Part 45

M. Gauvain writes: "One may put the question, why respect for the Sabbath is so peremptorily imposed when Sunday is ignored among several of the Allied Powers. In France Christians are not dispensed from appearing on Sundays before the assize courts. Besides, Poland is further obliged not to order or authorize elections on a Saturday. What precautions these are in favor of the Jewish religion as compared with the legislation of many Allied states which have no such ordinances in favor of Catholicism! Is the same procedure to be adopted toward the Moslems? Shall we behold the famous Mussulmans of India, so opportunely drawn from the shade by Mr. Montagu, demanding the insertion of clauses to protect Islam? Will the Zionists impose their dogmas in Palestine? Is the life of a nation to be suspended two, three, or four days a week in order that religious laws may be observed? Catholicism has adapted itself in practice to laic legislation and to the exigencies of modern life. It may well seem that Judaism in Poland could do likewise. In Rumania, the Jews met with no obstacle to the exercise of their religion. Indeed, they had contrived in the localities to the north of Moldavia, where they formed a majority, to impose their own customs on the rest of the population. Jewish guardians of toll-bridges are known to have barred the passage of these bridges on Saturdays, because, on the one hand, their religion forbade them to accept money on that day, and, on the other hand, they could allow no one to pass without paying. The Big Four might have given their attention to matters more useful or more pressing than enforcing respect for the Sabbath.

"It is comprehensible that M. Bratiano should have refused to accept in advance the conditions which the Four or the Five may dictate in favor of ethnic and religious minorities. Rumania before the war was a free country governed congruously with the most modern principles. The restrictions which she had enacted respecting foreigners in general, and which were on the point of being repealed, did not exceed those which the United States and the Dominion of Australia still apply with remarkable tenacity. Why should the Cabinets of London and Washington take so much to heart the lot of ethnic and religious minorities in certain European countries while they themselves refuse to admit in the Covenant of the Society of Nations the principle of the equality of races? Their conduct is awakening among the states 'whose interests are limited' the belief that they are the victims of an arbitrary policy. And that is not without danger."

Another eminent Frenchman, M. Denis Cochin, who until quite recently was a Cabinet Minister, wrote: "The Conference, by imposing laws in favor of minorities, has uselessly and unjustly offended our allies. These laws oblige them to respect the usages of the Jews, to maintain schools for them.... I have spent a large part of my career in demanding for French Catholics exactly that which the Conference imposes elsewhere. The Catholics pay taxes in money and taxes in blood. And yet there is no budget for those schools in which their religion is taught; no liberty for those schoolmasters who wear the ecclesiastical habit. I have seen a doctor in letters, fellow of the university, driven from his class because he was a Marist brother and did not choose to repudiate the vocation of his youth. He died of grief. I have seen young priests, after the long, laborious preparation necessary before they could take part in the competition for a university fellowship, thrust aside at the last moment and debarred from the competition because they wore the garb of priests. Yet a year later they were soldiers. I have seen Father Schell presented unanimously by the Institute and the Professional Corps as worthy to receive a chair at the Collège de France, and refused by the Minister. Yet I hereby affirm that if foreigners, even though they were allies, even friends, were to meddle with imposing on us the abrogation of these iniquitous laws, my protest would be uplifted against them, together with that of M. Combes. I would exclaim, like Sganarelle's wife, 'And what if I wish to be beaten?' I hold tyranny in horror, but I hold foreign intervention in greater horror still. Let us combat bad laws with all our strength, but among ourselves."

The minority treaties tend to transform each of the states on which it is imposed into a miniature Balkans, to keep Europe in continuous turmoil and hinder the growth of the new and creative ideas from which alone one could expect that union of collective energy with individual freedom which is essential to peace and progress. Modern history affords no more striking example of the force of abstract bias over the teachings of experience than this amateur legislation which is scattering seeds of mischief and conflict throughout Europe.

* * * * *

Casting a final glance at the results of the Conference, it would be ungracious not to welcome as a precious boon the destruction of Prussian militarism, a consummation which we owe to the heroism of the armies rather than to the sagacity of the lawgivers in Paris. The restoration of a Polish state and the creation or extension of the other free communities at the expense of the Central Empires are also most welcome changes, which, however, ought never to have been marred by the disruptive wedge of the minority legislation. Again, although the League is a mill whose sails uselessly revolve, because it has no corn to grind, the mere fact that the necessity of internationalism was solemnly proclaimed as the central idea of the new ordering, and that an effort, however feeble, was put forth to realize it in the shape of a covenant of social and moral fellowship, marks an advance from which there can be no retrogression.

Actuality was thereby imparted to the idea, which is destined to remain in the forefront of contemporary politics until the peoples themselves embody it in viable institutions. What the delegates failed to realize is the truth that a program of a league is not a league.

On the debit side much might be added to what has already been said. The important fact to bear in mind--which in itself calls for neither praise nor blame--is that the world-parliament was at bottom an Anglo-Saxon assembly whose language, political conceptions, self-esteem, and disregard of everything foreign were essentially English. When speaking, the faces of the principal delegates were turned toward the future, and when acting they looked toward the past. As a thoroughly English press organ, when alluding to the League of Nations, puts it: "We have done homage to that entrancing ideal by spatchcocking the Convention into the Treaty. There it remains as a finger-post to point the way to a new heaven on earth. But we observe that the Treaty itself is a good old eighteenth-century piece, drawing its inspiration from mundane and practical considerations, and paying a good deal more than lip service to the principle of the balance of power."

That is a fair estimate of the work achieved by the delegates. But they sinned in their way of doing it. If they had deliberately and professedly aimed at these results, and had led the world to look for none other, most of the criticisms to which they have rendered themselves open would be pointless. But they raised hopes which they refused to realize, they weakened if they did not destroy faith in public treaties, they intensified distrust and race hatred throughout the world, they poured strong dissolvents upon every state on the European Continent, and they stirred up fierce passions in Russia, and then left that ill-starred nation a prey to unprecedented anarchy. In a word, they gathered up all the widely scattered explosives of imperialism, nationalism, and internationalism, and, having added to their destructiveness, passed them on to the peoples of the world as represented by the League of Nations. Some of them deplored the mess in which they were leaving the nations, without, however, admitting the causal nexus between it and their own achievements.

General Smuts, before quitting Paris for South Africa, frankly admitted that the Peace Treaty will not give us the real peace which the peoples hoped for, and that peace-making would not begin until after the signing of the Treaty. The Echo de Paris wrote: "As for us, we never believed in the Society of Nations." And again: "The Society of Nations is now but a bladder, and nobody would venture to describe it as a lantern." The Bolshevist dictator Lenin termed it "an organization to loot the world."

The Allies themselves are at sixes and sevens. The French are suspicious of the British. A large section of the American people is profoundly dissatisfied with the part played by the English and the French at the Conference; Italy is stung to the quick by the treatment she received from France, Britain, and the United States; Rumania loathes the very names of those for whom she staked her all and sacrificed so much; in Poland and Belgium the English have lost the consideration which they enjoyed before the Conference; the Greeks are wroth with the American delegates; the majority of Russians literally execrate their ex-Allies and turn to the Germans and the Japanese.

"The resettlement of central Europe," writes an American journal, "is not being made for the tranquillity of the liberated principles, but for the purposes of the Great Powers, among whom France is the active, and America and Britain the passive, partners. In Germany its purpose is the permanent elimination of the German nation as a factor in European politics.... We cannot save Europe by playing the sinister game now being played. There is no peace, no order, no security in it.... What it can do is to aggravate the mischief and intensify the schisms."

A distinguished American, who is a consistent friend of England, in a review article affirmed that the proposed League of Nations is slowly undermining the Anglo-American Entente. "There is in America a growing sense of irritation that she should be forever entangled in the spider-web of European politics." ... And if the Senate in the supposed interests of peace should ratify the League, he adds, "In my judgment no greater harm could result to Anglo-American unity than such reluctant consent."

Some of Mr. Wilson's fellow-countrymen who gave him their whole-hearted support when he undertook to establish a régime of right and justice sum up the result of his labors in Paris as follows:

"His solemn warning against special alliances emerged as a special alliance with Britain and France. His repeated condemnations of secret treaties emerges as a recognition that 'they could not honorably be brushed aside,' even though they conflicted with equally binding public engagements entered into after they had been written. Openly arrived at covenants were not openly arrived at. The removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers was applied to German barriers, and accompanied by the blockade of a people with whom we have never been at war. The adequate guaranties to be given and taken as respects armaments were taken from Germany and given to no one. The 'unhampered and unembarrassed opportunity for the independent determination of her own political development' promised to Russia, and defined as the 'acid test,' has been worked out by Mr. Wilson and others to a point where so cautious a man as Mr. Asquith says he regards it with 'bewilderment and apprehension.' The righting of the wrong done in 1871 emerges as a concealed annexation of the boundary of 1814. The 'clearly recognizable lines of nationality' which Italy was to obtain has been wheedled into annexations which have moved Viscount Bryce to denounce them. 'The freest opportunity of autonomous development' promised the peoples of Austria-Hungary failed to define the Austrians as peoples...."

Whatever the tests one applies to the work of the Conference--ethical, social, or political--they reveal it as a factor eminently calculated to sap high interests, to weaken the moral nerve of the present generation, to fan the flames of national and racial hatred, to dig an abyss between the classes and the masses, and to throw open the sluice-gates to the inrush of the waves of anarchist internationalities. Truth, justice, equity, and liberty have been twisted and pressed into the service of economico-political boards. In the United States the people who prided themselves on their aloofness are already fighting over European interests. In Europe every nation's hand is raised against its neighbors, and every people's hand against its ruling class. Every government is making its policy subservient to the needs of the future war which is universally looked upon as an unavoidable outcome of the Versailles peace. Imperialism and militarism are striking roots in soil where they were hitherto unknown. In a word, Prussianism, instead of being destroyed, has been openly adopted by its ostensible enemies, and the huge sacrifices offered up by the heroic armies of the foremost nations are being misused to give one half of the world just cause to rise up against the other half.

THE END

FOOTNOTES:

A contemporary of Goethe. His works were republished by Herzog in the year 1907.

The Daily Telegraph, January 28, 1919.

The Daily Telegraph, January 31, 1919.

The Daily Mail (Paris edition), February 13, 1919.

State-Secretary Hay addressed a note to the Powers in September, 1899, setting forth America's attitude toward China. It is known as the doctrine of the "open door." In a subsequent note (July 3, 1900) he enlarged its scope and promulgated the integrity of China. But Russia ignored it and flew her flag over the Chinese customs in Newchwang. It was Japan who, on that occasion, asserted and enforced the doctrine without outside help.

General March intimated, when testifying before the House Military Committee, that President Wilson approved of universal training, indorsing the War Department's army program.--New York Herald (Paris edition).

Bulletin des Droits de l'Homme, No. 10, May 15, 1919.

Journal Officiel, November 21, 1917.

Le Populaire, February 10, 1919.

La Stampa, June 11, 1919. Cf. L'Humanité, June 13, 1919.