PREFACE

This book is made up of a series of articles originally published in the

_Freeman_. It was compiled to establish one point and only one, namely:

that the German Government was not solely guilty of bringing on the war.

I have not been at all concerned with measuring the German Government's

share of guilt, with trying to show that it was either great or small,

or that it was either less or more than that of any other Government or

association of Governments. All this is beside the point. I do not by

any means wish to escape the responsibility of saying that I think the

German Government's share of guilt in the matter is extremely small; so

small by comparison with that of the major Powers allied against

Germany, as to be inconsiderable. That is my belief, demonstrable as I

think by such evidence as has now become available to any candid person.

But this has nothing whatever to do with the subject-matter of this

volume. If the guilt of the German Government could be proved to be ten

times greater than it was represented to be by the publicity-bureaux of

the Allied Powers, the conclusion established in the following chapters

would still remain. Guilty as the German Government may have been;

multiply by ten any estimate that any person, interested or

disinterested, informed or uninformed, may put upon its guilt; the fact

remains that it was far, very far indeed, from being the only guilty

party concerned.

If there were no practical end to be gained by establishing this

conclusion, if one's purpose were only to give the German Government the

dubious vindication of a _tu quoque_, the effort would be hardly worth

making. But as I say at the outset, there is at stake an extremely

important matter, one that will unfavourably affect the peace of the

world for at least a generation--the treaty of Versailles. If the German

Government may not be assumed to be solely responsible for the war, this

treaty is indefensible; for it is constructed wholly upon that

assumption. It becomes, not a treaty, but a verdict pronounced after the

manner of Brennus, by a superior power which, without regard to justice,

arrogates to itself the functions of prosecutor, jury and judge.

It is probably superfluous to point out that this treaty, conceived in

the pure spirit of the victorious Apache, has, in practice, utterly

broken down. It has not worked and it will not work, because it sets at

defiance certain economic laws which are as inexorable as the law of

gravitation. The incidence of these laws was well understood and clearly

foretold, at the time of the peace-conference, by an informed minority

in Europe, notably by Mr. Maynard Keynes in his volume entitled "The

Economic Consequences of the Peace." In this country also, a minority,

sufficiently informed to know its right hand from its left in economic

affairs, stood aghast in contemplation of the ruinous consequences which

it perceived as inevitable under any serious attempt to put this vicious

instrument into operation. But both here and in Europe, this minority

was very small and uninfluential, and could accomplish nothing against

the ignorant and unreasoning bad temper which the politicians kept

aflame.

The treaty had therefore to go to the test of experiment; and of the

results of this, one need surely say nothing, for they are obvious. The

harder Germany tried to fulfill the conditions of the treaty, and the

nearer she came to doing so, the worse things went in all the countries

that were presumably to benefit by her sacrifice. The Central Empires

are, as the informed minority in all countries has been from the

beginning anxiously aware, the key-group in the whole of European

industry and commerce. If they must work and trade under unfavourable

conditions, they also thereby automatically impose correspondingly

unfavourable conditions upon the whole of Europe; and, correspondingly

unfavourable conditions are thereby in turn automatically set up

wherever the trade of Europe reaches--for example, in the United States.

There is now no possible doubt about this, for one has but to glance at

the enormous dislocations of international commerce, and the universal

and profound stagnation of industry, in order to prove it to one's

complete satisfaction. Germany wisely and far-sightedly made a sincere

and vigourous effort to comply with the conditions of the treaty; and by

so doing she has carried the rest of the world to the verge of economic

collapse. The damage wrought by the war was in general of a spectacular

and impressive type, and was indeed very great--no one would minimize

it--but the damage, present and prospective, wrought by the treaty of

peace is much greater and more far-reaching.

The political inheritors of those who made the peace are now extremely

uneasy about it. Their predecessors (including Mr. Lloyd George, who

still remains in office) had flogged up popular hatred against the

Central Empires at such a rate that when they took office they still

had, or thought they had, to court and indulge this hatred. Thus we

found Mr. Secretary Hughes, for example, in his first communication to

the German Government, laying it down that the basis of the Versailles

treaty was sound--that Germany was solely responsible for the war. He

spoke of it quite in the vein of Mr. Lloyd George, as a _chose jugée_.

After having promulgated the treaty with such immense ceremony, and

raised such preposterous and extravagant popular expectations on the

strength of it, the architects of the treaty bequeathed an exceedingly

difficult task to their successors; the task of letting the public down,

diverting their attention with this or that gesture, taking their mind

off their disappointments and scaling down their expectations, so that

in time it might be safe to let the Versailles treaty begin to sink out

of sight.

The task is being undertaken; the curious piece of mountebankery

recently staged in Washington, for example, was an ambitious effort to

keep the peoples, particularly those of Europe, hopeful, confiding and

diverted; and if economic conditions permit, if times do not become too

hard, it may succeed. The politicians can not say outright that the

theory of the Versailles treaty is dishonest and outrageous, and that

the only chance of peace and well-being is by tearing up the treaty and

starting anew on another basis entirely. They can not say this on

account of the exigencies of their detestable trade. The best that they

can do is what they are doing. They must wait until the state of public

feeling permits them to ease down from their uncompromising stand upon

the treaty. Gradually, they expect, the public will accustom itself to

the idea of relaxations and accommodations, as it sees, from day to day,

the patent impracticability of any other course; feelings will weaken,

asperities soften, hatreds die out, contacts and approaches of one kind

or another will take place; and finally, these public men or their

political inheritors will think themselves able to effect in an

unobtrusive way, such substantial modifications of the treaty of

Versailles as will amount to its annulment.

The process is worth accelerating by every means possible; and what I

have here done is meant to assist it. There are many persons in the

country who are not politicians, and who are capable and desirous of

approaching a matter of this kind with intellectual honesty. Quite

possibly they are not aware, many of them, that the Versailles treaty

postulates the sole responsibility of the German Government for bringing

on the war; undoubtedly they are not acquainted with such evidence as I

have here compiled to show that this assumption is unjust and erroneous.

Having read this evidence, they will be in a position to review the

terms of the Versailles treaty and reassess the justice of those terms.

They will also be able to understand the unwillingness, the inability,

of the German people to acquiesce in those terms; and they can

comprehend the slowness and difficulty wherewith peace and good feeling

are being re-established in Europe, and the extreme precariousness and

uncertainty of Europe's situation--and our own, in

consequence--throughout a future that seems longer than one cares to

contemplate.

The reader will perceive at once that this book is a mere compilation

and transcription of fact, containing not a shred of opinion or of any

original matter. On this account it was published anonymously in its

serial form, because it seemed to me that such work should be judged

strictly as it stands, without regard to the authority, or lack of

authority, which the compiler might happen to possess. Almost all of it

is lifted straight from the works of my friends Mr. Francis Neilson and

Mr. E. D. Morel. I earnestly hope--indeed, it is my chief motive in

publishing this book--that it may serve as an introduction to these

words. I can not place too high an estimate upon their importance to a

student of British and Continental diplomacy. They are, as far as I

know, alone in their field; nothing else can take their place. They are

so thorough, so exhaustive and so authoritative that I wonder at their

being so little known in the United States. Mr. Morel's works,[1] "Ten

Years of Secret Diplomacy," "Truth and the War," and "Diplomacy

Revealed," are simply indispensable. Mr. Neilson's book "How Diplomats

Make War,"[2] is not an easy book to read; no more are Mr. Morel's; but

without having read it no serious student can possibly do justice to the

subject.