would be the outlook for the moral reconstitution of the family of nations, and vice versa. And to interlace the two would be to necessitate a compromise which would necessarily mar both.

In effect the split among the delegates respecting their aims and interests led to a tacit understanding among the leaders on the basis of give-and-take, the French and British acquiescing in Mr. Wilson's measures for working out his Covenant--the draft of which was contributed by the British--and the President, giving way to them on matters said to affect their countries' vital interests. How smoothly this method worked when great issues were not at stake may be inferred from the perfunctory way in which it was decided that the Kaiser's trial should take place in London. A few days before the Treaty was signed there was a pause in the proceedings of the Supreme Council during which the secretary was searching for a mislaid document. Mr. Lloyd George, looking up casually and without addressing any one in particular, remarked, "I suppose none of you has any objection to the Kaiser being tried in London?" M. Clemenceau shrugged his shoulders, Mr. Wilson raised his hand, and the matter was assumed to be settled. Nothing more was said or written on the subject. But when the news was announced, after the President's departure from France, it took the other American delegates by surprise and they disclaimed all knowledge of any such decision. On inquiry, however, they learned that the venue had in truth been fixed in this offhand way.