Part 18

La Démocratie Nouvelle, May 30, 1919

See his admirable article in The New York Herald (Paris edition) of May 21, 1919, from which the following extract is worth quoting: "I have said that certain great forces have steadily and occultly worked for a German peace. But I mean, in fact, one force--an international finance to which all other forces hostile to the freedom of nations and of the individual soul are contributory. The influence of this finance had permeated the Conference, delaying the decisions as long as possible, increasing divisions between people and people, between class and class, between peace-makers and peace-makers, in order to achieve two definite ends, which two ends are one and the same.

"The first end was so to manipulate the minds of the peace-makers, of their hordes of retainers and 'experts,' as to bring about, if possible, a peace that would not be destructive to industrial Germany. The second end was so to delay the Russian question, so to complicate and thwart every proposed solution, that, at last, either during or after the Peace Conference, a recognition of the Bolshevist power as the de facto government of Russia would be the only possible solution."

"What confidence can be commanded by men who, asserting one week that the ultimate of human wisdom has been attained in a document, confess the next week that the document is frail? When are we to believe that their confessions are at an end?"--The Chicago Tribune (Paris edition), August 23, 1919.

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

M. Affonso Costa, who shortly before had succeeded the Minister of Foreign Affairs, M. Monas Egiz.

Dedeagatch.

See Rapports et Enquêtes de la Commission Interalliée sur les Violations du droit des gens commises en Macédoine Orientale par les armées bulgares. The conclusion of the report is one of the most terrible indictments ever drawn up by impartial investigators against what is practically a whole people.

Zora, August 11th. Cf. Le Temps, August 28, 1919.

Mr. Charles House published a statement in the press of Saloniki to the effect that the Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions forbids missionaries to take an active part in politics. He added that if this injunction was transgressed--and in Paris the current belief was that it had been--it would not be tolerated by the Missionary Board, nor recognized by the American government.

The Daily Mail (Paris edition), March 31, 1919.

The Daily Mail (Paris edition), April 6, 1919.

Somewhere between August 17 and 20, 1919. It was transmitted by Admiral Bristol, American member of the Inter-Allied Inquiry Mission at Smyrna.

Cf. L'Echo de Paris, August 28, 1919. Article by Pertinax.

L'Echo de Paris, August 28, 1919. Article by Pertinax.

THE LESSER STATES

Before the Anglo-Saxon statesmen thus set themselves to rearrange the complex of interests, forces, policies, nationalities, rights, and claims which constituted the politico-social world of 1919, they were expected to deal with all the Allied and Associated nations, without favor or prejudice, as members of one family. This expectation was not fulfilled. It may not have been warranted. From the various discussions and decisions of which we have knowledge, a number of delegates drew the inference that France was destined for obvious reasons to occupy the leading position in continental Europe, under the protection of Anglo-Saxondom; and that a privileged status was to be conferred on the Jews in eastern Europe and in Palestine, while the other states were to be in the leading-strings of the Four. This view was not lightly expressed, however inadequately it may prove to have been then supported by facts. As to the desirability of forming this rude hierarchy of states, the principal plenipotentiaries were said to have been in general agreement, although responding to different motives. There was but one discordant voice--that of France--who was opposed to the various limitations set to Poland's aggrandizement, and also to the clause placing the Jews under the direct protection of the League of Nations, and investing them with privileges in which the races among whom they reside are not allowed to participate. Bulgaria had a position unique in her class, for she was luckier than most of her peers in having enlisted on her side the American delegation and Mr. Wilson as leading counsel and special pleader for her claim to an outlet to the Ægean Sea.

At the Conference each state was dealt with according to its class. Entirely above the new law, as we saw, stood its creators, the Anglo-Saxons. To all the others, including the French, the Wilsonian doctrine was applied as fully as was compatible with its author's main object, the elaboration of an instrument which he could take back with him to the United States as the great world settlement. Within these limits the President was evidently most anxious to apply his Fourteen Points, but he kept well within these. Thus he would, perhaps, have been quite ready to insist on the abandonment by Britain of her supremacy on the seas, on a radical change in the international status of Egypt and Ireland, and much else, had these innovations been compatible with his own special object. But they were not. He was apparently minded to test the matter by announcing his resolve to moot the problem of the freedom of the seas, but when admonished by the British government that it would not even brook its mention, he at once gave it up and, presumably drawing the obvious inference from this downright refusal, applied it to the Irish, Egyptian, and other issues, which were forthwith eliminated from the category of open or international problems. But France's insistent demand, on the other hand, for the Rhine frontier met with an emphatic refusal.

The social reformer is disheartened by the one-sided and inexorable way in which maxims proclaimed to be of universal application were restricted to the second-class nations.

Russia's case abounds in illustrations of this arbitrary, unjust, and impolitic pressure. The Russians had been our allies. They had fought heroically at the time when the people of the United States were, according to their President, "too proud to fight." They were essential factors in the Allies' victory, and consequently entitled to the advantages and immunities enjoyed by the Western Powers. In no case ought they to have been placed on the same level as our enemies, and in lieu of recompense condemned to punishment. And yet this latter conception of their deserts was not wholly new. Soon after their defection, and when the Allies were plunged in the depths of despondency, a current of opinion made itself felt among certain sections of the Allied peoples tending to the conclusion of peace on the basis of compensations to Germany, to be supplied by the cession of Russian territory. This expedient was advocated by more than one statesman, and was making headway when fresh factors arose which bade fair to render it needless.

At the Paris Conference the spirit of this conception may still have survived and prompted much that was done and much that was left unattempted. Russia was under a cloud. If she was not classed as an enemy she was denied the consideration reserved for the Allies and the neutrals. Her integrity was a matter of indifference to her former friends; almost every people and nationality in the Russian state which asked for independence found a ready hearing at the Supreme Council. And some of them before they had lodged any such claim were encouraged to lose no time in asking for separation. In one case a large sum of money and a mission were sent to "create the independent state of the Ukraine," so impatient were peoples in the West to obtain a substitute for the Russian ally whom they had lost in the East, and great was their consternation when their protégés misspent the funds and made common cause with the Teutons.

Disorganized Russia was in some ways a godsend to the world's administrators in Paris. To the advocate of alliances, territorial equilibrium, and the old order of things it offered a facile means of acquiring new helpmates in the East by emancipating its various peoples in the name of right and justice. It held out to the capitalists who deplored the loss of their milliards a potential source whence part of that loss might be made good. To the zealots of the League of Nations it offered an unresisting body on which all the requisite operations from amputation to trepanning might be performed without the use of anesthetics.

The various border states of Russia were thus quietly lopped off without even the foreknowledge, much less the assent, of the patient, and without any pretense at plebiscites. Finland, Esthonia, Latvia, Georgia were severed from the chaotic Slav state offhandedly, and the warrant was the doctrine propounded by President Wilson--that every people shall be free to choose its own mode of living and working. Every people? Surely not, remarked unbiased onlookers. The Egyptians, the Irish, the Austrians, the Persians, to name but four among many, are disqualified for the exercise of these indefeasible rights. Perhaps with good reason? Then modify the doctrine. Why this difference of treatment? they queried. Is it not because the supreme judge knows full well that Great Britain would not brook the discussion of the Egyptian or the Irish problem, and that France, in order to feel quite secure, must hinder the Austrian-Germans from coalescing with their brethren of the Reich? But if Britain and France have the right to veto every self-denying measure that smacks of disruption or may involve a sacrifice, why is Russia bereft of it? If the principle involved be of any value at all, its application must be universal. To an equal all-round distribution of sacrifice the only alternative is the supremacy of force in the service of arbitrary rule. And to this force, accordingly, the Supreme Council had recourse. The only cases in which it seriously vindicated the rights of oppressed or dissatisfied peoples to self-determination against the will of the ruling race or nation were those in which that race or nation was powerless to resist. Whenever Britain or France's interests were deemed to be imperiled by the putting in force of any of the Fourteen Points, Mr. Wilson desisted from its application. Thus it came about that Russia was put on the same plane with Germany and received similar, in some respects, indeed, sterner, treatment. The Germans were at least permitted to file objections to the conditions imposed and to point out flaws in the arrangements drafted, and their representations sometimes achieved their end. It was otherwise with the Russians. They were never consulted. And when their representatives in Paris respectfully suggested that all such changes as might be decided upon by the Great Powers during their country's political disablement should be taken to be provisional and be referred for definite settlement to the future constituent assembly, the request was ignored.

Of psychological rather than political interest was Mr. Wilson's conscientious hesitation as to whether the nationalities which he was preparing to liberate were sufficiently advanced to be intrusted with self-government. As stated elsewhere, his first impulse would seem to have been to appoint mandatories to administer the territories severed from Russia. The mandatory arrangement under the ubiquitous League is said to have been his own. Presumably he afterward acquired the belief that the system might be wisely dispensed with in the case of some of Russia's border states, for they soon afterward received promises of independence and implicitly of protection against future encroachments by a resuscitated Russia.

In this connection a scene is worth reproducing which was enacted at the Peace Table before the system of administering certain territories by proxy was fully elaborated. At one of the sittings the delegates set themselves to determine what countries should be thus governed, and it was understood that the mandatory system was to be reserved for the German colonies and certain provinces of the Turkish Empire. But in the course of the conversation Mr. Wilson casually made use of the expression, "The German colonies, the territories of the Turkish Empire and other territories." One of the delegates promptly put the question, "What other territories?" to which the President replied, unhesitatingly, "Those of the late Russian Empire." Then he added by way of explanation: "We are constantly receiving petitions from peoples who lived hitherto under the scepter of the Tsars--Caucasians, Central Asiatic peoples, and others--who refuse to be ruled any longer by the Russians and yet are incapable of organizing viable independent states of their own. It is meet that the desires of these nations should be considered." At this the Czech delegate, Doctor Kramarcz, flared up and exclaimed: "Russia? Cut up Russia? But what about her integrity? Is that to be sacrificed?" But his words died away without evoking a response. "Was there no one," a Russian afterward asked, "to remind those representatives of the Great Powers of their righteous wrath with Germany when the Brest-Litovsk treaty was promulgated?"

Toward Italy, who, unlike Russia, was not treated as an enemy, but as relegated to the category of lesser states, the attitude of President Wilson was exceptionally firm and uncompromising. On the subject of Fiume and Dalmatia he refused to yield an inch. In vain the Italian delegation argued, appealed, and lowered its claims. Mr. Wilson was adamant. It is fair to admit that in no other way could he have contrived to get even a simulacrum of a League. Unless the weak states were awed into submitting to sacrifices for the great aim which he had made his own, he must return to Washington as the champion of a manifestly lost cause. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that his thesis was not destitute of arguments to support it. Accordingly the deadlock went on for months, until the Italian Cabinet fell and people wearied of the Adriatic problems.

Poland was another of the communities which had to bend before Anglo-Saxon will, represented in her case mainly by Mr. Lloyd George, not, however, without the somewhat tardy backing of his colleague from Washington. It is important for the historian and the political student to observe that as the British Premier was not credited with any profound or original ideas about the severing or soldering of east European territories, the authorship of the powerful and successful opposition to the allotting of Dantzig to Poland was rightly or wrongly ascribed not to him, but to what is euphemistically termed "international finance" lurking in the background, whose interest in Poland was obviously keen, and whose influence on the Supreme Council, although less obvious, was believed to be far-reaching. The same explanation was currently suggested for the fixed resolve of Mr. Lloyd George not to assign Upper Silesia to Poland without a plebiscite. His own account of the matter was that although the inhabitants were Polish--they are as two to one compared with the Germans--it was conceivable that they entertained leanings toward the Germans, and might therefore desire to throw in their lot with these. When one compares this scrupulous respect for the likes and dislikes of the inhabitants of that province with the curt refusal of the same men at first to give ear to the ardent desire of the Austrians to unite with the Germans, or to abide by a plebiscite of the inhabitants of Fiume or Teschen, one is bewildered. The British Premier's wish was opposed by the official body of experts appointed to report on the matter. Its members had no misgivings. The territory, they said, belonged of right to Poland, the great majority of its population was unquestionably Polish, and the practical conclusion was that it should be handed over to the Polish government as soon as feasible. Thereupon the staff of the commission was changed and new members were substituted for the old. But that was not enough. The British Premier still encountered such opposition among his foreign colleagues that it was only by dint of wordy warfare and stubbornness that he finally won his point.

The stipulation for which the first British delegate toiled thus laboriously was that within a fortnight after the ratification of the Treaty the German and Polish forces should evacuate the districts in which the plebiscite was to be held, that the Workmen's Councils there should be dissolved, and that the League of Nations should take over the government of the district so as to allow the population to give full expression to its will. But the League of Nations did not exist and could not be constituted for a considerable time. It was therefore decided that some temporary substitute for the League should be formed at once, and the Supreme Council decided that Inter-Allied troops should occupy the districts. That was the first instalment of the price to be paid for the British Premier's tenderness for plebiscites, which the expert commissions deprecated as unnecessary, and which, as events proved in this case, were harmful.