The Inside Story of The Peace Conference

by

Dr. E.J. Dillon

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

NEW YORK AND LONDON

Copyright 1920, by Harper & Brothers

Printed in the United States of America

Published February, 1920

To
C.W. BARRON
in memory of interesting conversations
on historic occasions

These pages are inscribed.

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

It is almost superfluous to say that this book does not claim to be a history, however summary, of the Peace Conference, seeing that such a work was made sheer impossible now and forever by the chief delegates themselves when they decided to dispense with records of their conversations and debates. It is only a sketch—a sketch of the problems which the war created or rendered pressing—of the conditions under which they cropped up; of the simplicist ways in which they were conceived by the distinguished politicians who volunteered to solve them; of the delegates' natural limitations and electioneering commitments and of the secret influences by which they were swayed; of the peoples' needs and expectations; of the unwonted procedure adopted by the Conference and of the fateful consequences of its decisions to the world.

In dealing with all those matters I aimed at impartiality, which is an unattainable ideal, but I trust that sincerity and detachment have brought me reasonably close to it. Having no pet theories of my own to champion, my principal standard of judgment is derived from the law of causality and the rules of historical criticism.

The fatal tactical mistake chargeable to the Conference lay in its making the charter of the League of Nations and the treaty of peace with the Central Powers interdependent. For the maxims that underlie the former are irreconcilable with those that should determine the latter, and the efforts to combine them must, among other untoward results, create a sharp opposition between the vital interests of the people of the United States and the apparent or transient interests of their associates. The outcome of this unnatural union will be to damage the cause of stable peace which it was devised to further.

But the surest touchstone by which to test the capacity and the achievements of the world-legislators is their attitude toward Russia in the political domain and toward the labor problem in the economic sphere. And in neither case does their action or inaction appear to have been the outcome of statesman-like ideas, or, indeed, of any higher consideration than that of evading the central issue and transmitting the problem to the League of Nations. The results are manifest to all.

The continuity of human progress depends at bottom upon labor, and it is becoming more and more doubtful whether the civilized races of mankind can be reckoned on to supply it for long on conditions akin to those which have in various forms prevailed ever since the institutions of ancient times and which alone render the present social structure viable. If this forecast should prove correct, the only alternative to a break disastrous in the continuity of civilization is the frank recognition of the principle that certain inferior races are destined to serve the cause of mankind in those capacities for which alone they are qualified and to readjust social institutions to this axiom.

In the meanwhile the Conference which ignored this problem of problems has transformed Europe into a seething mass of mutually hostile states powerless to face the economic competition of their overseas rivals and has set the very elements of society in flux.

E.J. DILLON.

THE INSIDE STORY OF THE PEACE CONFERENCE

I

THE CITY OF THE CONFERENCE

The choice of Paris for the historic Peace Conference was an afterthought. The Anglo-Saxon governments first favored a neutral country as the most appropriate meeting-ground for the world's peace-makers. Holland was mentioned only to be eliminated without discussion, so obvious and decisive were the objections. French Switzerland came next in order, was actually fixed upon, and for a time held the field. Lausanne was the city first suggested and nearly chosen. There was a good deal to be said for it on its own merits, and in its suburb, Ouchy, the treaty had been drawn up which terminated the war between Italy and Turkey. But misgivings were expressed as to its capacity to receive and entertain the formidable peace armies without whose co-operation the machinery for stopping all wars could not well be fabricated. At last Geneva was fixed upon, and so certain were influential delegates of the ratification of their choice by all the Allies, that I felt justified in telegraphing to Geneva to have a house hired for six months in that picturesque city.

But the influential delegates had reckoned without the French, who in these matters were far and away the most influential. Was it not in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, they asked, that Teuton militarism had received its most powerful impulse? And did not poetic justice, which was never so needed as in these evil days, ordain that the chartered destroyer who had first seen the light of day in that hall should also be destroyed there? Was this not in accordance with the eternal fitness of things? Whereupon the matter-of-fact Anglo-Saxon mind, unable to withstand the force of this argument and accustomed to give way on secondary matters, assented, and Paris was accordingly fixed upon....

"Paris herself again," tourists remarked, who had not been there since the fateful month when hostilities began—meaning that something of the wealth and luxury of bygone days was venturing to display itself anew as an afterglow of the epoch whose sun was setting behind banks of thunder-clouds. And there was a grain of truth in the remark. The Ville Lumière was crowded as it never had been before. But it was mostly strangers who were within her gates. In the throng of Anglo-Saxon warriors and cosmopolitan peace-lovers following the trailing skirts of destiny, one might with an effort discover a Parisian now and again. But they were few and far between.

They and their principal European guests made some feeble attempts to vie with the Vienna of 1814-15 in elegance and taste if not in pomp and splendor. But the general effect was marred by the element of the nouveaux-riches and nouveaux-pauvres which was prominent, if not predominant. A few of the great and would-be great ladies outbade one another in the effort to renew the luxury and revive the grace of the past. But the atmosphere was numbing, their exertions half-hearted, and the smile of youth and beauty was cold like the sheen of winter ice. The shadow of death hung over the institutions and survivals of the various civilizations and epochs which were being dissolved in the common melting-pot, and even the man in the street was conscious of its chilling influence. Life in the capital grew agitated, fitful, superficial, unsatisfying. Its gaiety was forced—something between a challenge to the destroyer and a sad farewell to the past and present. Men were instinctively aware that the morrow was fraught with bitter surprises, and they deliberately adopted the maxim, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." None of these people bore on their physiognomies the dignified impress of the olden time, barring a few aristocratic figures from the Faubourg St.-Germain, who looked as though they had only to don the perukes and the distinctive garb of the eighteenth century to sit down to table with Voltaire and the Marquise du Châtelet. Here and there, indeed, a coiffure, a toilet, the bearing, the gait, or the peculiar grace with which a robe was worn reminded one that this or that fair lady came of a family whose life-story in the days of yore was one of the tributaries to the broad stream of European history. But on closer acquaintanceship, especially at conversational tournaments, one discovered that Nature, constant in her methods, distributes more gifts of beauty than of intellect.

Festive banquets, sinful suppers, long-spun-out lunches were as frequent and at times as Lucullan as in the days of the Regency. The outer, coarser attributes of luxury abounded in palatial restaurants, hotels, and private mansions; but the refinement, the grace, the brilliant conversation even of the Paris of the Third Empire were seen to be subtle branches of a lost art. The people of the armistice were weary and apprehensive—weary of the war, weary of politics, weary of the worn-out framework of existence, and filled with a vague, nameless apprehension of the unknown. They feared that in the chaotic slough into which they had fallen they had not yet touched bottom. None the less, with the exception of fervent Catholics and a number of earnest sectarians, there were few genuine seekers after anything essentially better.

Not only did the general atmosphere of Paris undergo radical changes, together with its population, but the thoroughfares, many of them, officially changed their names since the outbreak of the war.

The Paris of the Conference ceased to be the capital of France. It became a vast cosmopolitan caravanserai teeming with unwonted aspects of life and turmoil, filled with curious samples of the races, tribes, and tongues of four continents who came to watch and wait for the mysterious to-morrow. The intensity of life there was sheer oppressive; to the tumultuous striving of the living were added the silent influences of the dead. For it was also a trysting-place for the ghosts of sovereignties and states, militarisms and racial ambitions, which were permitted to wander at large until their brief twilight should be swallowed up in night. The dignified Turk passionately pleaded for Constantinople, and cast an imploring look on the lone Armenian whose relatives he had massacred, and who was then waiting for political resurrection. Persian delegates wandered about like souls in pain, waiting to be admitted through the portals of the Conference Paradise. Beggared Croesus passed famishing Lucullus in the street, and once mighty viziers shivered under threadbare garments in the biting frost as they hurried over the crisp February snow. Waning and waxing Powers, vacant thrones, decaying dominations had, each of them, their accusers, special pleaders, and judges, in this multitudinous world-center on which tragedy, romance, and comedy rained down potent spells. For the Conference city was also the clearing-house of the Fates, where the accounts of a whole epoch, the deeds and misdeeds of an exhausted civilization, were to be balanced and squared.

Here strange yet familiar figures, survivals from the past, started up at every hand's turn and greeted one with smiles or sighs. Men on whom I last set eyes when we were boys at school, playing football together in the field or preparing lessons in the school-room, would stop me in the street on their way to represent nations or peoples whose lives were out of chime, or to inaugurate the existence of new republics. One face I shall never forget. It was that of the self-made temporary dictator of a little country whose importance was dwindling to the dimensions of a footnote in the history of the century. I had been acquainted with him personally in the halcyon day of his transient glory. Like his picturesque land, he won the immortality of a day, was courted and subsidized by competing states in turn, and then suddenly cast aside like a sucked orange. Then he sank into the depths of squalor. He was eloquent, resourceful, imaginative, and brimful of the poetry of untruth. One day through the asphalt streets of Paris he shuffled along in the procession of the doomed, with wan face and sunken eyes, wearing a tragically mean garb. And soon after I learned that he had vanished unwept into eternal oblivion.

An Arabian Nights touch was imparted to the dissolving panorama by strange visitants from Tartary and Kurdistan, Korea and Aderbeijan, Armenia, Persia, and the Hedjaz—men with patriarchal beards and scimitar-shaped noses, and others from desert and oasis, from Samarkand and Bokhara. Turbans and fezzes, sugar-loaf hats and headgear resembling episcopal miters, old military uniforms devised for the embryonic armies of new states on the eve of perpetual peace, snowy-white burnooses, flowing mantles, and graceful garments like the Roman toga, contributed to create an atmosphere of dreamy unreality in the city where the grimmest of realities were being faced and coped with.

Then came the men of wealth, of intellect, of industrial enterprise, and the seed-bearers of the ethical new ordering, members of economic committees from the United States, Britain, Italy, Poland, Russia, India, and Japan, representatives of naphtha industries and far-off coal mines, pilgrims, fanatics, and charlatans from all climes, priests of all religions, preachers of every doctrine, who mingled with princes, field-marshals, statesmen, anarchists, builders-up, and pullers-down. All of them burned with desire to be near to the crucible in which the political and social systems of the world were to be melted and recast. Every day, in my walks, in my apartment, or at restaurants, I met emissaries from lands and peoples whose very names had seldom been heard of before in the West. A delegation from the Pont-Euxine Greeks called on me, and discoursed of their ancient cities of Trebizond, Samsoun, Tripoli, Kerassund, in which I resided many years ago, and informed me that they, too, desired to become welded into an independent Greek republic, and had come to have their claims allowed. The Albanians were represented by my old friend Turkhan Pasha, on the one hand, and by my friend Essad Pasha, on the other—the former desirous of Italy's protection, the latter demanding complete independence. Chinamen, Japanese, Koreans, Hindus, Kirghizes, Lesghiens, Circassians, Mingrelians, Buryats, Malays, and Negroes and Negroids from Africa and America were among the tribes and tongues forgathered in Paris to watch the rebuilding of the political world system and to see where they "came in."

One day I received a visit from an Armenian deputation; its chief was described on his visiting-card as President of the Armenian Republic of the Caucasus. When he was shown into my apartment in the Hôtel Vendôme, I recognized two of its members as old acquaintances with whom I had occasional intercourse in Erzerum, Kipri Keui, and other places during the Armenian massacres of the year 1895. We had not met since then. They revived old memories, completed for me the life-stories of several of our common friends and acquaintances, and narrated interesting episodes of local history. And having requested my co-operation, the President and his colleagues left me and once more passed out of my life.

Another actor on the world-stage whom I had encountered more than once before was the "heroic" King of Montenegro. He often crossed my path during the Conference, and set me musing on the marvelous ups and downs of human existence. This potentate's life offers a rich field of research to the psychologist. I had watched it myself at various times and with curious results. For I had met him in various European capitals during the past thirty years, and before the time when Tsar Alexander III publicly spoke of him as Russia's only friend. King Nikita owes such success in life as he can look back on with satisfaction to his adaptation of St. Paul's maxim of being all things to all men. Thus in St. Petersburg he was a good Russian, in Vienna a patriotic Austrian, in Rome a sentimental Italian. He was also a warrior, a poet after his own fashion, a money-getter, and a speculator on 'Change. His alleged martial feats and his wily, diplomatic moves ever since the first Balkan war abound in surprises, and would repay close investigation. The ease with which the Austrians captured Mount Lovtchen and his capital made a lasting impression on those of his allies who were acquainted with the story, the consequences of which he could not foresee. What everybody seemed to know was that if the Teutons had defeated the Entente, King Nikita's son Mirko, who had settled down for the purpose in Vienna, would have been set on the throne in place of his father by the Austrians; whereas if the Allies should win, the worldly-wise monarch would have retained his crown as their champion. But these well-laid plans went all agley. Prince Mirko died and King Nikita was deposed. For a time he resided at a hotel, a few houses from me, and I passed him now and again as he was on his way to plead his lost cause before the distinguished wreckers of thrones and régimes.

It seemed as though, in order to provide Paris with a cosmopolitan population, the world was drained of its rulers, of its prosperous and luckless financiers, of its high and low adventurers, of its tribe of fortune-seekers, and its pushing men and women of every description. And the result was an odd blend of classes and individuals worthy, it may be, of the new democratic era, but unprecedented. It was welcomed as of good augury, for instance, that in the stately Hôtel Majestic, where the spokesmen of the British Empire had their residence, monocled diplomatists mingled with spry typewriters, smart amanuenses, and even with bright-eyed chambermaids at the evening dances.[1] The British Premier himself occasionally witnessed the cheering spectacle with manifest pleasure. Self-made statesmen, scions of fallen dynasties, ex-premiers, and ministers, who formerly swayed the fortunes of the world, whom one might have imagined capaces imperii nisi imperassent, were now the unnoticed inmates of unpretending hotels. Ambassadors whose most trivial utterances had once been listened to with concentrated attention, sued days and weeks for an audience of the greater plenipotentiaries, and some of them sued in vain. Russian diplomatists were refused permission to travel in France or were compelled to undergo more than average discomfort and delay there. More than once I sat down to lunch or dinner with brilliant commensals, one of whom was understood to have made away with a well-known personage in order to rid the state of a bad administrator, and another had, at a secret Vehmgericht in Turkey, condemned a friend of mine, now a friend of his, to be assassinated.

In Paris, this temporary capital of the world, one felt the repercussion of every event, every incident of moment wheresoever it might have occurred. To reside there while the Conference was sitting was to occupy a comfortable box in the vastest theater the mind of men has ever conceived. From this rare coign of vantage one could witness soul-gripping dramas of human history, the happenings of years being compressed within the limits of days. The revolution in Portugal, the massacre of Armenians, Bulgaria's atrocities, the slaughter of the inhabitants of Saratoff and Odessa, the revolt of the Koreans—all produced their effect in Paris, where official and unofficial exponents of the aims and ambitions, religions and interests that unite or divide mankind were continually coming or going, working aboveground or burrowing beneath the surface.

It was within a few miles of the place where I sat at table with the brilliant company alluded to above that a few individuals of two different nationalities, one of them bearing, it was said, a well-known name, hatched the plot that sent Portugal's strong man, President Sidonio Paes, to his last account and plunged that ill-starred land into chaotic confusion. The plan was discovered by the Portuguese military attaché, who warned the President himself and the War Minister. But Sidonio Paes, quixotic and foolhardy, refused to take or brook precautions. A few weeks later the assassin, firing three shots, had no difficulty in taking aim, but none of them took effect. The reason was interesting: so determined were the conspirators to leave nothing to chance, they had steeped the cartridges in a poisonous preparation, whereby they injured the mechanism of the revolver, which, in consequence, hung fire. But the adversaries of the reform movement which the President had inaugurated again tried and planned another attempt, and Sidonio Paes, who would not be taught prudence, was duly shot, and his admirable work undone[2] by a band of semi-Bolshevists.

Less than six months later it was rumored that a number of specially prepared bombs from a certain European town had been sent to Moscow for the speedy removal of Lenin. The casual way in which these and kindred matters were talked of gave one the measure of the change that had come over the world since the outbreak of the war. There was nobody left in Europe whose death, violent or peaceful, would have made much of an impression on the dulled sensibilities of the reading public. All values had changed, and that of human life had fallen low.

To follow these swiftly passing episodes, occasionally glancing behind the scenes, during the pauses of the acts, and watch the unfolding of the world-drama, was thrillingly interesting. To note the dubious source, the chance occasion of a grandiose project of world policy, and to see it started on its shuffling course, was a revelation in politics and psychology, and reminded one of the saying mistakenly attributed to the Swedish Chancellor Oxenstjern, "Quam parva sapientia regitur mundus."[3]

The wire-pullers were not always the plenipotentiaries. Among those were also outsiders of various conditions, sometimes of singular ambitions, who were generally free from conventional prejudices and conscientious scruples. As traveling to Paris was greatly restricted by the governments of the world, many of these unofficial delegates had come in capacities widely differing from those in which they intended to act. I confess I was myself taken in by more than one of these secret emissaries, whom I was innocently instrumental in bringing into close touch with the human levers they had come to press. I actually went to the trouble of obtaining for one of them valuable data on a subject which did not interest him in the least, but which he pretended he had traveled several thousand miles to study. A zealous prelate, whose business was believed to have something to do with the future of a certain branch of the Christian Church in the East, in reality held a brief for a wholly different set of interests in the West. Some of these envoys hoped to influence decisions of the Conference, and they considered they had succeeded when they got their points of view brought to the favorable notice of certain of its delegates. What surprised me was the ease with which several of these interlopers moved about, although few of them spoke any language but their own.

Collectivities and religious and political associations, including that of the Bolshevists, were represented in Paris during the Conference. I met one of the Bolshevists, a bright youth, who was a veritable apostle. He occupied a post which, despite its apparent insignificance, put him occasionally in possession of useful information withheld from the public, which he was wont to communicate to his political friends. His knowledge of languages and his remarkable intelligence had probably attracted the notice of his superiors, who can have had no suspicion of his leanings, much less of his proselytizing activity. However this may have been, he knew a good deal of what was going on at the Conference, and he occasionally had insight into documents of a certain interest. He was a seemingly honest and enthusiastic Bolshevik, who spread the doctrine with apostolic zeal guided by the wisdom of the serpent. He was ever ready to comment on events, but before opening his mind fully to a stranger on the subject next to his heart, he usually felt his way, and only when he had grounds for believing that the fortress was not impregnable did he open his batteries. Even among the initiated, few would suspect the rôle played by this young proselytizer within one of the strongholds of the Conference, so naturally and unobtrusively was the work done. I may add that luckily he had no direct intercourse with the delegates.

Of all the collectivities whose interests were furthered at the Conference, the Jews had perhaps the most resourceful and certainly the most influential exponents. There were Jews from Palestine, from Poland, Russia, the Ukraine, Rumania, Greece, Britain, Holland, and Belgium; but the largest and most brilliant contingent was sent by the United States. Their principal mission, with which every fair-minded man sympathized heartily, was to secure for their kindred in eastern Europe rights equal to those of the populations in whose midst they reside.[4] And to the credit of the Poles, Rumanians, and Russians, who were to be constrained to remove all the existing disabilities, they enfranchised the Hebrew elements spontaneously. But the Western Jews, who championed their Eastern brothers, proceeded to demand a further concession which many of their own co-religionists hastened to disclaim as dangerous—a kind of autonomy which Rumanian, Polish, and Russian statesmen, as well as many of their Jewish fellow-subjects, regarded as tantamount to the creation of a state within the state. Whether this estimate is true or erroneous, the concessions asked for were given, but the supplementary treaties insuring the protection of minorities are believed to have little chance of being executed, and may, it is feared, provoke manifestations of elemental passions in the countries in which they are to be applied.

Twice every day, before and after lunch, one met the "autocrats," the world's statesmen whose names were in every mouth—the wise men who would have been much wiser than they were if only they had credited their friends and opponents with a reasonable measure of political wisdom. These individuals, in bowler hats, sweeping past in sumptuous motors, as rarely seen on foot as Roman cardinals, were the destroyers of thrones, the carvers of continents, the arbiters of empires, the fashioners of the new heaven and the new earth—or were they only the flies on the wheel of circumstance, to whom the world was unaccountably becoming a riddle?

This commingling of civilizations and types brought together in Paris by a set of unprecedented conditions was full of interest and instruction to the observer privileged to meet them at close quarters. The average observer, however, had little chance of conversing with them, for, as these foreigners had no common meeting-place, they kept mostly among their own folk. Only now and again did three or four members of different races, when they chanced to speak some common language, get an opportunity of enjoying their leisure together. A friend of mine, a highly gifted Frenchman of the fine old type, a descendant of Talleyrand, who was born a hundred and fifty years too late, opened his hospitable house once a week to the élite of the world, and partially met the pressing demand.

To the gaping tourist the Ville Lumière resembled nothing so much as a huge world fair, with enormous caravanserais, gigantic booths, gaudy merry-go-rounds, squalid taverns, and huge inns. Every place of entertainment was crowded, and congregations patiently awaited their turn in the street, undeterred by rain or wind or snow, offering absurdly high prices for scant accommodation and disheartened at having their offers refused. Extortion was rampant and profiteering went unpunished. Foreigners, mainly American and British, could be seen wandering, portmanteau in hand, from post to pillar, anxiously seeking where to lay their heads, and made desperate by failure, fatigue, and nightfall. The cost of living which harassed the bulk of the people was fast becoming the stumbling-block of governments and the most powerful lever of revolutionaries. The chief of the peace armies resided in sumptuous hotels, furnished luxuriously in dubious taste, flooded after sundown with dazzling light, and filled by day with the buzz of idle chatter, the shuffling of feet, the banging of doors, and the ringing of bells. Music and dancing enlivened the inmates when their day's toil was over and time had to be killed. Thus, within, one could find anxious deliberation and warm debate; without, noisy revel and vulgar brawl. "Fate's a fiddler; life's a dance."

To few of those visitors did Paris seem what it really was—a nest of golden dreams, a mist of memories, a seed-plot of hopes, a storehouse of time's menaces.

THE PARIS CONFERENCE AND THE CONGRESS OF VIENNA

There were no solemn pageants, no impressive ceremonies, such as those that rejoiced the hearts of the Viennese in 1814-15 until the triumphal march of the Allied troops.

The Vienna of Congress days was transformed into a paradise of delights by a brilliant court which pushed hospitality to the point of lavishness. In the burg alone were two emperors, two empresses, four kings, one queen, two crown-princes, two archduchesses, and three princes. Every day the Emperor's table cost fifty thousand gulden—every Congress day cost him ten times that sum. Galaxies of Europe's eminent personages flocked to the Austrian capital, taking with them their ministers, secretaries, favorites, and "confidential agents." So eager were these world-reformers to enjoy themselves that the court did not go into mourning for Queen Marie Caroline of Naples, the last of Marie Theresa's daughters. Her death was not even announced officially lest it should trouble the festivities of the jovial peace-makers!

The Paris of the Conference, on the other hand, was democratic, with a strong infusion of plutocracy. It attempted no such brilliant display as that which flattered the senses or fired the imagination of the Viennese. In 1919 mankind was simpler in its tastes and perhaps less esthetic. It is certain that the froth of contemporary frivolity had lost its sparkling whiteness and was grown turbid. In Vienna, balls, banquets, theatricals, military reviews, followed one another in dizzy succession and enabled politicians and adventurers to carry on their intrigues and machinations unnoticed by all except the secret police. And, as the Congress marked the close of one bloody campaign and ushered in another, one might aptly term it the interval between two tragedies. For a time it seemed as though this part of the likeness might become applicable to the Conference of Paris.

Moving from pleasure to politics, one found strong contrasts as well as surprising resemblances between the two peace-making assemblies, and, it was assumed, to the advantage of the Paris Conference. Thus, at the Austrian Congress, the members, while seemingly united, were pulling hard against one another, each individual or group tugging in a different direction. The Powers had been compelled by necessity to unite against a common enemy and, having worsted him on the battlefield, fell to squabbling among themselves in the Council Chamber as soon as they set about dividing the booty. In this respect the Paris Conference—the world was assured in the beginning—towered aloft above its historic predecessor. Men who knew the facts declared repeatedly that the delegates to the Quai d'Orsay were just as unanimous, disinterested, and single-minded during the armistice as they were through the war. Probably they were.

Another interesting point of comparison was supplied by the dramatis personæ? of both illustrious companies. They were nearly all representatives of old states, but there was one exception.

THE CONGRESS CHIEF

Mistrusted, Feared, Humored, and Obeyed

A relatively new Power took part in the deliberations of the Vienna Congress, and, perhaps, because of its loftier intentions, introduced a jarring note into the concert of nations. Russia was then a newcomer into the European councils; indeed she was hardly yet recognized as European. Her gifted Tsar, Alexander I, was an idealist who wanted, not so much peace with the vanquished enemy as a complete reform of the ordering of the whole world, so that wars should thenceforward be abolished and the welfare of mankind be set developing like a sort of pacific perpetuum mobile. This blessed change, however, was to be compassed, not by the peoples or their representatives, but by the governments, led by himself and deliberating in secret. At the Paris Conference it was even so.

This curious type of public worker—a mixture of the mystical and the practical—was the terror of the Vienna delegates. He put spokes in everybody's wheel, behaved as the autocrat of the Congress and felt as self-complacent as a saint. Countess von Thurheim wrote of him: "He mistrusted his environment and let himself be led by others. But he was thoroughly good and high-minded and sought after the weal, not merely of his own country, but of the whole world. Son coeur eût embrassé le bonheur du monde." He realized in himself the dreams of the philosophers about love for mankind, but their Utopias of human happiness were based upon the perfection both of subjects and of princes, and, as Alexander could fulfil only one-half of these conditions, his work remained unfinished and the poor Emperor died, a victim of his high-minded illusions.[5]

The other personages, Metternich in particular, were greatly put out by Alexander's presence. They labeled him a marplot who could not and would not enter into the spirit of their game, but they dared not offend him. Without his brave troops they could not have been victorious and they did not know how soon they might need him again, for he represented a numerous and powerful people whose economic and military resources promised it in time the hegemony of the world. So, while they heartily disliked the chief of this new great country, they also feared and, therefore, humored him. They all felt that the enemy, although defeated and humbled, was not, perhaps, permanently disabled, and might, at any moment, rise, phoenix-like and soar aloft again. The great visionary was therefore fêted and lauded and raised to a dizzy pedestal by men who, in their hearts, set him down as a crank. His words were reverently repeated and his smiles recorded and remembered. Hardly any one had the bad taste to remark that even this millennial philosopher in the statesman's armchair left unsightly flaws in his system for the welfare of man. Thus, while favoring equality generally, he obstinately refused to concede it to one race, in fact, he would not hear of common fairness being meted out to that race. It was the Polish people which was treated thus at the Vienna Congress, and, owing to him, Poland's just claims were ignored, her indefeasible rights were violated, and the work of the peace-makers was botched....

Happily, optimists said, the Paris Conference was organized on a wholly different basis. Its members considered themselves mere servants of the public—stewards, who had to render an account of their stewardship and who therefore went in salutary fear of the electorate at home. This check was not felt by the plenipotentiaries in Vienna. Again, everything the Paris delegates did was for the benefit of the masses, although most of it was done by stealth and unappreciated by them.

The remarkable document which will forever be associated with the name of President Wilson was the clou of the Conference. The League of Nations scheme seemed destined to change fundamentally the relations of peoples toward one another, and the change was expected to begin immediately after the Covenant had been voted, signed, and ratified. But it was not relished by any government except that of the United States, and it was in order to enable the delegates to devise such a wording of the Covenant as would not bind them to an obnoxious principle or commit their electorates to any irksome sacrifice, that the peace treaty with Germany and the liquidation of the war were postponed. This delay caused profound dissatisfaction in continental Europe, but it had the incidental advantage of bringing home to the victorious nations the marvelous recuperative powers of the German race. It also gave time for the drafting of a compact so admirably tempered to the human weaknesses of the rival signatory nations, whose passions were curbed only by sheer exhaustion, that all their spokesmen saw their way to sign it. There was something almost genial in the simplicity of the means by which the eminent promoter of the Covenant intended to reform the peoples of the world. He gave them credit for virtues which would have rendered the League unnecessary and displayed indulgence for passions which made its speedy realization hopeless, thus affording a superfluous illustration of the truth that the one deadly evil to be shunned by those who would remain philanthropists is a practical knowledge of men, and of the truism that the statesman's bane is an inordinate fondness for abstract ideas.

One of the decided triumphs of the Paris Peace Conference over the Vienna Congress lay in the amazing speed with which it got through the difficult task of solving offhandedly some of the most formidable problems that ever exercised the wit of man. One of the Paris journals contained the following remarkable announcement: "The actual time consumed in constituting the League of Nations, which it is hoped will be the means of keeping peace in the world, was thirty hours. This doesn't seem possible, but it is true."[6]

How provokingly slowly the dawdlers of Vienna moved in comparison may be read in the chronicles of that time. The peoples hoped and believed that the Congress would perform its tasks in a short period, but it was only after nine months' gestation and sore travail that it finally brought forth its offspring—a mountain of Acts which have been moldering in dust ever since.

The Wilsonian Covenant, which bound together thirty-two states—a league intended to be incomparably more powerful than was the Holy Alliance—will take rank as the most rapid improvisation of its kind in diplomatic history.

A comparison between the features common to the two international legislatures struck many observers as even more reassuring than the contrast between their differences. Both were placed in like circumstances, faced with bewildering and fateful problems to which an exhausting war, just ended, had imparted sharp actuality. One of the delegates to the Vienna Congress wrote:

"Everything had to be recast and made new, the destinies of Germany, Italy, and Poland settled, a solid groundwork laid for the future, and a commercial system to be outlined."[7] Might not those very words have been penned at any moment during the Paris Conference with equal relevance to its undertakings?

Or these: "However easily and gracefully the fine old French wit might turn the topics of the day, people felt vaguely beneath it all that these latter times were very far removed from the departed era and, in many respects, differed from it to an incomprehensible degree."[8] And the veteran Prince de Ligne remarked to the Comte de la Garde: "From every side come cries of Peace, Justice, Equilibrium, Indemnity.... Who will evolve order from this chaos and set a dam to the stream of claims?" How often have the same cries and queries been uttered in Paris?

When the first confidential talks began at the Vienna Congress, the same difficulties arose as were encountered over a century later in Paris about the number of states that were entitled to have representatives there. At the outset, the four Cabinet Ministers of Austria, Russia, England, and Prussia kept things to themselves, excluding vanquished France and the lesser Powers. Some time afterward, however, Talleyrand, the spokesman of the worsted nation, accompanied by the Portuguese Minister, Labrador, protested vehemently against the form and results of the deliberations. At one sitting passion rose to white heat and Talleyrand spoke of quitting the Congress altogether, whereupon a compromise was struck and eight nations received the right to be represented. In this way the Committee of Eight was formed.[9] In Paris discussion became to the full as lively, and on the first Saturday, when the representatives of Belgium, Greece, Poland, and the other small states delivered impassioned speeches against the attitude of the Big Five they were maladroitly answered by M. Clemenceau, who relied, as the source from which emanated the superior right of the Great Powers, upon the twelve million soldiers they had placed in the field. It was unfortunate that force should thus confer privileges at a Peace Conference which was convoked to end the reign of force and privilege. In Vienna it was different, but so were the times.

Many of the entries and comments of the chroniclers of 1815 read like extracts from newspapers of the first three months of 1919. "About Poland, they are fighting fiercely and, down to the present, with no decisive result," writes Count Carl von Nostitz, a Russian military observer.... "Concerning Germany and her future federative constitution, nothing has yet been done, absolutely nothing."[10] Here is a gloss written by Countess Elise von Bernstorff, wife of the Danish Minister: "Most comical was the mixture of the very different individuals who all fancied they had work to do at the Congress ... One noticed noblemen and scholars who had never transacted any business before, but now looked extremely consequential and took on an imposing bearing, and professors who mentally set down their university chairs in the center of a listening Congress, but soon turned peevish and wandered hither and thither, complaining that they could not, for the life of them, make out what was going on." Again: "It would have been to the interest of all Europe—rightly understood—to restore Poland. This matter may be regarded as the most important of all. None other could touch so nearly the policy of all the Powers represented,"[11] wrote the Bavarian Premier, Graf von Montgelas, just as the Entente press was writing in the year 1919.

The plenipotentiaries of the Paris Conference had for a short period what is termed a good press, and a rigorous censorship which never erred on the side of laxity, whereas those of the Vienna Congress were criticized without truth. For example, the population of Vienna, we are told by Bavaria's chief delegate, was disappointed when it discerned in those whom it was wont to worship as demigods, only mortals. "The condition of state affairs," writes Von Gentz, one of the clearest heads at the Congress, "is weird, but it is not, as formerly, in consequence of the crushing weight that is hung around our necks, but by reason of the mediocrity and clumsiness of nearly all the workers."[12] One consequence of this state of things was the constant upspringing of new and unforeseen problems, until, as time went on, the bewildered delegates were literally overwhelmed. "So many interests cross each other here," comments Count Carl von Nostitz, "which the peoples want to have mooted at the long-wished-for League of Nations, that they fall into the oddest shapes.... Look wheresoever you will, you are faced with incongruity and confusion.... Daily the claims increase as though more and more evil spirits were issuing forth from hell at the invocation of a sorcerer who has forgotten the spell by which to lay them."[13] It was of the Vienna Congress that those words were written.

In certain trivial details, too, the likeness between the two great peace assemblies is remarkable. For example, Lord Castlereagh, who represented England at Vienna, had to return to London to meet Parliament, thus inconveniencing the august assembly, as Mr. Wilson and Mr. George were obliged to quit Paris, with a like effect. Before Castlereagh left the scene of his labors, uncharitable judgments were passed on him for allowing home interests to predominate over his international activities.

The destinies of Poland and of Germany, which were then about to become a confederation, occupied the forefront of interest at the Congress as they did at the Conference. A similarity is noticeable also in the state of Europe generally, then and now. "The uncertain condition of all Europe," writes a close observer in 1815, "is appalling for the peoples: every country has mobilized ... and the luckless inhabitants are crushed by taxation. On every side people complain that this state of peace is worse than war ... individuals who despised Napoleon say that under him the suffering was not greater ... every country is sapping its own prosperity, so that financial conditions, in lieu of improving since Napoleon's collapse, are deteriorating every where."[14]

In 1815, as in 1919, the world pacifiers had their court painters, and Isabey, the French portraitist, was as much run after as was Sir William Orpen in 1919. In some respects, however, there was a difference. "Isabey," said the Prince de Ligne, "is the Congress become painter. Come! His talk is as clever as his brush." But Sir William Orpen was so absorbed by his work that he never uttered a word during a sitting. The contemporaries of the Paris Conference were luckier than their forebears of the Vienna Congress—for they could behold the lifelike features of their benefactors in a cinema. "It is understood," wrote a Paris journal, "that the necessity of preserving a permanent record of the personalities and proceedings at the Peace Conference has not been lost sight of. Very shortly a series of cinematographic films of the principal delegates and of the commissions is to be made on behalf of the British government, so that, side by side with the Treaty of Paris, posterity will be able to study the physiognomy of the men who made it."[15] In no case is it likely to forget them.

So the great heart of Paris, even to a greater degree than that of Vienna over a hundred years ago, beat and throbbed to cosmic measures while its brain worked busily at national, provincial, and economic questions.

Side by side with the good cheer prevalent that kept the eminent lawgivers of the Vienna Congress in buoyant spirits went the cost of living, prohibitive outside the charmed circle in consequence of the high and rising prices.

"Every article," writes the Comte de la Garde, one of the chroniclers of the Vienna Congress, "but more especially fuel, soared to incredible heights. The Austrian government found it necessary, in consequence, to allow all its officials supplements to their salaries and indemnities."[16] In Paris things were worse. Greed and disorganization combined to make of the French capital a vast fleecing-machine. The sums of money expended by foreigners in France during all that time and a much longer period is said to have exceeded the revenue from foreign trade. There was hardly any coal, and even the wood fuel gave out now and again. Butter was unknown. Wine was bad and terribly dear. A public conveyance could not be obtained unless one paid "double, treble, and quintuple fares and a gratuity." The demand was great and the supply sometimes abundant, but the authorities contrived to keep the two apart systematically.

THE COST OF LIVING

In no European country did the cost of living attain the height it reached in France in the year 1919. Not only luxuries and comforts, but some of life's necessaries, were beyond the reach of home-coming soldiers, and this was currently ascribed to the greed of merchants, the disorganization of transports, the strikes of workmen, and the supineness of the authorities, whose main care was to keep the nation tranquil by suppressing one kind of news, spreading another, and giving way to demands which could no longer be denied. There was another and more effectual cause: the war had deprived the world of twelve million workmen and a thousand milliard francs' worth of goods. But of this people took no account. The demobilized soldiers who for years had been well fed and relieved of solicitude for the morrow returned home, flushed with victory, proud of the commanding position which they had won in the state, and eager to reap the rewards of their sacrifices. But they were bitterly disillusioned. They expected a country fit for heroes to live in, and what awaited them was a condition of things to which only a defeated people could be asked to resign itself. The food to which the poilu had, for nearly five years, been accustomed at the front was become, since the armistice, the exclusive monopoly of the capitalist or the nouveau-riche in the rear. To obtain a ration of sugar he or his wife had to stand in a long queue for hours, perhaps go away empty-handed and return on the following morning. When his sugar-card was eventually handed to him he had again to stand in line outside the grocer's door and, when his turn came to enter it, was frequently told that the supply was exhausted and would not be replenished for a week or longer. Yet his newspaper informed him that there was plenty of colonial sugar, ready for shipment, but forbidden by the authorities to be imported into France. I met many poor people from the provinces and some resident in Paris who for four years had not once eaten a morsel of sugar, although the well-to-do were always amply supplied. In many places even bread was lacking, while biscuits, shortbread, and fancy cakes, available at exorbitant prices, were exhibited in the shop windows. Tokens of unbridled luxury and glaring evidences of wanton waste were flaunted daily and hourly in the faces of the humbled men who had saved the nation and wanted the nation to realize the fact. Lucullan banquets, opulent lunches, all-night dances, high revels of an exotic character testified to the peculiar psychic temper as well as to the material prosperity of the passive elements of the community and stung the poilus to the quick. "But what justice," these asked, "can the living hope for, when the glorious dead are so soon forgotten?" For one ghastly detail remains to complete a picture to which Boccaccio could hardly have done justice. "While all this wild dissipation was going on among the moneyed class in the capital the corpses of many gallant soldiers lay unburied and uncovered on the shell-plowed fields of battle near Rheims, on the road to Neuville-sur-Margival and other places—sights pointed out to visitors to tickle their interest in the grim spectacle of war. In vain individuals expostulated and the press protested. As recently as May persons known to me—my English secretary was one—looked with the fascination of horror on the bodies of men who, when they breathed, were heroes. They lay there where they had fallen and agonized, and now, in the heat of the May sun, were moldering in dust away—a couple of hours' motor drive from Paris...."[17]

The soldiers mused and brooded. Since the war began they had undergone a great psychic transformation. Stationed at the very center of a sustained fiery crisis, they lost their feeling of acquiescence in the established order and in the place of their own class therein. In the sight of death they had been stirred to their depths and volcanic fires were found burning there. Resignation had thereupon made way for a rebellious mood and rebellion found sustenance everywhere. The poilu demobilized retained his military spirit, nay, he carried about with him the very atmosphere of the trenches. He had rid himself of the sentiment of fear and the faculty of reverence went with it. His outlook on the world had changed completely and his inner sense reversed the social order which he beheld, as the eye reverses the object it apprehends. Respect for persons and institutions survived in relatively few instances the sacredness of life and the fear of death. He was impressed, too, with the all-importance of his class, which he had learned during the war to look upon as the Atlas on whose shoulders rest the Republic and its empire overseas. He had saved the state in war and he remained in peace-time its principal mainstay. With his value as measured by these priceless services he compared the low estimate put upon him by those who continued to identify themselves with the state—the over-fed, lazy, self-seeking money-getters who reserved to themselves the fruits of his toil.

One can well imagine—I have actually heard—the poilus putting their case somewhat as follows: "So long as we filled the gap between the death-dealing Teutons and our privileged compatriots we were well fed, warmly clad, made much of. During the war we were raised to the rank of pillars of the state, saviors of the nation, arbiters of the world's destinies. So long as we faced the enemy's guns nothing was too good for us. We had meat, white bread, eggs, wine, sugar in plenty. But, now that we have accomplished our task, we have fallen from our high estate and are expected to become pariahs anew. We are to work on for the old gang and the class from which it comes, until they plunge us into another war. For what? What is the reward for what we have achieved, what the incentive for what we are expected to accomplish? We cannot afford as much food as before the war, nor of the same quality. We are in want even of necessaries. Is it for this that we have fought? A thousand times no. If we saved our nation we can also save our class. We have the will and the power. Why should we not exert them?" The purpose of the section of the community to which these demobilized soldiers mainly belonged grew visibly definite as consciousness of their collective force grew and became keener. Occasionally it manifested itself openly in symptomatic spurts.

One dismal night, at a brilliant ball in a private mansion, a select company of both sexes, representatives of the world of rank and fashion, were enjoying themselves to their hearts' content, while their chauffeurs watched and waited outside in the cold, dark streets, chewing the cud of bitter reflections. Between the hours of three and four in the morning the latter held an open-air meeting, and adopted a resolution which they carried out forthwith. A delegation was sent upstairs to give notice to the light-hearted guests that they must be down in their respective motors within ten minutes on pain of not finding any conveyances to take them home. The mutineers were nearly all private chauffeurs in the employ of the personages to whom they sent this indelicate ultimatum. The resourceful host, however, warded off the danger and placated the rebellious drivers by inviting them to an improvised little banquet of pâtés de foie gras, dry champagne, and other delicacies. The general temper of the proletariat remained unchanged. Tales of rebellion still more disquieting were current in Paris, which, whether true or false, were aids to a correct diagnosis of the situation.

A dancing mania broke out during the armistice, which was not confined to the French capital. In Berlin, Rome, London, it aroused the indignation of those whose sympathy with the spiritual life of their respective nations was still a living force. It would seem, however, to be the natural reaction produced by a tremendous national calamity, under which the mainspring of the collective mind temporarily gives way and the psychical equilibrium is upset. Disillusion, despondency, and contempt for the passions that lately stirred them drive the people to seek relief in the distractions of pleasures, among which dancing is perhaps one of the mildest. It was so in Paris at the close of the long period of stress which ended with the rise of Napoleon. Dancing then went on uninterruptedly despite national calamities and private hardships. "Luxury," said Victor Hugo, "is a necessity of great states and great civilizations, but there are moments when it must not be exhibited to the masses." There was never a conjuncture when the danger of such an exhibition was greater or more imminent than during the armistice on the Continent—for it was the period of incubation preceding the outbreak of the most malignant social disease to which civilized communities are subject.

The festivities and amusements in the higher circles of Paris recall the glowing descriptions of the fret and fever of existence in the Austrian capital during the historic Vienna Congress a hundred years ago. Dancing became epidemic and shameless. In some salons the forms it took were repellent. One of my friends, the Marquis X., invited to a dance at the house of a plutocrat, was so shocked by what he saw there that he left almost at once in disgust. Madame Machin, the favorite teacher of the choreographic art, gave lessons in the new modes of dancing, and her fee was three hundred francs a lesson. In a few weeks she netted, it is said, over one hundred thousand francs.

The Prince de Ligne said of the Vienna Congress: "Le Congrès danse mais il ne marche pas." The French press uttered similar criticisms of the Paris Conference, when its delegates were leisurely picking up information about the countries whose affairs they were forgathered to settle. The following paragraph from a Paris journal—one of many such—describes a characteristic scene:

The domestic staff at the Hôtel Majestic, the headquarters of the British Delegation at the Peace Conference, held a very successful dance on Monday evening, attended by many members of the British Mission and Staff. The ballroom was a medley of plenipotentiaries and chambermaids, generals and orderlies, Foreign Office attachés and waitresses. All the latest forms of dancing were to be seen, including the jazz and the hesitation waltz, and, according to the opinion of experts, the dancing reached an unusually high standard of excellence. Major Lloyd George, one of the Prime Minister's sons, was among the dancers. Mr. G.H. Roberts, the Food Controller, made a very happy little speech to the hotel staff.[18]

The following extract is also worth quoting:

A packed house applauded 'Hullo, Paris!' from the rise of the curtain to the finale at the new Palace Theater (in the rue Mogador), Paris, last night.... President Wilson, Mr. A.J. Balfour, and Lord Derby all remained until the fall of the curtain at 12.15 ... and ... were given cordial cheers from the dispersing audience as they passed through the line of Municipal Guards, who presented arms as the distinguished visitors made their way to their motor-cars.[19]

Juxtaposed with the grief, discontent, and physical hardships prevailing among large sections of the population which had provided most of the holocausts for the Moloch of War, the ostentatious gaiety of the prosperous few might well seem a challenge. And so it was construed by the sullen lack-alls who prowled about the streets of Paris and told one another that their turn would come soon.

When the masses stare at the wealthy with the eyes one so often noticed during the eventful days of the armistice one may safely conclude, in the words of Victor Hugo, that "it is not thoughts that are harbored by those brains; it is events."

By the laboring classes the round of festivities, the theatrical representations, the various negro and other foreign dances, and the less-refined pleasures of the world's blithest capital were watched with ill-concealed resentment. One often witnessed long lines of motor-cars driving up to a theater, fashionable restaurant, or concert-hall, through the opening portals of which could be caught a glimpse of the dazzling illumination within, while, a few yards farther off, queues of anemic men and women were waiting to be admitted to the shop where milk or eggs or fuel could be had at the relatively low prices fixed by the state. The scraps of conversation that reached one's ears were far from reassuring.

I have met on the same afternoon the international world-regenerators, smiling, self-complacent, or preoccupied, flitting by in their motors to the Quai d'Orsay, and also quiet, determined-looking men, trudging along in the snow and slush, wending their way toward their labor conventicles, where they, too, were drafting laws for a new and strange era, and I voluntarily fell to gaging the distance that sundered the two movements, and asked myself which of the inchoate legislations would ultimately be accepted by the world. The question since then has been partially answered. As time passed, the high cost of living was universally ascribed, as we saw, to the insatiable greed of the middlemen and the sluggishness of the authorities, whose incapacity to organize and unwillingness to take responsibility increased and augured ill of the future of the country unless men of different type should in the meanwhile take the reins. Practically nothing was done to ameliorate the carrying power of the railways, to utilize the waterways, to employ the countless lorries and motor-vans that were lying unused, to purchase, convey, and distribute the provisions which were at the disposal of the government. Various ministerial departments would dispute as to which should take over consignments of meat or vegetables, and while reports, notes, and replies were being leisurely written and despatched, weeks or months rolled by, during which the foodstuffs became unfit for human consumption. In the middle of May, to take but one typical instance, 2,401 eases of lard and 1,418 cases of salt meat were left rotting in the docks at Marseilles. In the storage magazines at Murumas, 6,000 tons of salt meat were spoiled because it was nobody's business to remove and distribute them. Eighteen refrigerator-cars loaded with chilled meat arrived in Paris from Havre in the month of June. When they were examined at the cold-storage station it was discovered that, the doors having been negligently left open, the contents of the cases had to be destroyed.[20] From Belgium 108,000 kilos of potatoes were received and allowed to lie so long at one of the stations that they went bad and had to be thrown away. When these and kindred facts were published, the authorities, who had long been silent, became apologetic, but remained throughout inactive. In other countries the conditions, if less accentuated, were similar.

One of the dodges to which unscrupulous dealers resorted with impunity and profit was particularly ingenious. At the central markets, whenever any food is condemned, the public-health authorities seize it and pay the owner full value at the current market rates. The marketmen often turned this equitable arrangement to account by keeping back large quantities of excellent vegetables, for which the population was yearning, and when they rotted and had to be carted away, received their money value from the Public Health Department, thus attaining their object, which was to lessen the supply and raise the prices on what they kept for sale.[21] The consequence was that Paris suffered from a continual dearth of vegetables and fruits. Statistics published by the United States government showed the maximum increase in the cost of living in four countries as follows: France, 235 per cent.; Britain, 135 per cent.; Canada, 115 per cent.; and the United States, 107 per cent.[22] But since these data were published prices continued to rise until, at the beginning of July, they had attained the same level as those of Russia on the eve of the revolution there. In Paris, Lyons, Marseilles, the prices of various kinds of fish, shell-fish, jams, apples, had gone up 500 per cent., cabbage over 900 per cent., and celeriac 2,000 per cent. Anthracite coal, which in the year 1914 cost 56 francs a ton, could not be purchased in 1919 for less than 360 francs.

The restaurants and hotels waged a veritable war of plunder on their guests, most of whom, besides the scandalous prices, which bore no reasonable relation to the cost of production, had to pay the government luxury tax of 10 per cent, over and above. A well-known press correspondent, who entertained seven friends to a simple dinner in a modest restaurant, was charged 500 francs, 90 francs being set down for one chicken, and 28 for three cocktails. The maître d'hotel, in response to the pressman's expostulations, assured him that these charges left the proprietor hardly any profit. As it chanced, however, the journalist had just been professionally investigating the cost of living, and had the data at his finger-ends. As he displayed his intimate knowledge to his host, and obviously knew where to look for redress, he had the satisfaction of obtaining a rebate of 150 francs.[23]

Nothing could well be more illuminating than the following curious picture contributed by a journal whose representative made a special inquiry into the whole question of the cost of living.[24] "I was dining the other day at a restaurant of the Bois de Boulogne. There was a long queue of people waiting at the door, some sixty persons all told, mostly ladies, who pressed one another closely. From time to time a voice cried: 'Two places,' whereupon a door was held opened, two patients entered, and then it was loudly slammed, smiting some of those who stood next to it. At last my turn came, and I went in. The guests were sitting so close to one another that they could not move their elbows. Only the hands and fingers were free. There sat women half naked, and men whose voices and dress betrayed newly acquired wealth. Not one of them questioned the bills which were presented. And what bills! The hors d'oeuvre, 20 francs. Fish, 90 francs. A chicken, 150 francs. Three cigars, 45 francs. The repast came to 250 francs a person at the very lowest." Another journalist commented upon this story as follows: "Since the end of last June," he said, "445,000 quintals of vegetables, the superfluous output of the Palatinate, were offered to France at nominal prices. And the cost of vegetables here at home is painfully notorious. Well, the deal was accepted by the competent Commission in Paris. Everything was ready for despatching the consignment. The necessary trains were secured. All that was wanting was the approval of the French authorities, who were notified. Their answer has not yet been given and already the vegetables are rotting in the magazines."

The authorities pleaded the insufficiency of rolling stock, but the press revealed the hollowness of the excuse and the responsibility of those who put it forward, and showed that thousands of wagons, lorries, and motor-vans were idle, deteriorating in the open air. For instance, between Cognac and Jarnac the state railways had left about one thousand wagons unused, which were fast becoming unusable.[25] And this was but one of many similar instances.

It would be hard to find a parallel in history for the rapacity combined with unscrupulousness and ingenuity displayed during that fateful period by dishonest individuals, and left unpunished by the state. Doubtless France was not the only country in which greed was insatiable and its manifestations disastrous. From other parts of the Continent there also came bitter complaints of the ruthlessness of profiteers, and in Italy their heartless vampirism contributed materially to the revolutionary outbreaks throughout that country in July. Even Britain was not exempt from the scourge. But the presence of whole armies of well-paid, easy-going foreign troops and officials on French soil stimulated greed by feeding it, and also their complaints occasionally bared it to the world. The impression it left on certain units of the American forces was deplorable. When United States soldiers who had long been stationed in a French town were transferred to Germany, where charges were low, the revulsion of feeling among the straightforward, honest Yankees was complete and embarrassing. And by way of keeping it within the bounds of political orthodoxy, they were informed that the Germans had conspired to hoodwink them by selling at undercost prices, in order to turn them against the French. It was an insidious form of German propaganda!

On the other hand, the experience of British and American warriors in France sometimes happened to be so unfortunate that many of them gave credence to the absurd and mischievous legend that their governments were made to pay rent for the trenches in which their troops fought and died, and even for the graves in which the slain were buried.

An acquaintance of mine, an American delegate, wanted an abode to himself during the Conference, and, having found one suitable for which fifteen to twenty-five thousand francs a year were deemed a fair rent, he inquired the price, and the proprietor, knowing that he had to do with a really wealthy American, answered, "A quarter of a million francs." Subsequently the landlord sent to ask whether the distinguished visitor would take the place; but the answer he received ran, "No, I have too much self-respect."

Hotel prices in Paris, beginning from December, 1918, were prohibitive to all but the wealthy. Yet they were raised several times during the Conference. Again, despite the high level they had reached by the beginning of July, they were actually quintupled in some hotels and doubled in many for about a week at the time of the peace celebrations. Rents for flats and houses soared proportionately.

One explanation of the fantastic rise in rents is characteristic. During the war and the armistice, the government—and not only the French government—proclaimed a moratorium, and no rents at all were paid, in consequence of which many house-owners were impoverished and others actually beggared. And it was with a view to recoup themselves for these losses that they fleeced their tenants, French and foreign, as soon as the opportunity presented itself. An amusing incident arising out of the moratorium came to light in the course of a lawsuit. An ingenious tenant, smitten with the passion of greed, not content with occupying his flat without paying rent, sublet it at a high figure to a man who paid him well and in advance, but by mischance set fire to the place and died. Thereupon the tenant demanded and received a considerable sum from the insurance company in which the defunct occupant had had to insure the flat and its contents. He then entered an action at law against the proprietor of the house for the value of the damage caused by the fire, and he won his case. The unfortunate owner was condemned to pay the sum claimed, and also the costs of the action.[26] But he could not recover his rent.

Disorganization throughout France, and particularly in Paris, verged on the border of chaos. Every one felt its effects, but none so severely as the men who had won the war. The work of demobilization, which began soon after the armistice, but was early interrupted, proceeded at snail-pace. The homecoming soldiers sent hundreds of letters to the newspapers, complaining of the wearisome delays on the journey and the sharp privations which they were needlessly forced to endure. Thus, whereas they took but twenty-eight hours to travel from Hanover to Cologne—the lines being German, and therefore relatively well organized—they were no less than a fortnight on the way between Cologne and Marseilles.[27] During the German section of the journey they were kept warm, supplied with hot soup and coffee twice daily; but during the second half, which lasted fourteen days, they received no beverage, hot or cold. "The men were cared for much less than horses." That these poilus turned against the government and the class responsible for this gross neglect was hardly surprising. One of them wrote: "They [the authorities] are frightened of Bolshevism. But we who have not got home, we all await its coming. I don't, of course, mean the real Bolshevism, but even that kind which they paint in such repellent hues."[28] The conditions of telegraphic and postal communications were on a par with everything else. There was no guarantee that a message paid for would even be sent by the telegraph-operators, or, if withheld, that the sender would be apprised of its suppression. The war arrangements were retained during the armistice. And they were superlatively bad. A committee appointed by the Chamber of Deputies to inquire into the matter officially, reported that,[29] at the Paris Telegraph Bureau alone, 40,000 despatches were held back every day—40,000 a day, or 58,400,000 in four years! And from the capital alone. The majority of them were never delivered, and the others were distributed after great delay. The despatches which were retained were, in the main, thrown into a basket, and, when the accumulation had become too great, were destroyed. The Control Section never made any inquiry, and neither the senders nor those to whom the despatches were addressed were ever informed.[30] Even important messages of neutral ambassadors in Rome and London fell under the ban. The recklessness of these censors, who ceased even to read what they destroyed, was such that they held up and made away with state orders transmitted by the great munitions factories, and one of these was constrained to close down because it was unable to obtain certain materials in time.

The French Ambassador in Switzerland reported that, owing to these holocausts, important messages from that country, containing orders for the French national loan, never reached their destination, in consequence of which the French nation lost from ten to twenty million francs. And even the letters and telegrams that were actually passed were so carelessly handled that many of them were lost on the way or delayed until they became meaningless to the addressee. So, for instance, an official letter despatched by the Minister of Commerce to the Minister of Finance in Paris was sent to Calcutta, where the French Consul-General came across it, and had it directed back to Paris. The correspondent of the Echo de Paris, who was sent to Switzerland by his journal, was forbidden by law to carry more than one thousand francs over the frontier, nor was the management of the journal permitted to forward to him more than two hundred francs at a time. And when a telegram was given up in Paris, crediting him with two hundred francs, it was stopped by the censor. Eleven days were let go by without informing the persons concerned. When the administrator of the journal questioned the chief censor, he declined responsibility, having had nothing to do with the matter, but he indicated the Central Telegraph Control as the competent department. There, too, however, they were innocent, having never heard of the suppression. It took another day to elicit the fact that the economic section of the War Ministry was alone answerable for the decision. The indefatigable manager of the Echo de Paris applied to the department in question, but only to learn that it, too, was without any knowledge of what had happened, but it promised to find out. Soon afterward it informed the zealous manager that the department which had given the order could only be the Exchange Commission of the Ministry of Finances. And during all the time the correspondent was in Zurich without money to pay for telegrams or to settle his hotel and restaurant bills.[31]

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs itself, in a report on the whole subject, characterized the section of Telegraphic Control as "an organ of confusion and disorder which has engendered extraordinary abuses, and risked compromising the government seriously."[32] It did not merely risk, it actually went far to compromise the government and the entire governing class as well.

It looked as though the rulers of France were still unconsciously guided by the maxim of Richelieu, who wrote in his testament, "If the peoples were too comfortable there would be no keeping them to the rules of duty." The more urgent the need of resourcefulness and guidance, the greater were the listlessness and confusion. "There is neither unity of conduct," wrote a press organ of the masses, "nor co-ordination of the Departments of War, Public Works, Revictualing, Transports. All these services commingle, overlap, clash, and paralyze one another. There is no method. Thus, whereas France has coffee enough to last her a twelvemonth, she has not sufficient fuel for a week. Scruples, too, are wanting, as are punishments; everywhere there is a speculator who offers his purse, and an official, a station-master, or a subaltern to stretch out his hand.... Shortsightedness, disorder, waste, the frittering away of public moneys and irresponsibility: that is the balance...."[33]

That the spectacle of the country sinking in this administrative quagmire was not conducive to the maintenance of confidence in its ruling classes can well be imagined. On all sides voices were uplifted, not merely against the Cabinet, whose members were assumed to be actuated by patriotic motives and guided by their own lights, but against the whole class from which they sprang, and not in France only, but throughout Europe. Nothing, it was argued, could be worse than what these leaders had brought upon the country, and a change from the bourgeoisie to the proletariat could not well be inaugurated at a more favorable conjuncture.

In truth the bourgeoisie were often as impatient of the restraints and abuses as the homecoming poilu. The middle class during the armistice was subjected to some of the most galling restraints that only the war could justify. They were practically bereft of communications. To use the telegraph, the post, the cable, or the telephone was for the most part an exhibition of childish faith, which generally ended in the loss of time and money.

This state of affairs called for an immediate and drastic remedy, for, so long as it persisted, it irritated those whom it condemned to avoidable hardship, and their name was legion. It was also part of an almost imperceptible revolutionary process similar to that which was going on in several other countries for transferring wealth and competency from one class to another and for goading into rebellion those who had nothing to lose by "violent change in the politico-social ordering." The government, whose powers were concentrated in the hands of M. Clemenceau, had little time to attend to these grievances. For its main business was the re-establishment of peace. What it did not fully realize was the gravity of the risks involved. For it was on the cards that the utmost it could achieve at the Conference toward the restoration of peace might be outweighed and nullified by the consequences of what it was leaving undone and unattempted at home. At no time during the armistice was any constructive policy elaborated in any of the Allied countries. Rhetorical exhortations to keep down expenditure marked the high-water level of ministerial endeavor there.

The strikes called by the revolutionary organizations whose aim was the subversion of the regime under which those monstrosities flourished at last produced an effect on the parliament. One day in July the French Chamber left the Cabinet in a minority by proposing the following resolution: "The Chamber, noting that the cost of living in Belgium has diminished by a half and in England by a fourth since the armistice, while it has continually increased in France since that date, judges the government's economic policy by the results obtained and passes to the order of the day."[34]

Shortly afterward the same Chamber recanted and gave the Cabinet a majority. In Great Britain, too, the House of Commons put pressure on the government, which at last was forced to act.

On the other hand, extravagance was systematically encouraged everywhere by the shortsighted measures which the authorities adopted and maintained as well as by the wanton waste promoted or tolerated by the incapacity of their representatives. In France the moratorium and immunity from taxation gave a fillip to recklessness. People who had hoarded their earnings before the war, now that they were dispensed from paying rent and relieved of fair taxes, paid out money ungrudgingly for luxuries and then struck for higher salaries and wages.

Even the Deputies of the Chamber, which did nothing to mitigate the evil complained of, manifested a desire to have their own salaries—six hundred pounds a year—augmented proportionately to the increased cost of living; but in view of the headstrong current of popular opinion against parliamentarism the government deemed it impolitic to raise the point at that conjuncture.

Most of the working-men's demands in France as in Britain were granted, but the relief they promised was illusory, for prices still went up, leaving the recipients of the relief no better off. And as the wages payable for labor are limited, whereas prices may ascend to any height, the embittered laborer fancied he could better his lot by an appeal to the force which his organization wielded. The only complete solution of the problem, he was assured, was to be found in the supersession of the governing classes and the complete reconstruction of the social fabric on wholly new foundations.[35] And some of the leaders rashly declared that they were unable to discern the elements of any other.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Cf. The Daily Mail (Paris edition), March 12,1919.

[2] On December 18, 1918.

[3] "With what little wisdom the world is governed."

[4] "Mr. Bernard Richards, Secretary of the delegation from the American Jewish Congress to the Peace Conference, expressed much satisfaction with the work done in Paris for the protection of Jewish rights and the furtherance of the interests of other minorities involved in the peace settlement." (The New York Herald, July 20, 1919.) How successful was the influence of the Jewish community at the Peace Conference may be inferred from the following: "Mr. Henry H. Rosenfelt, Director of the American Jewish Relief Committee, announces that all New York agencies engaged in Jewish relief work will join in a united drive in New York in December to raise $7,500,000 (£1,500,000) to provide clothing, food, and medicines for the six million Jews throughout Eastern Europe as well as to make possible a comprehensive programme for their complete rehabilitation.—American Radio News Service." Cf. The Daily Mail, August 19, 1919.

[5] Countess Lulu von Thurheim, My Life, 1788-1852. German edition, Munich, 1913-14.

[6] The New York Herald (Paris edition), February 23, 1919.

[7] Grafen von Montgelas, Denwürdigkeiten des bayrischen Staatsministers Maximilian. See also Dr. Karl Soll, Der Wiener Kongress.

[8] Varnhagen von Ense.

[9] Friedrich von Gentz.

[ [10] Dr. Karl Soll, Count Carl von Nostitz.

[ [11] Cf. Dr. Karl Soll, Der Wiener Kongress.

[ [12] Dr. Karl Soll, Friedrich von Gentz.

[ [13] Dr. Karl Soll, Count Carl von Nostitz, p. 109.

[ [14] Jean Gabriel Eynard—the representative of Geneva.

[ [15] The Daily Mail (Paris edition), March 22, 1919.

[ [16] Count de la Garde.

[ [17] Cf. Le Matin, May 31, 1919. A noteworthy example of the negligence of the authorities was narrated by this journal on the same day. To a wooden cross with an inscription recording that the grave was tenanted by "an unknown Frenchman" was hung a disk containing his name and regiment! And here and there the skulls of heroes protruded from the grass, but the German tombs were piously looked after by Boche prisoners.

[ [18] The Daily Mail (Continental edition), March 12, 1919.

[ [19] Ibid., April 23, 1919.

[ [20] Cf. The New York Herald (Paris edition), June 8, 1919.

[ [21] Cf. The New York Herald, June 2, 1919.

[ [22] Cf. The New York Herald (Paris edition), April 20, 1919.

[ [23] Le Figaro, June 8, 1919.

[ [24] L'Humanité, July 10, 1919.

[ [25] La Democratie Nouvelle, June 14, 1919.

[ [26] Le Figaro, March 6, 1919.

[ [27] L'Humanité, May 23, 1919.

[ [28] Ibid.

[ [29] Le Gaulois, March 23, 1919. The New York Herald (Paris edition), March 22, 1919. L'Echo de Paris, June 12, 1919.

[ [30] The New York Herald, March 22, 1919.

[ [31] L'Echo de Paris, June 12, 1919.

[ [32] The New York Herald, March 22, 1919.

[ [33] L'Humanité, May 23, 1919.

[ [34] on July 18, 1919. Cf. Matin, Echo de Paris, Figaro, July 10, 1919.

[ [35] Cf. L'Humanité (French Syndicalist organ), July 11, 1919.

II

SIGNS OF THEIR TIMES

Society during the transitional stage through which it has for some years been passing underwent an unprecedented change the extent and intensity of which are as yet but imperfectly realized. Its more striking characteristics were determined by the gradual decomposition of empires and kingdoms, the twilight of their gods, the drying up of their sources of spiritual energy, and the psychic derangement of communities and individuals by a long and fearful war. Political principles, respect for authority and tradition, esteem for high moral worth, to say nothing of altruism and public spirit, either vanished or shrank to shadowy simulacra. In contemporary history currents and cross-currents, eddies and whirlpools, became so numerous and bewildering that it is not easy to determine the direction of the main stream. Unsocial tendencies coexisted with collectivity of effort, both being used as weapons against the larger community and each being set down as a manifestation of democracy. Against every kind of authority the world, or some of its influential sections, was up in revolt, and the emergence of the passions and aims of classes and individuals had freer play than ever before.

To this consummation conservative governments, and later on their chiefs at the Peace Conference, systematically contributed with excellent intentions and efficacious measures. They implicitly denied, and acted on the denial, that a nation or a race, like an individual, has something distinctive, inherent, and enduring that may aptly be termed soul or character. They ignored the fact that all nations and races are not of the same age nor endowed with like faculties, some being young and helpless, others robust and virile, and a third category senescent and decrepit, and that there are some races which Nature has wholly and permanently unfitted for service among the pioneers of progress. In consequence of these views, which I venture to think erroneous, they applied the same treatment to all states. Just as President Wilson, by striving to impose his pinched conception of democracy and his lofty ideas of political morality on Mexico, had thrown that country into anarchy, the two Anglo-Saxon governments by enforcing their theories about the protection of minorities and other political conceptions in various states of Europe helped to loosen the cement of the politico-social structure there.

Through these as well as other channels virulent poison penetrated to the marrow of the social organism. Language itself, on which all human intercourse hinges, was twisted to suit unwholesome ambitions, further selfish interests, and obscure the vision of all those who wanted real reforms and unvarnished truth. During the war the armies were never told plainly what they were struggling for; officially they were said to be combating for justice, right, self-determination, the sacredness of treaties, and other abstract nouns to which the heroic soldiers never gave a thought and which a section of the civil population misinterpreted. Indeed, so little were these shibboleths understood even by the most intelligent among the politicians who launched them that one half of the world still more or less conscientiously labors to establish their contraries and is anathematizing the other half for championing injustice, might, and unveracity—under various misnomers.

Anglo-Saxondom, taking the lead of humanity, imitated the Catholic states of by-past days, and began to impose on other peoples its own ideas, as well as its practices and institutions, as the best fitted to awaken their dormant energies and contribute to the social reconstruction of the world. In the interval, language, whether applied to history, journalism, or diplomacy, was perverted and words lost their former relations to the things connoted, and solemn promises were solemnly broken in the name of truth, right, or equity. For the new era of good faith, justice and morality was inaugurated, oddly enough, by a general tearing up of obligatory treaties and an ethical violation of the most binding compacts known to social man. This happened coincidently to be in keeping with the general insurgence against all checks and restraints, moral and social, for which the war is mainly answerable, and to be also in harmony with the regular supersession of right by might which characterizes the present epoch and with the disappearance of the sense of law. In a word, under the auspices of the amateur world-reformers, the tendency of Bolshevism throve and spread—an instructive case of people serving the devil at the bidding of God's best friends.

As in the days of the Italian despots, every individual has the chance of rising to the highest position in many of the states, irrespective of his antecedents and no matter what blots may have tarnished his 'scutcheon. Neither aristocratic descent, nor public spirit nor even a blameless past is now an indispensable condition of advancement. In Germany the head of the Republic is an honest saddler. In Austria the chief of the government until recently was the assassin of a prime minister. The chief of the Ukraine state was an ex-inmate of an asylum. Trotzky, one of the Russian duumvirs, is said to have a record which might of itself have justified his change of name from Braunstein. Bela Kuhn, the Semitic Dictator of Hungary, had the reputation of a thief before rising to the height of ruler of the Magyars.... In a word, Napoleon's ideal is at last realized, "La carrière est ouverte aux talents."

Among the peculiar traits of this evanescent epoch may be mentioned inaccessibility to the teaching of facts which run counter to cherished prejudices, aims, and interests. People draw from facts which they cannot dispute only the inferences which they desire. An amusing instance of this occurred in Paris, where a Syndicalist organ[36] published an interesting and on the whole truthful account of the chaotic confusion, misery, and discontent prevailing in Russia and of the brutal violence and foxy wiles of Lenin. The dreary picture included the cost of living; the disorganization of transports; the terrible mortality caused by the after-effects of the war; the crowding of prisons, theaters, cinemas, and dancing-saloons; the eagerness of employers to keep their war prisoners employed while thousands of demobilized soldiers were roaming about the cities and villages vainly looking for work; the absence of personal liberty; the numerous arrests, and the relative popularity withal of the Dictator. This popularity, it was explained, the press contributed to keep alive, especially since the abortive attempt made on his life, when the journals declared that he was indispensable for the time being to his country.

He himself was described as a hard despot, ruthless as a tiger who strikes his fellow-workers numb and dumb with fear. "But he is under no illusions as to the real sentiments of the members of the Soviet who back him, nor does he deign to conceal those which he entertains toward them.... Whenever Lenin himself is concerned justice is expeditious. Some men will be delivered from prison after many years of preventive confinement without having been brought to trial, others who fired on Kerensky will be kept untried for an indefinite period, whereas the brave Russian patriot who aimed his revolver at Lenin, and whom the French press so justly applauded, had only three weeks to wait for his condemnation to death."

This article appearing in a Syndicalist organ seemed an event. Some journals summarized and commented it approvingly, until it was discovered to be a skit on the transient conditions in France, whereupon the "admirable exposé based upon convincing evidence" and the "forcible arguments" became worthless.[37]

An object-lesson in the difficulty of legislating in Anglo-Saxon fashion for foreign countries and comprehending their psychology was furnished by two political trials which, taking place in Paris during the Conference, enabled the delegates to estimate the distance that separates the Anglo-Saxon from the Continental mode of thought and action in such a fundamental problem as the administration of justice. Raoul Villain, the murderer of Jean Jaurès—France's most eminent statesman—was kept in prison for nearly five years without a trial. He had assassinated his victim in cold blood. He had confessed and justified the act. The eye-witnesses all agreed as to the facts. Before the court, however, a long procession of ministers of state, politicians, historians, and professors defiled, narrating in detail the life-story, opinions, and strivings of the victim, who, in the eyes of a stranger, unacquainted with its methods, might have seemed to be the real culprit. The jury acquitted the prisoner.

The other accused man was a flighty youth who had fired on the French Premier and wounded him. He, however, had not long to wait for his trial. He was taken before the tribunal within three weeks of his arrest and was promptly condemned to die.[38] Thus the assassin was justified by the jury and the would-be assassin condemned to be shot. "Suppose these trials had taken place in my country," remarked a delegate of an Eastern state, "and that of the two condemned men one had been a member of the privileged minority, what an uproar the incident would have created in the United States and England! As it happened in western Europe, it passed muster."

How far removed some continental nations are from the Anglo-Saxons in their mode of contemplating and treating another momentous category of social problems may be seen from the circumstance that the Great Council in Basel adopted a bill brought in by the Socialist Welti, authorizing the practice of abortion down to the third month, provided that the husband and wife are agreed, and in cases where there is no marriage provided it is the desire of the woman and that the operation is performed by a regular physician.[39]

Another striking instance of the difference of conceptions between the Anglo-Saxon and continental peoples is contained in the following unsavory document, which the historian, whose business it is to flash the light of criticism upon the dark nooks of civilization, can neither ignore nor render into English. It embodies a significant decision taken by the General Staff of the 256th Brigade of the Army of Occupation[40] and was issued on June 21, 1919.[41]

SIGNS OF THE TIMES

EXPLOITATION ET POLICE DE LA MAISON PUBLIQUE DE MÜNCHEN-GLADBACH

(1.) Les deux femmes composant l'unique personnel de la maison publique de Gladbach (2, Gasthausstrasse), sont venues en délégation déclarer qu'elles ne pouvaient suffire à la nombreuse clientèle, qui envahit leur maison, devant laquelle stationneraient en permanence de nombreux groupes de clients affamés.

Elles déclarent que défalcation faite du service qu'elles doivent assurer à leurs abonnés belges et allemands, elles ne peuvent fournir à la division qu'un total de vingt entrées par jour (10 pour chacune d'elle).

L'établissement d'ailleurs ne travaille pas la nuit et observe strictement le repos dominical. D'autre part les ressources de la ville ne permettent pas, paraît-il, d'augmenter le personnel. Dans ces conditions, en vue d'éviter tout désordre et de ne pas demander à ces femmes un travail audessus de leurs forces, les mesures suivantes seront prises:

(2.) JOURS DE TRAVAIL: Tous les jours de la semaine, sauf le dimanche.

RENDEMENT MAXIMUM: Chaque jour chaque femme reçoit 10 hommes, soit 20 pour les deux personnes, 120 par semaine.

HEURES D'OUVERTURE: 17 heures à 21 heures. Aucune réception n'aura lieu en dehors de ces heures.

TARIF: Pour un séjour d'un quart heure (entrée et sortie de l'établissement comprises) ... 5 marks.

CONSOMMATIONS: La maison ne vend aucune boisson. Il n'y a pas de salle d'attente. Les clients doivent donc se présenter par deux.

(3.) RÉPARTITION: Les 6 jours de la semaine sont donnés:

Le lundi—1er bat. du 164 et C.H.R.
Le mardi—1er bat. du 169 et C.H.R.
Le mercredi—2e bat. du 164 et C.H.R.
Le jeudi—2e bat. du 169 et C.H.R.
Le vendredi—3e bat. du 164.
Le samedi—3e bat. du 169.

(4.) Dans chaque bataillon il sera établi le jour qui leur est fixé, 20 tickets déposés aux bureaux des sergents-majeur à raison de 5 par compagnie. Les hommes désireux de rendre visite à l'établissement réclamerout au bureau de leur sergent-majeur, 1 ticket qui leur donnera driot de priorité.

The value of that document derives from its having been issued as an ordinary regulation, from its having been reproduced in a widely circulated journal of the capital without evolving comment, and from the strong light which it projects upon one of the darkest corners of the civilization which has been so often and so eloquently eulogized.

Manifestly the currents of the new moral life which the Conference was to have set flowing are as yet somewhat weak, the new ideals are still remote and the foreshadowings of a nobler future are faint. Another token of the change which is going forward in the world was reported from the Far East, but passed almost unnoticed in Europe. The Chinese Ministry of Public Instruction, by an edict of November 3, 1919, officially introduced in all secondary schools a phonetic system of writing in place of the ideograms theretofore employed. This is undoubtedly an event of the highest importance in the history of culture, little though it may interest the Western world to-day. At the same time, as a philologist by profession, I agree with a continental authority[42] who holds that, owing to the monosyllabic character of the Chinese language and to the further disadvantage that it lacks wholly or partly several consonants,[43] it will be practically impossible, as the Japanese have already found, to apply the new alphabet to the traditional literary idiom. Neither can it be employed for the needs of education, journalism, of the administration, or for telegraphing. It will, however, be of great value for elementary instruction and for postal correspondence. It is also certain to develop and extend. But its main significance is twofold: as a sign of China's awakening and as an innovation, the certain effect of which will be to weaken national unity and extend regionalism at its expense. From this point of view the reform is portentous.

Another of the signs of the new times which calls for mention is the spread and militancy of the labor movement, to which the war and its concomitants gave a potent impulse. It is differentiated from all previous ferments by this, that it constitutes merely an episode in the universal insurgency of the masses, who are fast breaking through the thin social crust formed by the upper classes and are emerging rapidly above the surface. One of the most impressive illustrations of this general phenomenon is the rise of wages, which in Paris has set the municipal street-sweepers above university professors, the former receiving from 7,600 to 8,000 francs a year, whereas the salary of the latter is some 500 francs less.[44]

This general disturbance is the outcome of many causes, among which are the over-population of the world, the spread of education and of equal opportunity, the anonymity of industrial enterprises, scientific and unscientific theories, the specialization of labor and its depressing influence.[45] These factors produced a labor organization which the railways, newspapers, and telegraph contributed to perfect and transform into a proletarian league, and now all progressive humanity is tending steadily and painfully to become one vast collectivity for producing and sharing on more equitable lines the means of living decently. This consummation is coming about with the fatality of a natural law, and the utmost the wisest of governments can do is to direct it through pacific channels and dislodge artificial obstacles in its course.

One of the first reforms toward which labor is tending with more or less conscious effort is the abolition of the hereditary principle in the possession of wealth and influence and of the means of obtaining them. The division of labor in the past caused the dissociation of the so-called nobler avocations from manual work, and gradually those who followed higher pursuits grew into a sort of hereditary caste which bestowed relative immunity from the worst hardships of life's struggle and formed a ruling class. To-day the masses have their hands on the principal levers for shattering this top crust of the social sphere and seem resolved to press them.

The problem for the solution of which they now menacingly clamor is the establishment of an approximately equitable principle for the redistribution of the world's resources—land, capital, industries, monopolies, mines, transports, and colonies. Whether socialization—their favorite prescription—is the most effectual way of achieving this object may well be doubted, but must be thoroughly examined and discussed. The end once achieved, it is expected that mankind will have become one gigantic living entity, endowed with senses, nerves, heart, arteries, and all the organs necessary to operate and employ the forces and wealth of the planet. The process will be complex because the factors are numerous and of various orders, and for this reason few political thinkers have realized that its many phases are aspects of one phenomenon. That is also a partial explanation of the circumstance that at the Conference the political questions were separated from the economic and treated by politicians as paramount, the others being relegated to the background. The labor legislation passed in Paris reduced itself, therefore, to counsels of perfection.

That the Conference was incapable of solving a problem of this magnitude is self-evident. But the delegates could and should have referred it to an international parliament, fully representative of all the interests concerned. For the best way of distributing the necessaries and comforts of life, which have been acquired or created by manual toil, is a problem that can neither be ignored nor reasoned away. So long as it remains a problem it will be a source of intermittent trouble and disorder throughout the civilized world. The titles, which the classes heretofore privileged could invoke in favor of possession, are now being rapidly acquired by the workers, who in addition dispose of the force conferred by organization, numbers, and resolve. At the same time most of the stimuli and inventives to individual enterprise are being gradually weakened by legislation, which it would be absurd to condemn and dangerous to regard as a settlement. In the meanwhile productivity is falling off, while the demand for the products of labor is growing proportionately to the increase of population and culture.

Hitherto the laws of distribution were framed by the strong, who were few and utilized the many. To-day their relative positions have shifted; the many have waxed strong and are no longer minded to serve as instruments in the hands of a class, hereditary or selected. But the division of mankind into producers and utilizers has ever been the solid and durable mainstay of that type of civilization from which progressive nations are now fast moving away, and the laws and usages against which the proletariat is up in arms are but its organic expression.

From the days of the building of the Pyramids down to those of the digging of the Panama Canal the chasm between the two social orders remained open. The abolition of slavery changed but little in the arrangement—was, indeed, effected more in the interests of the old economics than in deference to any strong religious or moral sentiment. In substance the traditional ordering continued to exist in a form better adapted to the modified conditions. But the filling up of that chasm, which is now going forward, involves the overthrow of the system in its entirety, and the necessity of either rearing a wholly new structure, of which even the keen-sighted are unable to discern the outlines, or else the restoration of the old one on a somewhat different basis. And the only basis conceivable to-day is that which would start from the postulate that some races of men come into the world devoid of the capacity for any more useful part in the progress of mankind than that which was heretofore allotted to the proletariat. It cannot be gainsaid that there are races on the globe which are incapable of assimilating the higher forms of civilization, but which might well be made to render valuable services in the lower without either suffering injustice themselves or demoralizing others. And it seems nowise impossible that one day these reserves may be mobilized and systematically employed in virtue of the principle that the weal of the great progressive community necessitates such a distribution of parts as will set each organ to perform the functions for which it is best qualified.

Since the close of the war internationalism was in the air, and the labor movement intensified it. It stirred the thought and warmed the imagination alike of exploiters and exploited. Reformers and pacifists yearned for it as a means of establishing a well-knit society of progressive and pacific peoples and setting a term to sanguinary wars. Some financiers may have longed for it in a spirit analogous to that in which Nero wished that the Roman people had but one neck. And the Conference chiefs seemed to have pictured it to themselves—if, indeed, they meditated such an abstract matter—in the guise of a pax Anglo-Saxonica, the distinctive feature of which would lie in the transfer to the two principal peoples—and not to a board representing all nations—of those attributes of sovereignty which the other states would be constrained to give up. Of these three currents flowing in the direction of internationalism only one—that of finance—appears for the moment likely to reach its goal....

FOOTNOTES:

[ [36] L'Humanité, March 6 and 18, 1919.

[ [37] Cf. L'Humanité, April 10,1919.

[ [38] The sentence was subsequently commuted.

[ [39] La Gazette de Lausanne, May 26, 1919.

[ [40] 128th Division.

[ [41] It was reproduced by the French Syndicalist organ, L'Humanité of July 7, 1919.

[ [42] R. de Saussure. Cf. Journal de Genève, August 18, and also May 26, 1919.

[ [43] d, r, t, l, g (partly) and p, except at the beginning of a word.

[ [44] Cf. the French papers generally for the month of May—also Bonsoir, July 26, 1919.

[ [45] Walther Rathenau has dealt with this question in several of his recent pamphlets, which are not before me at the moment.

III

THE DELEGATES

The plenipotentiaries, who became the world's arbiters for a while, were truly representative men. But they mirrored forth not so much the souls of their respective peoples as the surface spirit that flitted over an evanescent epoch. They stood for national grandeur, territorial expansion, party interests, and even abstract ideas. Exponents of a narrow section of the old order at its lowest ebb, they were in no sense heralds of the new. Amid a labyrinth of ruins they had no clue to guide their footsteps, in which the peoples of the world were told to follow. Only true political vision, breadth of judgment, thorough mastery of the elements of the situation, an instinct for discerning central issues, genuine concern for high principles of governance, and the rare moral courage that disregards popularity as a mainspring of action—could have fitted any set of legislators to tackle the complex and thorny problems that pressed for settlement and to effect the necessary preliminary changes. That the delegates of the principal Powers were devoid of many of these qualities cannot fairly be made a subject of reproach. It was merely an accident. But it was as unfortunate as their honest conviction that they could accomplish the grandiose enterprise of remodeling the communities of the world without becoming conversant with their interests, acquainted with their needs, or even aware of their whereabouts. For their failure, which was inevitable, was also bound to be tragic, inasmuch as it must involve, not merely their own ambition to live in history as the makers of a new and regenerate era, but also the destinies of the nations and races which confidently looked up to them for the conditions of future pacific progress, nay, of normal existence.

During the Conference it was the fashion in most European countries to question the motives as well as to belittle the qualifications of the delegates. Now that political passion has somewhat abated and the atmosphere is becoming lighter and clearer, one may without provoking contradiction pay a well-deserved tribute to their sincerity, high purpose, and quick response to the calls of public duty and moral sentiment. They were animated with the best intentions, not only for their respective countries, but for humanity as a whole. One and all they burned with the desire to go as far as feasible toward ending the era of destructive wars. Steady, uninterrupted, pacific development was their common ideal, and they were prepared to give up all that they reasonably could to achieve it. It is my belief, for example, that if Mr. Wilson had persisted in making his League project the cornerstone of the new world structure and in applying his principles without favor, the Italians would have accepted it almost without discussion, and the other states would have followed their example. All the delegates must have felt that the old order of things, having been shaken to pieces by the war and its concomitants, could not possibly survive, and they naturally desired to keep within evolutionary bounds the process of transition to the new system, thus accomplishing by policy what revolution would fain accomplish by violence. It was only when they came to define that policy with a view to its application that their unanimity was broken up and they split into two camps, the pacifists and the militarists, or the democrats and imperialists, as they have been roughly labeled. Here, too, each member of the assembly worked with commendable single-mindedness, and under a sense of high responsibility, for that solution of the problem which to him seemed the most conducive to the general weal. And they wrestled heroically one with the other for what they held to be right and true relatively to the prevalent conditions. The circumstance that the cause and effects of this clash of opinions and sentiments were so widely at variance with early anticipations had its roots partly in their limited survey of the complex problem, and partly, too, in its overwhelming vastness and their own unfitness to cope with it.

The delegates who aimed at disarmament and a society of pacific peoples made out as good a case—once their premises were admitted—as those who insisted upon guarantees, economic and territorial. Everything depended, for the theory adopted, upon each individual's breadth of view, and for its realization upon the temper of the peoples and that of their neighbors. As under the given circumstances either solution was sure to encounter formidable opposition, which only a doughty spirit would dare to affront, compromise, offering a side-exit out of the quandary, was avidly taken. In this way the collective sagacities, working in materials the nature of which they hardly understood, brought forth strange products. Some of the incongruities of the details, such, for instance, as the invitation to Prinkipo, despatched anonymously, occasionally surpass satire, but their bewildered authors are entitled to the benefit of extenuating circumstances.

On the momentous issue of a permanent peace based on Mr. Wilson's pristine concept of a league of nations, and in accordance with rigid principles applied equally to all the states, there was no discussion. In other words, it was tacitly agreed that the fourteen points should not form a bar to the vital postulates of any of the Great Powers. It was only on the subject of the lesser states and the equality of nations that the debates were intense, protracted, and for a long while fruitless. At times words flamed perilously high. For months the solutions of the Adriatic, the Austrian, Turkish, and Thracian problems hung in poignant suspense, the public looking on with diminishing interest and waxing dissatisfaction. The usual optimistic assurances that all would soon run smoothly and swiftly fell upon deaf ears. Faith in the Conference was melting away.

The plight of the Supreme Council and the vain exhortations to believe in its efficiency reminded me of the following story.

A French parish priest was once spiritually comforting a member of his flock who was tormented by doubts about the goodness of God as measured by the imperfection of His creation. Having listened to a vivid account of the troubled soul's high expectation of its Maker and of its deep disappointment at His work, the pious old curé said: "Yes, my child. The world is indeed bad, as you say, and you are right to deplore it. But don't you think you may have formed to yourself an exaggerated idea of God?" An analogous reflection would not be out of place when passing judgment on the Conference which implicitly arrogated to itself some of the highest attributes of the Deity, and thus heightened the contrast between promise and achievement. Certainly people expected much more from it than it could possibly give. But it was the delegates themselves who had aroused these expectations announcing the coming of a new epoch at their fiat. The peoples were publicly told by Mr. Lloyd George and several of his colleagues that the war of 1914-18 would be the last. His "Never again" became a winged phrase, and the more buoyant optimists expected to see over the palace of arbitration which was to be substituted for the battlefield, the inspiring inscription: "A la dernière des guerres, l'humanité reconnaissante."[46] Mr. Wilson's vast project was still more attractive.

Mr. Lloyd George is too well known in his capacity of British parliamentarian to need to be characterized. The splendid services he rendered the Empire during the war, when even his defects proved occasionally helpful, will never be forgotten. Typifying not only the aims, but also the methods, of the British people, he never seems to distrust his own counsels whencesoever they spring nor to lack the courage to change them in a twinkling. He stirred the soul of the nation in its darkest hour and communicated his own glowing faith in its star. During the vicissitudes of the world struggle he was the right man for the responsible post which he occupied, and I am proud of having been one of the first to work in my own modest way to have him placed there. But a good war-leader may be a poor peace-negotiator, and, as a matter of fact, there are few tasks concerned with the welfare of the nation which Mr. Lloyd George could not have tackled with incomparably greater chances of accomplishing it than that of remodeling the world. His antecedents were all against him. His lack of general equipment was prohibitive; even his inborn gifts were disqualifications. One need not pay too great heed to acrimonious colleagues who set him down as a word-weaving trimmer, between whose utterances and thoughts there is no organic nexus, who declines to take the initiative unless he sees adequate forces behind him ready to his to his support, who lacks the moral courage that serves as a parachute for a fall from popularity, but possesses in abundance that of taking at the flood the rising tide which balloon-like lifts its possessor high above his fellows. But judging him in the light of the historic events in which he played a prominent part, one cannot dismiss these criticisms as groundless.

Opportunism is an essential element of statecraft, which is the art of the possible. But there is a line beyond which it becomes shiftiness, and it would be rash to assert that Mr. Lloyd George is careful to keep on the right side of it. At the Conference his conduct appeared to careful observers to be traced mainly by outside influences, and as these were various and changing the result was a zigzag. One day he would lay down a certain proposition as a dogma not to be modified, and before the week was out he would advance the contrary proposition and maintain that with equal warmth and doubtless with equal conviction. Guided by no sound knowledge and devoid of the ballast of principle, he was tossed and driven hither and thither like a wreck on the ocean. Mr. Melville Stone, the veteran American journalist, gave his countrymen his impression of the first British delegate. "Mr. Lloyd George," he said, "has a very keen sense of humor and a great power over the multitude, but with this he displays a startling indifference to, if not ignorance of, the larger affairs of nations." In the course of a walk Mr. Lloyd George expressed surprise when informed that in the United States the war-making power was invested in Congress. "What!" exclaimed the Premier, "you mean to tell me that the President of the United States cannot declare war? I never heard that before." Later, when questions of national ambitions were being discussed, Mr. Lloyd George asked, "What is that place Rumania is so anxious to get?" meaning Transylvania.[47]

The stories current of his praiseworthy curiosity about the places which he was busy distributing to the peoples whose destinies he was forging would be highly amusing if the subject were only a private individual and his motive a desire for useful information, but on the representative of a great Empire they shed a light in which the dignity of his country was necessarily affected and his own authority deplorably diminished. For moral authority at that conjuncture was the sheet anchor of the principal delegates. Although without a program, Mr. Lloyd George would appear to have had an instinctive feeling, if not a reasoned belief, that in matters of general policy his safest course would be to keep pace with the President of the United States. For he took it for granted that Mr. Wilson's views were identical with those of the American people. One of his colleagues, endeavoring to dispel this illusion, said: "Your province at this Conference is to lead. Your colleagues, including Mr. Wilson, will follow. You have the Empire behind you. Voice its aspirations. They coincide with those of the English-speaking peoples of the world. Mr. Wilson has lost his elections, therefore he does not stand for as much as you imagine. You have won your elections, so you are the spokesman of a vast community and the champion of a noble cause. You can knead the Conference at your will. Assert your will. But even if you decide to act in harmony with the United States, that does not mean subordinating British interests to the President's views, which are not those of the majority of his people." But Mr. Lloyd George, invincibly diffident—if diffidence it be—shrank from marching alone, and on certain questions which mattered much Mr. Wilson had his way.

One day there was an animated discussion in the twilight of the Paris conclave while the press was belauding the plenipotentiaries for their touching unanimity. The debate lay between the United States as voiced by Mr. Wilson and Great Britain as represented by Mr. Lloyd George. On the morrow, before the conversation was renewed, a colleague adjured the British Premier to stand firm, urging that his contention of the previous day was just in the abstract and beneficial to the Empire as well. Mr. Lloyd George bowed to the force of these motives, but yielded to the greater force of Mr. Wilson's resolve. "Put it to the test," urged the colleague. "I dare not," was the rejoinder. "Wilson won't brook it. Already he threatens, if we do, to leave the Conference and return home." "Well then, let him. If he did, we should be none the worse off for his absence. But rest assured, he won't go. He cannot afford to return home empty-handed after his splendid promises to his countrymen and the world." Mr. Lloyd George insisted, however, and said, "But he will take his army away, too." "What!" exclaimed the tempter. "His army? Well, I only ..." but it would serve no useful purpose to quote the vigorous answer in full.

This odd mixture of exaggerated self-confidence, mismeasurement of forces, and pliability to external influences could not but be baleful in one of the leaders of an assembly composed, as was the Paris Conference, of men each with his own particular ax to grind and impressible only to high moral authority or overwhelming military force. It cannot be gainsaid that no one, not even his own familiars, could ever foresee the next move in Mr. Lloyd George's game of statecraft, and it is demonstrable that on several occasions he himself was so little aware of what he would do next that he actually advocated as indispensable measures diametrically opposed to those which he was to propound, defend, and carry a week or two later. A conversation which took place between him and one of his fellow-workers gives one the measure of his irresolution and fitfulness. "Do tell me," said this collaborator, "why it is that you members of the Supreme Council are hurriedly changing to-day the decisions you came to after five months' study, which you say was time well spent?"

"Because of fresh information we have received in the meanwhile. We know more now than we knew then and the different data necessitate different treatment."

"Yes, but the conditions have not changed since the Conference opened. Surely they were the same in January as they are in June. Is not that so?"

"No doubt, no doubt, but we did not ascertain them before June, so we could not act upon them until now."

With the leading delegates thus drifting and the pieces on the political chessboard bewilderingly disposed, outsiders came to look upon the Conference as a lottery. Unhappily, it was a lottery in which there were no mere blanks, but only prizes or heavy forfeits.

To sum up: the first British delegate, essentially a man of expedients and shifts, was incapable of measuring more than an arc of the political circle at a time. A comprehensive survey of a complicated situation was beyond his reach. He relied upon imagination and intuition as substitutes for precise knowledge and technical skill. Hence he himself could never be sure that his decision, however carefully worked out, would be final, seeing that in June facts might come to his cognizance with which five months' investigations had left him unacquainted. This incertitude about the elements of the problem intensified the ingrained hesitancy that had characterized his entire public career and warped his judgment effectually. The only approach to a guiding principle one can find in his work at the Conference was the loosely held maxim that Great Britain's best policy was to stand in with the United States in all momentous issues and to identify Mr. Wilson with the United States for most purposes of the Congress. Within these limits Mr. Lloyd George was unyielding in fidelity to the cause of France, with which he merged that of civilization.

M. Clemenceau is the incarnation of the tireless spirit of destruction. Pulling down has ever been his delight, and it is largely to his success in demolishing the defective work of rivals—and all human work is defective—that he owes the position of trust and responsibility to which the Parliament raised him during the last phase of the war. Physically strong, despite his advanced age, he is mentally brilliant and superficial, with a bias for paradox, epigram, and racy, unconventional phraseology. His action is impulsive. In the Dreyfus days I saw a good deal of M. Clemenceau in his editorial office, when he would unburden his soul to M.M. Vaughan, the poet Quillard, and others. Later on I approached him while he was chief of the government on a delicate matter of international combined with national politics, on which I had been requested to sound him by a friendly government, and I found him, despite his developed and sobering sense of responsibility, whimsical, impulsive, and credulous as before. When I next talked with him he was the rebellious editor of _L'Homme Enchaîné_, whose corrosive strictures upon the government of the day were the terror of Ministers and censors. Soon afterward he himself became the wielder of the great national gagging-machine, and in the stringency with which he manipulated it he is said by his own countrymen to have outdone the government of the Third Empire. His _alter ego_, Georges Mandel, is endowed with qualities which supplement and correct those of his venerable chief. His grasp of detail is comprehensive and firm, his memory retentive, and his judgment bold and deliberate. A striking illustration of the audacity of his resolve was given in the early part of 1918. Marshal Joffre sent a telegram to President Wilson in Washington, and because he had omitted to despatch it through the War Ministry, M. Mandel, who is a strict disciplinarian, proposed that he be placed under arrest. It was with difficulty that some public men moved him to leniency.

M. Clemenceau, the professional destroyer, who can boast that he overthrew eighteen Cabinets, or nineteen if we include his own, was unquestionably the right man to carry on the war. He acquitted himself of the task superbly. His faith in the Allies' victory was unwavering. He never doubted, never flagged, never was intimidated by obstacles nor wheedled by persons. Once during the armistice, in May or June, when Marshal Foch expressed his displeasure that the Premier should have issued military orders to troops under his command[48] without first consulting him, he was on the point of dismissing the Marshal and appointing General Pétain to succeed him.[49] Whether the qualities which stood him in such good stead during the world struggle could be of equal, or indeed of much, avail in the general constructive work for which the Conference was assembled is a question that needs only to be formulated. But in securing every advantage that could be conferred on his own country his influence on the delegates was decisive. M. Clemenceau, who before the war was the intimate friend of Austrian journalists, hated his country's enemies with undying hate. And he loved France passionately. I remember significant words of his, uttered at the end of the year 1899 to an enterprising young man who had founded a Franco-German review in Munich and craved his moral support. "Is it possible," he exclaimed, "that it has already come to that? Well, a nation is not conquered until it accepts defeat. Whenever France gives up she will have deserved her humiliation."

At the Conference M. Clemenceau moved every lever to deliver his country for all time from the danger of further invasions. And, being a realist, he counted only on military safeguards. At the League of Nations he was wont to sneer until it dawned upon him that it might be forged into an effective weapon of national defense. And then he included it in the litany of abstract phrases about right, justice, and the self-determination of peoples which it became the fashion to raise to the inaccessible heights where those ideals are throned which are to be worshiped but not incarnated. The public somehow never took his conversion to Wilsonianism seriously, neither did his political friends until the League bade fair to become serviceable in his country's hands. M. Clemenceau's acquaintanceship with international politics was at once superior to that of the British Premier and very slender. But his program at the Conference was simple and coherent, because independent of geography and ethnography: France was to take Germany's leading position in the world, to create powerful and devoted states in eastern Europe, on whose co-operation she could reckon, and her allies were to do the needful in the way of providing due financial and economic assistance so as to enable her to address herself to the cultural problems associated with her new rôle. And he left nothing undone that seemed conducive to the attainment of that object. Against Mr. Wilson he maneuvered to the extent which his adviser, M. Tardieu, deemed safe, and one of his most daring speculations was on the President's journey to the States, during which M. Clemenceau and his European colleagues hoped to get through a deal of work on their own lines and to present Mr. Wilson with the decisions ready for ratification on his return. But the stratagem was not merely apparent; it was bruited abroad with indiscreet details, whereupon the first American delegate on his return broke the tables of their laws—one of which separated the Treaty from the Covenant—and obliged them to begin anew. It is fair to add that M. Clemenceau was no uncompromising partisan of the conquest of the left bank of the Rhine, nor of colonial conquests. These currents took their rise elsewhere. "We don't want protesting deputies in the French Parliament," he once remarked in the presence of the French Minister of Foreign Affairs.[50] Offered the choice between a number of bridgeheads in Germany and the military protection of the Anglo-Saxon peoples, he unhesitatingly decided for the latter, which had been offered to him by President Wilson after the rejection of the Rhine frontier.

M. Clemenceau, whose remarkable mental alacrity, self-esteem, and love of sharp repartee occasionally betrayed him into tactless sallies and epigrammatic retorts, deeply wounded the pride of more than one delegate of the lesser Powers in a way which they deemed incompatible alike with circumspect statesmanship and the proverbial hospitality of his country. For he is incapable of resisting the temptation to launch a _bon mot_, however stinging. It would be ungenerous, however, to attach more importance to such quickly forgotten utterances than he meant them to carry. An instance of how he behaved toward the representatives of Britain and France is worth recording, both as characterizing the man and as extenuating his offense against the delegates of the lesser Powers.

One morning[51] M. Clemenceau appeared at the Conference door, and seemed taken aback by the large number of unfamiliar faces and figures behind Mr. Balfour, toward whom he sharply turned with the brusque interrogation: "Who are those people behind you? Are they English?" "Yes, they are," was the answer. "Well, what do they want here?" "They have come on the same errand as those who are now following you." Thereupon the French Premier, whirling round, beheld with astonishment and displeasure a band of Frenchmen moving toward him, led by M. Pichon, the Minister of Foreign Affairs. In reply to his question as to the motive of their arrival, he was informed that they were all experts, who had been invited to give the Conference the benefit of their views about the revictualing of Hungary. "Get out, all of you. You are not wanted here," he cried in a commanding voice. And they all moved away meekly, led by M. Pichon, the Minister of Foreign Affairs. Their services proved to be unnecessary, for the result reached by the Conference was negative.

M. Tardieu cannot be separated from his chief, with whom he worked untiringly, placing at his disposal his intimate knowledge of the nooks and crannies of professional and unprofessional diplomacy. He is one of the latest arrivals and most pushing workers in the sphere of the Old World statecraft, affects Yankee methods, and speaks English. For several years political editor of the _Temps_, he obtained access to the state archives, and wrote a book on the Agadir incident which was well received, and also a monograph on Prince von Bülow, became Deputy, aimed at a ministerial portfolio, and was finally appointed Head Commissary to the United States. Faced by difficulties there—mostly the specters of his own former utterances evoked by German adversaries—his progress at first was slow. He was accused of having approved some of the drastic methods—especially the U-boat campaign—which the Germans subsequently employed, because in the year 1912, when he was writing on the subject, France believed that she herself possessed the best submarines, and she meant to employ them. He was also challenged to deny that he had written, in August, 1912, that in every war churches and monuments of art must suffer, and that "no army, whatever its nationality, can renounce this." He was further charged with having taken a kindly interest in air-war and bomb-dropping, and given it as his opinion that it would be absurd "to deprive of this advantage those who had made most progress in perfecting this weapon." But M. Tardieu successfully exorcised these and other ghosts. And on his return from the United States he was charged with organizing a press bureau of his own, to supply American journalists with material for their cablegrams, while at the same time he collaborated with M. Clemenceau in reorganizing the political communities of the world. It is only in the French Chamber, of which he is a distinguished member, that M. Tardieu failed to score a brilliant success. Few men are prophets in their own country, and he is far from being an exception. At the Conference, in its later phases, he found himself in frequent opposition to the chief of the Italian delegation, Signor Tittoni. One of the many subjects on which they disagreed was the fate of German Austria and the political structure and orientation of the independent communities which arose on the ruins of the Dual Monarchy. M. Tardieu favored an arrangement which would bring these populations closely together and impart to the whole an anti-Teutonic impress. If Germany could not be broken up into a number of separate states, as in the days of her weakness, all the other European peoples in the territories concerned could, and should, be united against her, and at the least hindered from making common cause with her. The unification of Germany he considered a grave danger, and he strove to create a countervailing state system.

To the execution of this project there were formidable difficulties. For one thing, none of the peoples in question was distinctly anti-German. Each one was for itself. Again, they were not particularly enamoured of one another, nor were their interests always concordant, and to constrain them by force to unite would have been not to prevent but to cause future wars. A Danubian federation—the concrete shape imagined for this new bulwark of European peace—did not commend itself to the Italians, who had their own reasons for their opposition besides the Wilsonian doctrine, which they invoked. If it be true, Signor Tittoni argues, that Austria does not desire to be amalgamated with Germany, why not allow her to exercise the right of self-determination accorded to other peoples? M. Tardieu, on the other hand, not content with the prohibition to Germany to unite with Austria, proposed[52] that in the treaty with Austria this country should be obliged to repress the unionist movement in the population. This amendment was inveighed against by the Italian delegation in the name of every principle professed and transgressed by the world-mending Powers. Even from the French point of view he declared it perilous, inasmuch as there was, and could be, no guarantee that a Danubian confederation would not become a tool in Germany's hands.

Two things struck me as characteristic of the principal plenipotentiaries: as a rule, they eschewed first-rate men as fellow-workers, one integer and several zeros being their favorite formula, and they took no account of the flight of time, planning as though an eternity were before them and then suddenly improvising as though afraid of being late for a train or a steamer. These peculiarities were baleful. The lesser states, having mainly first-class men to represent them, illustrated the law of compensation, which assigned many mediocrities to the Great Powers. The former were also the most strenuous toilers, for their task bristled with difficulties and abounded in startling surprises, and its accomplishment depended on the will of others. Time and again they went over the ground with infinite care, counting and gaging the obstacles in their way, devising means to overcome them, and rehearsing the effort in advance. So much stress had been laid during the war on psychology, and such far-reaching consequences were being drawn from the Germans' lack of it, that these public men made its cultivation their personal care. Hence, besides tracing large-scale maps of provinces and comprehensive maps[53] of the countries to be reconstituted, and ransacking history for arguments and precedents, they conscientiously ascertained the idiosyncrasies of their judges, in order to choose the surest ways to impress, convince, or persuade them. And it was instructive to see them try their hand at this new game.

One and all gave assent to the axiom that moderation would impress the arbiters more favorably than greed, but not all of them wielded sufficient self-command to act upon it. The more resourceful delegates, whose tasks were especially redoubtable because they had to demand large provinces coveted by others, prepared the ground by visiting personally some of the more influential arbiters before these were officially appointed, forcibly laying their cases before them and praying for their advice. In reality they were striving to teach them elementary geography, history, and politics. The Ulysses of the Conference, M. Venizelos, first pilgrimaged to London, saying: "If the Foreign Office is with Greece, what matters it who is against her." He hastened to call on President Wilson as soon as that statesman arrived in Europe, and, to the surprise of many, the two remained a long time closeted together. "Whatever did you talk about?" asked a colleague of the Greek Premier. "How did you keep Wilson interested in your national claims all that time? You must have—" "Oh no," interrupted the modest statesman. "I disposed of our claims succinctly enough. A matter of two minutes. Not more. I asked him to dispense me from taking up his time with such complicated issues which he and his colleagues would have ample opportunity for studying. The rest of the time I was getting him to give me the benefit of his familiarity with the subject of the League of Nations. And he was good enough to enumerate the reasons why it should be realized, and the way in which it must be worked. I was greatly impressed by what he said." "Just fancy!" exclaimed a colleague, "wasting all that time in talking about a scheme which will never come to anything!" But M. Venizelos knew that the time was not misspent. President Wilson was at first nowise disposed to lend a favorable ear to the claims of Greece, which he thought exorbitant, and down to the very last he gave his support to Bulgaria against Greece whole-heartedly. The Cretan statesman passed many an hour of doubt and misgiving before he came within sight of his goal. But he contrived to win the President over to his way of envisaging many Oriental questions. He is a past-master in practical psychology.

The first experiments of M. Venizelos, however, were not wholly encouraging. For all the care he lavished on the chief luminaries of the Conference seemingly went to supplement their education and fill up a few of the geographical, historical, philological, ethnological, and political gaps in their early instruction rather than to guide them in their concrete decisions, which it was expected would be always left to the "commissions of experts." But the fruit which took long to mature ripened at last, and Greece had many of her claims allowed. Thus in reorganizing the communities of the world the personal factor played a predominant part. Venizelos was, so to say, a fixed star in the firmament, and his light burned bright through every rift in the clouds. His moderation astonished friends and opponents. Every one admired his _exposé_ of his case as a masterpiece. His statesman-like setting, in perspective, the readiness with which he put himself in the place of his competitor and struck up a fair compromise, endeared him to many, and his praises were in every one's mouth. His most critical hour—it lasted for months—struck when he found himself struggling with the President of the United States, who was for refusing the coast of Thrace to Greece and bestowing it on Bulgaria. But with that dispute I deal in another place.

Of Italy's two plenipotentiaries during the first five months one was the most supple and the other the most inflexible of her statesmen, Signor Orlando and Baron Sonnino. If her case was presented to the Conference with less force than was attainable, the reasons are obvious. Her delegates had a formal treaty on which they relied; to the attitude of their country from the outbreak of the war to its finish they rightly ascribed the possibility of the Allies' victory, and they expected to see this priceless service recognized practically; the moderation and suppleness of Signor Orlando were neutralized by the uncompromising attitude of Baron Sonnino, and, lastly, the gaze of both statesmen was fixed upon territorial questions and sentimental aspirations to the neglect of economic interests vital to the state—in other words, they beheld the issues in wrong perspective. But one of the most popular figures among the delegates was Signor Orlando, whose eloquence and imagination gave him advantages which would have been increased a hundredfold if he might have employed his native language in the conclave. For he certainly displayed resourcefulness, humor, a historic sense, and the gift of molding the wills of men. But he was greatly hampered. Some of his countrymen alleged that Baron Sonnino was his evil genius. One of the many sayings attributed to him during the Conference turned upon the quarrels of some of the smaller peoples among themselves. "They are," the Premier said, "like a lot of hens being held by the feet and carried to market. Although all doomed to the same fate, they contrive to fight one another while awaiting it."

After the fall of Orlando's Cabinet, M. Tittoni repaired to Paris as Italy's chief delegate. His reputation as one of Europe's principal statesmen was already firmly established; he had spent several years in Paris as Ambassador, and he and the late Di San Giuliano and Giolitti were the men who broke with the Central Empires when these were about to precipitate the World War. In French nationalist circles Signor Tittoni had long been under a cloud, as the man of pro-German leanings. The suspicion—for it was nothing more—was unfounded. On the contrary, M. Tittoni is known to have gone with the Allies to the utmost length consistent with his sense of duty to his own country. To my knowledge he once gave advice which his Italian colleagues and political friends and adversaries now bitterly regret was disregarded. The nature of that counsel will one day be disclosed....

Of Japan's delegates, the Marquis Saionji and Baron Makino, little need be said, seeing that their qualifications for their task were demonstrated by the results. Mainly to statesmanship and skilful maneuvering Japan is indebted for her success at the Paris Conference, where her cause was referred by Mr. Lloyd George and M. Clemenceau to Mr. Wilson to deal with. The behavior of her representatives was an illuminating object-lesson in the worth of psychological tactics in practical politics. They hardly ever appeared in the footlights, remained constantly silent and observant, and were almost ignored by the press. But they kept their eyes fixed on the goal. Their program was simple. Amid the flitting shadows of political events they marched together with the Allies, until these disagreed among themselves, and then they voted with Great Britain and the United States. Occasionally they went farther and proposed measures for the lesser states which Britain framed, but desired to second rather than propose. Japan, at the Conference, was a stanch collaborator of the two English-speaking principals until her own opportunity came, and then she threw all her hoarded energies into her cause, and by her firm resolve dispelled any opposition that Mr. Wilson may have intended to offer. One of the most striking episodes of the Conference was the swift, silent, and successful campaign by which Japan had her secret treaty with China hall-marked by the puritanical President of the United States, whose sense of morality could not brook the secret treaties concluded by Italy and Rumania with the Greater and Greatest Powers of Europe. Again, it was with statesman-like sagacity that the Japanese judged the Russian situation and made the best of it—first, shortly before the invitation to Prinkipo, and, later, before the celebrated eight questions were submitted to Admiral Kolchak. I was especially struck by an occurrence, trivial in appearance, which demonstrated the weight which they rightly attached to the psychological side of politics. Everybody in Paris remarked, and many vainly complained of, the indifference, or rather, unfriendliness, of which Russians were the innocent victims. Among the Allied troops who marched under the Arc de Triomphe on July 14th there were Rumanians, Greeks, Portuguese, and Indians, but not a single Russian. A Russian general drove about in the forest of flags and banners that day looking eagerly for symbols of his own country, but for hours the quest was fruitless. At last, when passing the Japanese Embassy, he perceived, to his delight, an enormous Russian flag waving majestically in the breeze, side by side with that of Nippon. "I shed tears of joy," he told his friend that evening, "and I vowed that neither I nor my country would ever forget this touching mark of friendship."

Japanese public opinion criticized severely the failure of their delegates to obtain recognition of the equality of races or nations. This judgment seems unjust, for nothing that they could have done or said would have wrung from Mr. Wilson and Mr. Hughes their assent to the doctrine, nor, if they had been induced to proclaim it, would it have been practically applied.

In general, the lawyers were the most successful in stating their cases. But one of the delegates of the lesser states who made the deepest impression on those of the greater was not a member of the bar. The head of the Polish delegation, Roman Dmowski, a picturesque, forcible speaker, a close debater and resourceful pleader, who is never at a loss for an image, a comparison, an _argumentum ad hominem_, or a repartee, actually won over some of the arbiters who had at first leaned toward his opponents—a noteworthy feat if one realizes all that it meant in an assembly where potent influences were working against some of the demands of resuscitated Poland. His speech in September on the future of eastern Galicia was a veritable masterpiece.

M. Dmowski appeared at the Conference under all the disadvantages that could be heaped upon a man who has incurred the resentment of the most powerful international body of modern times. He had the misfortune to have the Jews of the world as his adversaries. His Polish friends explained this hostility as follows. His ardent nationalist sentiments placed him in antagonism to every movement that ran counter to the progress of his country on nationalist lines. For he is above all things a Pole and a patriot. And as the Hebrew population of Poland, disbelieving in the resurrection of that nation, had long since struck up a cordial understanding with the states that held it in bondage, the gifted author of a book on the _Foundations of Nationalism_, which went through four editions, was regarded by the Hebrew elements of the population as an irreconcilable enemy. In truth, he was only the leader of a movement that was a historical necessity. One of the theses of the work was the necessity of cultivating an anti-German spirit in Poland as the only antidote against the Teuton virus introduced from Berlin through economic and other channels. And as the Polish Jews, whose idiom is a corrupted German dialect and whose leanings are often Teutonic, felt that the attack upon the whole was an attack on the part, they anathematized the author and held him up to universal obloquy. And there has been no reconciliation ever since. In the United States, where the Jewish community is numerous and influential, M. Dmowski found spokes in his wheel at every stage of his journey, and in Paris, too, he had to full-front a tremendous opposition, open and covert. Whatever unbiased people may think of this explanation and of his hostility to the Germans and their agents, Roman Dmowski deservedly enjoys the reputation of a straightforward and loyal fighter for his country's cause, a man who scorns underhand machinations and proclaims aloud—perhaps too frankly—the principles for which he is fighting. Polish Jews who appeared in Paris, some of them his bitterest antagonists, recognized the chivalrous way in which he conducts his electoral and other campaigns. Among the delegates his practical acquaintanceship with East European polities entitled him to high rank. For he knows the world better than any living statesman, having traveled over Europe, Asia, and America. He undertook and successfully accomplished a delicate mission in the Far East in the year 1905, rendering valuable services to his country and to the cause of civilization.

"M. Dmowski's activity," his friends further assert, "is impassioned and unselfish. The ambition that inspires and nerves him is not of the personal sort, nor is his patriotism a ladder leading to place and power. Polish patriotism occupies a category apart from that of other European peoples, and M. Dmowski has typified it with rare fidelity and completeness. If Wilsonianism had been realized, Polish nationalism might have become an anachronism. To-day it is a large factor in European politics and is little understood in the West. M. Dmowski lives for his country. Her interests absorb his energies. He would probably agree with the historian Paolo Sarpi, who said, 'Let us be Venetians first and Christians after.' Of the two widely divergent currents into which the main stream of political thought and sentiment throughout the world is fast dividing itself, M. Dmowski moves with the national away from the international championed by Mr. Wilson. The frequency with which the leading spirits of Bolshevism turn out to be Jews—to the dismay and disgust of the bulk of their own community—and the ingenuity they displayed in spreading their corrosive tenets in Poland may not have been without effect upon the energy of M. Dmowski's attitude toward the demand of the Polish Jews to be placed in the privileged position of wards of the League of Nations. But the principle of the protection of minority—Jewish or Gentile—is assailable on grounds which have nothing to do with race or religion." Some of the most interesting and characteristic incidents at the Conference had the Polish statesman for their principal actor, and to him Poland owes some of the most solid and enduring benefits conferred on her at the Conference.

Of a different temper is M. Paderewski, who appeared in Paris to plead his country's cause at a later stage of the labors of the Conference. This eminent artist's energies were all blended into one harmonious whole, so that his meetings with the great plenipotentiaries were never disturbed by a jarring note. As soon as it was borne in upon him that their decisions were as irrevocable as decrees of Fate, he bowed to them and treated the authors as Olympians who had no choice but to utter the stern fiat. Even when called upon to accept the obnoxious clause protecting religious and ethnic minorities against which his colleague had vainly fought, M. Paderewski sunk political passion in reason and attuned himself to the helpful role of harmonizer. He held that it would have been worse than useless to do otherwise. He was grieved that his country must acquiesce in that decree, he regretted intensely the necessity which constrained such proven friends of Poland as the Four to pass what he considered a severe sentence on her; but he resigned himself gracefully to the inevitable and thanked Fate's executioners for their personal sympathy. This attitude evoked praise and admiration from Messrs. Lloyd George and Wilson, and the atmosphere of the conclave seemed permeated with a spirit that induced calm satisfaction and the joy of elevated thoughts. M. Paderewski made a deep and favorable impression on the Supreme Council.

Belgium sent her most brilliant parliamentarian, M. Hymans, as first plenipotentiary to the Conference. He was assisted by the chief of the Socialist party, M. Vandervelde, and by an eminent authority on international law, M. Van den Heuvel. But for reasons which elude analysis, none of the three delegates hit it off with the duumvirate who were spinning the threads of the world's destinies. M. Hymans, however, by his warmth, sincerity, and courage impressed the representatives of the lesser states, won their confidence, became their natural spokesman, and blazed out against all attempts—and they were numerous and deliberate—to ignore their existence. It was he who by his direct and eloquent protest took M. Clemenceau off his guard and elicited the amazing utterance that the Powers which could put twelve million soldiers in the field were the world's natural arbiters. In this way he cleared the atmosphere of the distorting mists of catchwords and shibboleths.

How decisive a role internal politics played in the designation of plenipotentiaries to the Conference was shown with exceptional clearness in the case of Rumania. That country had no legislature. The Constituent Assembly, which had been dissolved owing to the German invasion, was followed by no fresh elections. The King, with whom the initiative thus rested, had reappointed M. Bratiano Chief of the Government, and M. Bratiano was naturally desirous of associating his own historic name with the aggrandizement of his country. But he also desired to secure the services of his political rival, M. Take Jonescu, whose reputation as a far-seeing statesman and as a successful negotiator is world-wide. Among his qualifications are an acquaintanceship with European countries and their affairs and a rare facility for give and take which is of the essence of international politics. He can assume the initiative in _pourparlers_, however uncompromising the outlook; frame plausible proposals; conciliate his opponents by showing how thoroughly he understands and appreciates their point of view, and by these means he has often worked out seemingly hopeless negotiations to a satisfactory issue. M. Clemenceau wrote of him, "C'est un grand Européen."[54]

M. Bratiano's bid for the services of his eminent opponent was coupled with the offer of certain portfolios in the Cabinet to M. Jonescu and to a number of his parliamentary supporters. While negotiations were slowly proceeding by telegraph, M. Jonescu, who had already taken up his abode in Paris, was assiduously weaving his plans. He began by assuming what everybody knew, that the Powers would refuse to honor the secret treaty with France, Britain, and Russia, which assigned to Rumania all the territories to which she had laid claim, and he proposed first striking up a compromise with the other interested states, then compacting Rumania, Jugoslavia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Greece into a solid block, and asking the Powers to approve and ratify the new league. Truly it was a genial conception worthy of a broad-minded statesman. It aimed at a durable peace based on what he considered a fair settlement of claims satisfactory to all, and it would have lightened the burden of the Big Four. But whether it could have been realized by peoples moved by turbid passions and represented by trustees, some of whom were avowedly afraid to relinquish claims which they knew to be exorbitant, may well be doubted.

But the issue was never put to the test. The two statesmen failed to agree on the Cabinet question; M. Jonescu kept aloof from office, and the post of second delegate fell to Rumania's greatest diplomatist and philologist, M. Mishu, who had for years admirably represented his country as Minister in the British capital. From the outset M. Bratiano's position was unenviable, because he based his country's case on the claims of the secret treaty, and to Mr. Wilson every secret treaty which he could effectually veto was anathema. Between the two men, in lieu of a bond of union, there was only a strong force of mutual repulsion, which kept them permanently apart. They moved on different planes, spoke different languages, and Rumania, in the person of her delegates, was treated like Cinderella by her stepmother. The Council of Three kept them systematically in the dark about matters which it concerned them to know, negotiated over their heads, transmitted to Bucharest injunctions which only they were competent to receive, insisted on their compromising to accept future decrees of the Conference without an inkling as to their nature, and on their admitting the right of an alien institution—the League of Nations—to intervene in favor of minorities against the legally constituted government of the country. M. Bratiano, who in a trenchant speech inveighed against these claims of the Great Powers to take the governance of Europe into their own hands, withdrew from the Conference and laid his resignation in the hands of the King.

One of the most remarkable debaters in this singular parliament, where self-satisfied ignorance and dullness of apprehension were so hard to pierce, was the youthful envoy of the Czechoslovaks, M. Benes. This politician, who before the Conference came to an end was offered the honorable task of forming a new Cabinet, which he wisely declined, displayed a masterly grasp of Continental politics and a rare gift of identifying his country's aspirations with the postulates of a settled peace. A systematic thinker, he made a point of understanding his case at the outset. He would begin his _exposé_ by detaching himself from all national interests and starting from general assumptions recognized by the Olympians, and would lead his hearers by easy stages to the conclusions which he wished them to draw from their own premises. And two of them, who had no great sympathy with his thesis, assured me that they could detect no logical flaw in his argument. Moderation and sincerity were the virtues which he was most eager to exhibit, and they were unquestionably the best trump cards he could play. Not only had he a firm grasp of facts and arguments, but he displayed a sense of measure and open-mindedness which enabled him to implant his views on the minds of his hearers.

Armenia's cause found a forcible and suasive pleader in Boghos Pasha, whose way of marshaling arguments in favor of a contention that was frowned upon by many commanded admiration. The Armenians asked for a vast stretch of territory with outlets on the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, but they were met with the objections that their total population was insignificant; that only in one province were they in a majority, and that their claim to Cilicia clashed with one of the reserved rights of France. The ice, therefore, was somewhat thin in parts, but Boghos Pasha skated over it gracefully. His description of the Armenian massacres was thrilling. Altogether his _exposé_ was a masterpiece, and was appreciated by Mr. Wilson and M. Clemenceau.

The Jugoslav delegates, MM. Vesnitch and Trumbitch, patriotic, tenacious, uncompromising, had an early opportunity of showing the stuff of which they were made. When they were told that the Jugoslav state was not yet recognized and that the kingdom of Serbia must content itself with two delegates, they lodged an indignant protest against both decisions, and refused to appear at the Conference unless they were allowed an adequate number of representatives. Thereupon the Great Powers compromised the matter by according them three, and with stealthy rage they submitted to the refusal of recognition. They were not again heard of until one day they proposed that their dispute with Italy about Fiume and the Dalmatian coast should be solved by submitting it to President Wilson for arbitration. The expedient was original. President Wilson, people remembered, had had an animated talk on the subject with the Italian Premier, Orlando, and it was known that he had set his face against Italy's claim and against the secret treaty that recognized it. Consequently the Serbs were running no risk by challenging Signor Orlando to lay the matter before the American delegate. Whether, all things considered, it was a wise move to make has been questioned. Anyhow, the Italian delegation declined the suggestion on a number of grounds which several delegates considered convincing. The Conference, it urged, had been convoked precisely for the purpose of hearing and settling such disputes as theirs, and the Conference consisted, not of one, but of many delegates, who collectively were better qualified to deal with such problems than any one man. Europeans, too, could more fully appreciate the arguments, and the atmosphere through which the arguments should be contemplated, than the eminent American idealist, who had more than once had to modify his judgment on European matters. Again, to remove the discussion from the international court might well be felt as a slight put upon the men who composed it. For why should their verdict be less worth soliciting than that of the President of the United States? True, Italy's delegates were themselves judges in that tribunal, but the question to be tried was not a matter between two countries, but an issue of much wider import—namely, what frontiers accorded to the embryonic state of Jugoslavia would be most conducive to the world's peace. And nobody, they held, could offer a more complete or trustworthy answer than they and their European colleagues, who were conversant with all the elements of the problem. Besides—but this objection was not expressly formulated—had not Mr. Wilson already decided against Italy? On these and other grounds, then, they decided to leave the matter to the Conference. It was a delicate subject, and few onlookers cared to open their minds on its merits.

Albania was represented by an old friend of mine, the venerable Turkhan Pasha, who had been in diplomacy ever since the Congress of Berlin in the 'seventies of last century, and who looked like a modernized Nestor. I made his acquaintance many years ago, when he was Ambassador of Turkey in St. Petersburg. He was then a favorite everywhere in the Russian capital as a conscientious Ambassador, a charming talker, and a professional peace-maker, who wished well to everybody. The Young Turks having recalled him from St. Petersburg, he soon afterward became Grand Vizier to the Mbret of Albania. Far resonant events removed the Mbret from the throne, Turkhan Pasha from the Vizierate, and Albania from the society of nations, and I next found my friend in Switzerland ill in health, eating the bitter bread of exile, temporarily isolated from the world of politics and waiting for something to turn up. A few years more gave the Allies an unexpectedly complete victory and brought back Turkhan Pasha to the outskirts of diplomacy and politics. He suddenly made his appearance at the Paris Conference as the representative of Albania and the friend of Italy.

Another Albanian friend of mine, Essad Pasha, whose plans for the regeneration of his country differed widely from those of Turkhan, was for a long while detained in Saloniki. By dint of solicitations and protests, he at last obtained permission to repair to Paris and lay his views before the Conference, where he had a curious interview with Mr. Wilson. The President, having received from Albanians in the United States many unsolicited judgments on the character and antecedents of Essad Pasha, had little faith in his fitness to introduce and popularize democratic institutions in Albania. And he unburdened himself of these doubts to friends, who diffused the news. The Pasha asked for an audience, and by dint of patience and perseverance his prayer was heard. Five minutes before the appointed hour he was at the President's house, accompanied by his interpreter, a young Albanian named Stavro, who converses freely in French, Greek, and Turkish, besides his native language. But while in the antechamber Essad, remembering that the American President speaks nothing but pure English, suggested that Stavro should drive over to the Hôtel Crillon for an interpreter to translate from French. Thereupon one of the secretaries stopped him, saying: "Although he cannot speak French, the President understands it, so that a second interpreter will be unnecessary." Essad then addressed Mr. Wilson in Albanian, Stavro translated his words into French, and the President listened in silence. It was the impression of those in the room that, at any rate, Mr. Wilson understood and appreciated the gist of the Pasha's sharp criticism of Italy's behavior. But, to be on the safe side, the President requested his visitor to set down on paper at his leisure everything he had said and to send it to him.

PRESIDENT WILSON

President Wilson, before assuming the redoubtable rôle of world arbiter, was hardly more than a name in Europe, and it was not a synonym for statecraft. His ethical objections to the rule of Huerta in Mexico, his attempt to engraft democratic principles there, and the anarchy that came of it were matters of history. But the President of the nation to whose unbounded generosity and altruism the world owes a debt of gratitude that can only be acknowledged, not repaid, deservedly enjoyed a superlative measure of respect from his foreign colleagues, and the author of the project which was to link all nations together by ties of moral kinship was literally idolized by the masses. Never has it fallen to my lot to see any mortal so enthusiastically, so spontaneously welcomed by the dejected peoples of the universe. His most casual utterances were caught up as oracles. He occupied a height so far aloft that the vicissitudes of everyday life and the contingencies of politics seemingly could not touch him. He was given credit for a rare degree of selflessness in his conceptions and actions and for a balance of judgment which no storms of passion could upset. So far as one could judge by innumerable symptoms, President Wilson was confronted with an opportunity for good incomparably vaster than had ever before been within the reach of man.

Soon after the opening of the Conference the shadowy outlines of his portrait began to fill in, slowly at first, and before three months had passed the general public beheld it fairly complete, with many of its natural lights and shades. The quality of an active politician is never more clearly brought out than when, raised to an eminent place, he is set an arduous feat in sight of the multitude. Mr. Wilson's task was manifestly congenial to him, for it was deliberately chosen by himself, and it comprised the most tremendous problems ever tackled by man born of woman. The means by which he set to work to solve them were startlingly simple: the regeneration of the human race was to be compassed by means of magisterial edicts secretly drafted and sternly imposed on the interested peoples, together with a new and not wholly appropriate nomenclature.

In his own country, where he has bitter adversaries as well as devoted friends, Mr. Wilson was regarded by many as a composite being made up of preacher, teacher, and politician. To these diverse elements they refer the fervor and unction, the dogmatic tone, and the practised shrewdness that marked his words and acts. Independent American opinion doubted his qualifications to be a leader. As a politician, they said, he had always followed the crowd. He had swum with the tide of public sentiment in cardinal matters, instead of stemming or canalizing and guiding it. Deficient in courageous initiative, he had contented himself with merely executive functions. No new idea, no fresh policy, was associated with his name. His singular attitude on the Mexican imbroglio had provoked the sharp criticism even of friends and the condemnation of political opponents. His utterances during the first stages of the World War, such as the statement that the American people were too proud to fight and had no concern with the causes and objects of the war,[55] when contrasted with the opposite views which he propounded later on, were ascribed to quick political evolution—but were not taken as symptoms of a settled mind. He seemed a pacifist when his pride revolted at the idea of settling any intelligible question by an appeal to violence, and a semi-militarist when, having in his own opinion created a perfectly safe and bloodless peace guarantee in the shape of the League of Nations, he agreed to safeguard it by a military compact which sapped its foundation. He owed his re-election for a second term partly, it was alleged, to the belief that during the first he had kept his country out of the war despite the endeavors of some of its eminent leaders to bring it in; yet when firmly seated in the saddle, he followed the leaders whom he had theretofore with-stood and obliged the nation to fight.

As chief of the great country, his domestic critics add, which had just turned victory's scale in favor of the Allies, Mr. Wilson saw a superb opportunity to hitch his wagon to a star, and now for the first time he made a determined bid for the leadership of the world. Here the idealist showed himself at his best. But by the way of preparation he asked the nation at the elections to refuse their votes to his political opponents, despite the fact that they were loyally supporting his policy, and to return only men of his own party, and in order to silence their misgivings he declared that to elect Republican Senators would be to repudiate the administration of the President of the United States at a critical conjuncture. This was urged against him as the inexpiable sin. The electors, however, sent his political opponents to the Senate, whereupon the President organized his historic visit to Europe. It might have become a turning-point in the world's history had he transformed his authority and prestige into the driving-power requisite to embody his beneficent scheme. But he wasted the opportunity for lack of moral courage. Thus far American criticism. But the peoples of Europe ignored the estimates of the President made by his fellow-countrymen, who, as such, may be forgiven for failing to appreciate his apostleship, or set the full value on his humanitarian strivings. The war-weary masses judged him not by what he had achieved or attempted in the past, but by what he proposed to do in the future. And measured by this standard, his spiritual statue grew to legendary proportions.

Europe, when the President touched its shores, was as clay ready for the creative potter. Never before were the nations so eager to follow a Moses who would take them to the long-promised land where wars are prohibited and blockades unknown. And to their thinking he was that great leader. In France men bowed down before him with awe and affection. Labor leaders in Paris told me that they shed tears of joy in his presence, and that their comrades would go through fire and water to help him to realize his noble schemes.[56] To the working classes in Italy his name was a heavenly clarion at the sound of which the earth would be renewed. The Germans regarded him and his humane doctrine as their sheet-anchor of safety. The fearless Herr Muehlon said, "If President Wilson were to address the Germans, and pronounce a severe sentence upon them, they would accept it with resignation and without a murmur and set to work at once." In German-Austria his fame was that of a savior, and the mere mention of his name brought balm to the suffering and surcease of sorrow to the afflicted. A touching instance of this which occurred in the Austrian capital, when narrated to the President, moved him to tears. There were some five or six thousand Austrian children in the hospitals at Vienna who, as Christmas was drawing near, were sorely in need of medicaments and much else. The head of the American Red Cross took up their case and persuaded the Americans in France to send two million dollars' worth of medicaments to Vienna. These were duly despatched, and had got as far as Berne, when the French authorities, having got wind of the matter, protested against this premature assistance to infant enemies on grounds which the other Allies had to recognize as technically tenable, and the medicaments were ordered back to France from Berne. Thereupon Doctor Ferries, of the International Red Cross, became wild with indignation and laid the matter before the Swiss government, which undertook to send some medicaments to the children, while the Americans were endeavoring to move the French to allow at least some of the remedies to go through. The children in the hospitals, when told that they must wait, were bright and hopeful. "It will be all right," some of them exclaimed. "Wilson is coming soon, and he will bring us everything."

Thus Mr. Wilson had become a transcendental hero to the European proletarians, who in their homely way adjusted his mental and moral attributes to their own ideal of the latter-day Messiah. His legendary figure, half saint, half revolutionist, emerged from the transparent haze of faith, yearning, and ignorance, as in some ecstatic vision. In spite of his recorded acts and utterances the mythopeic faculty of the peoples had given itself free scope and created a messianic democrat destined to free the lower orders, as they were called, in each state from the shackles of capitalism, legalized thraldom, and crushing taxation, and each nation from sanguinary warfare. Truly, no human being since the dawn of history has ever yet been favored with such a superb opportunity. Mr. Wilson might have made a gallant effort to lift society out of the deep grooves into which it had sunk, and dislodge the secular obstacles to the enfranchisement and transfiguration of the human race. At the lowest it was open to him to become the center of a countless multitude, the heart of their hearts, the incarnation of their noblest thought, on condition that he scorned the prudential motives of politicians, burst through the barriers of the old order, and deployed all his energies and his full will-power in the struggle against sordid interests and dense prejudice. But he was cowed by obstacles which his will lacked the strength to surmount, and instead of receiving his promptings from the everlasting ideals of mankind and the inspiriting audacities of his own highest nature and appealing to the peoples against their rulers, he felt constrained in the very interest of his cause to haggle and barter with the Scribes and the Pharisees, and ended by recording a pitiful answer to the most momentous problems couched in the impoverished phraseology of a political party.

Many of his political friends had advised the President not to visit Europe lest the vast prestige and influence which he wielded from a distance should dwindle unutilized on close contact with the realists' crowd. Even the war-god Mars, when he descended into the ranks of the combatants on the Trojan side, was wounded by a Greek, and, screaming with pain, scurried back to Olympus with paling halo. But Mr. Wilson decided to preside and to direct the fashioning of his project, and to give Europe the benefit of his advice. He explained to Congress that he had expressed the ideals of the country for which its soldiers had consciously fought, had had them accepted "as the substance of their own thoughts and purpose" by the statesmen of the associated governments, and now, he concluded: "I owe it to them to see to it, in so far as in me lies, that no false or mistaken interpretation is put upon them, and no possible effort omitted to realize them. It is now my duty to play my full part in making good what they offered their lives and blood to obtain. I can think of no call to service which could transcend this."[57] No intention could well be more praiseworthy.

Soon after the _George Washington_, flying the presidential flag, had steamed out of the Bay on her way to Europe, the United Press received from its correspondent on board, who was attached to Mr. Wilson's person, a message which invigorated the hopes of the world and evoked warm outpourings of the seared soul of suffering man in gratitude toward the bringer of balm. It began thus: "The President sails for Europe to uphold American ideals, and literally to fight for his Fourteen Points. The President, at the Peace Table, will insist on the freedom of the seas and a general disarmament.... The seas, he holds, ought to be guarded by the whole world."

Since then the world knows what to think of the literal fighting at the Peace Table. The freedom of the seas was never as much as alluded to at the Peace Table, for the announcement of Mr. Wilson's militant championship brought him a wireless message from London to the effect that that proposal, at all events, must be struck out of his program if he wished to do business with Britain. And without a fight or a remonstrance the President struck it out. The Fourteen Points were not discussed at the Conference.[58] One may deplore, but one cannot misunderstand, what happened. Mr. Wilson, too, had his own fixed aim to attain: intent on associating his name with a grandiose humanitarian monument, he was resolved not to return to his country without some sort of a covenant of the new international life. He could not afford to go home empty-handed. Therein lay his weakness and the source of his failure. For whenever his attitude toward the Great Powers was taken to mean, "Unless you give me my Covenant, you cannot have your Treaty," the retort was ready: "Without our Treaty there will be no Covenant."

Like Dejoces, the first king of the Medes, who, having built his palace at Ecbatana, surrounded it with seven walls and permanently withdrew his person from the gaze of his subjects, Mr. Wilson in Paris admitted to his presence only the authorized spokesmen of states and causes, and not all of these. He declined to receive persons who thought they had a claim to see him, and he received others who were believed to have none. During his sojourn in Paris he took many important Russian affairs in hand after having publicly stated that no peace could be stable so long as Russia was torn by internal strife. And as familiarity with Russian conditions was not one of his accomplishments, he presumably needed advice and help from those acquainted with them. Now a large number of Russians, representing all political parties and four governments, were in Paris waiting to be consulted. But between January and May not one of them was ever asked for information or counsel. Nay, more, those who respectfully solicited an audience were told to wait. In the meanwhile men unacquainted with the country and people were sent by Mr. Wilson to report on the situation, and to begin by obtaining the terms of an acceptable treaty from the Bolshevik government.

The first plenipotentiary of one of the principal lesser states was for months refused an audience, to the delight of his political adversaries, who made the most of the circumstance at home. An eminent diplomatist who possessed considerable claims to be vouchsafed an interview was put off from week to week, until at last, by dint of perseverance, as it seemed to him, the President consented to see him. The diplomatist, pleased at his success, informed a friend that the following Wednesday would be the memorable day. "But are you not aware," asked the friend, "that on that day the President will be on the high seas on his way back to the United States?" He was not aware of it. But when he learned that the audience had been deliberately fixed for a day when Mr. Wilson would no longer be in France he felt aggrieved.

In Italy the President's progress was a veritable triumph. Emperors and kings had roused no such enthusiasm. One might fancy him a deity unexpectedly discovered under the outward appearance of a mortal and now being honored as the god that he was by ecstatic worshipers. Everything he did was well done, everything he said was nobly conceived and worthy of being treasured up. In these dispositions a few brief months wrought a vast difference.

In this respect an instructive comparison might be made between Tsar Alexander I at the Vienna Congress and the President of the United States at the Conference of Paris. The Russian monarch arrived in the Austrian capital with the halo of a Moses focusing the hopes of all the peoples of Europe. His reputation for probity, public spirit, and lofty aspirations had won for him the good-will and the anticipatory blessings of war-weary nations. He, too, was a mystic, believed firmly in occult influences, so firmly indeed that he accepted the fitful guidance of an ecstatic lady whose intuition was supposed to transcend the sagacity of professional statesmen. And yet the Holy Alliance was the supreme outcome of his endeavors, as the League of Nations was that of Mr. Wilson's. In lieu of universal peace all eastern Europe was still warring and revolting in September and the general outlook was disquieting. The disheartening effect of the contrast between the promise and the achievement of the American statesman was felt throughout the world. But Mr. Wilson has the solace to know that people hardly ever reach their goal—though they sometimes advance fairly near to it. They either die on the way or else it changes or they do.

It was doubtless a noble ambition that moved the Prime Ministers of the Great Powers and the chief of the North American Republic to give their own service to the Conference as heads of their respective missions. For they considered themselves to be the best equipped for the purpose, and they were certainly free from such prejudices as professional traditions and a confusing knowledge of details might be supposed to engender. But in almost every respect it was a grievous mistake and the source of others still more grievous. True, in his own particular sphere each of them had achieved what is nowadays termed greatness. As a war leader Mr. Lloyd George had been hastily classed with Marlborough and Chatham, M. Clemenceau compared to Danton, and Mr. Wilson set apart in a category to himself. But without questioning these journalistic certificates of fame one must admit that all three plenipotentiaries were essentially politicians, old parliamentary hands, and therefore expedient-mongers whose highest qualifications for their own profession were drawbacks which unfitted them for their self-assumed mission. Of the concrete world which they set about reforming their knowledge was amazingly vague. "Frogs in the pond," says the Japanese proverb, "know naught of the ocean." There was, of course, nothing blameworthy in their unacquaintanceship with the issues, but only in the offhandedness with which they belittled its consequences. Had they been conversant with the subject or gifted with deeper insight, many of the things which seemed particularly clear to them would have struck them as sheer inexplicable, and among these perhaps their own leadership of the world-parliament.

What they lacked, however, might in some perceptible degree have been supplied by enlisting as their helpers men more happily endowed than themselves. But they deliberately chose mediocrities. It is a mark of genial spirits that they are well served, but the plenipotentiaries of the Conference were not characterized by it. Away in the background some of them had familiars or casual prompters to whose counsels they were wont to listen, but many of the adjoints who moved in the limelight of the world-stage were gritless and pithless.

As the heads of the principal governments implicitly claimed to be the authorized spokesmen of the human race and endowed with unlimited powers, it is worth noting that this claim was boldly challenged by the peoples' organs in the press. Nearly all the journals read by the masses objected from the first to the dictatorship of the group of Premiers, Mr. Wilson being excepted. "The modern parasite," wrote a respectable democratic newspaper,[59] "is the politician. Of all the privileged beings who have ever governed us he is the worst. In that, however, there is nothing surprising ... he is not only amoral, but incompetent by definition. And it is this empty-headed individual who is intrusted with the task of settling problems with the very rudiments of which he is unacquainted." Another French journal[60] wrote: "In truth it is a misfortune that the leaders of the Conference are Cabinet chiefs, for each of them is obsessed by the carking cares of his domestic policy. Besides, the Paris Conference takes on the likeness of a lyrical drama in which there are only tenors. Now would even the most beautiful work in the world survive this excess of beauties?"

The truth as revealed by subsequent facts would seem to be that each of the plenipotentiaries recognizing parliamentary success as the source of his power was obsessed by his own political problems and stimulated by his own immediate ends. As these ends, however incompatible with each other, were believed by each one to tend toward the general object, he worked zealously for their attainment. The consequences are notorious. M. Clemenceau made France the hub of the universe. Mr. Lloyd George harbored schemes which naturally identified the welfare of mankind with the hegemony of the English-speaking races. Signor Orlando was inspired by the "sacred egotism" which had actuated all Italian Cabinets since Italy entered the war, and President Wilson was burning to associate his name and also that of his country with the vastest and noblest enterprise inscribed in the annals of history. And each one moved over his own favorite route toward his own goal. It was an apt illustration of the Russian fable of the swan, the crab, and the pike being harnessed together in order to remove a load. The swan flew upward, the crab crawled backward, the pike made with all haste for the water, and the load remained where it was.

A lesser but also a serious disadvantage of the delegation of government chiefs made itself felt in the procedure. Embarrassing delays were occasioned by the unavoidable absences of the principal delegates whom pressure of domestic politics called to their respective capitals, as well as by their tactics, and their colleagues profited by their absence for the sake of the good cause. Thus all Paris, as we saw, was aware that the European chiefs, whose faith in Wilsonian orthodoxy was still feeble at that time, were prepared to take advantage of the President's sojourn in Washington to speed up business in their own sense and to confront him on his return with accomplished facts. But when, on his return, he beheld their handiwork he scrapped it, and a considerable loss of time ensued for which the world has since had to pay very heavily.

Again, when Premier Orlando was in Rome after Mr. Wilson's appeal to the Italian people, a series of measures was passed by the delegates in Paris affecting Italy, diminishing her importance at the Conference, and modifying the accepted interpretation of the Treaty of London. Some of these decisions had to be canceled when the Italians returned. These stratagems had an undesirable effect on the Italians.

Not the least of the Premiers' disabilities lay in the circumstance that they were the merest novices in international affairs. Geography, ethnography, psychology, and political history were sealed books to them. Like the rector of Louvain University who told Oliver Goldsmith that, as he had become the head of that institution without knowing Greek, he failed to see why it should be taught there, the chiefs of state, having attained the highest position in their respective countries without more than an inkling of international affairs, were unable to realize the importance of mastering them or the impossibility of repairing the omission as they went along.

They displayed their contempt for professional diplomacy and this feeling was shared by many, but they extended that sentiment to certain diplomatic postulates which can in no case be dispensed with, because they are common to all professions. One of them is knowledge of the terms of the problems to be solved. No conjuncture could have been less favorable for an experiment based on this theory. The general situation made a demand on the delegates for special knowledge and experience, whereas the Premiers and the President, although specialists in nothing, had to act as specialists in everything. Traditional diplomacy would have shown some respect for the law of causality. It would have sent to the Conference diplomatists more or less acquainted with the issues to be mooted and also with the mentality of the other negotiators, and it would have assigned to them a number of experts as advisers. It would have formed a plan similar to that proposed by the French authorities and rejected by the Anglo-Saxons. In this way at least the technical part of the task would have been tackled on right lines, the war would have been liquidated and normal relations quickly re-established among the belligerent states. It may be objected that this would have been a meager contribution to the new politico-social fabric. Undoubtedly it would, but, however meager, it would have been a positive gain. Possibly the first stone of a new world might have been laid once the ruins of the old were cleared away. But even this modest feat could not be achieved by amateurs working in desultory fashion and handicapped by their political parties at home. The resultant of their apparent co-operation was a sum in subtraction because dispersal or effort was unavoidably substituted for concentration.

Whether one contemplates them in the light of their public acts or through the prism of gossip, the figures cut by the delegates of the Great Powers were pathetic. Giants in the parliamentary sphere, they shrank to the dimensions of dwarfs in the international. In matters of geography, ethnography, history, and international politics they were helplessly at sea, and the stories told of certain of their efforts to keep their heads above water while maintaining a simulacrum of dignity would have been amusing were the issues less momentous. "Is it after Upper or Lower Silesia that those greedy Poles are hankering?" one Premier is credibly reported to have asked some months after the Polish delegation had propounded and defended its claims and he had had time to familiarize himself with them. "Please point out to me Dalmatia on the map," was another characteristic request, "and tell me what connection there is between it and Fiume." One of the principal plenipotentiaries addressed a delegate who is an acquaintance of mine approximately as follows: "I cannot understand the spokesmen of the smaller states. To me they seem stark mad. They single out a strip of territory and for no intelligible reason flock round it like birds of prey round a corpse on the field of battle. Take Silesia, for example. The Poles are clamoring for it as if the very existence of their country depended on their annexing it. The Germans are still more crazy about it. But for their eagerness I suppose there is some solid foundation. But how in Heaven's name do the Armenians come to claim it? Just think of it, the Armenians! The world has gone mad. No wonder France has set her foot down and warned them off the ground. But what does France herself want with it? What is the clue to the mystery?" My acquaintance, in reply, pointed out as considerately as he could that Silesia was the province for which Poles and Germans were contending, whereas the Armenians were pleading for Cilicia, which is farther east, and were, therefore, frowned upon by the French, who conceive that they have a civilizing mission there and men enough to accomplish it.

It is characteristic of the epoch, and therefore worthy of the historian's attention, that not only the members of the Conference, but also other leading statesmen of Anglo-Saxon countries, were wont to make a very little knowledge of peoples and countries go quite a far way. Two examples may serve to familiarize the reader with the phenomenon and to moderate his surprise at the defects of the world-dictators in Paris. One English-speaking statesman, dealing with the Italian government[61] and casting around for some effective way of helping the Italian people out of their pitiable economic plight, fancied he hit upon a felicitous expedient, which he unfolded as follows. "I venture," he said, "to promise that if you will largely increase your cultivation of bananas the people of my country will take them all. No matter how great the quantities, our market will absorb them, and that will surely make a considerable addition to your balance on the right side." At first the Italians believed he was joking. But finding that he really meant what he said, they ruthlessly revealed his idea to the nation under the heading, "Italian bananas!"

Here is the other instance. During the war the Polish people was undergoing unprecedented hardships. Many of the poorer classes were literally perishing of hunger. A Polish commission was sent to an English-speaking country to interest the government and people in the condition of the sufferers and obtain relief. The envoys had an interview with a Secretary of State, who inquired to what port they intended to have the foodstuffs conveyed for distribution in the interior of Poland. They answered: "We shall have them taken to Dantzig. There is no other way." The statesman reflected a little and then said: "You may meet with difficulties. If you have them shipped to Dantzig you must of course first obtain Italy's permission. Have you got it?" "No. We had not thought of that. In fact, we don't yet see why Italy need be approached." "Because it is Italy who has command of the Mediterranean, and if you want the transport taken to Dantzig it is the Italian government that you must ask!"[62]

The delegates picked up a good deal of miscellaneous information about the various countries whose future they were regulating, and to their credit it should be said that they put questions to their informants without a trace of false pride. One of the two chief delegates wending homeward from a sitting at which M. Jules Cambon had spoken a good deal about those Polish districts which, although they contained a majority of Germans, yet belonged of right to Poland, asked the French delegate why he had made so many allusions to Frederick the Great. "What had Frederick to do with Poland?" he inquired. The answer was that the present German majority of the inhabitants was made up of colonists who had immigrated into the districts since the time of Frederick the Great and the partition of Poland. "Yes, I see," exclaimed the statesman, "but what had Frederick the Great to do with the partition of Poland?" ... In the domain of ethnography there were also many pitfalls and accidents. During an official _exposé_ of the Oriental situation before the Supreme Council, one of the Great Four, listening to a narrative of Turkish misdeeds, heard that the Kurds had tortured and killed a number of defenseless women, children, and old men. He at once interrupted the speaker with the query: "You now call them Kurds. A few minutes ago you said they were Turks. I take it that the Kurds and the Turks are the same people?" Loath to embarrass one of the world's arbiters, the delegate respectfully replied, "Yes, sir, they are about the same, but the worse of the two are the Kurds."[63]

Great Britain's first delegate, with engaging candor sought to disarm criticism by frankly confessing in the House of Commons that he had never before heard of Teschen, about which such an extraordinary fuss was then being made, and by asking: "How many members of the House have ever heard of Teschen? Yet," he added significantly, "Teschen very nearly produced an angry conflict between two allied states."[64]

The circumstance that an eminent parliamentarian had never heard of problems that agitate continental peoples is excusable. Less so was his resolve, despite such a capital disqualification, to undertake the task of solving those problems single-handed, although conscious that the fate of whole peoples depended on his succeeding. It is no adequate justification to say that he could always fall back upon special commissions, of which there was no lack at the Conference. Unless he possessed a safe criterion by which to assess the value of the commissions' conclusions, he must needs himself decide the matter arbitrarily. And the delegates, having no such criterion, pronounced very arbitrary judgments on momentous issues. One instance of this turned upon Poland's claims to certain territories incorporated in Germany, which were referred to a special commission under the presidency of M. Cambon. Commissioners were sent to the country to study the matter on the spot, where they had received every facility for acquainting themselves with it. After some weeks the commission reported in favor of the Polish claim with unanimity. But Mr. Lloyd George rejected their conclusions and insisted on having the report sent back to them for reconsideration. Again the commissioners went over the familiar ground, but felt obliged to repeat their verdict anew. Once more, however, the British Premier demurred, and such was his tenacity that, despite Mr. Wilson's opposition, the final decision of the Conference reversed that of the commission and non-suited the Poles. By what line of argument, people naturally asked, did the first British delegate come to that conclusion? That he knew more about the matter than the special Inter-Allied commission is hardly to be supposed. Indeed, nobody assumed that he was any better informed on that subject than about Teschen. The explanation put in circulation by interested persons was that, like Socrates, he had his own familiar demon to prompt him, who, like all such spirits, chose to flourish, like the violet, in the shade. That this source of light was accessible to the Prime Minister may, his apologists hold, one day prove a boon to the peoples whose fate was thus being spun in darkness and seemingly at haphazard. Possibly. But in the meanwhile it was construed as an affront to their intelligence and a violation of the promise made to them of "open covenants openly arrived at." The press asked why the information requisite for the work had not been acquired in advance as these semi-mystical ways of obtaining it commended themselves to nobody. Wholly mystical were the methods attributed to one or other of the men who were preparing the advent of the new era. For superstition of various kinds was supposed to be as well represented at the Paris Conference as at the Congress of Vienna. Characteristic of the epoch was the gravity with which individuals otherwise well balanced exercised their ingenuity in finding out the true relation of the world's peace to certain lucky numbers. For several events connected with the Conference the thirteenth day of the month was deliberately, and some occultists added felicitously, chosen. It was also noticed that an effort was made by all the delegates to have the Allies' reply to the German counter-proposals presented on the day of destiny, Friday, June 13th. When it miscarried a flutter was caused in the dovecotes of the illuminated. The failure was construed as an inauspicious omen and it caused the spirits of many to droop. The principal clairvoyante of Paris, Madame N——, who plumes herself on being the intermediary between the Fates that rule and some of their earthly executors, was consulted on the subject, one knows not with what result.[65] It was given out, however, as the solemn utterance of the oracle in vogue that Mr. Wilson's enterprise was weighted with original sin; he had made one false step before his arrival in Europe, and that had put everything out of gear. By enacting fourteen commandments he had countered the magic charm of his lucky thirteen. One of the fourteen, it was soothsaid, must therefore be omitted—it might be, say, that of open covenants openly arrived at, or the freedom of the seas—in a word, any one so long as the mystic number thirteen remained intact. But should that be impossible, seeing that the Fourteen Points had already become house-hold words to all nations and peoples, then it behooved the President to number the last of his saving points 13a.[66]

This odd mixture of the real and the fanciful—a symptom, as the initiated believed, of a mood of fine spiritual exaltation—met with little sympathy among the impatient masses whose struggle for bare life was growing ever fiercer. Stagnation held the business world, prices were rising to prohibitive heights, partly because of the dawdling of the world's conclave; hunger was stalking about the ruined villages of the northern departments of France, destructive wars were being waged in eastern Europe, and thousands of Christians were dying of hunger in Bessarabia.[67] Epigrammatic strictures and winged words barbed with stinging satire indicated the feelings of the many. And the fact remains on record that streaks of the mysticism that buoyed up Alexander I at the Congress of Vienna, and is supposed to have stimulated Nicholas II during the first world-parliament at The Hague, were noticeable from time to time in the environment of the Paris Conference. The disclosure of these elements of superstition was distinctly harmful and might have been hindered easily by the system of secrecy and censorship which effectively concealed matters much less mischievous.

The position of the plenipotentiaries was unenviable at best and they well deserve the benefit of extenuating circumstances. For not even a genius can efficiently tackle problems with the elements of which he lacks acquaintanceship, and the mass of facts which they had to deal with was sheer unmanageable. It was distressing to watch them during those eventful months groping and floundering through a labyrinth of obstacles with no Ariadne clue to guide their tortuous course, and discovering that their task was more intricate than they had imagined. The ironic domination of temper and circumstance over the fitful exertions of men struggling with the partially realized difficulties of a false position led to many incongruities upon which it would be ungracious to dwell. One of them, however, which illustrates the situation, seems almost incredible. It is said to have occurred in January. According to the current narrative, soon after the arrival of President Wilson in Paris, he received from a French publicist named M.B. a long and interesting memorandum about the island of Corsica, recounting the history, needs, and aspirations of the population as well as the various attempts they had made to regain their independence, and requesting him to employ his good offices at the Conference to obtain for them complete autonomy. To this demand M.B. is said to have received a reply[68] to the effect that the President "is persuaded that this question will form the subject of a thorough examination by the competent authorities of the Conference" Corsica, the birthplace of Napoleon, and as much an integral part of France as the Isle of Man is of England, seeking to slacken the ties that link it to the Republic and receiving a promise that the matter would be carefully considered by the delegates sounds more like a mystification than a sober statement of fact. The story was sent to the newspapers for publication, but the censor very wisely struck it out.

These and kindred occurrences enable one better to appreciate the motives which prompted the delegates to shroud their conversations and tentative decisions in a decorous veil of secrecy.

It is but fair to say that the enterprise to which they set their hands was the vastest that ever tempted lofty ambitions since the tower-builders of Babel strove to bring heaven within reach of the earth. It transcended the capacity of the contemporary world's greatest men.[69] It was a labor for a wonder-worker in the pristine days of heroes. But although to solve even the main problems without residue was beyond the reach of the most genial representatives of latter-day statecraft, it needed only clearness of conception, steadiness of purpose, and the proper adjustment of means to ends, to begin the work on the right lines and give it an impulse that might perhaps carry it to completion in the fullness of time.

But even these postulates were wanting. The eminent parliamentarians failed to rise to the gentle height of average statecraft. They appeared in their new and august character of world-reformers with all the roots still clinging to them of the rank electoral soil from which they sprang. Their words alone were redolent of idealism, their deeds were too often marred by pettifogging compromises or childish blunders—constructive phrases and destructive acts. Not only had they no settled method of working, they lacked even a common proximate aim. For although they all employed the same phraseology when describing the objects for which their countries had fought and they themselves were ostensibly laboring, no two delegates attached the same ideas to the words they used. Yet, instead of candidly avowing this root-defect and remedying it, they were content to stretch the euphemistic terms until these covered conflicting conceptions and gratified the ears of every hearer. Thus, "open covenants openly arrived at" came to mean arbitrary ukases issued by a secret conclave, and "the self-determination of peoples" connoted implicit obedience to dictatorial decrees. The new result was a bewildering phantasmagoria.

And yet it was professedly for the purpose of obviating such misunderstandings that Mr. Wilson had crossed the Atlantic. Having expressed in plain terms the ideals for which American soldiers had fought, and which became the substance of the thoughts and purposes of the associated statesmen, "I owe it to them," he had said, "to see to it, in so far as in me lies, that no false or mistaken interpretation is put upon them and no possible effort omitted to realize them." And that was the result achieved.

No such juggling with words as went on at the Conference had been witnessed since the days of medieval casuistry. New meanings were infused into old terms, rendering the help of "exegesis" indispensable. Expressions like "territorial equilibrium" and "strategic frontiers" were stringently banished, and it is affirmed that President Wilson would wince and his expression change at the bare mention of these obnoxious symbols of the effete ordering which it was part of his mission to do away with forever. And yet the things signified by those words were preserved withal under other names. Nor could it well be otherwise. One can hardly conceive a durable state system in Europe under the new any more than the old dispensation without something that corresponds to equilibrium. An architect who should boastingly discard the law of gravitation in favor of a different theory would stand little chance of being intrusted with the construction of a palace of peace. Similarly, a statesman who, while proclaiming that the era of wars is not yet over, would deprive of strategic frontiers the pivotal states of Europe which are most exposed to sudden attack would deserve to find few disciples and fewer clients. Yet that was what Mr. Wilson aimed at and what some of his friends affirm he has achieved. His foreign colleagues re-echoed his dogmas after having emasculated them. It was instructive and unedifying to watch how each of the delegates, when his own country's turn came to be dealt with on the new lines, reversed his tactics and, sacrificing sound to substance, insisted on safeguards, relied on historic rights, invoked economic requirements, and appealed to common sense, but all the while loyally abjured "territorial equilibrium" and "strategic guarantees." Hence the fierce struggles which MM. Orlando, Dmowski, Bratiano, Venizelos, and Makino had to carry on with the chief of that state which is the least interested in European affairs in order to obtain all or part of the territories which they considered indispensable to the security and well-being of their respective countries.

At the outset Mr. Wilson stood for an ideal Europe of a wholly new and undefined type, which would have done away with the need for strategic frontiers. Its contours were vague, for he had no clear mental picture of the concrete Europe out of which it was to be fashioned. He spoke, indeed, and would fain have acted, as though the old Continent were like a thinly inhabited territory of North America fifty years ago, unencumbered by awkward survivals of the past and capable of receiving any impress. He seemingly took no account of its history, its peoples, or their interests and strivings. History shared the fate of Kolchak's government and the Ukraine; it was not recognized by the delegates. What he brought to Europe from America was an abstract idea, old and European, and at first his foreign colleagues treated it as such. Some of them had actually sneered at it, others had damned it with faint praise, and now all of them honestly strove to save their own countries' vital interests from its disruptive action while helping to apply it to their neighbors. Thus Britain, who at that time had no territorial claims to put forward, had her sea-doctrine to uphold, and she upheld it resolutely. Before he reached Europe the President was notified in plain terms that his theory of the freedom of the seas would neither be entertained nor discussed. Accordingly, he abandoned it without protest. It was then explained away as a journalistic misconception. That was the first toll paid by the American reformer in Europe, and it spelled failure to his entire scheme, which was one and indivisible. It fell to my lot to record the payment of the tribute and the abandonment of that first of the fourteen commandments. The mystic thirteen remained. But soon afterward another went by the board. Then there were twelve. And gradually the number dwindled.

This recognition of hard realities was a bitter disappointment to all the friends of the spiritual and social renovation of the world. It was a spectacle for cynics. It rendered a frank return to the ancient system unavoidable and brought grist to the mill of the equilibrists. And yet the conclusion was shriked. But even the tough realities might have been made to yield a tolerable peace if they had been faced squarely. If the new conception could not be realized at once, the old one should have been taken back into favor provisionally until broader foundations could be laid, but it must be one thing or the other. From the political angle of vision at which the European delegates insisted on placing themselves, the Old World way of tackling the various problems was alone admissible. Their program was coherent and their reasoning strictly logical. The former included strategic frontiers and territorial equilibrium. Doubtless this angle of vision was narrow, the survey it allowed was inadequate, and the results attainable ran the risk of being ultimately thrust aside by the indignant peoples. For the world problem was not wholly nor even mainly political. Still, the method was intelligible and the ensuing combinations would have hung coherently together. They would have satisfied all those—and they were many—who believed that the second decade of the twentieth century differs in no essential respect from the first and that latter-day world problems may be solved by judicious territorial redistribution. But even that conception was not consistently acted on. Deviations were permitted here and insisted upon there, only they were spoken of unctuously as sacrifices incumbent on the lesser states to the Fourteen Points. For the delegates set great store by their reputation for logic and coherency. Whatever other charges against the Conference might be tolerated, that of inconsistency was bitterly resented, especially by Mr. Wilson. For a long while he contended that he was as true to his Fourteen Points as is the needle to the pole. It was not until after his return to Washington, in the summer, that he admitted the perturbations caused by magnetic currents—sympathy for France he termed them.

The effort of imagination required to discern consistency in such of the Council's decisions as became known from time to time was so far beyond the capacity of average outsiders that the ugly phrase "to make the world safe for hypocrisy" was early coined, uttered, and propagated.

FOOTNOTES:

[ [46] Cf. Le Temps, May 23, 1919. It is an adaptation of the inscription over the Pantheon, "Aux grands hommes, la Patrie reconnaissante."

[ [47] The Daily Mail, April 25, 1919 (Paris edition).

[ [48] In Germany.

[ [49] General Pétain is said to have rejected the suggestion.

[ [50] Cf. Bulletin des Droits de l'Homme, 19ème année, p. 461.

[ [51] It was either Friday, the 4th, or Saturday, the 5th of July.

[ [52] At the end of August, 1919.

[ [53] One delegate from a poor and friendless country had to take the maps of a rival state and retouch them in accordance with the ethnographical data, which he considered alone correct.

[ [54] L'Homme Enchatné, December 14, 1914.

[ [55] "With its causes and objects we have no concern." Speech delivered by Mr. Wilson before the League to Enforce Peace in Washington on May 24, 1916.

[ [56] The testimony of a leading French press organ is worth reproducing here: "La situation du Président Wilson dans nos démocraties est magnifique, souveraine et extrêmement périlleuse. On ne connaît pas d'hommes, dans les temps contemporains, ayant eu plus d'autorité et de puissance; la popularité lui a donné ce que le droit divin ne conférait pas toujours aux monarques héréditaires. En revanche et par le fait du choc en retour, sa responsabilité est supérieure à celle du prince le plus absolu. S'il réussit à organiser le monde d'après ses rêves, sa gloire dominera les plus hautes gloires; mais il faut dire hardiment que s'il échouait il plongerait le monde dans un chaos dont le bolchevisme russe ne nous offre qu'une faible image; et sa responsabilité devant la conscience humaine dépasserait ce que peut supporter un simple mortel. Redoutable alternative!"—Cf. Le Figaro, February 10, 1919.

[ [57] From Mr. Wilson's address to Congress read on December 2, 1918. Cf. The Times, December 4, 1918.

[ [58] Cf. Secretary Lansing's evidence before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, The Chicago Tribune, August 27, 1919.

[ [59] La Démocratie Nouvelle, May 27, 1919

[ [60] Le Figaro, March 26, 1919.

[ [61] Both of them occurred before the armistice, but during the war.

[ [62] For the accuracy of this and the preceding story I vouch absolutely. I have the names of persons, places, and authorities, which are superfluous here.

[ [63] The Kurds are members of the great Indo-European family to which the Greeks, Italians, Celts, Teutons, Slavs, Hindus, Persians, and Afghans belong, whereas the Turks are a branch of a wholly different stock, the Ural-Altai group, of which the Mongols, Turks, Tartars, Finns, and Magyars are members.

[ [64] April 16, 1919.

[ [65] Madame N—— showed a friend of mine an autograph letter which she claims to have received from one of her clients, "a world's famous man." I was several times invited to inspect it at the clairvoyante's abode, or at my own, if I preferred.

[ [66] Articles on the subject appeared in the French press. To the best of my recollection there was one in _Bonsoir_.

[ [67] The American Red Cross buried sixteen hundred of them in August, 1919. _The Chicago Tribune_ (Paris edition), August 30, 1919.

[ [68] The reply, of which I possess what was given to me as a copy, is dated Paris, January 9, 1919, and is in French.

[ [69] Imagine, for instance, the condition of mind into which the following day's work must have thrown the American statesman, beset as he was with political worries of his own. The extract quoted is taken from The Daily Mail of April 18, 1919 (Paris edition).

President Wilson had a busy day yesterday, as the following list of engagements shows:
11 A.M. Dr. Wellington Koo, to present the Chinese Delegation to the Peace Conference.
11.10 A.M. Marquis de Vogué had a delegation of seven others, representing the Congrès Français, to present their view as to the disposition of the left bank of the Rhine.
11.30 A.M. Assyrian and Chaldean Delegation, with a message from the Assyrian-Chaldean nation.
11.45 A.M. Dalmatian Delegation, to present to the President the result of the plebiscite of that part of Dalmatia occupied by Italians.
Noon. M. Bucquet, Chargé d'Affaires of San Marino, to convey the action of the Grand Council of San Marino, conferring on the President Honorary Citizenship in the Republic of San Marino.
12.10 P.M. M. Colonder, Swiss Minister of Foreign Affairs.
12.20 P.M. Miss Rose Schneiderman and Miss Mary Anderson, delegates of the National Women's Trade Union League of the United States.
12.30 P.M. The Patriarch of Constantinople, the head of the Orthodox Eastern Church.
12.45 P.M. Essad Pasha, delegate of Albania, to present the claims of Albania.
1 P.M. M. M.L. Coromilas, Greek Minister at Rome, to pay his respects.
Luncheon. Mr. Newton D. Baker, Secretary for War. 4 P.M. Mr. Herbert Hoover.
4.15 P.M. M. Bratiano, of the Rumanian Delegation.
4.30 P.M. Dr. Affonso Costa, former Portuguese Minister, Portuguese Delegate to the Peace Conference.
4.45 P.M. Boghos Nubar Pasha, president of the Armenian National Delegation, accompanied by M.A. Aharoman and Professor A. Der Hagopian, of Robert College.
5.15 P.M. M. Pasitch, of the Serbian Delegation.
5.30 P.M. Mr. Frank Walsh, of the Irish-American Delegation.

IV

CENSORSHIP AND SECRECY

Never was political veracity in Europe at a lower ebb than during the Peace Conference. The blinding dust of half-truths cunningly mixed with falsehood and deliberately scattered with a lavish hand, obscured the vision of the people, who were expected to adopt or acquiesce in the judgments of their rulers on the various questions that arose. Four and a half years of continuous and deliberate lying for victory had disembodied the spirit of veracity and good faith throughout the world of politics. Facts were treated as plastic and capable of being shaped after this fashion or that, according to the aim of the speaker or writer. Promises were made, not because the things promised were seen to be necessary or desirable, but merely in order to dispose the public favorably toward a policy or an expedient, or to create and maintain a certain frame of mind toward the enemies or the Allies. At elections and in parliamentary discourses, undertakings were given, some of which were known to be impossible of fulfilment. Thus the ministers in some of the Allied countries bound themselves to compel the Germans not only to pay full compensation for damage wantonly done, but also to defray the entire cost of the war.