_The Inside Story of
The Peace Conference_
_by
Dr. E.J. Dillon_
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
_NEW YORK AND LONDON_
THE INSIDE STORY OF THE PEACE CONFERENCE
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
CHAP. PAGE
FOREWORD ix
I. THE CITY OF THE CONFERENCE 1
II. SIGNS OF THE TIMES 45
III. THE DELEGATES 58
IV. CENSORSHIP AND SECRECY 117
V. AIMS AND METHODS 136
VI. THE LESSER STATES 184
VII. POLAND'S OUTLOOK IN THE FUTURE 264
VIII. ITALY 272
IX. JAPAN 322
X. ATTITUDE TOWARD RUSSIA 344
XI. BOLSHEVISM 376
XII. HOW BOLSHEVISM WAS FOSTERED 399
XIII. SIDELIGHTS ON THE TREATY 407
XIV. THE TREATY WITH GERMANY 455
XV. THE TREATY WITH BULGARIA 464
XVI. THE COVENANT AND MINORITIES 469
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