SOME PROBLEMS
OF THE
PEACE CONFERENCE

BY

CHARLES HOMER HASKINS

AND

ROBERT HOWARD LORD

CAMBRIDGE

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

1920

COPYRIGHT, 1920
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

TO
ARCHIBALD CARY COOLIDGE

PREFACE

The purpose of the lectures here published is to give a rapid survey of the principal elements in that territorial settlement of Europe which has been pronounced “the most reasonable part of the work of the Conference”[1] of Paris. Each problem is placed in its historical setting, while at the same time the effort is made to view it as something demanding practical solution in the treaties of peace. The perspective of proceedings as seen at Paris has been kept in mind throughout, although the authors have not felt at liberty to enter into the details of negotiations which may have become known to them in their official capacity. Limits of time and space restrict the treatment to Europe, and to those parts of Europe which came before the Conference for settlement. Hence Russia is necessarily omitted.

The lectures are printed substantially as delivered at the Lowell Institute last January, with only incidental revision. In the spelling of place names the official local usage has been followed except where there is a well established English form.

The first four chapters were prepared by Mr. Haskins, the last four by Mr. Lord.

Where material has been gathered from such a variety of sources, detailed acknowledgment is impossible. The bibliographical notes at the end of the several chapters are meant merely to indicate the more obvious references for readers who may wish to follow out particular topics. The authors desire to express their indebtedness to their colleagues on the ‘Inquiry’ and the territorial section of the American Commission to Negotiate Peace, and their appreciation of many courtesies from the experts of the Allied delegations. They are under special obligations to the hospitality of the American Geographical Society and its Director, Dr. Isaiah Bowman. Mr. George W. Robinson has made valuable suggestions in correcting the proof sheets. While grateful for assistance from many sources, each of the authors bears sole responsibility for the opinions he has here expressed.

C. H. H.
R. H. L.

Cambridge, May 1920.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Charles Seignobos, in The New Europe, March 25, 1920.

CONTENTS

MAPS

SOME PROBLEMS
OF THE
PEACE CONFERENCE

I
TASKS AND METHODS OF THE CONFERENCE

Great peace conferences are proverbially slow bodies. The negotiators of Münster and Osnabrück spent five years in elaborating the treaty of Westphalia; the conferences of Paris and Vienna labored a year and a half at undoing the work of Napoleon. Judged by these standards, the Peace Conference of 1919 was an expeditious body. It began its sessions January 18 and adjourned December 9. It submitted the treaty with Germany, including the covenant of the League of Nations, May 7; the treaty with Austria June 2 and July 20; the treaty with Bulgaria September 19; the treaty with Hungary in November. In the early summer it prepared various treaties with Roumania and the new states of eastern Europe. The heaviest part of its work was done in less than six months, before the departure of President Wilson on June 28.

Judged by its output in a given time, the Conference must also be pronounced a businesslike and efficient body. Whereas the treaty of Vienna covers some seventy pages of print, and the related conventions perhaps a hundred and fifty pages more, the published works of the Paris Conference fill several volumes. The treaties which it drew up were long and detailed, each of the major treaties running to a couple of hundred pages and comprising some hundreds of articles and annexes—territorial, political, financial, economic, naval, and military—besides the provisions respecting labor and the League of Nations which are common to all.

The Conference of Paris was likewise a laborious body. The gaiety of the Congress of Vienna has become proverbial. “The Congress does not march,” said the Prince de Ligne, “it dances.” “Everybody dances save Talleyrand, who has a club foot. He plays whist.” It is probable, as recent historians of the Vienna assemblage have pointed out, that “the unending series of balls, dinners, reviews, and fêtes did not greatly hinder the work of those whose industry was important.”[2] Nevertheless the presence of a crowd of kings and princes and great ladies—the Prince de Ligne wore out his hat taking it off at every turn—gave the Congress of Vienna an air of splendor and gaiety which was conspicuously lacking at Paris. There were no kings at the Paris Conference, indeed there were few kings left anywhere in Europe by January 1919. There were no balls, no great festivities. If the Conference did not always advance, at least it did not dance. The Marne was too near for that, in space as well as in time. Armageddon was just past. The Germans had barely missed marching up the Champs-Elysées and under the Arc de Triomphe. The American delegates were within an hour’s ride of Château-Thierry and Belleau Wood, where their countrymen had, only a few months before, done “the things that can’t be done.” Two hours would take them to the heart of the devastated region, refugees from which still filled Paris. The regiments of poilus that marched by with steady stride had looked into the mouth of hell, and their eyes showed it. The Paris which Castlereagh had found “a bad place for business” in 1814 was a better place for business in 1919. The world wanted peace, and it wanted it soon.

It was also a hungry world. Pliny tells of a fabled people of the East so narrow-mouthed that they lived by the smell of roast meat. Even that gladsome and satisfying odor had long since disappeared from the nostrils of a great part of Europe, and the mouths had not shrunk. “If they have no bread, let them eat cake,” a great lady had said at the time of the French Revolution. The cake had gone with the bread. “The wolf,” said Mr. Hoover, “is at the door of the world.” More than once the Peace Conference had to turn from other matters to feed the peoples whose frontiers it was drawing, to deal earnestly and under pressure with problems of blockade and rationing, of transportation by land and sea.

Back of hunger lay anarchy. Great states were on the verge of dissolution, and it was doubtful who, if anyone, could sign the treaty on their behalf. There were times when the Conference had also to interrupt its labors to consider the chaos into which the world seemed to be drifting. The day after the Bolshevist revolution in Hungary one of the sanest of American journalists remarked, “In the race between peace and anarchy, anarchy seems today to be ahead.”

No peace congress had ever confronted so colossal a task. The assembly at Paris met to end a world war, then in its fifth year, which had destroyed 9,000,000 lives and untold billions of property, and left the world staggering under a crushing burden of debt and destruction. It had in the first instance to liquidate the affairs of three bankrupt empires, the German, the Austro-Hungarian, and the Turkish. The peoples which they had held in unwilling subjection were to be set free, and either attached to the neighboring peoples from which they had once been torn, or established firmly as independent and self-governing states. “As Lord Bryce had predicted, the most knotty disputes which faced the Conference were ‘nearly all problems that involve the claims of peoples dissatisfied with their present rulers and seeking either independence or union with some kindred race.’” Several thousand miles of new boundaries had to be drawn, marking new frontiers, and if possible these frontiers must be just and lasting. Provision must be made for restoring the lands laid waste by war and reëstablishing the normal commercial and industrial life of the warring countries. Those responsible for the war must pay, and they must be punished. Finally, if possible, effective measures must be taken to prevent the recurrence of a similar war, whether brought about by Germany’s lust of conquest or by any other state. If war could not be prevented, it must at least be rendered more difficult and more abhorrent to the common moral sense of mankind.

Far beyond the more immediate and necessary tasks of the Conference rose the dreams of those who looked for the dawning of a new age of peace and justice, a new social and economic era. The downtrodden and the oppressed looked toward Paris. Visions of peace were confused with visions of the millennium. “We were told,” said a Scotch mill-worker, later in the winter, “that the peace would bring in the New Jerusalem. We want some of that New Jerusalem.” The day President Wilson sailed for Brest, a worker at the Twenty-third Street Ferry, speaking for the early crowd hurrying to their long hours in New York sweatshops, pointed to Hoboken and said, “There goes the man who is going to change all this for us.” Beautiful, extravagant, heart-breaking hopes were centred on the Conference at Paris, most of all on the leader of the American delegation and his programme. And such hopes were in large measure inevitably doomed to disappointment. The congress could not create a new heaven and a new earth; it could at best only make some short advance on the road thither and show the way along which further advance lay. Renan tells of a devout soul, who, seeing so much evil about him, was periodically afflicted with doubts concerning the goodness of an all-powerful God. “Perhaps,” his parish priest would answer, “you have too high an idea of God and what he can do.” “It was an old world,” writes Mommsen of the age which just preceded the Christian era, “and even Caesar could not make it young again.”

A just peace, a durable peace, if possible a quick peace, could these ends be secured? The task was one which called for compromise and adjustment, it called also for organization. There is said to have been a plan for quick preliminaries which should end the state of war, followed by the leisurely and expert working out of details. If such a course had been possible, it would probably have been the best. Germany would have accepted terms in January at which she howled in June, while the Allied peoples might thus have avoided the long agony of doubt and postponement which delayed the resumption of normal activities and the rehabilitation of the devastated regions. The world that was malleable after the armistice soon grew cold and hard. It is, however, a matter for serious question whether an agreement upon such preliminaries was possible. The problems were too varied and intricate, the conflict of interests too acute, the new ideas too new, to admit of even provisional adjustment in a few weeks. The Conference seemed long, too long, to the outside world which waited. If it did not dance, like the Congress of Vienna, neither did it always seem to march, like the Congress of Berlin, which had a cut-and-dried programme. At times it was undoubtedly too slow; at times certain special problems, like Fiume, consumed energy altogether out of proportion to their importance; yet the Conference made steady and on the whole rapid progress. It was a hard-working body, and its scanty time was well spent.

It will be many years before the history of the Peace Conference can be written. Its work was too vast and too varied; its records are too scattered and too inaccessible, many of them still unwritten. We are still too near for a true perspective. For some time we must be content with fragmentary, partial, provisional, journalistic accounts, and we do well to keep to the main lines of unmistakable fact. The most obvious results of the work of the Conference, though not necessarily the most permanent results, are its territorial decisions, the readjustment of boundaries and sovereignties, the calling of new states into being. These, so far as they go, are clear and definite. They can be expressed on a map, their origin and occasion can be traced, their nature explained. It is these, the territorial results of the Conference, with their consequences and implications, which form the subject of this volume. The treatment is further limited to Europe, omitting the problems of Asia, Africa, and the isles of the Pacific.

There are those who maintain that the territorial results are unstable and hence relatively unimportant, liable to speedy readjustment in a fluid state of international relations, subordinated in ever increasing degree to economic and social influences which transcend national boundaries. All this the future must determine. For the present the decisive fact for many millions of Europeans is that they are on one side or another of a political frontier, members or not of the state to which their natural allegiance gravitates; and this is a matter of specific boundary. One may deplore the rivalries over small bits of territory, which acquire a factitious significance in the course of the dispute, but they cannot be ignored. The possession of land is still a passion of peoples, and even of what our census calls ‘minor civil divisions,’ and the history of individual ownership shows that such passions do not grow less with the growth of other interests. So long as states continue to exercise authority within definitely recognized frontiers, the establishing of their territorial limits must remain a fundamental problem of international relations. If an illustration of the meaning of frontiers is desired nearer home, one has only to look at the two sides of the Rio Grande.

Reduced to their lowest terms, the elements which enter into a national boundary are two, the land and the people; and an ideally perfect frontier would be at the same time geographic and ethnographic. Such coincidences are, however, relatively rare, and the problem varies from age to age as different geographical considerations change in relative importance and as the human elements of race, language, and nationality develop, shift, and grow more complex.

Thus a glance at the map of Europe shows that certain frontiers apparently have been drawn by nature, while others are clearly the work of man. The Spanish peninsula, Italy, the British Isles, and the Scandinavian lands are set apart from the mass of the Continent by broad boundaries of sea or mountain which have come to form permanent political frontiers. On the other hand no such obvious natural obstacles separate France from Germany, Germany from Russia, Belgium from Holland, Austria from its neighbors, Serbia from Bulgaria. So far as the boundaries have been drawn by geographic forces, the forces are less obvious; if they have been drawn by the course of history, this requires explanation and elucidation. It so happened that the Paris congress had to do, not with the outlying regions where the physical and the political maps generally coincide, but with those lands of central and eastern Europe where the adjustment is most complicated. We shall understand its work more clearly if we pause to analyze briefly this problem of frontiers.

Of the geographical elements which go to form frontiers, the most obvious, after the sea, is constituted by mountains. The Pyrenees are a perfect example of a natural frontier which is also an actual frontier, and so in a lesser degree are the Alps and the Carpathians. Mountains inevitably divide, turning peoples different ways, in spite of modern means of communication, and they have always been valued as military barriers. Rivers, on the contrary, although they have military value, unite rather than divide, so that we need not be surprised if we find no important instances of a river frontier in present-day Europe, save along the Danube and where the Rhine separates Alsace and Baden. Most frontiers are neither mountain ranges nor rivers, yet they are often adjusted to lesser features of topography, with reference either to defence or to means of communication. Communication notably, with the growth of modern systems of transportation, bears an intimate relation to boundary problems. Access to the sea, either directly or by neutralized or internationalized rivers, has become a prime necessity for most states, and occupied the Conference especially in the cases of Poland and Czecho-Slovakia. Even railroad lines, especially where they monopolize natural routes, have their place in frontier adjustments, as in Carinthia or between East and West Prussia.

Another geographical element, essentially modern in its significance, is found in natural resources. This has never been wholly absent from boundary problems, at least in its early form of fertile or less fertile land, but it has taken on a preponderant importance with the growth of modern industrialism. Each state has been anxious to bring within its limits supplies of mineral resources, and especially of that foundation of modern industry, coal. Now it so happens that some of the most important deposits of coal and mineral wealth lie on or near disputed frontiers. The coal of Upper Silesia, Teschen, Limburg, and the Saar, the iron of Briey and annexed Lorraine, the potash of Upper Alsace, the mercury mines of Carniola, are all cases in point. Prussia was affected by such considerations in drawing the frontiers of 1815 and 1871; other countries had learned the lesson by 1919.

The human elements in frontier-making are still more complex than the geographical. Obviously we have to do not with individuals but with groups, and with those larger groups which have acquired a full measure of what the sociologists call ‘consciousness of kind,’ to the point of constituting some kind of national unity or national organization. We speak of the self-determination of peoples, but what is a people? Is it created by race or language or political allegiance, or only by that more subtle compound which we call nationality? How large must a people be to have a right to stand alone? Can it stand alone without certain economic and even military prerequisites? How far can we go in breaking up states in order to give effect to self-determination?

Such general principles might have a very wide application. Formulated with special reference to the Central Powers, self-determination was seized upon by men who had a case to urge in any part of the world—in Ireland, in Egypt, in the Philippines. A German map of last spring even represented Hawaii, St. Thomas, Florida, and Texas as trying to escape from their unwilling subjection to the United States[3]—a curious evidence that German mentality had not changed since the notorious Zimmermann note of 1917. More than once it was necessary to point out that the function of the Paris Conference was not to do abstract justice in every corner of the earth, but to make peace with Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey. Many causes perhaps excellent in themselves were not the business of the Conference.

Even within the self-imposed limits of the Conference, there were difficulties. “Self-determination,” President Wilson had said, “is not a mere phrase, it is an imperative principle of action.” But President Wilson had also said that self-government cannot be given but must be earned; that “liberty is the privilege of maturity, of self-control,” that “some peoples may have it, therefore, and others may not.”[4] However just and admirable self-determination might be, it could be fully applied only to peoples who had some experience in self-government and thus some means of political self-expression. For this reason it was not applicable to the downtrodden natives of the German colonies. And even among self-governing peoples there are practical limitations. Self-determination may be only another name for secession, and we fought the Civil War to prevent that; we have been none too successful in securing the subsequent self-determination of the negroes in the southern states. Sometimes a people may be too small to stand alone, and sometimes, as in parts of the Balkans and Asia Minor, the mixture of peoples may defy separation. In western Asia, notably, national aspirations have outrun the social organization.

Wherever you apply it, self-determination runs against minorities. Ireland has its Ulster, Bohemia its Germans, Poland its Germans and Lithuanians. There are minorities along every frontier. Some one remarked that there was need of a fifteenth point, the rights of minorities. The Conference found this out, and upon the newly established states of eastern Europe were imposed special treaties safeguarding the rights of minority peoples—Jews, Germans, Russians, etc.—whom past experience had shown to need such guarantees.

Of these human elements in frontier-making we may begin by eliminating race, for in Europe race is a matter of no importance in drawing national lines. This point is emphasized, here and later, because there has been a great deal of loose talk about race, notably on the part of German writers. So far as it is an exact term at all, race is a physical fact, dependent upon certain elements of stature, color, and shape of the skull which occur and are transmitted in certain fixed combinations or racial types. There are three such types in Europe, the Teutonic, the Alpine, and the Mediterranean, most prevalent respectively in northern, central, and southern Europe. But in no country do they appear in pure or unmixed form. Migration and conquest have intermingled them to such an extent as to leave no sharp racial frontiers and to make the people of every country a mixture of two or three races. Thus the central or Alpine type is widely prevalent in the south and west of Germany, and the Teutonic type in the north and east of France. Furthermore these physical types are quite without political significance—no one cares whether his neighbors are tall or short, blonde or brunette, round-headed or long-headed. So far as Europe is concerned, all talk of race has to be eliminated from serious international discussion.

Language, on the other hand, is a matter of prime importance. Speech is a fundamental element in creating consciousness of kind: the man in the street knows whether he can understand the speech of his neighbor, and has always had opprobrious epithets for those who speak an alien tongue, from the ‘barbarians’ of the Greeks and the ‘Welsh’ of the Teutonic Middle Ages to the ‘dagoes’ and ‘gringoes’ and ‘wops’ of current parlance. Even differences of dialect engender similar terms, as when the people of the Right Bank are called Schwob in Alsace and the Alsatians are stigmatized as Wacke by those beyond the Rhine.

Still, language has its pitfalls as a guide to national lines of cleavage. To begin with, while in the country districts it is singularly persistent, it can also be learned and unlearned by a new generation, especially when the resources of universal education are wielded by the compulsive power of the modern state. The German schoolmaster has labored to reduce the area of Danish in Schleswig and of French in Alsace-Lorraine. The Russians have checked German in the Baltic provinces. In the British Isles Celtic speech is far less widespread than Celtic blood. Moreover, if the government cannot always drive out minority languages, it can at least make its own language statistics. It is easy for the census-taker to impose on the weak or ignorant, to interpret all doubtful cases in one direction, to adopt definitions which fall on one side. The statistics of Polish-speaking districts in Prussia and of Italian-speaking elements in Austria-Hungary are well known examples.

Again, language statistics, even when trustworthy, do not necessarily yield a sharp dividing line. There may be more than two significant elements in the population, or, as in parts of the Balkans and Asia Minor, villages of different speech may be interspersed in a checkerboard fashion.

Finally, language, even when accurately ascertained, is not a certain test of political affiliation. There has been a strong pro-French tradition among the German-speaking Alsatians. The small German-speaking districts of Belgium are not pro-German.

After all, it is the opinion of the people concerned which we wish to ascertain with respect to a given frontier, and language is important chiefly as a guide to that. Unequivocal expressions of popular opinion are, however, hard to reach, especially in times of stress and in regions that are under dispute. At best a plebiscite may be but a poor indication of real opinion, and the opinion it registers well may be only transitory. Moreover, caution may be required in giving effect to a vote or an otherwise well ascertained expression of opinion. Thus it is open to debate whether the vote of a small district should necessarily carry with it the disposal of a great key deposit of mineral wealth which concerns a much wider constituency. It is also possible that in the long run commercial intercourse and economic interest may create ties more lasting than language or national sentiment, and that a given boundary may do more ultimate harm by violating the fundamental economic interests of a region than by violating its momentary political sentiments.

Again, the political sentiment of the moment may run counter to strong historic forces, as in Bohemia, where the considerable German element has been settled for centuries, so that its incorporation with adjacent German-speaking countries would tear apart the historic unity of the Czech state. Indeed, it is a nice question how far it was the task of the Peace Conference to right ancient territorial wrongs. “The wrong done to France by Prussia in 1871 in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine” was a clear case for rectification, if only because, in President Wilson’s phrase, it had “unsettled the peace of the world for nearly fifty years.” Much the same could be said for the restoration of North Schleswig, seized by Prussia in 1864, and even for Poland, though its destruction dates back to the eighteenth century. On the other hand, more recent acts of injustice, such as the Prussian annexations of 1814, the Conference left untouched, except on the Belgian frontier, evidently considering them as internal German questions which time had adjusted. Some notion of prescription had evidently to be admitted, else in seeking to right ancient wrongs the Conference would have done a greater wrong by introducing confusion into every part of the world. The only noteworthy attempt to reach far back into history would be the restoration of the Jews to Palestine, now inhabited by a preponderantly Mohammedan and Christian population. Here, as in many parts of eastern Europe, religion becomes an important element in national cleavage.

In general, the Paris Conference was disposed to give more weight to the principle of nationality, in its broader historic sense, than to economic or strategic considerations. This idea of nationality runs through the programme of President Wilson, which the members of the Conference had accepted in advance. It is, of course, easier to set peoples free from their rulers than from economic necessity, and the creation of new political frontiers undoubtedly complicates questions of trade and commercial policy. Nevertheless, it is a curious inconsistency that some who are most eager to find discrepancies between the programme of the Conference and its achievements should at the same time propose to destroy the economic and political independence of the newly liberated peoples of central Europe and the Balkans by imposing on them a compulsory customs union after the manner of Germany’s Mitteleuropa.[5]

Finally, the nature of the frontiers to be drawn at Paris depended on the kind of world for which they were to be made. If Europe was to continue to be an armed camp, divided between two competing systems of alliances, then the strongest possible military frontiers would be required—along the Rhine and the Danube, in the Alps and in the Balkans—, and the strategic element must preponderate in every boundary. If, on the other hand, some better form of international organization could be found through a League of Nations, however rudimentary, strategic considerations could drop into the background in favor of the economic convenience and the political desires of the people concerned. If colonial rivalries were to be reduced in the interest of world peace, the German colonies ought to be subjected to some international control, and they could not be internationalized without creating some international authority. An international control of ports and rivers might affect the whole problem of access to the sea, while areas of special tension or perplexity, like Danzig or the Saar valley, might be placed under some form of international administration such as commissions of the League of Nations. This explains why the problem of the League could not be postponed until after the conclusion of peace, but formed an integral part of the negotiations and of the treaty itself. At every turn the problem of the League of Nations obtruded itself, and the elaboration of the plan for a League facilitated, instead of hindering, the work of the Conference.

In addition to the fundamental principle of self-determination expressed in President Wilson’s speeches, Germany and the Allies had accepted his specific Fourteen Points as the basis of the negotiations. This immensely simplified the task of the Conference in certain directions, and gave a firm ground for discussion wherever these applied; but much was required in the way of interpretation, extension, supplementing, and application before the two pages of the Fourteen Points could grow into the two hundred pages of the treaty with Germany and the correspondingly long texts of the other treaties. The Fourteen Points did not cover the whole field, and even where they were clearly and directly applicable, much knowledge and much negotiation were required to put them into effect.

The Congress of Vienna had its Statistical Commission, one of the most successful parts of the Congress, which collected the statistical data for parcelling out peoples among the various princes. It was limited, however, to statistics of population, the counting of heads being the only basis there admitted in the balancing of territorial adjustments. The Paris Conference needed a far larger and more varied body of knowledge, not only because it covered every part of the world, but because its declared principles necessitated information of every sort respecting the history, traditions, aspirations, ethnology, government, resources, and economic conditions of the peoples with which it was to deal.

Information the Conference had in huge quantities, literally by the ton. It came in every day in scores of foreign newspapers, in masses of pamphlets, in piles of diplomatic reports and despatches. Every special interest was on hand, eager to present its case orally to the Conference or its commissions, to enlighten personally the commissioners or their subordinates, to hand in endless volumes of more or less trustworthy ethnographical maps and statistics, of pictures and description, of propagandist matter of every conceivable sort. A steady head, a critical judgment, and a considerable background of fact were required to keep one’s vision clear amidst this mass of confusing and conflicting material.

The collecting and sifting of such information for the Conference had begun years before. The French, systematic as always, had appointed governmental commissions, economic, military, geographic, and had also a special university committee with Professor Lavisse as chairman, the Comité d’Etudes, which prepared two admirable volumes, with detailed maps, on the European problems of the conference. The British had printed two considerable series of Handbooks, one got out by the Naval Intelligence Division under the guidance of Professor W. McNeil Dixon of Glasgow, the other prepared in the Historical Section of the Foreign Office under the editorship of Sir George Prothero. The United States had put little into print, but more than a year before the armistice, by direction of the President, Colonel Edward M. House had organized a comprehensive investigation, known as the ‘Inquiry,’ with its headquarters at the building of the American Geographical Society in New York City, whose secretary, Dr. Isaiah Bowman, served as executive officer. It enlisted throughout the country the services of a large number of geographers, historians, economists, statisticians, ethnologists, and students of government and international law; and carloads of maps, statistics, manuscript reports, and fundamental books of reference accompanied the American Commission to Paris. The specialists who went along or were later brought together were organized into a group of economic advisers—Messrs. Baruch, Davis, Lamont, McCormick, Taussig, Young, and their staffs—; two technical advisers in international law—Messrs. David Hunter Miller and James Brown Scott—with their assistants; and a section of territorial and political intelligence.

Peace conferences are always represented as sitting around green tables, and this pleasant fiction is perpetuated with reference to Paris in the widely circulated advertisement of a well known fountain pen. Now the Paris Conference never sat around a table. It is true that for certain formal sessions of the whole Conference there was arranged a long table lining three sides of the principal room in the French Foreign Office on the Quai d’Orsay, and that the delegates could be packed in here twice as close as nature meant them to sit. But there were very few formal meetings of this sort, and they could not by any stretch of the imagination be thought of as round-table conferences, if indeed as conferences at all. Certain leaders delivered prepared speeches, and rarely did lesser lights venture to break the prearranged course of the proceedings.

It was early apparent that the Conference could not profitably meet and do business as a whole. Twenty-seven different states were represented, besides the five British dominions. There were seventy authorized delegates. Such a body would have become a debating society; it would still be in session, its labors scarcely begun. Some guiding or steering executive committee was obviously required, and it was early found in the delegates of the five chief Powers: America, England, France, Italy, and Japan.

The five Great Powers themselves had thirty-four delegates, and it was plain that this also was too large a body for doing ordinary business. So there was early organized a Committee or Council of Ten, each state having two members, ordinarily the chief delegate and the foreign secretary; and this became the active agency of the Conference. It had a secretariat; and expert advisers, civil or military, attended as they were needed. If a military matter came up, Marshal Foch would be on hand, member of the Conference in his capacity of Commander-in-Chief, with his curving shoulders, fine face, and clear eye. A naval question brought in the British sea lords, Admiral Benson, and a keen-looking lot of Japanese. When economic questions were to the fore, the American delegation bulked large, with the square jaw of Mr. Herbert Hoover well in evidence.

Even the Council of Ten was not seated about a table, although it is so imagined in an ‘inside history’ of the Conference by one who was never inside.[6] Nor did the American delegation meet around a table, notwithstanding the preparation of an official picture which represents the members in a room where they never met, seated at one end of a table and backed by an imposing array of secretaries and assistants. The Council of Ten sat along three sides of the pleasant office of M. Pichon, the French Foreign Secretary, its walls covered with bright tapestries after the style of Rubens, its windows looking out over a beautiful French garden which tempted the roving eye while a long speech was being translated. M. Clémenceau presided, a tiger at rest, his eyes mostly on the ceiling, sometimes bored but always alert and never napping. Others sometimes appeared to sleep or to distract themselves as best they could; but no one lost touch with the proceedings. Certainly the President of the United States, long trained by golf, kept his eye steadily on the ball.

The Council of Ten met almost daily at three. Each special interest, each minor nationality, had a chance to come forward and state its case, usually at considerable length. Whatever was said in French was translated into English, and vice versa. The sessions grew long and tiresome, and progress was slow. More and more people were called in. One of them remarked that he would not have missed his first meeting for a thousand dollars, but would not give ten cents to see a second! For its last two sessions the Council moved into the large room reserved for the plenary sessions of the Conference. One of these meetings was reported at length in the Paris papers, and it was alleged that undue publicity, as well as undue prolixity, was responsible for the sudden change on March 24. After that date the Council of Ten ceased to meet. Cartoonists represented it as seeking a bomb-proof shelter. At times thereafter the foreign ministers met as a Council of Five. But the real power rested with a new body, the Council of the four principal delegates of England, France, Italy, and the United States—Messrs. Lloyd George, Clémenceau, Orlando, and Wilson.

The Council of Four left the spacious quarters of the Quai d’Orsay. Sometimes it met in M. Clémenceau’s office at the Ministry of War, sometimes at Mr. Lloyd George’s apartment, most frequently at President Wilson’s residence, either in his study, or, when several outsiders were present, in the large drawing-room. The meetings in the study were not always “private and unattended,” nor were the occasional conferences upstairs the confused gatherings which an infrequent spectator has pictured.[7] Outsiders were called in as needed, but ordinarily the Four met by themselves, with a confidential interpreter, Captain Mantoux, very able and very trustworthy. There was no stenographer, not even a secretary, though secretaries were usually outside the door to execute orders. The meetings were quite conversational, and the records necessarily fragmentary. But the Council at least worked rapidly, sometimes perforce too rapidly. Steadily the main lines of the treaty emerged.

By March the expert work of the Conference had been largely organized into commissions, not systematically and at the outset, as the French had proposed in January, but haltingly and irregularly, as necessity compelled. Foresight and organizing ability were not the strong points of the congress. One by one there were created commissions on Poland, on Greece, on Morocco, on Roumania, etc., on reparation, finance, waterways, and the principal economic problems of the conference. Ordinarily a commission consisted of two members from each of the five great powers, with a secretary from each and special advisers as required. Their proceedings were regularly noted, and formal minutes of each session were approved in print. Each country expressed its opinion, but efforts were made to reach and report a unanimous conclusion. On one occasion a Japanese delegate, perplexed by a detailed problem of local topography, gave as his vote, “I agree with the majority.” As the commission had just divided, two to two, he scarcely clarified the situation.

Some of the best work of the Conference was done in these commissions, and it is to be regretted that the system was not organized earlier and used more widely. Some matters were never referred to commissions, delicate questions like Fiume and Dalmatia and the Rhine frontier being reserved for the exclusive consideration of the Four. Problems of an intermediate sort were sent to special committees, extemporized and set to work at double speed. Such were the Saar valley and Alsace-Lorraine, referred to a committee of three, Messrs. Tardieu, Headlam-Morley, and Haskins. Not being an organized commission, this body had no secretariat. Economic and legal advisers might be present, but often there were only the three. This committee met for a certain period very steadily, sometimes twice a day. It reported unanimously the chapters of the treaty on the Saar and Alsace-Lorraine, and was present at the meetings of the Council of Four each time these questions came up.

One naturally asks how far the recommendations of these commissions and special committees were followed in framing the final draft of the treaty. To this it is hard to give a general answer, for in the nature of the case there was no uniform policy. The printed minutes of the commissions will some day be public and can then be compared with the several clauses of the treaty. In general, the territorial commissions were thought of in the first instance as gatherers and sifters of evidence, rather than as framers of treaty articles, questions of policy being reserved for the ultimate consideration of the Council of Ten. As time went on, the commissions tended to acquire more responsibility and to throw their reports into the form of specific articles or sections of a treaty. These naturally required coördination with the work of other bodies, such as the commissions on finance, reparation, or waterways, and a general correlation of the territorial reports was attempted by a Central Territorial Commission of five. Some final suggestions were also made by the Drafting Commission. The reports of the commissions were, however, first made directly to the Ten or the Four or the Five, as the case might be. Each report had its place on the docket, and the members of the commission were then present, each at the elbow of his principal, to furnish any necessary explanations in his ear, but not to speak out. Later in the summer members of the commissions were allowed to take part in the discussions of the Council of Five.

Sometimes the report, presented in print, would be accepted without debate. Sometimes a particular question would be considered at length, perhaps with the result of recommitting the report. Unanimous reports were likely to go through rapidly. A session of the Council of Four might take an important report clause by clause, with explanations from the committee and suggestions from members of the Council, but without fundamental modifications. On the other hand important changes in one chapter of the treaty were made at the last moment by the Four without any consultation of the commission concerned.

In general, the American delegation was disposed to trust its experts, both on matters of fact and on matters of judgment, and trusted them in greater measure as the Conference wore on. It did not dictate or even suggest their decisions, but left them free to form their opinions on the basis of the evidence. They could have been used to better advantage if they had been set to work earlier, and there were unfortunate instances where they were consulted too late; but in general this is to be explained by the haste and confusion inevitable in the rapid movement of events rather than by any desire to ignore the facts or the judgment based upon them. Certainly none of the chief delegates was more eager for the facts of the case than was the President of the United States, and none was able to assimilate them more quickly or use them more effectively in the discussion of territorial problems.

The treaty of Versailles, like the other treaties drawn up at Paris, is by no means a perfect instrument. Those who took part in framing it would be the last to believe it verbally inspired. It is necessarily a peace of compromise and adjustment, and that means that it does not embody completely the desires of any one person or any one country. It was also framed rapidly, not always with sufficient preliminary study, and in some places it bears the marks of haste. But it represents an honest effort to secure a just and durable settlement, and neither the Conference in general nor the United States in particular need be ashamed of it. It is easy to criticise in detail, easy to magnify the defects and forget the substantial results achieved, just as it was easy to criticise the Constitution of the United States when it issued from the Convention of 1787, and to discover therein dangers which history has shown to be imaginary. For one result of the Paris treaties, however, their framers are not responsible, namely the delays in ratification and enforcement. The treaties were drawn for the world of 1919 by men of 1919, on the assumption that what was needed was an early peace as well as a just settlement. The governing commissions and mandates were to begin at once, the plebiscites were to be held as soon as possible, the disarmament of Germany was to be prompt and real, the difficult work of reparation was to be taken up immediately. None of these expectations has been realized, and the responsibility lies less with the Peace Conference than with the failure of America to ratify the treaties and to take part in carrying out their provisions.

In one fundamental respect the treaties drawn up at Paris differ from all such instruments in the past: they do not pretend to be final. The treaty of Vienna lasted, in many respects, for a hundred years, and parts of it are still in force, unchanged by the war or the Conference. For all this the Congress of Vienna deserves its full measure of credit, but it must be remembered that it provided no method of change or adjustment. Only a new war could undo its provisions, and more than one such war proved necessary. At Paris it was recognized from the start that much of the treaty must be temporary and provisional. No one could determine in advance how peoples would vote, or just how much of an indemnity Germany could pay, or whether she would endeavor to execute or to avoid the obligations she there assumed, or what would happen in Austria or in Turkey. Some means of amendment, adjustment, correction, and supplementing was required, and this was found primarily in the League of Nations. In the League the treaties possess the possibility of their own betterment, the starting-point of a new development. Hence, unlike all previous treaties, those of 1919 are dynamic and not static: they are constructive and not merely restorative; they look to the future more than to the past.

Bibliographical Note

The published records of the Paris Conference are limited to the official reports of the plenary sessions and the official text of the treaties, in French and English, with authoritative maps, subject to correction after the frontiers have been fixed on the spot. The proceedings of the Council of Ten and the Council of Five were kept by a regular secretariat, those of the Council of Four less officially and systematically; these minutes were manifolded but not printed. The minutes of the various commissions, while printed, have not been made public.

The German and Austrian treaties and related documents are printed as supplements to the American Journal of International Law since July 1919. The German treaty is also printed as a Senate Document and as a publication of the American Association for International Conciliation. The entire series of treaties is best available in the British Parliamentary Papers, Treaty Series, 1919 and 1920. A bibliographical list of all these treaties by Denys P. Myers is to be published by the World Peace Foundation, League of Nations Series, iii, no. 1. Documents and Statements relating to Peace Proposals and War Aims, December 1916 to November 1918, have been edited by G. Lowes Dickinson (London and New York, 1919).

There is as yet no memoir literature by members of the Conference. Some confidential papers are printed in the Hearings before the Committee on Foreign Relations of the United States Senate (Washington, 1919), but these do not concern territorial problems. Some things touching France will be found in the report of the Barthou committee to the Chamber of Deputies, supplemented by the articles of A. Tardieu in L’Illustration since February 1920. The official German criticisms of the Treaty of Versailles were published in various languages and have been freely reproduced by pro-German writers in other countries. A Kommentar in six volumes has been prepared by one of the German delegates, Walter Schücking.

So far the printed accounts of the Conference are the work of journalists, who from the nature of the proceedings cannot be fully informed. The most direct information was perhaps possessed by Ray Stannard Baker, chief of the American service of publicity, but his volume, What Wilson did at Paris (New York, 1919), is ex parte and very brief. E. J. Dillon, The Inside History of the Peace Conference (New York, 1920), is a diffuse composite of hearsay and newspaper clippings; it is anti-French but in general friendly to small nations. H. Wilson Harris, The Peace in the Making (New York, 1920), is an intelligent account by a fair-minded British Liberal. Sisley Huddleston, Peace-Making at Paris (London, 1919), is more impressionistic. J. M. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (London and New York, 1919), is the brilliant but untrustworthy work of a British financial expert who finally repented of the treaty. Influenced by German propaganda, it is in general anti-French, anti-Belgian, and anti-Polish, and disparages political self-determination in favor of economic frontiers. Of the various critiques which the book has called out, the most searching is that of David Hunter Miller, in the New York Evening Post, February 6 and 10, 1920, and in separate pamphlets.

A volume on the Conference, with an elaborate atlas, is announced by an American territorial expert, Isaiah Bowman; a fuller work is in preparation by British and American experts under the editorship of Harold W. V. Temperley, of Peterhouse, Cambridge.

Of the material collected in France for the Conference, the only systematic publication is the Travaux du Comité d’Etudes, in two volumes with an atlas (Paris, 1919). Most of the British material was printed but not published, a useful exception being C. K. Webster, The Congress of Vienna (Oxford, 1918). The Foreign Office series of Handbooks has now been made public (London, 1920). The most important American publication of the sort is the Atlas of Mineral Resources to be issued by the United States Geological Survey (Washington, 1920).

There is no entirely satisfactory discussion of the general problem of frontiers. T. L. Holdich, Political Frontiers and Boundary Making (London, 1916), is concerned chiefly with ‘natural’ frontiers outside of Europe. For the facts of race, see W. Z. Ripley, The Races of Europe (New York, 1899). Leon Dominian, Frontiers of Language and Nationality in Europe (New York, 1917), is convenient. A more authoritative work on the linguistic side is A. Meillet, Les langues dans l’Europe nouvelle (Paris, 1918). Experience with plebiscites is brought together in Miss Sarah Wambaugh’s elaborate Monograph on Plebiscites (New York, 1920). A. Toynbee, Nationality and the War (London, 1915), is an attempt to state the territorial problems in the early months of the war; L. Stoddard and G. Frank, Stakes of the War (New York, 1918), seeks to sum them up at its close. The relation of certain of these problems to a league of nations is discussed in The League of Nations, edited by Stephen P. Duggan, with references (Boston, 1919); and by Lord Eustace Percy, The Responsibilities of Peace (London and New York, 1920).

FOOTNOTES:

[2] Webster, The Congress of Vienna, p. 93.

[3] Was von der Entente übrig bliebe wenn sie Ernst machte mit dem “Selbstbestimmungsrecht” (Berlin, D. Reimer).

[4] Atlantic Monthly, xc, pp. 728, 731 (1902).

[5] Keynes, Economic Consequences of the Peace, p. 265.

[6] Dillon, The Inside History of the Peace Conference, p. 151.

[7] Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, pp. 30-32. M. Mantoux asserts that Mr. Keynes never attended a regular session of the Council of Four. London Times, February 14, 1920.

II
BELGIUM AND DENMARK

Our examination of the specific territorial problems of the Conference may most conveniently begin with the simplest, the frontier between Germany and Denmark. This had been established by force of arms when Schleswig was taken from Denmark in 1864, while a promise made in 1866 to consult the population had never been fulfilled. Only at the close of the World War did an opportunity come to fix the boundary in accordance with the will of the inhabitants. The duty of the Conference was to provide the means of giving effect to their desires.

The territory of the former duchy of Schleswig comprises the portion of the peninsula of Jutland lying between the Danish frontier on the north and the River Eider and the Kiel Canal on the south. Called by the Danes South Jutland (Sönderjylland), it is similar in most respects to Denmark, being chiefly agricultural, with a fishing population on the Frisian islands to the west and a considerable shipping industry in its principal town, Flensburg, a town of 63,000 at the head of the Flensburg fiord. The region has an area of 3385 square miles, and 474,355 inhabitants, not far from twice the extent and population of the state of Delaware. About one-third of the people speak Danish; these are chiefly in the northern portion of the province. The rest, save for an isolated group of Frisians on the west coast, speak German.

The earlier history of Schleswig would take us into the tangled history of the Schleswig-Holstein question, which is for present purposes unnecessary. Suffice it to say that, whatever the previous rights of the king of Denmark may have been, the attempt to unite the duchy of Schleswig fully to the kingdom of Denmark by the constitution of 1863 led in the following year to war with Austria and Prussia and to the defeat of Denmark, whose king, by the treaty of Vienna, renounced all rights over Schleswig, Holstein, and Lauenburg. In 1866, at the conclusion of the war between Austria and Prussia, the treaty of Prague transferred the rights of Austria to the king of Prussia, with the reservation that the “inhabitants of North Schleswig shall be again reunited with Denmark if they should express such a desire in a vote freely given.” Nothing could be clearer, and nothing more ineffective, for the article was contained in a treaty between two powers neither of which had the slightest interest in the performance of the obligation. As a matter of fact, the provision had been suggested by Napoleon III, but the interested parties, Denmark and the inhabitants of the district, were not put in a position to secure its execution. Bismarck, who seems at first to have expected a referendum, maintained in 1867 that the people as Prussian subjects had no right to demand it, the only right to such a demand resting with the emperor of Austria. Prussia made no effort to put the article into effect, and in 1878 it was abrogated by agreement with Austria.

So, since 1864, Schleswig has been under Prussian rule, and since 1867 an integral part of the kingdom of Prussia. Once probably wholly Danish, it had been subject for centuries to penetration from the south, and by this time possessed a large German element which henceforth had the active support of the Prussian government. The history of the attempt to Germanize Schleswig is, on a smaller scale, much the same as the history of the Germanization of Prussian Poland. Efforts at replacement of the population by Germans had little success, but the spread of German culture and the suppression of Danish culture were everywhere steadily pushed. German was made compulsory in the schools, the courts, and the churches; Danish was put under the ban in public meetings and theatres; and the Danish press and Danish societies were subjected to various forms of persecution. Intercourse with Denmark was in various ways restricted or made difficult. Constant war was waged against the Danish flag, and even against dresses which displayed the red and white colors of Denmark. It was even said that the owner of a white dog was obliged to repaint his red kennel! The regular agents of Prussian policy were omnipresent: the police, the pastor, and the schoolmaster. The officers’ duty was chiefly negative, the suppression of Danish tendencies; the schoolmaster’s was more positive, to instil Germanism into the rising generation, partly by teaching only in the German language save for a small amount of religious instruction, partly by the well known propagandist methods of German history and patriotic songs. Thus all were compelled to sing, “Ich bin ein Preusse, will ein Preusse sein”; and if a little girl should say, “Ich bin kein Preusse, will kein Preusse sein,” she was whipped and sent home.

Inevitably the zone of German speech crept gradually northward. In some villages of central Schleswig which spoke only Danish half a century ago, it is said that the language has disappeared save among the very old. Still the process of Germanization was slow, and as time went on active resistance was organized in the three great societies of the Language Union, the School Union, and the Voters’ Union. Leaders found in Denmark the Danish education which was forbidden them at home, and kept alive a strong tradition of Danish speech and Danish sympathies. A local political party was maintained, and the Danish vote increased after 1886, although under the German gerrymander of 1867 it was still allowed to return only one member of the Reichstag, and that in the extreme north. Treasonable acts were in general avoided, but the hope of reunion with Denmark was never entirely lost.

The fortunes of the World War gave at first but little hope to the pro-Danish Schleswigers. They served in the German army up to their full capacity; probably, as is stated, their losses were proportionately greater than those among purely German troops. If they were not fighting their own kin and friends, like the soldiers of Alsace-Lorraine, they were at least fighting in another’s cause. Denmark, too, walked warily during the war, with the fate of other small nations ever before her eyes and the profits of German friendship dangled in front of her. It was no time for Schleswig to look for help in this quarter. With the armistice, matters took on a new aspect. Foreseeing that the Schleswig question would be raised at the peace table, Germany proposed a separate arrangement with Denmark, and it was some time before Denmark readjusted her policy to correspond to a world in which the victorious Allies were able to impose terms on a defeated Germany. Even then the readjustment was incomplete. Germany might become powerful again, and Denmark must beware, so many thought, of laying up vengeance for the future by acquiring territory which Germany might demand back. In many quarters there seemed to be genuine terror lest the Allies might impose territory and obligations upon an unwilling Denmark. A natural hesitation over absorbing alien elements was accompanied by a fear lest many new voters might upset the party balance in a small country. In determining the future of Schleswig, it appeared that the timidity of Denmark was to have its weight, as well as the hopes of the population. The Radical party, then in power, wished only limited accessions of population in the region of North Schleswig; while the Conservatives favored a more decided policy extending into southern Schleswig, though few went so far as to demand outright the ancient frontier of the Eider or even the old rampart of the Dannevirke.

No mention had been made of Schleswig in President Wilson’s Fourteen Points, but a just determination of the question was promised by him in a letter to certain Danish-Americans just after the armistice (November 21). Diplomatic conversations had indeed already begun, and February 21 the Danish government formally placed the matter before the Peace Conference in an exposé made to the Council of Ten by its minister in Paris, Chamberlain Bernhoft. It asked for a plebiscite as soon as possible in the region of unquestioned Danish speech north of a line stretching west from the head of the Flensburg fiord to the north of the island of Sylt in the North Sea, a line which had been demanded, November 17, 1918, by the North Schleswig Voters’ Union at Aabenraa. By February sentiment was ready to ask for a plebiscite also in a zone to the south, which included Flensburg and certain adjacent territory. In order that all possibilities of pressure might be removed, the evacuation of German troops and German higher officials was requested in a considerable strip of territory farther south.

The commission to which the Conference referred the Schleswig problem heard delegates from the different parts of the territory, as well as reports of the various points of view in Denmark. The commission saw no reason why the right of voting should be refused to any part of the region to be evacuated, though it was plain that some judgment would need to be used in drawing a frontier upon the basis of the voting, so as to avoid enclaves and inconvenient meanderings. Definite evidence was before it of a desire to vote on the part of many persons in south Schleswig. Accordingly its report, incorporated in the draft treaty submitted to the Germans in May, provided for a plebiscite by three zones, so that the frontier between Germany and Denmark might be fixed in conformity with the wishes of the population. In the first or northernmost zone, where the voting was supposed to be largely a matter of form, the plebiscite was to take place for the whole district within three weeks of the German evacuation. In the second zone of mixed speech in middle Schleswig, where opinion was likely to vary in different districts and to be affected somewhat by the result in the first zone, the voting was to occur not more than five weeks later and to be taken commune by commune. The same method was to be applied two weeks thereafter in the third zone, which comprised the remainder of the evacuated territory extending to the Eider and the Schlei, a region of predominantly German speech, where the Danish tradition had been greatly weakened in course of time and where the people would likewise want to know the result in the neighboring zone to the northward. Within ten days of the coming into force of the treaty German troops and higher officials were to evacuate the whole territory north of the Eider and the Schlei, and the administration was to be carried on by an International Commission of five, one appointed by Norway, one by Sweden, and three by the Allied and Associated Powers. This commission was to hold the plebiscites in accordance with provisions which had been suggested by the Danish government; and upon the result of the voting, with due regard to geographic and economic conditions, recommend a permanent boundary to the Allied and Associated Powers. The whole plan was carefully drawn to secure as full and free an expression as possible of the desires of the population.

Opposition came from two sources. The German criticisms, as handed in to the Conference in May, had little weight. They proposed to limit the voting, and hence any possible loss of German territory, to a portion of the first zone, on the ground that only there did more than half of the population speak Danish. Apart from the fact that this affirmation was based on the official language statistics of the Prussian census, which was notoriously unfavorable to non-German elements, the proposal started from two inadmissible assumptions: one that language is the sole test of political sympathy; the other that no region where Germans were in a majority should be allowed self-determination, for, it was implicitly believed, no German could possibly want to leave the Fatherland. Germany thus sought to prevent free expression of opinion where it might turn to Germany’s disadvantage, at the very moment she clamored for it in Upper Silesia, where it might possibly turn out in her favor. How Germany hoped to control the plebiscite appeared from another proposal, namely that, all German officials still remaining in the country, the administration and the voting should be in charge of a commission of Germans and Danes, with a Swedish chairman!

The Danish objection, as voiced by the majority Radicals, was against the inclusion of the third zone in the voting. The reason most generally given was that districts in this zone might vote for Denmark from purely economic motives, especially the desire to escape German war taxes and war indemnities, and thus form an irredentist minority in a country with which they were not really in sympathy. Probably also there was still the lurking fear of the powerful neighbor of the past and the future, as well as some measure of friendliness for the new regime in Germany.

To such arguments the Conference yielded, cutting out of the final treaty the plebiscite in the third zone and its evacuation as well. The change was made at the last moment, without readjustment of the other provisions, so that this section of the treaty shows certain signs of haste. The effect was to take away all opportunity for self-determination in the third zone and to leave the German troops and administration here in a position to exert pressure on the region to the northward.[8]

The vote in the first zone, held February 10, 1920, resulted in a decisive Danish majority of three to one, and led to occupation by Denmark, as the treaty had provided. Feeling ran high in the second zone, where the German government sought to influence the decision by threats in the Reichstag; the struggle centred around Flensburg, certain in either event to be a frontier town now that the third zone had been eliminated. The plebiscite, held March 14, resulted decisively for Germany, the vote in Flensburg being overwhelming and only a few scattered villages on the islands voting for Denmark. The result failed to satisfy either party entirely, a large Danish group still wanting Flensburg, while in the first zone the Germans wished to recover Tönder, where the voting had favored Germany. Indeed it remains to be seen whether German hopes of recovery will be limited to Tönder.

One question of which Denmark and the Schleswigers showed great desire to keep clear was the Kiel Canal. Even the widest limit of evacuation proposed carefully left a belt of Schleswig territory between its southern border and the canal, lest what was fundamentally a question of popular rights might become complicated with a wholly distinct international problem. Only in case of the internationalization of the canal would its fate have reacted on the Schleswig problem by leaving an isolated strip of German territory to the north which might then have been separated from Germany and attached to the adjacent Danish territory. Whatever might have been said for the internationalization of this great waterway, the question was not seriously considered at the Conference. The parallel to Suez and Panama was too close! The treaty leaves the canal under German control, but provides that it shall be open on terms of entire equality to the vessels of commerce and of war of all nations at peace with Germany.[9]

The island of Heligoland, which England had seized from Denmark in 1807 and ceded to Germany in exchange for Zanzibar in 1890, is not restored to either of its former owners. Instead it is stipulated that all fortifications and harbor works there shall be destroyed by German labor and at Germany’s expense, and that no similar works shall be constructed in the future.[10] Immunity for the future might do something to offset the great price which England had paid for Zanzibar throughout the World War.

The case of Belgium at the Peace Conference was widely different from that of Denmark. Denmark had remained neutral; her neutrality had been respected by others, and had even been a source of commercial profit; and at the end of the war, without the slightest effort on her part, she saw all her desires gratified in Schleswig. Indeed, her only fear was lest she should receive more territory than she wanted. The neutrality of Belgium, specially guaranteed by an international treaty, and thus far more binding on her neighbors than that of Denmark, had been violated by Germany at the very outbreak of the war. Belgium had suffered more than four years of German occupation, including the systematic spoliation of her farms, her factories, and her railroads, and the deliberate attempt to divide her people into two separate Walloon and Flemish states; she had barely escaped permanent incorporation with Germany. Yet all this time she had fought as best she could beside the Allies; she had made heavy sacrifices; she had stood for international right. Belgium expected much from the peace, and Belgium was in large measure disappointed.

Belgium was disappointed on the economic side, for she was flooded with depreciated German currency which the Allies did not take over, and her hopes for full priority on the account of restoration and reparation were not entirely fulfilled. Indeed, it soon became apparent that the general bill for reparation would far exceed the ability of Germany to pay, and that there were not resources enough in all Germany to meet that restoration of invaded territory upon which President Wilson had declared “the whole world was agreed.” Belgium had suffered less than France by the destruction of war itself, for her territory, save in the case of the Meuse fortresses and the battle zone in Flanders, had not been fought over; but the German occupation which she had borne in equal measure was relatively far more serious, for it affected the whole country and not merely a part, and it produced stagnation of industry and cessation of commerce on a scale that destroyed enterprise and left idleness as well as poverty in its stead.

In territorial matters Belgium’s desires, save for a small correction of the German frontier, concerned neutral powers, Holland and Luxemburg, which were not members of the Peace Conference and not subject to its jurisdiction. The most that the Conference could do was to help in the adjustment of Belgium’s claims, and Belgium feels strongly that the Conference did not help enough.

Finally, Belgium was dissatisfied with her whole position at the Conference. During the war she had acted as one of the Allies and had her representation in the Allied councils. At Paris she was only a small power, limited to three delegates—at first even to two—and excluded from the guiding and deciding group of the Five Great Powers. Even the decisions which directly concerned her were taken by the Council of Ten or the Council of Four. She was outside, while Italy and Japan were inside. Individually her delegates sat on important committees, but there were times when Belgium must have felt far removed from the central tasks of the Conference, in the outer limbo occupied by Liberia, Panama, and Siam. A Belgian told the story of an officer who had lost both legs. “You will always be a hero,” said a consoling friend. “No,” replied the officer, “I shall be a hero for a year and a cripple for the rest of my life.” Belgium felt that the days of her position as a hero were over. You will recall Mr. Dooley on Lieutenant Hobson: “I’m a hero,” said the Lieutenant. “Are ye, faith?” said Admiral Dewey, “Well, I can’t do anything f’r ye in that line. All th’ hero jobs on this boat is compitintly filled be mesilf.”

Let us call to mind so much of Belgium’s history as is necessary to approach her modern problems. Belgium as a separate and independent state has existed only since 1830, but her national history goes back into the Middle Ages. Easy of access from both the Rhine and the north of France, the territory of modern Belgium has always been a highroad of peoples, for migration, commerce, and war, and the natural meeting-point of races and civilizations from north and south. It formed a part of the great middle kingdom created between France and Germany by the partition of the Frankish empire in the ninth century, and with the break-up of the middle kingdom it became a natural object of ambition from both sides. The various feudal principalities which shared this territory in the Middle Ages divided their allegiance between the king of France and the German emperor; and it was not till the fifteenth century that the rise of a new middle kingdom under the dukes of Burgundy brought the region of the Netherlands, northern as well as southern, under a single hand and made them for practical purposes independent of France and Germany. Enlarged toward the east by the Emperor Charles V in the sixteenth century, the territories of the Netherlands comprised seventeen provinces and included substantially what is now Holland and Belgium.

By the marriage of Mary, heiress of Burgundy, to Maximilian of Austria in 1477 the seventeen provinces of the Netherlands passed to the house of Hapsburg, and thus to their grandson, the Emperor Charles V. Upon the division of his possessions in 1556 they went with Spain to the so-called Spanish branch of the family, represented by Philip II. Religious and political reasons led to the great revolt against Philip II in 1568, a movement in which the whole seventeen provinces joined. The skilful policy of Philip’s general, Alexander Farnese, succeeded in detaching the southern provinces, which had remained for the most part Catholic, from the Protestant, or United, Netherlands of the north, and from 1579 on the southern provinces led a separate existence under Spanish rule, being generally known as the Spanish Netherlands. In this period they lost considerable territory on the north to the Dutch and on the south to the French.

Upon the division of the Spanish dominions by the treaty of Utrecht in 1713, the Spanish Netherlands were in the following year transferred to Austria, and were known as the Austrian Netherlands until their conquest by the armies of the French Revolution in 1794. They were then incorporated with France (1795) and organized into nine departments, a state of affairs which lasted until 1814.

By the Congress of Vienna in 1815 the northern and the southern Netherlands were reunited, under the rule of a king of the house of Nassau. After a separation of one hundred and thirty-five years the union proved unsatisfactory to the southern population. Marked differences of religion, economic interest, and language produced friction from the start, which was aggravated by the exclusive policy of the Dutch, who, though a minority, monopolized the higher offices and enforced the use of the Dutch language. The revolutionary movement of 1830 kindled a revolt in the southern provinces, and a separate government was organized under a constitutional monarch, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg. The separation was declared “final and irrevocable” by a convention of representatives of the five Great Powers meeting in London in 1831, and the treaty was accepted by Holland in 1839. The boundaries of the new kingdom were, as we shall see, drawn in a manner quite unsatisfactory to the Belgians.

The treaty of 1839 guaranteed the independence and the neutrality of Belgium, while at the same time it placed restrictions on the new state. By Article VII it was provided that

Belgium ... shall form an independent and perpetually neutral state. It shall be bound to observe the same neutrality toward all other states.

It will thus be seen that, while the roots of Belgian nationality lie deep in the past, the modern state was established in a somewhat artificial form, its boundaries drawn and its international status fixed by the Powers, not by Belgium itself. Its frontiers are in no direction ‘natural’ frontiers. At the same time Belgium is dependent in the closest way upon the outside world. It possesses the densest population of any country in Europe—the same number of inhabitants as the state of Pennsylvania, with one-fourth the area. In spite of a highly intensive cultivation, the soil is unable to produce sufficient food, so that sixty per cent of the consumption of cereals is imported. For this large importation Belgium is unable to pay in minerals, its only considerable underground resource being coal, of which there has been no surplus for export since 1910. It must consequently pay for its imports by exports of manufactured products, for which the raw materials are likewise for the most part imported.

Belgium is thus a highly industrialized country, with a large manufacturing population. Its principal industries are iron furnaces and rolling mills, zinc works, machinery, arms, and tools; textiles, especially cotton goods; glass, cement, and ceramic wares; leather; and chemical products. Commerce is also of the highest importance in the economic life of Belgium. She requires foreign imports of raw materials and foreign markets for her manufactured articles. She has a very large transit trade, en route to and from Germany and northern France. In volume of trade Antwerp is one of the greatest of European ports, abreast of Hamburg and London. The system of railways and canals is elaborate, with the highest per capita mileage in Europe.

Of the territorial adjustments desired by Belgium, the least considerable concerned her Prussian frontier. Belgium (or at that time the Belgian part of Holland) and Prussia became neighbors in 1815, in consequence of the Prussian annexations on the left bank of the Rhine. The boundary then drawn was not based upon considerations of language or history, still less upon any expressed desire of the inhabitants, but was fixed primarily so as to give Prussia a certain number of people as compensation for her failure to receive Saxony. She thus acquired the eastern part of the lands of the abbey of Stavelot-Malmedy; the territory of St. Vith, which had belonged to Luxemburg; and a portion of Limburg in the region of Eupen. This land was largely hill and forest, of no great economic value, and it was used by Prussia chiefly for military purposes. Strategic railroads, of little importance in time of peace, were constructed along the Belgian and Luxemburg frontiers, and the great military camp of Elsenborn was built in this very region to serve for the concentration of troops against the invasion of Belgium. Liège, Belgium’s great industrial center, was only eighteen miles from the German border, and the taking of Liège in 1914 opened up the whole valley of the Meuse.

Belgium asked a minimum of protection for the future. It was plain that such protection could not come from any considerable advance of the frontier on the part of so small a state, but must be found chiefly in the demilitarization of the Left Bank and in measures for general peace. At least, however, Belgium might ask control over some of the military railroads and over the camp of Elsenborn.

If purely strategic arguments had prevailed, they would have carried the Belgian frontier forward to the Rhine or to the mountain range of the Eiffel. Within the narrower limits chosen, the strategic considerations were reënforced by others: the economic orientation of this region toward Belgium rather than toward Germany; the historic connection before 1815; and the opportunity for reparation, for this sparsely peopled territory was rich in forests, which might serve to replace the Belgian forests which had been systematically destroyed by Germany during the war, leaving a frontier line which can be followed for miles by the standing timber on the German side and its absence on the Belgian. The linguistic line was less sharp. German was spoken in certain districts on the Belgian side; while, in spite of a century of Germanization, Walloon still prevailed in Malmedy and the neighboring Prussian villages. Indeed, Malmedy was in many ways like a Belgian town, and German troops in 1914 are said to have begun pillaging here under the impression that they were already in Belgium.

The actual wishes of the population in the ceded districts had not been expressed, so it was provided in the treaty that during the six months after its coming into force the Belgian authorities should open registers in which the inhabitants might record a desire to have any part of the ceded territory remain under German sovereignty, the results to be passed upon by the League of Nations. It would have been more consistent with the rest of the treaty if the League had also been entrusted with securing the original expression of opinion. The territory transferred by the treaty comprised 376 square miles with a population of 61,000, constituting the Kreise of Malmedy and Eupen, whose administrative limits were preserved in order to interfere as little as possible with local conditions.[11]

The treaty also settled an old controversy in this region respecting the district of Moresnet, disputed between Belgium (until 1839 Holland) and Prussia since 1815, when two inconsistent boundary lines of the treaty of Vienna left in doubt the sovereignty over a triangular area of about 900 acres which contained the valuable zinc mine of Vieille Montagne. Neither side would yield, and a convention of 1816 which provided for the neutralization of the area under a condominium or joint administration lasted until the war. With the exhaustion of the mine the district has declined in importance, but the anomaly needed clearing up, as the Germans had frequently declared. The treaty assigns the disputed territory to Belgium, and adds a square mile or so in Prussian Moresnet, comprising the domanial and communal woods.[12]

Far more important for Belgium was the question of her relations with another eastern neighbor, the duchy of Luxemburg. An integral part of the southern Netherlands until the French Revolution, Luxemburg had in 1815 been made into a grand duchy and handed over to the king of Holland. It revolted with Belgium in 1830 and sent members to the Belgian Parliament, but on the final separation of Belgium and Holland in 1839 it was divided, the western or Walloon portion going to Belgium, and the eastern or German-speaking portion continuing as the grand duchy. The dynastic union with Holland came to an end in 1890, when a divergence in the laws of succession established a separate line of grand dukes.

The neutrality of Luxemburg was specially and perpetually guaranteed by the Powers, Prussia included, in 1867; but the state was not in every respect independent. Cut off from its Belgian markets by the separation of 1839, it entered three years later the German Zollverein, of which it continued a member until the close of the World War. Its railroads also passed under German control in 1871, with a proviso that they should not be used for military purposes. They were nevertheless extended and double-tracked in the direction of France and Belgium, for military reasons which became clearly apparent in 1914. August 1 of that year the German occupation of Luxemburg began, and the country remained a base of military operations throughout the war. Unlike Belgium, Luxemburg made no resistance. Indeed, its government was considered very friendly to Germany—une dynastie boche, the French called it—and the final victory of the Allies was followed January 15 by the abdication of the grand duchess, Marie Adelheid, in favor of her sister Charlotte.

It was plain that the Allies, Belgium and France most of all, could not permit a return of Luxemburg to German control; and it was equally plain that, whatever political independence the grand duchy retained, it could not stand economically alone. With but 260,000 people and 1000 square miles of territory, it was not large enough for that; and its principal industry, iron, needed the coal and the markets of adjacent lands. Belgium felt that Luxemburg would naturally turn to her. The people were Catholic; the language of government and of the educated classes was French; there were strong ties of tradition and sentiment between the two countries. Belgium counted, counted too confidently, on the result. She forgot the strong feeling for local independence among the Luxemburgers, who, as their national song runs, ‘want to remain what they are’; she forgot the strength of dynastic tradition and clerical influence. For any union with Belgium spelled the end of the local dynasty and of national identity, and might, it was feared, mean the swallowing up of a conservative Catholic people by a larger and more Socialistic neighbor.

France also wanted Luxemburg. She wanted it for purposes of defence, so as to prevent a repetition of 1914; she wanted its iron mines and blast furnaces. And, unlike the Belgians, she knew how to wait. The treaty of peace merely insisted upon the permanent detachment of Luxemburg from the Zollverein, and the abandonment of all German control over its railways.[13] It did not touch the dynasty; it compelled no new attachments. Meanwhile France, in the full glamor of victory, with a brilliant staff quartered in the duchy itself, dazzled the imagination of the Luxemburgers. They were brought to think that, while any arrangement with Belgium threatened their independence, this could be amply safeguarded in a merely economic union with France. In the winter French troops even suppressed a little revolution against the dynasty. And when the plebiscite came, September 28, 1919, a decided majority pronounced for the reigning duchess and for a customs union with France. Women voted for the first time in this election, and while no separate returns were made of their votes, it is not likely that they diminished the proportion of votes for the duchess.

Of all the German ruling families which were in power in 1918, the sole survivor today is that of the grand duchess of Luxemburg. And the only surviving Austrian prince is her consort, Prince Felix of Bourbon-Parma, naturalized as a Luxemburger November 5, 1919, by a close vote in the Chamber and married the following day. And if some time these two should disappear in another revolution, the republic which would follow seems likely to seek support from France rather than from Belgium.

Belgium’s chief territorial difficulties lie on the side of Holland, which controls the lower courses of her two great rivers, the Scheldt and the Meuse, and hems in Belgium on her northeast corner in Limburg and on her northwest corner in Flanders. The embarrassment is partly strategic, limiting Belgium’s freedom in time of war, partly economic, restricting the foreign commerce which is the lifeblood of the Belgian people. From any point of view, the Dutch-Belgian frontier is unnatural. It requires explanation as soon as you see it on the map. No one would draw such a frontier if he were starting afresh. But it is an historic frontier, and the ancient frontiers of a neutral power are hard things for a peace congress to disturb.

The long tongue of land which constitutes the southern prolongation of Dutch Limburg has diverse historical origins. Its chief town, Maestricht, with parts of the adjacent country, has been Dutch since the seventeenth century. Other parts belonged to the southern Netherlands, and were acquired by the king of Holland as ‘compensation’ in 1839. Like Luxemburg, Limburg joined in the Belgian revolution of 1830 and had representatives in the Belgian parliament until 1839. But in the final separation the peninsula was given to Holland, greatly to Belgium’s dissatisfaction. An outlying region, it complained of neglect by the Dutch government, and its economic relations were rather with the adjacent lands of Belgium and Germany on either side. Recently, with the development of its important coal mines, the Dutch have taken much more interest in Limburg, and active efforts have been made to counteract pro-Belgian tendencies.

The grievances of the Belgians respecting Limburg are twofold. From a military point of view, it cannot be defended by Holland, whose troops were withdrawn therefrom early in the late war. The Dutch claimed that its neutrality was a protection for Belgium. The Belgians, with no illusions as to German respect for neutral territory, replied that they had no permanent assurance of this, and that Limburg would have been crossed in 1914 if a breach had not finally been forced at Liège. They made much of the fact that after the armistice German troops, to the number of some 80,000, had been allowed to go home with their booty by this route, thus escaping capture or internment in Holland. The explanations of the Dutch were lame, but the offence could hardly be said to merit severe punishment. The economic grievances of the Belgians were more serious. Astride the Meuse at Maestricht, the Dutch have delayed improvement and hindered canal navigation. In eight miles of canal there are four sets of customs formalities, consuming several days. Moreover, the best route for a Rhine-Scheldt canal, to the construction of which Germany consented in the treaty,[14] lies via Limburg, the levels across the region of the upper Meuse being too difficult. If Belgium could not have Limburg, she at least wanted military guarantees and economic facilities.

Important as is the Meuse to Belgium, her great highway is the Scheldt. To all intents and purposes an arm of the sea, the Scheldt is navigable for ocean-going vessels as far as Antwerp, 55 miles from its mouth. Without it, Belgium becomes practically an inland country, for its 42 miles of North Sea coast have no harbors of value. Yet the lower Scheldt is not Belgian nor even neutral; it belongs to Holland, through whose territories it passes for 45 miles of its course. And it has belonged to Holland since the sixteenth century, when the weakness of Spain and the strength of the Dutch fixed the northern boundary of the Spanish Netherlands. When the treaty of Westphalia (1648) confirmed the northern provinces in the possession of the left bank of the Scheldt, it also gave them the right to close completely the mouths of the river and its tributaries. The purpose of this was to favor Amsterdam and Rotterdam, and in consequence grass grew in the streets of Antwerp. The revival of Belgium’s great port became possible only with the French Revolution, which reopened the river, while the treaty of Vienna declared navigation free on the Scheldt as well as the Meuse. The existing state of affairs on the Scheldt was established by the treaty of 1839, which created “a special regime which is neither that of the sea nor that of ordinary rivers.”

The regime created by the treaty of 1839 has never been satisfactory to the Belgians. One of its provisions reads:[15]

So far as regards specially the navigation of the Scheldt and of its mouths, it is agreed that the pilotage and the buoying of the channel, as well as the conservation of the channels of the Scheldt below Antwerp, shall be subject to a joint superintendence, and that this joint superintendence shall be exercised by commissioners to be appointed for this purpose by the two parties. Moderate pilotage dues shall be fixed by mutual agreement.

The Dutch have interpreted this strictly as giving the joint commission control only over the pilotage (two concurrent services) and over keeping the channels open and properly marked and buoyed. The Belgians, on the other hand, have contended that the commission should have cognizance of matters upon which the extent and security of the channels depend, such as diking, drainage, encroachments on the river and its accessory waters, etc., their ground being that the Scheldt constitutes a single hydrographic problem, no portion of which can be properly treated without reference to the whole. They allege the failure to make sufficient modern improvements on the western Scheldt because of the indifference of the Dutch authorities, and they also complain of the serious difficulties of drainage in Belgian Flanders caused by raising the level of the Dutch lands between it and the Scheldt. Being interested in the use of the river to a far greater degree than the Dutch, the Belgians find it intolerable to be dependent on Dutch consent to every act of maintenance or improvement. Belgium pays the entire cost of improvements, but the consent of Holland is necessary. Thus the Terneuzen canal, which connects Ghent with the Scheldt, was built by Dutch engineers but at Belgium’s expense, and the Dutch portion does not correspond to the portion south of the frontier. Holland’s position throughout is essentially negative. The Scheldt furthers no major interest of hers; she has no important towns along its banks, no foreign trade which it carries; its improvement benefits only a commercial rival.

In time of war Holland interprets her sovereignty as compelling her to close the river to belligerents. In August 1914 English reënforcements were thus forbidden to relieve Antwerp, although their purpose was to maintain Belgian neutrality, while Belgian troops were denied exit by the river and forced, to the number of several thousand, to suffer internment in Holland. Such control of the river nullifies the centre of Belgium’s defensive system at Antwerp; it might also permit the turning of her Flemish defences in case of a war with Holland. The Dutch maintain that the neutrality of the Scheldt during the Great War was of real assistance to the Allies, who would otherwise have suffered from German submarine bases along its banks; but the Belgians point out that the closing of the river in war destroys at one blow the whole foreign commerce of Antwerp, a result that might ensue even in a war in which Holland was a party and Belgium neutral.

The simplest solution of the problem of the Scheldt would be the elimination of Holland from its southern shore, which she has held for more than three hundred years. This land, called Maritime or Zealand Flanders (Flandre zélandaise, Ryksvlaanderen), has an area of 275 square miles and a population of 78,677, chiefly Catholic. Its economic relations are mainly with Belgium, but it has manifested no desire to change its political affiliations, and has recently been assiduously cultivated by Holland. A less drastic measure would be the admission of Belgium to co-sovereignty on the lower Scheldt, leaving Holland in possession of its banks. Still another possibility would be the complete internationalization of the river, under the League of Nations. These solutions, especially the first two, have been energetically opposed in Holland as infringements on her sovereignty. The question of her boundaries was not, she declared, a matter for the Peace Conference.

It was indeed suggested at Paris that Holland might be induced to relinquish Zealand Flanders and Limburg in return for a compensation in the Prussian territory on her eastern frontier, either in East Friesland or in the region of Cleves and Wesel on the lower Rhine, districts which once had much in common with the adjacent portions of the Netherlands. There was, however, no indication of any desire on the part of the inhabitants of these territories to change their political allegiance, nor was Holland in the least disposed to face the uncertainties arising out of any such exchange. The whole idea smacked too strongly of the methods of the Congress of Vienna.

One matter affecting Holland did, however, concern the Conference, namely Belgium’s compulsory and guaranteed neutrality, and it was the Belgian contention that this involved also her frontiers. The international status of Belgium rests upon the three treaties of April 19, 1839, one between the Five Great Powers and Belgium, one between these powers and Holland, and one between Holland and Belgium. These documents, in substance identical, fix the boundaries of Belgium at the same time that they establish her as an independent and perpetually neutralized state, “bound to observe the same neutrality toward all other states.” This whole system of neutrality collapsed in 1914, and Belgium wanted no more of it. By the time of the Peace Conference Prussia, Austria, and Russia were certainly in no position to guarantee Belgium’s neutrality, while France and England joined with Belgium in considering a revision of the treaties necessary. Upon the advice of its Commission on Belgian Affairs, the Conference took the position that the treaties, as constituting a single entity, should be revised in the entirety of their clauses, at the joint request of these three powers, and that Holland as a signatory of one of the treaties should take part in the revision, together with the Great Powers whose interests were general. The declared object of the revision was “to free Belgium from that limitation on her sovereignty which was imposed on her by the treaties of 1839, and, in the interest both of Belgium and of general peace, to remove the dangers and disadvantages arising from the said treaties.” Belgium and Holland were accordingly invited to appear before the Conference in order to set forth their views with regard to such a revision.

This action was taken by the Council of Ten March 8; but the Conference was busy with more pressing things, and it was not until May 19 and 20 that the representatives of the two countries were at last heard. The Belgians maintained that Belgium had been given weak frontiers in 1839 on the ground that she was to be protected by the Powers; such protection having failed disastrously in 1914, she should be given frontiers which would enable her to hold her own with her neighbors, in war and in peace. The unlimited sovereignty which had been promised her in President Wilson’s seventh point ought to carry with it the frontiers denied her in the days of her weakness. Holland had no objection to the abandonment of Belgium’s neutrality, which had been guaranteed to her as well as to Belgium, but she would not consider for a moment any cession of her own territory. She declared, however, that she was ready to discuss amicably with Belgium any adjustments of the conditions of navigation, etc.

A commission was then appointed, representing Belgium and Holland as well as the principal Allied and Associated Powers, but its field was specifically restricted to “proposals involving neither transfer of territorial sovereignty nor the creation of international servitudes.” As any thoroughgoing settlement satisfactory to Belgium could not help touching in some way the sovereignty of Holland, and as the regime of the Scheldt already constituted an international servitude, the terms of reference were generally regarded as a triumph for the Dutch. The commission went to work in the summer in two sections, one military and the other economic, but no final results had been reached when the Peace Conference dissolved in December. The reference of such outstanding matters to the governments concerned is another victory for Holland, who desires no change in the existing situation. In these matters Belgium has derived little advantage from the support of her allies. Holland still holds the lower Scheldt and the lower Meuse; Luxemburg seems permanently lost; except in the matter of her neutrality, Belgium stands substantially where she stood in 1839.

If the territorial status of Belgium has not been essentially bettered by the war, her economic status is certainly worse. No share in a problematic indemnity will compensate her for her direct losses, not to speak of her other expenses—the stripping of her resources, the enforced idleness of her factories, the disappearance of her foreign markets and her transit trade. Dependent in an extraordinary degree on the outside world, Belgium was cut off from it for nearly five years, and it is a question how fully she can recover her previous position. A hero in 1914, is Belgium to remain a cripple for the future? The German is gone, but he left ruin and disillusion behind him. Small wonder that many a Belgian asks whether it was all worth while, as he contrasts his lean and hungry country with the prosperity of neutral Holland. Small wonder that the neutral world, as it looks to the future, is encouraged to imitate the Holland that stood pat, the Luxemburg that succumbed, rather than the Belgium that resisted. The neutral is more prosperous than the ally.

In order to get a just perspective in the face of such considerations, it is necessary to go back a few months. Germany’s plan was not merely to use Belgium as a highroad to France, but to make Belgium permanently subject to German interests, if not politically subject, at least under complete military and economic control. The German literature of the war, official and unofficial, is full of plans for the permanent control of Belgium—political annexation, at least of that great Flemish-speaking half of the country which the German administration had separated from the rest of Belgium, and which, if not annexed outright, was to remain apart as the great support of German policy in the Belgium of the future; military control, of railroads and telegraphs, perhaps of the Flemish coast and the fortresses of the Meuse; economic control, through a customs union, railway tariffs, port privileges, and the domination of Belgian industrial enterprises. Now Belgium has at least escaped all this. She has maintained her independence while she has saved her soul. When discouraged about the present state of the world, it is well to remind ourselves that the war accomplished, at least for the time being, one great thing it set out to secure, the destruction of German militarism and the protection of small states against the imperial ambitions of Germany. Belgium has also improved her colonial position, not only by frustrating German plans against the Belgian Congo, but by receiving a mandate over an adjacent portion of German East Africa.

For the future Belgium’s security lies in a strong League of Nations and in what such a League stands for. At first Belgian statesmen took the League somewhat coldly, for the treaty of 1839 was an international covenant, and they had ample experience of the futility of mere paper guarantees. If the League covenant were merely another piece of paper, they would be right. The hopeful side of the League lies rather in its assurance of general coöperation, its growth as an administrative and informing body, its development of an international habit of mind and an international conscience. After all, it was the sense of international right that brought the world to Belgium’s side in the Great War, and it is in the broadening and deepening of that sense that the chief hope lies in the future. For centuries the position of Belgium surrounded by France, Germany, and England has made it the battleground of Europe, and it is only by diminishing the likelihood of battles that it can hope to escape this fate. The best guarantees of the security of small states are a stronger sense of right and justice throughout the world.

Bibliographical Note

On the problem of Schleswig the best collection is the Manual historique de la question du Slesvig, ed. F. de Jessen (Copenhagen, 1906); supplemented by Le Slesvig du Nord, 1906-1914 (Copenhagen, 1915). For a German view, see E. Daenell, Das Dänentum in Nordschleswig seit 1864 (Kiel, 1913). After the armistice Daenell protested strongly against the surrender of any part of Schleswig to Denmark: Has Denmark a claim to North Sleswick? (Münster, 1918). For a summary of conditions under Prussian rule, see L. M. Larson, in American Historical Review, xxiv, pp. 227-252 (1919); and M. Mackeprang, Nordslesvig (Copenhagen, 1910; German translation, 1912). For the Danish discussion in 1919, see Miss Karen Larsen, in Political Science Quarterly, December, 1919. G. Rosendal’s Sönderjylland (Odense, [1919]) contains convenient maps and statistics. See also the British Handbook.

For the history of Belgium, the standard work of H. Pirenne has not advanced beyond 1648; there are brief sketches by L. van der Essen (Chicago, 1916) and L. Vander Linden (Paris, 1918). General economic conditions are described by W. Bürklin, Handbuch des belgischen Wirtschaftslebens (Göttingen and Berlin, 1916); and by Gehrig and Wäntig, Belgiens Volkswirtschaft (Leipzig, 1918). An admirable special study of Belgian commerce will be found in A. Demangeon, “Le port d’Anvers,” in Annales de géographie, 1918, pp. 307-339, elaborated in the second volume of the Travaux du Comité d’Etudes. For Belgium’s coal and mineral resources, see P. Krusch, Die nutzbaren Lagerstätten Belgiens (Essen, 1916). The British Handbook on Belgium (1920) is particularly convenient, as are the related pamphlets in the same series.

German plans for permanent control of Belgium are illustrated in S. Grumbach, Das annexionistische Deutschland (Lausanne, 1917; abbreviated translation, New York, 1917); and in Notestein and Stoll, Conquest and Kultur (Washington, 1918). A specimen of this vast literature of annexation may be seen in the work of a Bonn professor: E. Zitelmann, Das Schicksal Belgiens beim Friedensschluss (third edition, Munich, 1917), where the systematic subjection of Belgium is planned. The exploitation of the Flemish question by the Germans is described by F. Passelecq, La question flamande et l’Allemagne (Paris and Nancy, 1917).

The problems of Belgium’s frontiers are not covered in any single book. The Belgian point of view will be found in P. Nothomb, La barrière belge (Paris, 1916); one chapter also as Histoire belge du grand duché de Luxembourg (Paris, 1918). See also E. Bourgeois, La frontière orientale du royaume de Belgique, in Travaux du Comité d’Etudes, ii. For Luxemburg in general, see Miss Ruth Putnam, Luxemburg and her Neighbors, with bibliography (second edition, New York, 1920). The question of the Scheldt is summarized by A. Rotsaert, L’Escaut depuis le traité de Munster (Brussels and Paris, 1918); numerous documents in Guillaume, L’Escaut depuis 1830 (Brussels, 1903). For a Dutch view, see Den Beer Poortugael, La neutralité sur l’Escaut (The Hague, 1911). For this question at Paris, cf. Cammaerts and Geyl in The New Europe, July 31 and August 14, 1919. On Belgian neutrality and the treaties of 1839, see F. L. Warrin, Jr., The Neutrality of Belgium (Washington, 1918).

The history of Belgium’s frontiers can be traced in the following historical atlases: L. van der Essen, Atlas de géographie historique de la Belgique (Brussels and Paris, 1919-), notably Map 10 (1786) by F. L. Ganshof; Geschiedkundige Atlas van Nederland (The Hague, 1912); Geschichtlicher Atlas der Rheinprovinz (Bonn, 1898-), especially the maps of 1789.

BELGIUM AND HER NEIGHBORS

FOOTNOTES:

[8] Articles 109-114, with official map.

[9] Articles 380-386.

[10] Article 115.

[11] Articles 34-39, with official map.

[12] Articles 32, 33.

[13] Articles 40, 41.

[14] Article 361.

[15] Article 9, § 2.

III
ALSACE-LORRAINE

The fate of Alsace-Lorraine was, in general, a problem of the war rather than of the Peace Conference. Nothing had done more, in President Wilson’s phrase, “to unsettle the peace of the world for nearly fifty years”; nothing was more earnestly discussed throughout the World War; nothing was settled more simply and quickly once the war was over. The completeness of the Allied victory and the immediate evacuation of Alsace-Lorraine required by the terms of the armistice left no doubt of the return of the lost provinces to France. The Peace Conference had only to determine certain necessary details. “The territories which were ceded to Germany in accordance with the Preliminaries of Peace signed at Versailles on February 26, 1871, and the Treaty of Frankfort of May 10, 1871, are restored to French sovereignty as from the date of the Armistice of November 11, 1918.” So runs Article 51 of the treaty of Versailles, and the rest follows from that.

Nevertheless, no account of the territorial problems of the Peace Conference would be complete which did not treat the question of Alsace-Lorraine and its background, and treat it with sufficient fulness to give the proper perspective to this major issue of the war. Moreover, Alsace-Lorraine is the necessary basis for any consideration of the whole matter of the Franco-German frontier, with its specific issues of the Rhine, the Left Bank, and the Saar valley. Let us begin with a minimum of history and description, followed by a fuller analysis of the recent aspects of the problem.

Alsace-Lorraine (German Elsass-Lothringen) was an imperial territory (Reichsland) of the German empire formed in 1871 by the union of the two districts then taken from France. It had an area of 5600 square miles (Connecticut and Rhode Island 6000) and a population in 1910 of 1,874,000 (Connecticut and Rhode Island 1,657,000). On the east the Rhine separates it from the grand duchy of Baden; on the south it touches the Swiss frontier; on the north it was bounded by the Palatinate, Prussia, and the grand duchy of Luxemburg. The French frontier on the west was formed in the south by the summit of the Vosges and farther north by an artificial line of demarcation drawn in 1871.

Geographically considered, Alsace consists of the eastern slopes of the Vosges and the rich plain of the valley of the Rhine and its tributary the Ill, Lorraine of a plateau cut in the west by the Moselle. Alsace is a rich agricultural region, producing grain, potatoes, hay, tobacco, and wine; it has also important manufactures in its towns, cottons being a specialty of Mulhouse and other towns of Upper Alsace. Lorraine is less productive in agriculture but richer in mineral resources and the furnaces and iron mills which these support. Alsace has important oil wells at Pechelbronn, and one of the richest potash deposits in the world at Wittelsheim. Lorraine has important salt mines, and valuable coal fields lie on its border in the valley of the Saar; and on its western edge it shared with France the ‘minette’ iron field, the greatest iron deposit in Europe, from the German portion of which before the war came 74 per cent of all the iron mined in the German empire.

The people of Alsace and eastern Lorraine are preponderantly German-speaking; those of western Lorraine speak French. French is also much spoken in the towns of Alsace. 76 per cent of the whole population is Catholic, 22 per cent Protestant.

Alsace-Lorraine as a single political division was a creation of the German government in 1871; the two districts have different origins and a different history, indeed each of them is made up of parts with histories still further separate and distinct. All have in common the fact that they form part of a region which since the ninth century has been debated ground between Germany and France. In the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries the territory which now forms Alsace and Lorraine was acquired bit by bit by France; in 1871 it was transferred in one lump to the new German empire.

In the later Middle Ages Lorraine formed a duchy, within which lay a number of small and in some cases independent feudal states and the city of Metz, a free city of the Holy Roman Empire whose people spoke French. In 1552, on the petition of certain German Protestant princes, Metz was placed under the protection of the king of France, who took possession of the city and the surrounding territory subject to it. In 1613 the bishopric of Metz and its lands were taken over by the French king, the whole being combined with Toul and Verdun into the province of the Three Bishoprics (Trois Evêchés), and the cession was confirmed by the Emperor in the treaty of Westphalia of 1648. Further acquisitions made in the seventeenth century, notably Sierck and Saarlouis, gave France a strategic line of communication through Lorraine to Alsace. The duchy of Lorraine, which had likewise been dependent on the Holy Roman Empire, was declared free by Emperor Charles V and was gradually drawn into the French sphere of influence. Relinquished by its Hapsburg duke in 1736, in 1738 by the treaty of Vienna it was handed over to a Polish duke, Stanislas Leszcynski, on condition that at his death it should pass to his son-in-law, Louis XV of France, by whom it was accordingly acquired in 1766. Certain small enclaves within Lorraine did not pass to France until the Revolution.

Alsace, except the city of Mulhouse, was annexed to France in the course of the reign of Louis XIV. The Middle Ages had broken the country up into a great variety of feudal states and free cities; the Reformation divided it still further by religious dissensions. In the Thirty Years’ War France intervened on the side of the Protestant princes of Germany; at its close France received considerable possessions in Alsace, in much the same way that Brandenburg (the future Prussia) then secured valuable additions in the north. The treaty of Westphalia (1648) assured to France certain lands and certain governmental rights possessed by the Emperor in his imperial capacity and as head of the house of Hapsburg, but the provisions were, possibly with intention, left vague at certain points and became the occasion of protracted legal and historical disputes. By a combination of undoubted grants, more or less justified legal interpretations, and the direct seizure of the city of Strasburg, Louis XIV rounded out his possession of the whole of Alsace. The sole exception, Mulhouse, allied with the Swiss Confederation, voluntarily offered itself to France in 1798.

Thus united to France, Alsace and Lorraine retained their boundaries until the treaty of Vienna. The general principle of the territorial adjustments of 1814 was to leave to France its frontiers of 1792; after Napoleon’s return and defeat at Waterloo the treaty of 1815 was supposed to reduce these to the limits of 1789. In Alsace and Lorraine two deviations were made from this principle, both to the disadvantage of France. At the northern end of Alsace France lost to Bavaria the territory between the Lauter and the Queich, including the fortress of Landau which she had possessed in 1789. On the northern border of Lorraine the frontier was readjusted to the advantage of Prussia, partly for strategic reasons, in connection particularly with the fortress of Saarlouis, partly in order to take away from France the valuable coal deposits of the Saar valley.

At the close of the Franco-Prussian war Germany required of France the cession of Alsace and Lorraine, with a boundary on the west which was defined by the treaty of Frankfort in 1871.

In the next forty years Alsace-Lorraine passed through various stages of government, from military dictatorship through a certain amount of territorial independence to the definite constitution imposed by the Reichstag in 1911. Those who had hoped for autonomy were disappointed in this instrument, which failed to elevate the Reichsland to the position of a federated state of the empire, although an anomalous provision was made for its representation in the Bundesrat. Legally Alsace-Lorraine was still a subject territory of the empire.

Under the constitution of 1911 the emperor possessed supreme executive authority, exercised chiefly through a governor (Statthalter) appointed and recalled by the emperor and resident in Strasburg. Legislative power was entrusted to a bicameral Diet (Landtag). The upper house (First Chamber) consisted of forty-six members, half of them named directly by the emperor, the others made up of certain ecclesiastical dignitaries, the president of the Superior Court, and representatives of cities and economic interests, so that the majority was under the emperor’s control. The sixty members of the lower house (Second Chamber) were elected by universal male suffrage. The emperor possessed the right of veto over the legislative acts of the Landtag; he could levy taxes if it refused to pass the budget; and he could prorogue it and issue decrees with the force of law during its recess. Independent in local matters of the Reichstag, the Reichsland was far from independent of the emperor.

In imperial matters Alsace-Lorraine had three representatives in the Bundesrat, appointed by the Statthalter and thus ultimately by the emperor; but “their votes were counted only when it made no difference how they were cast.”[16] Alsace-Lorraine had sent representatives to the Reichstag since 1874; these numbered fifteen, elected by all male citizens over the age of twenty-five.

For local government Alsace-Lorraine consisted of the three districts (Bezirke) of Upper Alsace (capital Colmar), Lower Alsace (capital Strasburg), and Lorraine (capital Metz). Each of these fell into circles (Kreise), cantons, and communes (Gemeinden). The presidents of the districts and the directors of the circles were named by the emperor, as were also the directors of police. The organization of the local bodies and the distribution of their functions were similar to the system prevailing in Prussia.

The internal history of this half-century of German rule is a most interesting chapter, which we must pass over in order to gain time for an analysis of the question about which that history revolved. Taken as a whole, the period must be regarded as an unsuccessful attempt on the part of the rulers to assimilate by force an unwilling population. The German government had great resources on its side—compulsory education on the German model and in the German tongue, the repressive measures of the greatest army and the strongest administrative system in Europe, the influx of immigrants from beyond the Rhine, the development of communication with the other parts of the empire, an extraordinary material prosperity in which the Reichsland shared. Its policy alternated between harsh repression and clumsy efforts to win the people’s good will. There were periods when it seemed to be making headway, by the mere lapse of time and the apparent hopelessness of resistance, if by nothing else; the argument from prosperity had its effects; the protesting leaders turned toward more immediate measures of amelioration within the empire. Then an episode like the Zabern affair of 1913 would occur to show that the country was still governed by military force, and the pro-French feeling would blaze out again.

The relative strength of the French and German parties was a subject of acrimonious and inconclusive debate. The fact remained that there was a large French party, just how large nobody knew, which maintained a vigorous tradition of French speech and sympathies, by the fireside, among the clergy, in intercourse with France itself. Its existence was shown in the midst of the war by a project brought before the Reichstag for colonizing Alsace-Lorraine with ‘reliable’ subjects. The survival of this French party through fifty years of persecution is one of the finest public examples of the triumph of the inner over the outer life. A peasant who was waving an old French flag at Strasburg at the great reception to the French troops in November 1918 was asked how he had obtained it. “My father,” he said, “in 1871 put this under a plank of his barn, and every Sunday of his life he knelt over it in prayer for the return of Alsace to France. When he died, he handed on the charge to me to keep until that day should come.” The two elements in the population are well illustrated at Metz, where a German-speaking majority of soldiers, officials, and tradesmen came in, and a new quarter sprang up about the railroad station in the latest and heaviest style of neo-German architecture, but the old French town still remained, with its narrow streets, its mediaeval gates (especially that great eastern portal called the ‘German Gate’), its hôtel de ville, and its Gothic cathedral. And the three ages of Metz may be typified by this French cathedral of the thirteenth century, with the statue of William II as a prophet filling a niche in one of its portals, and the final inscription below this figure, attached by handcuffs after the armistice, “Sic transit gloria mundi!”

For more than half a century the problem of Alsace-Lorraine has been debated back and forth with arguments which have had no effect on the opposite sides of the controversy.

To Germans the Reichsland is a German country, save for the French-speaking strip along the western border. It was occupied by German tribes in the fifth century; its speech is German; it was a portion of the mediaeval Empire until violently torn away in the seventeenth century; in 1871 Germany was simply reclaiming her lost provinces. Furthermore, as stated in 1871, Metz and the Vosges were a necessary defence of the Fatherland against French aggression, which had been experienced under the two Napoleons and might be expected again. Finally, as stated now but not openly in 1871, the iron of Lorraine was absolutely necessary to the economic life of modern Germany. Germany held Alsace-Lorraine by right of nationality and by right of conquest, the symbol of her national unity achieved in the war by which it was recovered; it was a part of Germany, not an international question, and she would not give it up or discuss giving it up.

To the French Alsace and Lorraine had become and remained fundamentally French, having been assimilated gradually and without violence in the eighteenth century, French most of all by having entered fully into the spirit of the French Revolution and taken an active part therein. They begged to remain a part of France in 1871, as the unanimous protests of their representatives show, and they continued French at heart against the strongest pressure in the opposite direction. In spite of differences of language, such as exist in other parts of France, Alsace and Lorraine were French in social structure, in political ideals, and in the sympathies of the population. Without these lost provinces France was a mutilated country, not fully France. Furthermore, the possession of Metz and the Vosges by a military power like Germany constituted a standing menace to a peaceful country like the French Republic; it also menaced the economic life of France and its defence by making possible, as in 1914, immediate seizure of the richest part of its iron supply. France was robbed of these provinces by force in 1871, and the wrong had to be righted, not only in the interest of France but for the sake of the inhabitants.

There was a growing disposition to recognize that the problem of Alsace-Lorraine concerned not merely France and Germany and the inhabitants of the territory itself, but the world at large. The settlement of this question became of international moment partly as it affected the military and economic balance of power between France on the one hand and a Germany dangerous to international peace on the other; partly as a vindication of international right, violated by the forcible annexation of the two provinces in 1871 in defiance of the express protests of the population; partly in order to eliminate, in the interests of permanent international order, an issue which had “unsettled the peace of the world for nearly fifty years.” Whatever the solution, international interests had to be guarded.

Of the arguments which have been brought forward in support of the respective points of view, that of race is the least significant. It is true that most German writers have urged that the people of Alsace-Lorraine are of Germanic race, akin to the other peoples of the German empire; but this view lacks support from the anthropologist. Neither the tall, fair-haired Teuton nor the short, round-headed Alpine type dominates Alsace-Lorraine. The population is clearly mixed, with racial affinities reaching in both directions and resulting from the survival of an original Gallo-Roman substratum in the uplands along with a considerable infiltration of Teutonic invaders in the valleys. Whatever the exact percentage of the two races in Alsace-Lorraine, the fact has no demonstrable historical or political importance. Both Germany and France are, racially considered, strongly mixed peoples, all three races being well represented in France, and the non-Teutonic type in Germany being marked in the southwest and also in the Slavic regions of the east. To argue from race on either side proves either too much or too little—too much, if all people of Teutonic type (as in England, Scandinavia, and northern France) are claimed for the German empire; too little, if either Germany or France were to be limited to the regions where the Teutonic or the Alpine type respectively predominates.

The question of language is more difficult. It is the German view that Alsace and Lorraine (at least that larger part of Lorraine which speaks German), as German-speaking countries, ought to belong to Germany. The French point out that this theory breaks down in principle in the French-speaking districts of Lorraine; they emphasize the importance of the French-speaking minority in Alsace as a leading force and the strong pro-French feeling in a large part of the German-speaking population; and they deny that language is the proper test of political allegiance.

By a curious paradox, language is one of the most changeable and one of the most permanent facts in European history. It is changeable in that it can be quickly learned or unlearned, especially from one generation to another, as is convincingly illustrated by European immigrants to the United States. It is permanent in that the line of demarcation in the open country shows surprisingly little variation over a period of several centuries. Hence it is highly important to distinguish conditions in the towns and among the more conservative peasant population.

As regards the open country, the linguistic frontier between French and German shows very slight changes since the Middle Ages, when it was fixed in each region by the relative preponderance of the Latin-speaking Gauls or of the Teutonic invaders. Slight advances of German in the Middle Ages and of French since the sixteenth century are traceable at certain points, but are relatively unimportant. The present line of division has never been absolutely determined, but a local study was made by C. This in 1886 and 1887 on the basis of personal examination, and his results have been generally accepted by both French and German scholars. The line follows the political frontier, here the crest of the Vosges, only for about sixty miles in Upper Alsace. In the south it includes two districts to the east, Eteimbes and Montreux, while it dips still farther to the east in the upper valleys of the Weiss and the Breusch and the middle valley of the Liepvrette, all of these districts speaking French. In Lorraine the linguistic frontier lies well to the east of the political boundary, running in a zigzag fashion from Mount Donon to the northwest across the open country through or near Sarrebourg and southwest of Thionville to the Luxemburg boundary. About 6 per cent of the area of Alsace and about 46 per cent of the area of Lorraine thus contain a French-speaking majority.

It must not, however, be supposed that the cleavage is adequately described by any such line. In towns the influence of commerce, education, government, et cetera, often forms a considerable class whose speech differs from that of the surrounding country. In the long period of French occupation a French-speaking class was in this way created in Strasburg, Colmar, Mulhouse (notably), and many other towns of Alsace. After 1871 the large immigration of soldiers and officials to Metz made it appear as a German town in the official statistics (78 per cent German-speaking in 1910). The German majority in Metz has disappeared automatically with the withdrawal of the German garrison and civil government, but the French-speaking element in Alsace showed extraordinary persistence and vitality in the face of every measure of repression. In spite of the compulsory study of German in all schools and the official support of their language by all the agencies of the government, the official German returns show no significant diminution in the percentage of the French-speaking population since exact statistics have been kept:

No map of the distribution of language, however exact, would tell the whole story. Community of language is undoubtedly an important influence in producing that ‘consciousness of kind’ upon which nationality rests, and in facilitating the common life of the modern state. We prefer our neighbors to speak our language, however indifferent we may be respecting the shape of their skulls. Community of language is not, however, a necessary basis for a sound national life, as appears in such countries as Belgium and Switzerland. The distinction must also be noted between the local patois and the general national language taught in schools, for in many European countries these are quite different. Thus in Italy a north-Italian cannot understand a Sicilian speaking the local dialect, and there are also regions where French and German are spoken. In Germany there are marked differences between the official High German and the Low German dialects, not to mention the languages of the subject populations. In France languages quite distinct from French exist in Brittany, Provence, the Basque region, and the Flemish territory around Dunkirk, without weakening French nationality or destroying French unity.

In the case of Alsace-Lorraine, it is of fundamental importance to recognize that sympathy for France or Germany did not follow linguistic lines. While few of the French-speaking population were attracted to Germany, there was a very considerable element among the German-speaking population which favored France. Even German observers found French sympathies far more widespread than the French language. It is a well known fact that the anti-German movements of recent years have been more pronounced in Alsace, especially Upper Alsace, than in Lorraine with its larger French-speaking population.

Moreover, language, like race, is a two-edged sword for Germany. If Alsace ought to be part of the empire because it speaks chiefly German, so ought the German-speaking portions of Austria and Switzerland. And if France ought to have given up hope of Alsace because of its German-speaking population, Germany should make no complaint over the parallel renunciation of Prussian Poland or Upper Silesia. Germany cannot ask to apply the principle in the west and reject it in the east.

As a matter of history, the linguistic frontier between French and German has rarely coincided with the political frontier. The national lines, so far as national lines have been drawn, have been drawn by other forces. Language is an important element in national life, but it is not the only element, and in Alsace-Lorraine it has been subordinated to other considerations. Alsace, in spite of its German speech, was reasonably contented under French rule. It never became fully reconciled to German rule, in spite of a large measure of community of language. The causes for its aspirations and sympathies lie deeper than dialect. Although surer and clearer than race, language proved an illusory and insufficient basis for solving the problem of Alsace-Lorraine.

When we come to the historical tradition and affinities of the district, we find that German writers urge the long membership of Alsace and Lorraine in the mediaeval Empire down to 1648, the place of Alsace in the history of German literature, and its affinities with the German culture of the valley of the Rhine. The French bring out certain connections of Alsace and Lorraine with France before Louis XIV, but they urge especially the transformation of these provinces during the French Revolution into a people profoundly imbued with the French conceptions of liberty and democracy, in contradistinction to the political and social traditions and organization of Germany.

Arguments of this sort are by their nature less specific and tangible than those based upon the concrete facts of language and race, and judgments in relation to them are likely to be subjective. At certain points, however, they admit of objective analysis, particularly as regards political affiliations.

There is, in the first place, no question that both Alsace and Lorraine formed part of the mediaeval Empire from the tenth century on. It is also equally clear that the Empire of the Middle Ages was in no way comparable to the national states of modern Europe, but was a loose union of tribal duchies which were later dissolved into a mass of petty feudal states and free cities. The Emperors never succeeded in establishing a strong monarchy or real national unity, being, by virtue of their imperial title, often more interested in asserting a shadowy supremacy over Italy and the valley of the Rhone. In the broader sense the Empire covered at one time or another a considerable part of Europe, as, for example, central and northern Italy and eastern France; in the narrower sense the German kingdom comprised under its loose and ineffective sway the territory of modern Holland, eastern Belgium, a good part of Switzerland, Austria, Bohemia, et cetera. As time went on, the principalities and towns became more rather than less independent, until the treaty of Westphalia (1648) recognized the territorial sovereignty of such princes as had not already established it. Membership in so large and unconsolidated a body would not establish the German character of any particular member, else it would be necessary to incorporate many parts of Europe which have long enjoyed complete independence of Germany.

Moreover, it is important to note that the present German empire is not a continuation of the mediaeval Empire or a successor thereto. The old Empire came to an end in 1806, when Francis I laid aside the imperial crown and assumed the title of emperor of Austria. The modern German empire was created by Prussia in 1871 as a federation of German states from which Austria was carefully excluded. If the mediaeval Emperors had a legitimate successor, it was the Hapsburgs, not the Hohenzollerns, who were in the days of the older Empire merely one of many lines of feudal and electoral princes. The Hapsburgs made over to France their claims to Alsace and Lorraine, to Alsace and Metz in 1648, to the duchy of Lorraine in 1738.

On the other hand the cultural ties between Germany and Alsace, and in some measure between Germany and Lorraine, were stronger than the political. Alsace had its share in the literary and artistic development of the Rhine valley, and this, while affected by the French influences which spread eastward in the later Middle Ages, was preponderantly German. In the matter of speech French historians admit that “Alsace at the beginning of the seventeenth century was an absolutely German country,” and its local dialect was the vehicle of its vigorous local traditions. “At the moment when it passed under French rule it belonged to Germany in language, habits, institutions, and feeling.”[17]

The French government from 1648 to 1789 was tender to the traditions of the conquered territory. Except for the prescription of French in the courts, no restrictions were put on the use of the German language, although French naturally made rapid progress in the towns. There was little change in local institutions. In spite of its centralized monarchy, France itself abounded in local customs, privileges, and jurisdictions, and it was natural and prudent to allow even greater toleration in a newly conquered territory. Subject to the Sovereign Council and the intendant, local affairs went on very much in their old way and in large measure in the German tongue. Much was accomplished for the material wellbeing of the country, and the inhabitants came to recognize certain advantages in French rule. The old regime was a period of gradual assimilation without violence.

The institutions which the old regime tolerated in Alsace, the Revolution swept away. German historians naturally emphasize the excesses and violence of the Revolution, French historians its social and political reforms; but there is general agreement that it took long and rapid strides in the direction of making the country French. “It made an end of all the German mediaeval institutions which remained,” is the sad summary of Meyer’s Handlexikon.[18] The Revolution destroyed privilege, abolished seigniorial rights and jurisdictions, and established a democratic social order as fully in Alsace and Lorraine as in the rest of France. There was of course opposition, and the anti-religious policy of the Revolution was steadily resisted by this strongly Catholic population, but in general Alsace and Lorraine moved with the new movement. The Marseillaise was first sung at Strasburg; Alsatians served in great numbers in the armies which carried the principles of 1789 across Europe; and names like Kléber and Ney illustrate the share of these provinces in the wars of the Napoleonic era. The acceptance of the Revolution in Alsace and Lorraine made them at last one with France. “It is the Revolution, not Louis XIV, which made Alsace French,” wrote Fustel de Coulanges in 1870. “Since that moment Alsace has followed all our destinies, it has lived our life. It has shared all our thoughts and feelings, our victories and defeats, our glory and our defects, all our joys and all our sorrows.”[19] By 1813, confess the German historians of Alsace, “all feeling for Germany had been lost,” and “no trace remained of the ancient community of race between the Alsatians and their German brothers.”[20]

This participation in the life and ideals of France continued until 1871. There was, it is true, a considerable feeling of particularism in Alsace, and to a lesser extent in Lorraine, as well as some natural sympathy between the Protestant minority in Alsace and the Protestants beyond the Rhine; but there was no movement for separation from France and no desire manifested therefor. Toward 1870 the desire for the recovery of these ‘lost provinces’ became more pronounced in Germany, and it was fanned into flame as the war of 1870 progressed; but this nationalistic movement found little or no response among the Alsatians whom it claimed as long-lost kinsmen. If they were still German “socially and ethically,” “politically and nationally they were thoroughly French.” They were Germans as members of the family, Frenchmen as members of the nation.[21] The Germans freely admitted in 1871 that the Alsatians did not yet desire reunion with Germany, but this was laid to their French education, and time and experience of the blessings of German rule were expected to work a rapid change in their desires. The state of opinion in Alsace at the time of the Franco-Prussian war is excellently shown by an outside observer, Sir Robert Morier, then British secretary of legation at Darmstadt, whence he had opportunity to follow closely the events of the war and the course of German opinion. Strongly pro-German and anti-French throughout, he made it his business to inquire from the best German sources whether there was any party in Alsace which desired annexation to Germany, and the answer was uniformly in the negative. Among others he interrogated the Grand Duke of Baden, who had led an army in Alsace, and “had given himself the greatest trouble to ascertain the feeling of the population in regard to Germany and ... had come to the conclusion that not only no annexationist party existed, but that the strongest possible national French feeling pervaded the whole population.”[22]

The usual German justification of the seizure of Alsace and Lorraine may be summed up in the words of the historian Ranke in 1870, “We are fighting Louis XIV.” These provinces had been taken from Germany in the seventeenth century; they must now be taken back by their rightful owner. To many people this is still the essence of the problem of Alsace-Lorraine. Now if the world had not moved in the interval between Louis XIV and 1871, there would be little to say in answer to this argument. In the seventeenth century lands and peoples were passed from one sovereign to another like pieces on a chessboard, and what had been lost in one game might well be retaken in the next. But as regards this question the world had changed in three important respects:—

1. Germany had changed. The Germany which lost these provinces to Louis XIV was, as we have seen, a jumble of small states, loosely united under the ineffective headship of the Hapsburgs. The Germany which reclaimed them was a Hohenzollern empire from which much of the old empire, including the Hapsburgs, had been separated or excluded.
2. Alsace and Lorraine had changed. They had lost their German institutions and political sympathies and had become in all political respects French as the result of two centuries of membership in the French state, and especially of their share in the French Revolution.
3. European public opinion had changed through the growth of nationality, and was coming to regard peoples as entitled to determine their own destiny, or at least to be consulted regarding it. To tear away people from the country of which they formed a part in order to unite them with a state to which they had belonged two centuries before was becoming an anachronism.

It is quite true, then, that Germany in 1871 was fighting Louis XIV, but in the spirit of Louis XIV rather than that of the later nineteenth century. Its appeal to history was in reality a denial of the facts of historic change, in that it asserted the predominance of the older historic tradition against the newer and more vital historic tradition created during the union of Alsace and Lorraine with France. Only a clear pronouncement of the inhabitants themselves in favor of such a transfer could justify it to the thinking of a later age. Yet a popular vote was neither permitted nor desired by Germany in 1871 or at any time between 1871 and 1918.

In all such discussions of the affinities of Alsace and Lorraine, the outsider is struck with the failure of French and German to meet each other’s arguments. The truth seems to be that the disputants move in different realms of thought and feeling. To the Germans the German character of Alsace is accepted as self-evident, so that any connection with France appears unnatural and contrary to all national life. To the French the community of political and social ideas gained by long union with France seems the determining element, and subjection to Germany seems something monstrous.

In spite of all that has been written about the supposed affinities and desires of the population of Alsace-Lorraine, it must not be forgotten that the national interests of Germany and France are vitally concerned in its possession, not merely in the general sense of the desire to keep or to recover something which has been fought over as a matter of national honor, but in the very definite respects of military advantage and economic power. And there have been times when these considerations were put nakedly in the foreground as the dominant motives. Thus Emperor William I wrote to Empress Eugénie October 26, 1870: “The required cessions of territory have no other purpose than to set back the point of departure of the French armies which will come to attack us in the future.”[23] German blood, said Bismarck, “was shed not for the sake of Alsace-Lorraine, but for the German empire, its unity, and the protection of its frontiers.”[24] Stern treatment of its people he defended on the ground that it was the glacis of a fortress, to be used for the benefit of the Fatherland behind it, irrespective of the desires of the conquered.[25]

The military purpose of the annexation was also evident from the boundaries of the ceded territory. The frontier of the Vosges, of obvious advantage to Germany from a strategic point of view, might also be argued for on other grounds as the natural line of demarcation between Alsace and France—the watershed between two river systems, in part the boundary between French and German speech, etc. No such ‘natural’ or linguistic argument, however, could be urged for the annexation of French Lorraine. Here the obvious and declared object was the fortress of Metz, dominating the approaches to the upper Rhine by way of the Saar and to the middle Rhine by way of the valley of the Moselle. Bismarck, it is generally understood, wished to take only Alsace and feared the danger of a French population in the west, but Moltke and the military party insisted on Metz and had their way.

Still another consideration had weight in drawing the frontiers of 1871, namely the iron deposits of Lorraine. Apart from the potash of Upper Alsace, it so happens that the great natural resources of Alsace-Lorraine lay on its outer edges, in the coal of the Saar valley and the iron of the Lorraine border. The problems of the Saar will be discussed in the next chapter in relation to the frontier of 1814; those of the Lorraine frontier are particularly instructive in connection with our present subject.

The iron which forms the greatest mineral resource of Alsace-Lorraine is a part of the minette district, about forty miles in length and fourteen miles in breadth, lying on the borders of France and Luxemburg. The Franco-German frontier of 1871 divided this area nearly equally between the two countries, save for a small strip on the north extending beyond the Luxemburg line. Most of this ore is strongly phosphoric (minette), and could not be worked advantageously until the invention in 1878 of the Thomas process for dephosphorization. The ores are not relatively rich, the average iron content being 33 to 35 per cent; but they are easily mined and are sufficiently porous to be easily crushed, while a limestone which fluxes easily occurs either with the ore, as at Briey, or in the immediate neighborhood.

In 1913 German Lorraine produced 20,600,000 long tons, or three-fourths of the iron mined in Germany. French Lorraine in the same year produced 19,400,000 tons, or 90 per cent of the product of France, of which a considerable portion was exported to Germany. Of the world’s total production of iron in 1913, 29 per cent came from the minette district, i. e., 12 per cent from German Lorraine, 12 per cent from French Lorraine and 5 per cent from Luxemburg. The rest of Europe furnished 24 per cent. The reserves have been estimated as 3000 million tons for French Lorraine and 1830 million tons for German Lorraine; more recent estimates make the two more nearly equal, but with the preponderance in favor of the French. The whole constitutes by far the richest iron supply in Europe and one of the three or four greatest in the world.

This enormous development of the minette district was quite unforeseen in 1871, yet we know that even then the Germans were not blind to the importance of its iron. The iron deposits of the region were carefully studied by German geologists for their government, with the result that the German territorial demands were shaped with the purpose of including the best of them and were further increased between the preliminaries of Versailles and the final treaty of Frankfort. Hence the meanderings of the frontier then drawn. It was believed that the main vein had been secured, comprising the ores near the surface which alone appeared workable with profit, and that nothing valuable in the deposit had been omitted. Only later was it discovered that the dip of the strata toward Briey and Longwy concealed an even richer field on the French side which could be worked to a considerable depth. Moreover the German geologists of 1871 were especially interested in the phosphorus-free ore and could not foresee the value which the Thomas process would give the minette. Lamentations over their shortsightedness were heard before the war,[26] and in August 1914 German engineers hastened to occupy Briey and Longwy, whose ores are valued not only for their content but for mixing with the less calcareous German ores. It was frequently declared in Germany that without this occupied territory the production of German munitions would have to cease, although this is hardly justified by the facts now available concerning the actual use which was made of minette ore for this purpose.

Moreover, it is well to remember that readjustments of the Lorraine frontier at the expense of France were a constant objective of the Germans throughout the war. At times these were sketched broadly as part of a general advance of the German boundary along the whole front from Belfort to the mouth of the Somme, but more frequently they are described as “improvements” of the frontier in Lorraine, with the minette area of French Lorraine and the great border fortresses as the definite objectives. The acquisition of Briey and Longwy figured in all the principal programs of annexation, especially those of the great economic interests, which went so far as to declare that a war which did not secure them for Germany would be a failure. The object was clearly economic, or rather, in view of the place of iron and steel in modern warfare, military-economic.

More specifically military was the demand for the great fortresses of this part of the French frontier: Belfort, commanding the ‘Burgundian’ gate leading from Upper Alsace to the valleys of the Doubs and Saône, and still left in French hands after its heroic resistance of 1871; Epinal, on the Moselle; Toul, commanding the passage from the Moselle to the Meuse; and Verdun on the Meuse, whose importance was made clear to the world in the great operations of 1916-17. The strength of these positions is evident from the fact that the French hold on them remained unshaken during more than four years of war. Their importance is further indicated by the German demand, made at the outbreak of hostilities, that Toul and Verdun be handed over as guarantees of French neutrality. Such conditions of peace kept reappearing, sometimes under the specious suggestion of a “slight rectification of frontier” without indicating the decisive value of a few miles of territory in this region.

The day of such Pan-German dreams is over. They are mentioned merely to indicate the nature of the German war aims, and the fact that German interest in Alsace-Lorraine was not dictated wholly by motives of the language, race, or historic affinities of the population.

During the war the German attitude on Alsace-Lorraine was to stand pat, while at the same time taking stronger measures for destroying the local opposition. The Germans refused, as before, to admit that there was anything to discuss, much less anything to yield. Autonomy[27], even, was not officially proposed until the last month of the war, in a last effort to save Germany’s pride and iron mines. The German peace terms sent to President Wilson in December 1916 are said to have conceded to France only the small portion of Upper Alsace which had been held by French troops throughout the war. The support of “the just claims of France respecting Alsace-Lorraine”[28] which formed part of the terms proposed by the Austrian emperor in 1917 was promptly disavowed by Germany. Only rare Minority Socialists dared support the idea of a plebiscite.

All this changed with the armistice and the requirement of evacuation of the Reichsland by German troops and officials. The whole of Germany became suddenly enamored of the virtues of a plebiscite. President Wilson’s programme was invoked, on the alleged ground that the wrong done to France in 1871 lay simply in not calling for a popular vote, and the German government declared itself ready to right the wrong now by means of such a vote. The alternatives proposed for the voting were union with Germany, union with France, and an independent state free to form a customs union with either country. If Germany could not keep the Reichsland itself, she might perhaps thus keep its iron and its trade! To such proposals the French turned a deaf ear. Those who had opposed a plebiscite before the victory were not likely to support it now, and doubt disappeared before the reception which Strasburg gave the French troops and the President and Premier. “This is the best of plebiscites,” said President Poincaré in the midst of his tumultuous welcome by the Alsatians, and there were few to deny it. The Germans were genuinely surprised at the warmth of the popular enthusiasm, and began to ask themselves why after fifty years they had failed to get the sympathy of the people.

During the war the idea of a plebiscite in Alsace-Lorraine had been popular with certain sections of Allied and neutral opinion, both as a form of self-determination and as a means of settling finally and conclusively this ancient dispute. Such a decision would be democratic, and it would be final. Against it had been urged the grave practical difficulties which stood in the way of any free expression of the real opinion of the real inhabitants, particularly in view of the emigration of about half a million since 1871, the coming in of some hundreds of thousands from Germany, and the wholesale condemnations and deportations during the war. A popular vote under these conditions would have opened a wide field to bribery, intimidation, and influence of every sort, and would have engendered great bitterness and recrimination. A serious objection of principle was also raised on the part of the French, who felt they would thus be recognizing Germany’s legal right in the Reichsland. The will of the people, they said, had been expressed by the unanimous declarations of their elected representatives in the French Parliament in 1871 and in the German Reichstag in 1874, yet it had been openly flouted by Germany so long as she had any chance of retaining the Reichsland by other means. Germany could not be permitted to ignore a principle at one moment and to invoke it at another when it might possibly be manipulated in her favor, a system of “heads I win, tails you lose.” Such a proceeding was plainly unfair to France, and it also set a bad example of international morality by leaving Germany a chance to profit by her violation of international right in 1871. Under the guise of popular rights this would really sanction an international wrong. Some even maintained that, the treaty of Frankfort having been torn up by Germany in 1914, Alsace and Lorraine therewith reverted to France, ipso facto disannexed. To accept a plebiscite as the basis of restoration was to admit the lawfulness of the act of violence by which they had been seized.

These arguments were hard to answer save on the ground of a strongly expressed demand on the part of the people of Alsace-Lorraine, and, whatever their opinion, no such general demand was forthcoming. Certainly Germany’s record of oppression and failure as a ruler was sufficient to forfeit whatever claims she might justly have had upon the Reichsland, and she had formally accepted President Wilson’s demand that “the wrong done to France in 1871 should be righted.” That wrong consisted, not in failing to hold a plebiscite, but in contemptuously disregarding the unmistakable expressions of popular opinion then and thereafter expressed.

French Socialist opinion still wanted a plebiscite, but the purpose was plainly to satisfy a theoretical scruple, which required a popular vote for any change of sovereignty. For good or ill, Alsace-Lorraine came back to France without a popular consultation; it was administered by France in the interval between the armistice and the treaty of peace; and the treaty recognized French sovereignty as beginning with the armistice, November 11, 1918. The deed of Frankfort was thus undone. A plebiscite seemed impracticable, unless as a mere matter of form, and in that case it was unnecessary. There was something to be said for summoning a popular assembly for other purposes which might easily have expressed the opinion of the people, but this again would have been chiefly a matter of form, to forestall future objections.

So the fundamental provisions of the treaty which concern Alsace-Lorraine consist merely of a preamble by which the high contracting parties, Germany thus included, recognize “the moral obligation to redress the wrong done by Germany in 1871 both to the rights of France and to the wishes of the population of Alsace and Lorraine,” and the article[29] restoring to France the territories ceded by the treaty of Frankfort. The other articles[30] are, essentially, consequences and applications of this act of restoration. Some of them merely reproduce, in the opposite sense, clauses of the treaty of 1871. In general, however, the Paris articles are fuller and more complicated, partly because they had to be adapted, either by reference or by way of exception, to the other provisions of the instrument in which they are contained, partly because the restoration of territory after half a century necessarily raises questions not involved in the original cession.

Such a question was that of citizenship, which is regulated by an elaborate annex, adjusted to the complex conditions of citizenship and nationality which had arisen in the Reichsland. The general principle adopted is, broadly speaking, that French nationality is acquired ipso facto by those who had lost it in 1871 and by their descendants, except the offspring of a native mother and a German father who had come to the Reichsland subsequently to the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war; that it may be claimed before the French authorities by all others save Germans and the descendants of Germans who have come in since 1870; and that such German immigrants and their descendants can acquire French citizenship only by the process of naturalization. The purpose of the whole was to admit on the basis of domicile before 1870, and to exclude, for the present, the Germans, with their descendants, who had come to the Reichsland in large numbers since the German conquest.

The economic provisions had to consider not only the status of such individual matters as debts and contracts, pensions and suits at law, but also the new relations created in the region as a whole. Thus France acquired the public property, including the railroads, without any payment, and no share of the German public debt or war indemnity was attached to the transferred territory—arrangements which offset in some measure the principal and interest of the five milliards of war indemnity imposed by Germany in 1871. German economic penetration is restricted not only by the liquidation of existing enterprises but by the right to prohibit new participation in public utilities, mines, quarries, and metallurgical establishments. Important temporary provisions guard against the effects of a sudden interruption of relations between the Left and Right Banks in such matters as ports, terminals, and water power, and in respect to customs tariffs, a period of five years being set during which free exportation is permitted into Germany and free importation of textile materials from Germany into Alsace and Lorraine. This last is particularly important, for the Reichsland enjoyed profitable markets in Germany, and its economic prosperity was constantly urged as an argument for remaining under German rule. Whether or not France can furnish equally good outlets for local manufactures, she must at least provide a reasonable period for readjustment of the lines of trade.

The largest economic question involved in the return of the lost provinces to France is not mentioned in the treaty, namely the enormous transfer of mineral resources. By securing the potash of Upper Alsace France halves the German supply and thus breaks the German monopoly of the world’s mineral potash; by joining the iron of Lorraine to the iron of Briey, Longwy, and Nancy, France obtains, save for the small share of Luxemburg, full control of the greatest iron field in Europe. The minette ore is no longer shared between France and Germany, it is monopolized by France. If France had Germany’s coal, she might try to establish an economic supremacy as great as that possessed by Germany at the outbreak of the war. Late in 1918 one began to hear suggestions for some sort of condominium in Lorraine, or for a guarantee of German participation in its mine and furnaces; but such proposals found no favor with the French government. No such arrangements had been made for the benefit of France in 1871, and she saw no reason for making them now. And if other great powers had pointed out the danger of so great a monopoly in the world, the French might have replied that they had little coal, less oil, and no copper. After all, the nub of the situation is that France needs coal and Germany needs iron, and sooner or later it will be necessary to exchange one for the other. The sooner this natural necessity is recognized in a modus vivendi, the better for all concerned. If the compelling forces of trade are not allowed to assert themselves with reasonable freedom, the matter may well cause grave international difficulty.

Nor did the conference concern itself with other internal matters which had been much discussed before the armistice. During the forty-seven years of separation, France and the Reichsland had necessarily diverged in many matters of institutions, legislation, and social conditions, so that several difficult problems of readjustment were presented. The law of the new German civil code of 1900, the German organization of local government, the German systems of taxation and social legislation were well established in Alsace-Lorraine, and could not immediately be rooted up, if indeed their abolition was always desirable. Perhaps the most striking point of divergence was to be found in the relations of church and state. The Reichsland had preserved the system of the Concordat of 1801 and analogous measures for the Protestant and Jewish religious bodies, so that the government maintained religion from public funds and exercised direct authority over the appointment of the clergy. In France the Separation Laws of 1905 and 1907 had carried through the complete separation of church and state, so that the state relinquished the nomination of the higher clergy and discontinued the payment of clerical salaries, at the same time taking over ecclesiastical property. France had also suppressed the teaching religious orders and put all education into lay hands in so-called ‘neutral schools.’ These measures were viewed with grave disapproval in Alsace-Lorraine, a deeply religious country where the great majority of the schools are under the control of religious bodies and much of the lower education is still in the hands of nuns. Serious difficulty would be encountered in extending the French system to Alsace-Lorraine, and in this, as in other fields, some measure of local independence is required, at least for the present.

In adjusting their relations with the restored provinces the French will need an uncommon measure of tact, sympathetic understanding, and breadth of view, and any mistakes will be viewed critically in the country itself and magnified beyond the Rhine. Nevertheless, the questions are not now international, and it is earnestly to be hoped that they may not become international. They may best be left in the hands of those directly concerned, the people of France, including henceforth, for this as for all other purposes, the three departments of the Haut-Rhin, the Bas-Rhin, and the Moselle, which were once known as Alsace-Lorraine.

Bibliographical Note

The best history of Alsace is R. Reuss, Histoire d’Alsace (11th edition, Paris, 1916). There is no analogous work for Lorraine; see C. Pfister, La Lorraine, le Barrois, et les Trois Evêchés (Paris, 1912). A good recent book in German is lacking; see Lorenz and Scherer, Geschichte des Elsass (Berlin, 1886). For the seventeenth century, see R. Reuss, L’Alsace au xviiᵉ siècle (Paris, 1897-98). On the cession of 1871, see G. May, Le traité de Francfort (Paris, 1909); and for the fixing of the frontier, A. Laussedat, La délimitation de la frontière franco-allemande (Paris, 1901), with facsimile of the original map showing the changes between the preliminaries of Versailles and the final treaty.

There is a vast literature of the period since 1871 and the ‘question’ in all its aspects. Convenient accounts in English are B. Cerf, Alsace-Lorraine since 1870 (New York, 1919); C. D. Hazen, Alsace-Lorraine under German Rule (New York, 1917); C. Phillipson, Alsace-Lorraine (London, 1918); and E. A. Vizetelly, The True Story of Alsace-Lorraine (London, 1918). Examples of the literature are: H. and A. Lichtenberger, La question d’Alsace-Lorraine (Paris, 1915), by two fair-minded Frenchmen of Alsatian origin; the various books of the Alsatian nationalist, Abbé E. Wetterlé; S. Grumbach, Das Schicksal Elsass-Lothringens (Neuchâtel, 1915), by an Alsatian Socialist; D. Schäfer, Das Reichsland (Berlin, 1915), Pan-German; H. Wendel, Elsass-Lothringen und die Sozial-Demokratie (Berlin, 1916), Social Democrat; H. Ruland, Deutschtum und Franzosentum in Elsass-Lothringen (Colmar, 1908); E. Florent-Matter, Les Alsaciens-Lorrains contre l’Allemagne (Paris, 1918). The brilliant statement of the French case in the letter of Fustel de Coulanges to Mommsen (now in his Questions historiques, Paris, 1893, pp. 505-512) has lost none of its point with time. A. Schulte, Frankreich und das linke Rheinufer (Stuttgart, 1918), is an historical polemic against French claims.

A good manual of the government under German rule is O. Fischbach, Das öffentliche Recht des Reichslandes (Tübingen, 1914).

The human geography of the whole region is admirably discussed in P. Vidal de la Blache, La France de l’Est (Paris, 1917). There is a good general article by L. Gallois in the Geographical Review, vi, pp. 89-115 (1918). There are excellent discussions of resources, as well as of frontiers, by eminent geographers and historians in the first volume of the Travaux du Comité d’Etudes: L’Alsace-Lorraine et la frontière du Nord-est (Paris, 1918).

On the iron of Lorraine see The Iron Resources of the World (Stockholm, 1910); the Atlas of Mineral Resources of the U. S. Geological Survey; E. Gréaux, Le fer en Lorraine (Paris, 1908); F. Engerand, L’Allemagne et le fer (Paris, 1916); H. Schumacher, Die westdeutsche Eisenindustrie (Leipzig, 1910); P. Krusch, in Petermann’s Mitteilungen, lxiii, pp. 41-44 (1917).

The formation of Alsace and Lorraine is traced, from the point of view that they are naturally German, in Boeckh and Kiepert, Historische Karte von Elsass und Lothringen (Berlin, 1870); and in Droysen, Historischer Handatlas (1886), no. 41. For the changes of 1789-1815, the Atlas of the Comité d’Etudes is convenient, as also for mineral resources. There is a good map of the minette field in Petermann’s Mitteilungen, 1917, plate 8. The linguistic maps of C. This will be found in Beiträge zur Landes- und Volkskunde von Elsass-Lothringen, parts 1 and 5 (1887, 1888); those of H. Witte, showing the modifications of the linguistic frontier, in Forschungen zur deutschen Landes- und Volkskunde, viii, x. A percentage map based on the German census of languages is given by Langhans, in Deutsche Erde, 1910, plate 1; cf. 1909, plate 3. See also Gallois’ maps in Annales de géographie, ix, nos. 4, 5; and Gröber, Grundriss der romanischen Philologie (Strasburg, 1904-1906), i, end.

FOOTNOTES:

[16] Laband, Deutsches Reichsstaatsrecht (Tübingen, 1912), p. 190.

[17] R. Reuss, L’Alsace au xviiᵉ siècle (Paris, 1898), i, p. 720; ii, p. 186.

[18] Edition of 1890, i, p. 383, removed from later editions.

[19] Questions historiques (Paris, 1893), p. 509.

[20] Lorenz and Scherer, Geschichte des Elsass (Berlin, 1872), p. 441.

[21] Quoted as the opinion of a liberal German advocate of Mainz, who had “a perfect knowledge of Alsace,” in Memoirs of Sir Robert Morier (London, 1911), ii, p. 184.

[22] Memoirs of Sir Robert Morier, ii, pp. 185 ff.

[23] Printed from the original in Revue historique, cxxvii, p. ii (1918).

[24] Die politischen Reden, vi, p. 201; see also v, p. 56; vi, pp. 31, 32, 167; xiii, p. 347.

[25] Die politischen Reden, xiii, pp. 375, 26, 27; vii, p. 414.

[26] “Unfortunately the theory [that only a zone of two kilometres was workable] was held by the German geologists who were consulted in fixing the frontiers of the treaty of Frankfort, and hence led to the present course of the Franco-German frontier.” H. Schumacher, Die westdeutsche Eisenindustrie (Leipzig, 1910), p. 147; and in Grumbach, Das annexionistische Deutschland, p. 172.

[27] Annexation to Prussia was even urged, as by Laband, in Deutsche Revue, June 1917, much as by Treitschke in 1870 (Preussische Jahrbücher, xxvi, pp. 398 ff.).

[28] Facsimile in L’Illustration, January 3, 1920.

[29] Article 51.

[30] Articles 52-79 and annex.

IV
THE RHINE AND THE SAAR

If Alsace-Lorraine occupied the attention of the Peace Conference in far less measure than it had occupied the attention of Europe during the preceding half-century, quite the contrary is true of the related questions of the Rhine, the Left Bank, and the Saar valley. By the recovery of Alsace France found herself once more on the Rhine; she demanded a corresponding voice in Rhenish affairs. By regaining her boundaries of 1870, she was in a position to reopen the question of her boundaries of 1814, of those northern appendages of Alsace and Lorraine which she had lost to Prussia in 1815 and which contained the coal so much needed for the restoration of France. By defeating Germany decisively she was able to demand military guarantees on the Left Bank against another German invasion, perhaps even special privileges as well. French imperialism, French reparation, French self-defence were all in some degree involved in these problems of the Rhine and the intervening lands.

Let us look at these matters in their historical setting. To German geographers and historians the Rhine is a German river, by nature and by history, its valley forming a physiographic unity, itself the great highway of Germany. It is true, they sadly admit, that the upper third of the valley has been in course of time almost wholly withdrawn from Germany to fall under Swiss domination, but this still remains, in culture if not in politics, almost purely Germanic, like the lower Rhine in Holland. The common German view was summed up a century ago in the phrase of Arndt, so often repeated in 1870, “Der Rhein Deutschlands Strom, nicht Deutschlands Grenze.”

Since the seventeenth century there have not been lacking in France certain historians and geographers who have maintained that the Rhine was the natural frontier of France, as it had been of Roman Gaul. “Rhenus finis Germaniae,” said the contemporaries of Louis XIV, while a century later Carnot and Danton spoke of the Rhine as the natural limit of France. Scholars of this way of thinking have insisted upon the fundamentally Celtic character of the Left Bank, if not of the Rhine itself—is not der Rhein, der deutsche Rhein, originally a Celtic word?—and have emphasized French elements in Rhenish culture and French influence upon its political life. During the war men of this school organized the Comité de la Rive Gauche du Rhin and published a fair amount of propagandist literature which sought to reclaim the Left Bank for France; but while the group included some scholars of eminence, it cannot be considered representative of the great body of French historians.

To one who approaches the matter without any nationalistic prepossessions the fate of the Rhine valley seems to have been determined, not by any geographic necessity, but by the vicissitudes of history. France has no such clearly marked frontier on the northeast as it possesses in other directions, for the Rhine, like other rivers, unites more than it divides, while a mountain range like the Vosges, strongly recommended by German writers in the region of Alsace, fails as we proceed northward. As a matter of history, whatever value the Rhine frontier possessed in Roman days disappeared with the Germanic invasions, and ever since the partitions of the Frankish empire in the ninth century the lands between the Rhine and the Meuse have been debated between France and Germany. There is no racial frontier, for the region is one of mixed Teutonic and Alpine types, whose distribution was more affected by highland and valley than by any considerations of east and west. There is a linguistic frontier, which has scarcely changed in the open country since the early Middle Ages, and French and German speech have naturally been the vehicles of their respective civilizations; but the linguistic and the political frontiers have rarely coincided, and “the linguistic frontier has never determined the political.”[31] The decisive considerations have been political pressure and military force, and in the more recent period political affinities and economic relations.

At first Germany had the advantage, if we mean by Germany that loose congeries of tribal duchies and later of feudal principalities which made up the mediaeval Empire. Thus the partition of Meersen (870), which you will seek in vain in the text of Freeman’s Geography or in Schrader’s Atlas historique, is often cited by German scholars as fixing a permanent line of demarcation to Germany’s advantage, and was even invoked by Brockdorff-Rantzau in May 1919 as the original basis of the German title to the Saar valley. Yet this same line would give to France Maestricht, Liège, and the mouths of the Rhine! After the disintegration of the Empire in the later Middle Ages, French advance began actively in the sixteenth century in the region of the Three Bishoprics. In the seventeenth century Louis XIV intrenched himself on the Saar at Saarlouis, and piece by piece gained possession of Alsace. The Revolution carried the tricolor down the Rhine from Landau to the Dutch border. Then came the treaty of Vienna, setting France back to the limits of 1789 and even farther, and the treaty of Frankfort by which France lost all contact with the Rhine. The victory of 1918 again put France on the Rhine. A German medal of 1917 represents an exhausted France driven to her death by England at Verdun, while on the obverse under the insignia of peace the German Rhine flows calmly on—“und ruhig fliesst der Rhein.” The French flag now floats not only over Verdun but over Metz and Strasburg as well. The Rhine still flows on but in its Alsatian portion it is no longer the German Rhine; it is “Deutschlands Grenze, nicht Deutschlands Strom.”

With France once more a Rhine power, the perspective requires certain readjustments. First of all, there is the question of navigation. Freedom of commerce on the Rhine was established in 1815 by the treaty of Vienna, but it has been exercised for the benefit of the states bordering on the river, who drew up in 1868 at Mannheim the convention which has since regulated navigation on the river. France was one of the signatories, but dropped out with the loss of her riparian status in 1871, when a representative was assigned to the Reichsland. Of the others,—Baden, Bavaria, Hesse, Holland, and Prussia—Holland and Prussia were the most important, but the small states were in a position to delay and hinder. The executive organ, the Central Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine, sat semiannually at Mannheim, but had little coercive power over members. Complaint was made of discrimination against the vessels of other states and against certain cities, notably Strasburg. Switzerland, obviously a Rhine power, asked in vain for admission. In spite of the enormous growth of trade on the Rhine, the whole system belonged to an earlier age, and its reform was required in the general interest as well as in the interest of France.

Besides the general provisions of the Paris treaty securing freedom of transit and travel across German territory and prohibiting discrimination against the nationals of the Allied and Associated Powers in German ports and German rivers, a special chapter deals with the Rhine and its tributaries.[32] Pending the making of a general convention relating to international waterways, the convention of Mannheim is modified by granting France representation equal to the total number of delegates of the German riparian states (four), as well as an additional member as President of the Commission, while to the two representatives of the Netherlands are added an equal number from Switzerland and from Belgium, whose interests in the Rhine are thus recognized, and from two outside powers of large commercial interests, Great Britain and Italy. At the same time the jurisdiction of the Commission is extended to cover the upper Rhine between Basel and Lake Constance, if Switzerland consents, the lower Moselle, and tributary canals and artificial channels. The headquarters of the Commission are transferred from Mannheim to Strasburg, which is evidently meant to play a large part in the future development of the river. In order that Strasburg may not suffer while its port and terminal facilities are being developed to correspond to the new needs, the opposite port of Kehl in Baden is combined for seven years into a single port with Strasburg, the whole under the supervision of the Central Rhine Commission.[33]

Another problem of the upper Rhine is that of its water power, a matter which had proved difficult to adjust between Baden and the Reichsland and was likely to make greater trouble between two sovereign and antagonistic states. Alsace had complained that the Grand Duchy opposed plans for the utilization of the Rhine, and France proposed to take no chances of future disagreement. So Germany agrees that, subject to the approval of the Central Commission, France may build dams and take water from the Rhine on the whole course of the river between the extreme points of the French frontier, acquiring for proper compensation the necessary supports and rights of way on the Right Bank, with the understanding that Germany has a right to the value of half the power thus produced. Germany binds herself not to derive canals from the Rhine opposite the French frontiers.[34] Henceforth the Rhine is to be harnessed to serve the needs of Alsace.

If participation in the affairs of the upper Rhine was incidental to the recovery of Alsace, the lower course of the river was quite another matter. Between the Rhine and the Franco-Belgian frontier lay a belt of German territory, varying in breadth from fifty to one hundred miles, with an area of about 10,000 square miles, and a population of five and a half millions. Of these, nearly a million were in the Bavarian Palatinate, 50,000 in the principality of Birkenfeld, about 400,000 in Hesse; the rest, the great majority, were in the Rheinprovinz of Prussia. Practically all of them spoke German. They had been under their existing governments for at least a century; they had been under some sort of German government far longer.

Down to 1789 this region was parcelled out among a great number of petty principalities, lay or ecclesiastical, from the considerable dominions of the archbishoprics of Mainz, Trier, and Cologne, and the bishoprics of Speier and Worms, to the minute lay states of a few villages which can scarcely be distinguished on the map. A careful historian has counted ninety-seven such independent states on the Left Bank in 1789. Swept away by the Revolution, most of them were never restored. The chief exception was the Palatinate, which had passed about from one branch of the reigning family to another, and came back to Bavaria in 1815 as a well rounded territory under the house of Zweibrücken. The Congress of Vienna also handed over the valley of the Nahe to Hesse-Darmstadt, and gave the duke of Oldenburg a compensation of 25,000 souls to be furnished by Prussia, 20,000 of which were found on the Left Bank and formed into the principality of Birkenfeld.

The great gainer by the new arrangements was Prussia. Before the Revolution her only possessions on the Left Bank, namely Cleves, Mörs, and Prussian Guelders, were on the lower Rhine. At Vienna, as a compensation for the Saxony which was refused her, she was given the greater part of the Left Bank, her territory now reaching from the valley of the Saar to the Dutch border. For the first time Prussia and France were neighbors. However German these lands may have been, they had never been Prussian, and the bargain by which they were handed over to Prussia took no account of past history or the desires of the population. If the Paris Conference was to undo the historic wrongs perpetrated at Vienna, it could well begin here.

A wrong a hundred years old, however, is not easily undone, and its undoing may constitute an even greater wrong. Particularist at the outset, the Rhineland had been assimilated by Prussia and by the new German empire, partly through the agencies of government and administration, still more perhaps through its participation in the great economic development of modern Germany. It had become the seat of world industries: iron and steel mills, sugar refineries, textile manufactories, and chemical plants. It was served by an excellent railroad system, and by the shipping of the Rhine and its tributaries. Its rapidly growing cities lay on both banks of the river. It was in the closest connection with Westphalia, Prussia’s other great industrial province. Since 1815 the population of the Rheinprovinz had quadrupled, until it was one of the most densely peopled regions of Europe. Under Prussia it had prospered and waxed fat, and prosperity had reconciled differences. Then, if the Rhineland was to be taken from Prussia, to whom could it be given? No one wanted to return to the feudal lords, lay or spiritual, of the old regime and the simple life. Could the land go back to France?

For twenty years only had the Left Bank belonged to France, from 1794 to 1814. These years, however, were a period of rapid and far-reaching change. In place of the ninety-seven petty principalities four French departments had been organized and then incorporated into France, in many instances upon the petitions of the inhabitants themselves. Feudalism and ecclesiasticism had given way to democracy, the local laws had been superseded by the Code Napoléon, which survived on the Rhine till 1900. The younger generation learned French and looked toward France. The Prussians in 1814 were by no means generally welcomed. Small wonder that, when a new victory opened the way to the Rhine, the memories of a French Rhineland should suggest that the work of 1794 might be repeated and the new generation taught once more to turn to France. Small wonder that there were French who forgot, not only how quickly the French traditions had faded out after 1815, but also how the great industrial development of the nineteenth century had bound the Left Bank to the Right by bands of steel which only military force could destroy. Such force some were willing to apply, but others trusted still to the influence of the French language and the popularity and adaptability of a French occupation. They needed to ponder the prudent words of a French historian: “If it is well for public men to know a bit of history, this should be only on condition that they do not allow themselves to be dominated by their recollections of the past.”[35] He is a wise man indeed who can always distinguish between things as they are and things as he wishes them to be.

In the French projects respecting the Left Bank there was of course something more than sentiment, and there was also something more than mere imperialism, whether economic or political. It was in this region that France must needs seek something of that reparation for the devastation of war which Germany seemed unable to furnish elsewhere. And it was here that France would also seek means of defence and guarantees against a new German invasion. For any particular plan more than one of these reasons might be urged, and it was not always possible to distinguish what was imperialistic by nature from what was necessary to the restoration and protection of France. It was not the least of the services performed for France by that shrewd old man, Georges Clémenceau, that he refused to be swept on by the extremists and limited his ultimate demands to the substantial results which the treaty secured.

Comparatively few Frenchmen demanded the outright annexation of the Left Bank, nor was the number large of those who wished to prepare for it by an indefinitely prolonged military occupation. Nevertheless, the annexationist group was much in evidence, and conducted an active campaign. It was a Conservative and Nationalist body, whose opinion was expressed by journals like the Echo de Paris and the Libre Parole. It had also strong support in high military quarters, which desired a long military occupation of the country, particularly of the Rhine itself and its bridges. It was urged that, however the historical question might lie, the Rhine was the obvious military frontier of France, the one advanced line which could not be turned and which guaranteed France against invasion. It was even maintained that this was the real frontier of all the Allies, the front line that must be held at all cost against Germany. It need not even be held in force, for Allied control of the nine great Rhine bridges would suffice to prevent invasion. Germany must lose her springboard for jumping into France!

As to the intervening territory, a favorite French solution was that of an independent buffer state under French protection. And since such a state, in spite of its great resources, would not be large enough to maintain its economic independence, it was thought preferable that it should lie within the French customs zone. The political status of such a state was variously viewed as one of entire independence, as a French or Allied protectorate, or as a federal state of the German empire entirely detached from Prussia. At one time there were even signs of a movement toward separation, for the Catholic Rhineland was inclined to resist the programme of the Majority Socialists, and there were French Catholics who would have welcomed its affiliation to France. Separatist tendencies were not, however, encouraged by England and the United States, and they never reached serious proportions. The most notable example of such a movement was in the Palatinate, where French troops were in possession. Moreover an economic protectorate recalled too directly the history of the German Zollverein, and even certain economic aims of Germany during the world war. The only definite advance which France made in this direction was the severance of Luxemburg from the German customs union by the treaty, and its subsequent entry into the French customs union by popular vote of its inhabitants the following September.

However little sympathy might be felt with the various projects for the military or economic aggrandizement of France on the Left Bank, there was one French argument that was unanswerable: the Left Bank and the Rhine must not be made the basis of a new attack against France and thus against the world’s peace. Here Prussian militarism had used its opportunities to the full. The Rhine valley was covered with munition factories, with forts and garrisons and parade grounds, with bridges and strategic railroads, furnished with long detraining platforms in the open country or great camps like Elsenborn on the Belgian frontier. And the campaign of 1914 had shown to what use all this could be put in sudden attack. “Not another German soldier on the Rhine,” was a common form of the French demand. The demilitarization of the Left Bank was an elementary demand of national, and international, security.

The clauses to this effect in the treaty are brief but full of meaning:

Article 42.

Germany is forbidden to maintain or construct any fortifications either on the left bank of the Rhine or on the right bank to the west of a line drawn 50 kilometres to the East of the Rhine.

Article 43.

In the area defined above the maintenance and the assembly of armed forces, either permanently or temporarily, and military manoeuvres of any kind, as well as the upkeep of all permanent works for mobilization, are in the same way forbidden.

Article 44.

In case Germany violates in any manner whatever the provisions of Articles 42 and 43, she shall be regarded as committing a hostile act against the Powers signatory of the present Treaty and as calculated to disturb the peace of the world.

In order to insure immediate and full effect to these articles, the provisions respecting guarantees of the whole treaty involve the occupation of this very region. German territory west of the Rhine, together with the Rhine bridgeheads, is to be held for fifteen years by Allied and Associated troops. In case of faithful execution of the treaty, this region is to be evacuated by these troops in three successive zones at intervals of five years; in case of non-execution, the territory may be reoccupied and the period of occupation extended.[36] A further agreement, of even date with the treaty, provides for the administration of the occupied territory under a civilian Inter-Allied Rhineland High Commission representing France, Belgium, Great Britain, and the United States, subject to whose authority the German local administration is maintained. Neither the military occupation nor the civilian Commission covers the demilitarized zone on the Right Bank, a gap between the two systems of administration which was to prove particularly serious in the region of the Ruhr, the principal source of the coal on which France and other Allies had an option under other clauses of the treaty, a district liable to serious industrial disturbances for the suppression of which the German government would demand the right to use troops.

Finally, as a more positive and direct guarantee of the country which had borne the brunt of Germany’s aggression, Great Britain and the United States agreed to come to the aid of France in case of an unprovoked attack by Germany.[37] Designed to offer adequate assurance during the transitional period while the League of Nations was getting under way, this supplementary treaty recognized not only the peculiar dangers of France, exposed directly to the full force of a German offensive, but also the general interest in her full security and protection. To the French this was an essential part of the peace settlement, and without it they would have insisted on more direct and more material guarantees of their own.

Another matter affecting the Left Bank came into prominence at the conference, namely the valley of the Saar. From one point of view this was a phase of the question of Alsace-Lorraine, for a portion of the Saar basin had once been a part of Lorraine and the recovery of the lost provinces revived the question of their historic boundaries. It was also part of the problem of the Left Bank, for the territory belonged to Prussia and Bavaria and was inhabited by a population of predominantly German affinities, and any annexation here was subject to the same objections as elsewhere on German soil. Lastly, the coal mines of the valley raised a more special question, for they adjoined immediately the new boundary of France, and thus offered an easy source of reparation for the destruction and devastation of French territory.

At the outbreak of the French Revolution neither Alsace nor Lorraine possessed a clearly defined frontier toward the north. In each case the boundary had arisen historically, without any large measures of readjustment or delimitation, in a region of minute subdivisions and overlapping claims; and the result was a tortuous, broken line, with enclaves on either side, which defied geographical and administrative convenience. At certain points the limits of sovereignty were in dispute, and the boundary cannot everywhere be defined with certainty. In Alsace, beyond the present limit of the river Lauter, lay the enclave of Landau, an old Alsatian city which had passed to France in 1648, while the intervening territory obeyed the bishop of Speier, the duke of Zweibrücken, or the Elector Palatine. To the north of Lorraine Louis XIV had established French influence on the Saar and constructed his new town of Saarlouis, as an outpost to insure the military control of the valley. The acquisition in the eighteenth century of the duchy of Lorraine, already traversed and cut up by pieces of French territory, carried the French frontier well to the north and east of Saarlouis, while at the same time it left the German county of Saarbrücken astride the Saar on either side of the town of the same name. A glance at the map will show the impossible character of the resulting frontier, which had not been greatly improved when the armies of the Revolution poured over it and added the whole region to France. That its incorporation was not a simple act of violence appears from various petitions of 1797 asking for the privileges of French citizenship, among them a long list of signers from the canton of Saarbrücken.[38]

In 1814 the first treaty of Paris had as its primary task to reëstablish the limits of France. As the basis of its work it took the frontier of January 1, 1792, as anterior to the revolutionary wars of conquest. In this region, this did not differ from the frontier of 1789. It was, however, recognized that the old frontier had become an impossibility in the region of Alsace-Lorraine, and required straightening and adjustment to adapt it to modern conditions. Accordingly enclaves were abandoned on either side. Toward the Rhine the new arrangement took away certain French dependencies in the neighborhood of Wissembourg and Landau, but left France those towns and added a connecting strip of territory extending east to the Rhine. In the region of the Saar France lost the outlying lands to the north and gained the valley of the river above Saarlouis, including Saarbrücken and the region round about. In area the adjustments roughly balanced, but in resources France had received an advantage because of the coal deposits thus retained. As a geographic frontier, the new line of 1814 was a great improvement, but it was never laid out on the spot or put into actual effect.

In the frontier imposed upon her in 1815 France paid the penalty for Napoleon’s Hundred Days of glory. Toward the Rhine Landau was taken, and her territory was cut back to the Lauter. In Lorraine she lost the whole middle and lower portion of the Saar valley, including not only the new acquisitions about Saarbrücken but the town of Saarlouis, which had been French since its foundation. In theory the frontier of 1815 was to reëstablish the France of 1789. In fact it left France smaller than in 1789. And what was taken was given, not to the former rulers, still less to the inhabitants, but to Prussia. Whatever may be said against the claims of France in this region, Prussia had no rights there of any sort. Her nearest Rhenish possessions in 1789 had been a hundred and fifty miles away. She was established on the Rhine, not because the people wanted her, but because she wanted territory—Saxony, if possible, if not, something else—and because the Allies wanted somebody to watch France.

So the reasons of the boundary line of 1815 are not far to seek. Landau and Saarlouis were fortresses of Vauban, defences of which it was thought prudent to deprive France, and this strategic argument has always been emphasized. We now know that the coal of the Saar was also a reason. This was openly stated by German historians before the war, and is supported by the correspondence of Heinrich Böcking, an agent of the German family of Stumm, still one of the great manufacturing firms of the region. Made commissioner of the mines in 1814, he followed the Prussian commissioners to Paris in the following year, and urged large annexations for Prussia at the expense of the Palatinate and France. In 1802 the French had opened a mining school at Geislautern, near Saarbrücken, and developed considerably the mines and industries of the region. Their careful surveys of the coal field were insistently demanded by the Prussians, and finally acquired in 1817. Some petitions from the inhabitants were received by the Prussians from Saarbrücken, but then there had been petitions in the opposite sense in 1797.

The loss of the frontier of 1814 to Prussia remained a sore point with France until it was swallowed up in the greater loss of 1871. When the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine in 1918 revived the question of their former boundaries, it was natural to inquire what the intervening century had brought forth. In the region of Landau there has been little change. A town of 5000 in 1815, it had grown only to 18,000 in 1910. The surrounding region of farm and forest had likewise altered little. The Saar valley, on the other hand, had shared the industrial development of the most prosperous parts of the Rheinprovinz. Its coal mines, and those of the neighboring villages of the Palatinate, had come to produce eight per cent of the huge output of the German empire. About this supply of fuel had grown up numerous industrial establishments—pottery and glassware to some extent, but especially blast furnaces and great iron and steel plants at Dillingen, Völklingen, Burbach, and Neunkirchen, busy on tasks of war as well as on those of peace. Great names in the German iron and steel industry stand out as the proprietors—Böcking, Röchling, Mannesmann, Stumm. Saarbrücken, a town of perhaps 5000 in 1815, had a population of 105,000 in 1910. To the north and to the west the lines of industrial towns were almost unbroken. 355,000 people now lived between the Saar frontiers of 1814 and 1815; and as many more in the adjoining regions which depended on the valley’s coal and manufactures. The Prussian railroad system threw its network over the basin. Prussian legislation provided houses and schools and social insurance for the workmen. Save perhaps for the beautiful state forests which ran to the edge of the towns and the mines, the whole character of the country recalled the great industrial region of the lower Rhine. Over the border of the Palatinate matters moved a bit more slowly, after the Bavarian fashion. The towns were not quite so spick-and-span, the model dwellings were not so much in evidence, the local capital, Zweibrücken, preserved the flavor of a Residenzstadt of the old regime. But the flavor was German not French. In the western part of the valley French names could still be found, notably in Saarlouis, which kept much of the appearance of an old French town, with its hôtel de ville, its great public square, and along the river front the remains of its fortifications built by Vauban. And there were those who had not wholly forgotten that Saarlouis was the birthplace of Marshal Ney.

In France, at least, there were many who had not forgotten. The demand for the frontier of 1814 was noticeably greater than that for other parts of the Left Bank. It was partly historic, a desire to reclaim what had once been French and had played its part in the great deeds of French history. This was not confined to partisans of the old regime: Aulard, historian and upholder of the Revolution, urged the return of Saarlouis and Landau on the ground that they had sworn the great revolutionary covenant of 1790 and had been torn from France by violence in 1815, as were Alsace and Lorraine half a century later.[39] Popular interest would have been greater if the frontier of 1814 had been a real line separating peoples for a term of years, instead of a provision on paper. And the historic frontier of 1792, the actual boundary during the eighteenth century, had become impossible; no one asked for that. The best historic argument for the frontier of 1814 was that it had then been considered a just and practical equivalent for the line of 1792; in that sense it represented the peace of justice, while the line of 1815 was clearly the peace of violence.

Stronger than the historic argument was the economic: France, a country poor in coal, had been forcibly despoiled of the Saar mines in 1814; she needed them back; and her need was now much greater since the wanton and systematic destruction of her mines in the Nord and Pas-de-Calais by the Germans. The two arguments did not entirely coincide, so far as the Saar was concerned. The historic argument was strongest in respect to the district of Saarlouis, where there was little coal. Saarbrücken, the centre of the coal field, had been French only for a brief period, 1793-1815. Moreover, the frontier of 1814 did not cover the whole of the mining area, perhaps a third of which lay to the north toward Ottweiler and to the east in the Palatinate, and its reëstablishment would have disrupted the economic life of the region.

Many Frenchmen were genuinely opposed to any annexations of territory beyond the Alsace-Lorraine of 1871, as contrary to the principles on which the war had been fought. They had not, they said, been fighting for the Rhine or the Saar. This was the Socialist contention, and it was shared by many Republicans who were not Socialists. All, however, who looked facts in the face felt the need of the coal. “If we could only get the coal without the people,” said a distinguished Socialist early in the winter. “We must have the coal, and we must find some arrangement to get it without annexing the population,” a great historian said a little later.

The people were overwhelmingly German. A considerable directing element of capitalists, engineers, and officials had come from other parts of the empire, but the great majority were natives of the region. The mining population of 56,000 included surprisingly few foreigners or even Germans from a distance. Many had their cottages with a plot of ground about, going to and fro daily on workmen’s trains or returning home for the week-end. The ruling element was strongly Prussian, a part of the great administrative machine directed from Berlin. The regular local administration existed, but only as a part of the Rheinprovinz and of a Regierungsbezirk administered from Trier. The adjoining portions of the Palatinate were governed from Munich and Speier. The economic unity of the region had no corresponding political organization, as was admitted by German officials. The mass of the people were particularly interested in their labor organizations and in their rights under German labor legislation. If they had been consulted, they would doubtless have voted to remain with Germany. But it was at least debatable whether they had a right at the same time to vote to Germany the mines which she had taken in 1815 without consulting anybody. The control of key deposits of minerals by the small population which happens to live over them is not a necessary part of the principle of self-determination, particularly when this population forms part of a state which has been destroying the mines of others. The separation of mines from people may sometimes be governed by international considerations.

The coal field of the Saar is the northern outcrop of a considerable deposit which extends in a southwesterly direction across Lorraine to the Moselle in the neighborhood of Pont-à-Mousson. Toward the southwest, however, the strata dip so deep as to be unworkable. The practicable part of the field is in the Saar valley, partly on the edge of annexed Lorraine, chiefly in Rhenish Prussia, with a small strip in the adjoining part of the Palatinate. The total output in 1913 was seventeen and a half million tons, of which two-thirds was mined between the frontiers of 1814 and 1815. It was understood, however, that production had been artificially restricted in the interest of the Westphalian field, and the proportion of the actual coal reserve was much greater. Any estimates of reserves are necessarily approximate, but in 1913 it was calculated that the Saar field contained seventeen billion tons, equal to 22% of the total German reserve, and more than the whole known supply of France, a country relatively poor in coal. No wonder the French found it hard to forget the loss of 1815! Moreover, all the mines in operation lay within a dozen miles of the new French frontier in Lorraine.

France not only needed this coal, she had a strong claim to it. The chief French mines, those of Lens and Valenciennes on the Belgian border, had been in German hands for more than four years and had been deliberately flooded and rendered unworkable by the occupying armies. The period of restoration was variously estimated; it has since been fixed by German engineers at eight years at the least, and the total property loss has been estimated at eighty per cent. For this definite reparation in kind could be exacted in the Saar field. But that was not all. Germany had agreed to compensate for all damage done to the civilian population and their property, yet conservative estimates of the bill for general reparation in northern France far exceeded any available means of payment on Germany’s part, even when the payment was spread over a long series of years and thus reduced in actual restorative power. Proposals to take over German enterprises like railroads or factories were impracticable, not only because of the political difficulties of operating them on German territory but because this would interfere with Germany’s ability to earn her annual payments of indemnity. The Saar mines, on the contrary, lay on the outer edge of Germany; they were already linked with the industries of Lorraine, henceforth French; they were, with two exceptions (Frankenholz and Hostenbach), the property of the Prussian and Bavarian states. Always supposing that they were properly credited on the reparation account, no better means of payment could be found for a debt which Germany had agreed to pay.

Accordingly, it was agreed in principle, late in March 1919, that the full ownership of the coal mines of the Saar basin should pass to France, to be credited on her claims against Germany for reparation. With full and unencumbered property in the mines the treaty gave the fullest economic facilities for their exploitation, including the acquisition of all subsidiaries and dependencies, freedom of transportation and sale, exemption from other than local taxes, and full mobility of labor. The mines were placed within the French customs union, and payment in connection with their operation might be made in French money. The elementary justice of this transfer of the mines to France has become increasingly clear in the past few months. Out of the crumbling uncertainties of reparation for war damage, France secures one solid asset, and she secures it in a form absolutely essential for the revival of her wrecked industries. Those who have urged that she ought to have been satisfied with a coal contract instead, a claim for delivery rather than mines to be worked, have been refuted by the decreasing production of coal in Germany and the growing unwillingness of the Germans to make the deliveries of coal to which they obligated themselves in the treaty. A mine in hand is worth many contracts to deliver.

The transfer of the Saar mines and their appurtenances to the French state raised a difficult question of administration. If the German government retained the full power to fix the conditions of exploitation, transportation, and sale, and if German legislation was to be carried out by Prussian officials, the conditions of operation could easily be made impossible, and the ownership of the mines prove nugatory. On the other hand, if the government were handed over, either temporarily or permanently, to France, the inhabitants lost their political rights and were subjected to an alien rule. It was the old question, how to transfer the mines without subjecting the people.

The solution of this conflict of rights and interests was found in the international organization of the League of Nations. Germany agreed to hand over the government of the territory, but not the ultimate sovereignty, to the League of Nations as trustee, and the League is to administer it through an international Governing Commission. This commission consists of five members, one a native inhabitant of the Saar territory, one a Frenchman, the others representing other nations. Sitting in the territory, it has all powers of government hitherto belonging to the German empire, Prussia, and Bavaria, and full power to administer the local public services. It must maintain the existing system of courts and local officials, and must consult an elective assembly with respect to new taxes or legislation. Subject to its control, “the inhabitants will retain their local assemblies, their religious liberties, their schools, and their language.” They keep also their German nationality, their rights under German labor legislation, their pension rights and accrued pensions. They lose only their right to vote for representatives in the Reichstag and the Prussian and Bavarian diets; their participation in self-government is much greater than that of the inhabitants of the District of Columbia! They gain the advantages of a governing body resident in the territory and familiar with its special needs, in place of an administration from Berlin and Munich. They also gain exemption from military service and other than local taxes, and from contribution to the German war indemnities, besides favorable adjustments of customs duties.