THE MAIN FEATURES OF THE TREATY OF VERSAILLES
The principal Allied and Associated Powers, who took upon themselves
the entire responsibility for imposing and securing the execution
of the Treaty of Versailles, sent an exhaustive reply to the German
counter-proposals on June 16, in which, as we have seen, some
concessions were made in details, modifying the draft treaty. But these
were slight. In this reply they said:
They [the victors] believe that it is not only a just settlement
of the great war, but that it provides the basis upon which the
peoples of Europe can live together in friendship and equality. At
the same time it creates the machinery for the peaceful adjustment
of all international problems by discussion and consent, whereby
the settlement of 1919 itself can be modified from time to time
to suit new facts and new conditions as they arise. It is frankly
not based upon a general condonation of the events of 1914–1918.
It would not be a peace of justice if it were. But it represents
a sincere and deliberate attempt to establish “that reign of law,
based upon the consent of the governed, and sustained by the
organized opinion of mankind,” which was the agreed basis of the
peace. As such the treaty in its present form must be accepted or
rejected.
In the light of these words, uttered by the Big Four at a solemn
moment, we must examine the main features of this treaty. And lest it
be thought that the American President did not approve of the treaty as
signed, but agreed to it, as General Smuts did, only in the hope of its
immediate and radical revision by the League of Nations, it is fair to
quote the opening paragraph of Mr. Wilson’s speech at Kansas City on
September 6, 1919. He said:
I came back from Paris, bringing one of the greatest documents of
human history. One of the things that made it great was that it
was penetrated throughout with the principles to which America
has devoted her life. Let me hasten to say that one of the most
delightful circumstances of the work on the other side of the water
was that I discovered that what we called American principles had
penetrated to the heart and to the understanding, not only of the
great peoples of Europe, but to the hearts and understandings of
the great men who were representing the peoples of Europe.
The Treaty of Versailles, containing 440 articles, with annexes,
constitutes a large sized volume. Its first twenty-six articles contain
the Covenant of the League of Nations. Then follow the boundaries of
Germany; political clauses for Europe; German rights and interests
outside Germany; military, naval, and air clauses; prisoners of war
and graves; penalties; reparation; financial clauses; economic clauses;
aërial navigation; ports, waterways, and railways; labor; guarantees;
miscellaneous provisions.
The underlying idea of the treaty is that the Germans are a guilty and
vanquished people, who are indefinitely compelled, without appeal, to
put at the mercy of the conquerors their lives, their property, their
territory. A reading of the treaty will convince the fair-minded man
that its many “jokers” are so cleverly scattered through the treaty as
to nullify what provisions it does contain for setting dates for the
termination of the penalties and limitations imposed upon Germany. I
saw many of these “jokers” when I read the treaty. They were patent.
But a clever lawyer would find many more.
The late Senator Philander C. Knox, who had read the treaty through,
told me in the autumn of 1919 that, from a legal point of view, there
was no hope whatever of Germany’s being able to fulfil the obligations
placed upon her. He brushed the economic questions aside, and showed me
how Germany was trussed by the treaty in such a way that no matter what
she did towards fulfilment she would still be in default. “With all
the power and authority and good will in the world,” said our former
secretary of state, “no nation on earth could ever acquit herself of
the obligations of such a treaty. If Germany were a small nation, and
her enemies bound together permanently by common interests, central
Europe, under this treaty, would become within a decade a huge region
inhabited by millions of slaves. As it is, the treaty indicts those
who drew it up. It is a crime against civilization.” This comment was
provoked when I was trying to argue with the senator that the treaty
ought to be ratified with reservations.
Eight months later, on May 5, 1920, Senator Knox said publicly,
addressing the Senate:
The Treaty of Versailles is almost universally discredited in
all its parts. The majority of its negotiators concede this.
Its economic terms are impossible; its League of Nations is an
aggravated imitation of the worst features of the ill fated and
foolish holy alliance of a century ago. It promises little but
mischief unless recast on such radical lines as will entirely
obliterate its identity.... We must proceed in accordance with
the established beneficent and enlightened rules and principles
of international law as they have heretofore obtained between
civilized Christian nations.
The principal features of the Treaty of Versailles are the exclusion
of Germany from the League of Nations; the failure to establish or
promise reciprocity in any of its provisions that would otherwise have
been for the common good of the world; the violation of the principle
of self-determination where it was to the interest of the victors
to ignore it; the elimination of Germany from cultural and economic
participation in the development of the world; and the consecration of
the principle of the right of the victors in a war to confiscate the
private property of the vanquished. Let us take up these features one
by one, with examples.
_The Exclusion of Germany from the League of Nations._ Article IV of
the Covenant provides for a council of nine members, five of whom are
permanent “representatives of the principal Allied and Associated
Powers.” The four minority members “shall be selected by the Assembly
from time to time in its discretion.” It is true that the Council
“may name additional members of the League whose representatives
shall always be members of the Council,” and that new members of the
League may be admitted on a two thirds vote of the Assembly. But the
jokers that exclude Germany from membership in the League as well as
in the Council are the qualifying clauses providing that a new member
“shall give effective guarantees of its sincere intention to observe
its international obligations” and that each member of the Council
possesses an absolute veto. It is easily seen that these jokers put
the admission of Germany entirely in the hands of France, who can be
sole judge of Germany’s worthiness. This same handicap holds in regard
to Russia. And no student of world affairs believes that the League
of Nations can become anything else than the subservient tool of the
Entente powers, unable to move in anything against their interests or
wishes, unless Germany and Russia are permanent members of the Council.
_The Failure to Establish or Promise Reciprocity in Any of Its
Provisions That Would Otherwise Have Been for the Common Good of the
World._ The Treaty of Versailles contains many good points, such as
its penalties; the restoration of plunder taken from other countries
during previous wars as well as during the recent war; the military,
naval, and air clauses; the resurrection of Poland; the erection of
mixed arbitral tribunals; aërial navigation clauses; ports, waterways
and railways clauses; labor clauses; and other minor points. But all
these features, good in themselves, are not written in the treaties
for the purpose of establishing improved international relations but
as additional means of crippling and punishing Germany. None of them
are contractual, in the ordinary sense; that is, they bind only one
party. Reciprocity is not provided for, even in the future. The result
is not only to put Germans in a position of inferiority to citizens of
neighboring nations for the time being but to give them no hope that
this condition will ever be remedied. For the numerous jokers take away
the effectiveness of the time-limits provided in some instances for
withholding reciprocity.
It is inconceivable that officers and men of Allied armies had not
been guilty of violations of international law during more than
four years of fighting. But only Germans were to be tried, and the
German Government bound itself to hand over for trial before Allied
tribunals all whose names should be handed in. This impossible
provision in itself put Germany in hopeless default from the moment
her representatives signed the treaty. Only if the Germans had been an
uncivilized tribe of savages could such provisions have been executed.
Similarly, the trial of Kaiser Wilhelm, too, before an impartial
tribunal would have been a splendid measure. But the treaty bound the
Germans to an unheard-of thing in international relations. They were
obliged to confess their rulers’ guilt and their own, as a people,
before the trial! And the treaty gave no promise, as it should have
done, that the question of the responsibility for the war would be
fairly gone into by a court of justice, with all the evidence before
it. If the purpose of the men who made the Treaty of Versailles was
not vindictiveness but a desire to get at the truth, they would have
coupled their demand for the trial of the Kaiser with a guarantee
that all the documentary evidence on both sides should be brought into
court. Only in this way could a fair trial have been had. The penalties
clauses of the treaty, therefore, violate the accepted principles of
law as well as the dictates of fair play and common sense.
If the treaty had limited itself to the restoration of the loot of
the recent war, no exception could have been taken. But Germany was
summoned to give up art treasures and other plunder of the long ago.
Was this done because the restitution was a matter of justice or to
remove ancient grievances that stood in the way of the reconciliation
of peoples? If so, the victors should have promised to give back to
one another and to neutral nations--and in many instances to the
vanquished--the more notorious examples of loot in their own national
galleries and museums. This was a trifling matter, but it showed the
spirit of the treaty.
Permanent peace could never come from a one-sided application of
the principle of disarmament, especially when it was coupled with
the guarantees clauses. History does not record an instance where a
great people, deprived of its means of defense, with portions of its
territory under military occupation and neighboring enemy countries
still armed to the teeth, did not find some means, internally or
through alliances, to break the grip of its enemies. In 1870, by
annexing Alsace-Lorraine, Bismarck made an armed camp of Europe. In
1919, by occupying the Rhine and disarming Germany without promising
themselves to disarm, the Allies, in the Treaty of Versailles, laid
the foundation for a greater and more dangerous unrest than Europe has
known in modern times. Lack of reciprocity in the military, naval,
and aërial clauses was practicable only (a) if the enemies of Germany
were ready to form a permanent alliance and keep several million men
under arms, or (b) if they were willing to kill indefinitely all male
children born in Germany--and also the existing male population under
twenty-five.
The resurrection of Poland could have been a glorious and blessed
result of the Paris settlement had it been conceived and carried out in
the interests of the Poles. But the resurrection of Poland, as provided
for in the Treaty of Versailles and the supplementary treaty, was an
attempt to create an artificial state for old-fashioned “balance of
power” purposes. The real interests of the Poles were not considered at
all. Their only hope of succeeding in rebuilding their national life
lay in having boundaries that would not in the future create against
them fatal antagonism on the part of their two powerful neighbors,
Germany and Russia. Had Polish and not French interests been considered
in writing the Treaty of Versailles, the new Poland would not have
been saddled with the Danzig corridor, and Upper Silesia would have
remained German territory. A combination of fear and greed, without
statesmanlike vision, made a Poland that can never last. The frontiers
of Poland, as drawn in the Treaty of Versailles, heralded war and not
peace. They were a perpetuation of the worst evil from which Europe
had been suffering. The corridor and the “free port of Danzig” were
declared to be necessary in order to give Poland an outlet to the sea,
despite the fact that Danzig is an indisputably German city. But the
same men at the same time took away Trieste and Fiume from Austria and
Hungary, despite the dependence of their hinterland upon them, invoking
the argument of the population of the ports, the validity of which was
hotly denied by them when Germany invoked it!
The erection of mixed arbitral tribunals for adjustment of war claims
of private citizens put a premium upon the appeal to force. What it
meant was that, if your country was successful in fighting, you had
a valid claim against a citizen of a defeated country, and that your
claim would be adjusted by arbiters appointed by your own country. The
important thing, then, according to the Treaty of Versailles, was not
the sanctity of private contracts entered into between individuals of
different nations, but citizenship in a winning nation.
In aërial navigation and in ports, waterways, and railways, the right
of the victors to transit across and privileges on German soil were
affirmed without reciprocity. Not only were the Germans denied the
right of transport by air and water and rail, on equal terms with
other nations, outside their own country, but they were required to
open up Germany to Allied control and to concede special privileges in
waterways and ports, to facilitate the passage over their territory of
international trains--all this without reciprocity. The time-limits set
gave no reasonable hope of a change; for the removal of disabilities
depended upon the integral observance of all the other treaty
obligations.
_The Violation of the Principle of Self-Determination Where It Was
to the Interest of the Victors to Ignore It._ On the ground that
Alsace-Lorraine had been forcibly taken from France against the will of
the inhabitants in a previous war, it was altogether just that France
should receive back her “lost provinces” without a plebiscite. Even had
one been taken, the result would not have been in doubt. France would
have won by an overwhelming vote. It was just also to stipulate the
return to Denmark of indisputably Danish territory, with a plebiscite
for doubtful border districts. The other territorial provisions were
open to question.
The most flagrant violation of the principle of self-determination was
in the matter of the detachment for fifteen years (with a plebiscite
at the end of that time) of the Saar Valley from Germany. This wholly
German district of over half a million souls was put under the League
of Nations, but really given to France to run, as compensation for the
destruction of coal-mines in northern France. That the treaty of peace
should have contained provisions for adequate compensation--ton-to-ton
replacement--for the French losses in coal was to be expected. But the
Saar arrangement was political and not economic,[5] and, as far as the
inhabitants of the region were concerned, its practical application
meant for them what the Treaty of Frankfort had meant for Alsatians
nearly half a century earlier. The Saar clauses constitute a shameful
betrayal of the high ideals for which the war was fought. Confirmation
of this statement is easily obtained. Let the reader go to the Saar
and talk with the people. Violence has been done to their most sacred
sentiments. Two wrongs do not make a right.
In the House of Commons on May 9, 1923, Mr. Edward Wood, a member of
the Bonar Law Cabinet, who presided over the meeting of the Council
of the League in April, 1923, told how the Council had virtually
washed its hands of the Saar. The Commission consisted of a French
president, with four assistants, a Belgian, a Dane with a French name,
a Canadian, and a representative of the Saar population. The Canadian
sided with the local representative in trying to prevent the oppression
of the people, who were being ruled in a way that provoked them to
appeal for redress to the Council. The President of the Commission had
explained to the Council that the decrees, adopted by the majority
of the Commission, were “not illegal” and were justified on the
ground that they were adopted “to meet exceptional circumstances.” It
developed in the debate that one of the decrees imposed penalties of
imprisonment and fine for certain “crimes,” without hearing or trial
or resort to appeal. Among the “crimes” was casting discredit on the
Treaty of Versailles. The inhabitants of the Saar are not allowed to
discuss publicly the régime that governs them or their future. Sir
John Simon told the Commons that this measure was a “most astounding
abuse of legislative power,” and Mr. Asquith called it a “monstrous
and ridiculous decree” for the like of which “one might ransack the
annals of despotism in the worst days of Russia’s oppression of Finland
without finding a more monstrous specimen of despotic legislation or
one more suppressive of the elementary rights of free citizenship.”
Lord Robert Cecil, just back from his American tour in favor of the
League of Nations, declared that the action was worthy of militarism
at its worst, and that he had always had grave doubts of the wisdom of
making the League responsible for the Saar régime.
The cession of Malmédy and Eupen to Belgium was clearly against
the wishes of the inhabitants of those regions. During the peace
negotiations I visited these places, and I visited them afterward,
just as I did the Saar. The people told me that they were Germans and
wanted to remain Germans. They were not given the opportunity, any more
than the people of the Saar were, to vote upon their detachment from
Germany. The treaty provided for registers at Malmédy and Eupen, in
which, within a fixed time, any inhabitant of these regions could write
down his desire to return to German sovereignty. The defenders of the
treaty, by virtue of this curious provision, declared that the people
had a chance to decide. Did they? Any one who dared to sign those
registers was expelled and his property confiscated. After two or three
examples of this sort, nothing more was done. It was like the right
of our negroes to vote in the South. In these cases I have the facts,
names, dates, and particulars of each instance.
The plebiscite for Upper Silesia contained a joker that was afterward
invoked, when the decision went against Poland, by reason of which
the Entente Powers were at liberty to disregard the vote if it seemed
best to do so. No opportunity was given to the inhabitants of the
Polish corridor, separating East and West Prussia, to vote on their
own destinies. Mr. Lloyd George had secured a modification of the
original draft, by which plebiscites were allowed for the Marienwerder
and Allenstein regions. Although the commission on Polish frontiers at
the Paris Conference had recommended the detachment of these regions
from Germany, declaring that they were “predominantly Polish,” they
voted 98 per cent and 95 per cent respectively to remain with Germany,
and this under Allied military occupation and supervision! There is
little doubt that if a fair plebiscite had been held everywhere, as
had been promised, there would have been no corridor, and Poland would
have received a much more limited frontier in Posen than she got. I was
in Kattowitz, in Upper Silesia, when that city, despite its vote for
Germany was allotted to Poland. A prominent citizen told me: “You have
created another open sore, which will be healed only by a new war.”
If the Paris Conference was actuated by the desire to secure the
fulfilment of the ideals for which we fought, rather than the triumph
of the principle that might makes right, in taking away Trieste and
Fiume from Austria and Hungary, these ideals were violated by taking
away Danzig and Memel from Germany. I have found no apologist for the
Treaty of Versailles who, when confronted with the deadly parallel
here, has not admitted that different weights and different measures
were applied in these cases. There is no more striking proof than
Danzig and Memel, as opposed to Trieste and Fiume, of the judgment
passed upon the Treaty of Versailles by Mr. Ray Stannard Baker in his
recent defense of President Wilson, that the treaty was a piece of
hasty patchwork, imposed at the point of a bayonet, whose terms were
simply and solely due to the national interests of the victors.
In the provisions of the treaty relating to countries other than
Germany, the principle of self-determination was ignored in regard to
China, Morocco, and Egypt. The Chinese arguments about Shantung were
not answered. The Egyptians sent a delegation, representing their
National Assembly, to protest against the recognition of the British
protectorate. But they were not given a hearing, and this provision,
although there had been wide-spread riots in Egypt against the British
military occupation, was put into the treaty.
_The Elimination of Germany from Cultural and Economic Participation
in the Development of the World._ For more than a hundred years before
the World War, the European nations had come to realize that their
prosperity depended upon contacts with the extra-European world. These
contacts they had established at the cost of great sacrifices, through
colonial wars, wars with one another, and the gradual building up of
investments, banks, shipping, and trading companies in all parts of
the world. Because of her later unification and slower industrial
development, Germany was a late comer in world politics. She struggled
under great handicaps in finding a large part of the world already
preëmpted when she began to look for colonies, coaling-stations, and
fields for investment and economic development. But her progress
in the few decades preceding the World War had been marvelous, and
her whole economic structure was built, like that of England, upon
foreign trade. Her population had gone beyond the number that could be
sustained by home markets.
The greatest blow to Germany in the Treaty of Versailles was the ban
it placed upon her contacts with the outside world. She was compelled
to give up her colonies; to renounce her commercial treaties and
concessions in every country in the world except a few South American
countries that had not declared war upon her; and to surrender
everything that she had built up in the way of import and export
markets, by the confiscation of her shipping, foreign investments,
banking and commercial establishments, concessions, privileges, etc.
The aim of the treaty was to eliminate Germany as a competitor in world
markets, and to make it impossible for German capital to accomplish
anything in the future in Africa and Asia. Germany was called upon,
also, to renounce her treaties and private concessions, her loans, and
everything else that she had acquired in her relations with her former
allies. Her nationals were barred from Turkey, from former German
colonies, and from French and British protectorates in Africa and Asia.
Her mission work in foreign countries was to be given up entirely
and not renewed. Her missionaries, Catholic and Protestant, were
never again to return to their field. Provisions were inserted in the
treaty by which the victors had the right to bar German newspapers and
magazines and books, as well as German goods, without reciprocity. Some
one at Paris--I forget which of the outstanding figures it was--said
that in the Treaty of Versailles we had reverted to the law of the
jungle. The papal nuncio, Monsignor Ceretti, told me that the devil at
his worst could hardly have conceived so thorough a destruction of the
soul of mankind.
In connection with the various clauses throughout the treaty, which,
in their ensemble, cut Germany off from the rest of the world and make
her a pariah for ever among nations, an interesting dilemma faces
those who hope to profit by the treaty. If they are able to enforce
its provisions, do they still expect to have large reparations from a
Germany bound hand and foot in the matter of her foreign trade, while
enjoying the advantages in their own foreign trade of having her no
longer for a competitor? And, if so, will not the example of a Germany
without colonies, army, fleet, political and economic contacts with
Asia and Africa, paying not only her own expenses but a huge surplus
for reparations, refute the time-worn argument of economic imperialism,
that a nation must have all these things to live? The answer to the
former question is an economic one, difficult to explain and uphold,
whether you say yes or no. The answer to the second question, if
in the affirmative, proves that the greater part of our national
expenditures are money wasted, and, if in the negative, that the Treaty
of Versailles was a sentence of death passed upon a great nation,
affecting not so much those guilty of the war as their progeny and an
unborn generation.
_The Consecration of the Principle of the Right of the Victors in
a War to Confiscate the Private Property of the Vanquished._ It is
impossible to deny that the Treaty of Versailles infringes upon the
age-old principle of the sanctity of private property. A study of its
reparations and economic clauses reveals that the greatest damage done
to the world during the riot of ungoverned passions at Paris was the
attack made in the treaty upon the fundamental bases of society. The
Treaty of Versailles assumes the dangerous doctrine that the state
is all-powerful and has the right to dispose of the property of its
citizens, and that a government can not only levy taxes on capital and
property of a confiscatory character but is able to give a clear title
to the confiscation by others of its subjects’ property.
I am sure that I have not exaggerated, or stated unfairly or extremely,
this feature of the Treaty of Versailles. During the last five years
I have had the opinion of a dozen international lawyers, French and
British and American, who are agreed that this feature of the Treaty of
Versailles, if applied, would lead to departures in existing notions of
property and the rôle of the state so startling as to be subversive of
the existing social order. The boomerang is evident. If Germany has a
right to confiscate or assent to the confiscation of private property
for the purposes of reparation, if the assent and carte blanche of the
German Government to confiscation by the Allies gives a valid title,
if taxes on capital can be levied by the German Government--all this
without ruining industry in Germany--why are not these measures legal
and practicable against private property and capital in other countries?
The heart of the Treaty of Versailles lay in its reparations clauses.
A Reparations Commission was created, which, like the armies of
occupation, was to be maintained at the expense of Germany. Not
until May, 1921, was it to decide upon the amount Germany owed and
could pay. The commission was given sweeping powers over Germany’s
finances, internal and external. It would fix the amounts in money and
kind of German reparations deliveries. Against the amounts fixed the
German Government had no appeal. If it did not do as the Reparations
Commission ordered, the commission had the power, by a majority vote,
to declare Germany in default on reparations. Then the treaty provided
that the victors could take what measures they decided upon to penalize
Germany for the default and to collect their claims. Since no appeal
or arbitration was provided for, the Treaty of Versailles gave no
protection to the debtor against the rapacity and vindictiveness of the
creditors. Sums due were not agreed upon by mutual consent; they were
fixed by the victors. There was no protection in the treaty against
possible abuse of this privilege, and no definition of the measures
to be taken after default. The Treaty of Versailles thus put Germany
at the absolute mercy of her conquerors, without appeal, legal or
otherwise. By taking away the security of German territory, the treaty
made impossible the revival of German prosperity and the fulfilment of
the obligations of the treaty.
Last of all, the most curious feature of the treaty was its failure
to provide the machinery for its enforcement. The Germans had been
able during more than four years to withstand their enemies. And it
is certain that the Entente powers could not have dictated a victors’
treaty without the coöperation of the United States. Germany signed
the treaty because she was forced to do so. And, as it was a one-sided
and humiliating treaty, giving the Germans no hope whatsoever for the
future as an encouragement to fulfil its terms, the victors ought to
have realized the necessity of providing, jointly, for the permanent
maintenance of a huge standing army to keep the Germans in submission.
A document of the nature of the Treaty of Versailles was worthless
unless coercion, permanent coercion, was provided for. As events have
proved, the assumption of the Paris peacemakers, i. e., that they would
stick together, was wrong. What other result could be expected, then,
from the Treaty of Versailles than that the Germans would obey the
treaty only in so far as force was employed? The spirit of the treaty
is not peace but war. The Germans were to be considered permanently as
enemies. They were not to be allowed to become friends.
When you have an enemy, you do not have peace.
When you cannot count upon remaining friends with one another, and you
are confronted with an unknown factor like Russia, you read over again
the Treaty of Versailles and say to yourself: “If I ever believed that
any good could come of it, I must have been of unbalanced judgment,
owing to the passions of the moment. Certainly those who made the
treaty were!”