of his life. It was to be the crown of his political career, to mark the
attainment of an end toward which all that was best in the human race
had for centuries been consciously or unconsciously wending without
moving perceptibly nearer. Instinctively he must have felt that the
Laodicean support given to him by his colleagues would not carry him
much farther and that their fervor would speedily evaporate once the
Conference broke up and their own special aims were definitely achieved
or missed. With the shrewdness of an experienced politician he grasped
the fact that if he was ever to present his Covenant to the world
clothed with the authority of the mightiest states, now was his
opportunity. After the Conference it would be too late. And the only
contrivance by which he could surely reckon on success was to insert the
Covenant in the Peace Treaty and set before his colleagues an
irresistible incentive for elaborating both at the same time.
He had an additional motive for these tactics in the attitude of a
section of his own countrymen. Before starting for Paris he had, as we
saw, made an appeal to the electorate to return to the legislature only
candidates of his own party to the exclusion of Republicans, and the
result fell out contrary to his expectations. Thereupon the oppositional
elements increased in numbers and displayed a marked combative
disposition. Even moderate Republicans complained in terms akin to those
employed by ex-President Taft of Mr. Wilson's "partizan exclusion of
Republicans in dealing with the highly important matter of settling the
results of the war. He solicited a commission in which the Republicans
had no representation and in which there were no prominent Americans of
any real experience and leadership of public opinion."[92]
The leaders of this opposition sharply watched the policy of the
President at the Conference and made no secret of their resolve to
utilize any serious slip as a handle for revising or rejecting the
outcome of his labors. Seeing his cherished cause thus trembling in the
scale, Mr. Wilson hit upon the expedient of linking the Covenant with
the Peace Treaty and making of the two an inseparable whole. He
announced this determination in a forcible speech[93] to his own
countrymen, in which he said, "When the Treaty comes back, gentlemen on
this side will find the Covenant not only in it, but so many threads of
the Treaty tied to the Covenant that you cannot dissect the Covenant
from the Treaty without destroying the whole vital structure." This
scheme was denounced by Mr. Wilson's opponents as a trick, but the
historian will remember it as a maneuver, which, however blameless or
meritorious its motive, was fraught with lamentable consequences for all
the peoples for whose interests the President was sincerely solicitous.
To take but one example. The misgivings generated by the Covenant
delayed the ratification of the Peace Treaty by the United States
Senate, in consequence of which the Turkish problem had to be postponed
until the Washington government was authorized to accept or compelled to
refuse a mandate for the Sultan's dominions, and in the meanwhile mass
massacres of Greeks and Armenians were organized anew.
A large section of the press and the majority of the delegates strongly
condemned the interpolation of the Covenant. What they demanded was
first the conclusion of a solid peace and then the establishment of
suitable international safeguards. For to be safeguarded, peace must
first exist. "A suit of armor without the warrior inside is but a
useless ornament," wrote one of the American journals.[94]
But the course advocated by Mr. Wilson was open to another direct and
telling objection. Peace between the belligerent adversaries was, in the
circumstances, conceivable only on the old lines of strategic frontiers
and military guaranties. The Supreme Council implied as much in its
official reply to the criticisms offered by the Austrians to the
conditions imposed on them, making the admission that Italy's new
northern frontiers were determined by considerations of strategy. The
plan for the governance of the world by a league of pacific peoples, on
the other hand, postulated the abolition of war preparations, including
strategic frontiers. Consequently the more satisfactory the Treaty the
more unfavorable would be the outlook for the moral reconstitution of
the family of nations, and _vice versa_. And to interlace the two would
be to necessitate a compromise which would necessarily mar both.
In effect the split among the delegates respecting their aims and
interests led to a tacit understanding among the leaders on the basis of
give-and-take, the French and British acquiescing in Mr. Wilson's
measures for working out his Covenant--the draft of which was
contributed by the British--and the President, giving way to them on
matters said to affect their countries' vital interests. How smoothly
this method worked when great issues were not at stake may be inferred
from the perfunctory way in which it was decided that the Kaiser's trial
should take place in London. A few days before the Treaty was signed
there was a pause in the proceedings of the Supreme Council during which
the secretary was searching for a mislaid document. Mr. Lloyd George,
looking up casually and without addressing any one in particular,
remarked, "I suppose none of you has any objection to the Kaiser being
tried in London?" M. Clemenceau shrugged his shoulders, Mr. Wilson
raised his hand, and the matter was assumed to be settled. Nothing more
was said or written on the subject. But when the news was announced,
after the President's departure from France, it took the other American
delegates by surprise and they disclaimed all knowledge of any such
decision. On inquiry, however, they learned that the venue had in truth
been fixed in this offhand way.[95]
Mr. Wilson found it a hard task at first to obtain acceptance for his
ill-defined tenets by France, who declined to accept the protection of
his League of Nations in lieu of strategic frontiers and military
guaranties. Insurmountable obstacles barred his way. The French
government and people, while moved by decent respect for their American
benefactors[96] to assent to the establishment of a league, flatly
refused to trust themselves to its protection against Teuton aggression.
But they were quite prepared to second Mr. Wilson's endeavors to oblige
some of the other states to content themselves with the guaranties it
offered, only, however, on condition that their own country was first
safeguarded in the traditional way. Territorial equilibrium and military
protection were the imperative provisos on which they insisted. And as
France was specially favored by Mr. Wilson on sentimental grounds which
outweighed his doctrine, and as she was also considered indispensable to
the Anglo-Saxon peoples as their continental executive, she had no
difficulty in securing their support. On this point, too, therefore, the
President found himself constrained to give way. And only did he abandon
his humanitarian intentions and his strongest arguments to be lightly
brushed aside, he actually recoiled so far into the camp of his
opponents that he gave his approval to an indefensible clause in the
Treaty which would have handed over to France the German population of
the Saar as the equivalent of a certain sum in gold. Coming from the
world-reformer who, a short time before, had hurled the thunderbolts of
his oratory against those who would barter human beings as chattels,
this amazing compromise connoted a strange falling off. Incidentally it
was destructive of all faith in the spirit that had actuated his
world-crusade. It also went far to convince unbiased observers that the
only framework of ideas with decisive reference to which Mr. Wilson
considered every project and every objection as it arose, was that which
centered round his own goal--the establishment, if not of a league of
nations cemented by brotherhood and fellowship, at least of the nearest
approach to that which he could secure, even though it fell far short of
the original design. These were the first-fruits of the interweaving of
the Covenant with the Treaty.
In view of this readiness to split differences and sacrifice principles
to expediency it became impossible even to the least observant of Mr.
Wilson's adherents in the Old World to cling any longer to the belief
that his cosmic policy was inspired by firm intellectual attachment to
the sublime ideas of which he had made himself the eloquent exponent and
had been expected to make himself the uncompromising champion. In every
such surrender to the Great Powers, as in every stern enforcement of his
principles on the lesser states, the same practical spirit of the
professional politician visibly asserted itself. One can hardly acquit
him of having lacked the moral courage to disregard the veto of
interested statesmen and governments and to appeal directly to the
peoples when the consequence of this attitude would have been the
sacrifice of the makeshift of a Covenant which he was ultimately content
to accept as a substitute for the complete reinstatement of nations in
their rights and dignity.
The general tendency of the labors of the Conference then was shaped by
those two practical maxims, the immunity of the Anglo-Saxon peoples and
of their French ally from the restrictions to be imposed by the new
politico-social ordering in so far as these ran counter to their
national interests, and the determination of the American President to
get and accept such a league of nations as was feasible under extremely
inauspicious conditions and to content himself with that.
To this estimate exception may be taken on the ground that it underrates
an effort which, however insufficient, was well meant and did at any
rate point the way to a just resettlement of secular problems which the
war had made pressing and that it fails to take account of the
formidable obstacles encountered. The answer is, that like efforts had
proceeded more than once before from rulers of men whose will, seeing
that they were credited with possessing the requisite power, was assumed
to be adequate to the accomplishment of their aim, and that they had led
to nothing. The two Tsars, Alexander I at the Congress of Vienna, and
Nicholas II at the first Conference of The Hague, are instructive
instances. They also, like Mr. Wilson, it is assumed, would fain have
inaugurated a golden age of international right and moral fellowship if
verbal exhortations and arguments could have done it. The only kind of
fresh attempt, which after the failure of those two experiments could
fairly lay claim to universal sympathy, was one which should withdraw
the proposed politico-social rearrangement from the domain alike of
rhetoric and of empiricism and substitute a thorough systematic reform
covering all the aspects of international intercourse, including all the
civilized peoples on the globe, harmonizing the vital interests of these
and setting up adequate machinery to deal with the needs of this
enlarged and unified state system. And it would be fruitless to seek for
this in Mr. Wilson's handiwork. Indeed, it is hardly too much to affirm
that empiricism and opportunism were among the principal characteristics
of his policy in Paris, and that the outcome was what it must be.
Disputes and delays being inevitable, the Conference began its work at
leisure and was forced to terminate it in hot haste. Having spent months
chaffering, making compromises, and unmaking them again while the
peoples of the world were kept in painful suspense, all of them
condemned to incur ruinous expenditure and some to wage sanguinary wars,
the springs of industrial and commercial activity being kept sealed, the
delegates, menaced by outbreaks, revolts, and mutinies, began, after
months had been wasted, to speed up and get through their work without
adequate deliberation. They imagined that they could make up for the
errors of hesitancy and ignorance by moments of lightning-like
improvisation. Improvisation and haphazard conclusions were among their
chronic failings. Even in the early days of the Conference they had
promulgated decisions, the import and bearings of which they missed, and
when possible they canceled them again. Sometimes, however, the error
committed was irreparable. The fate reserved for Austria was a case in
point. By some curious process of reasoning it was found to be not
incompatible with the Wilsonian doctrine that German-Austria should be
forbidden to throw in her lot with the German Republic, this prohibition
being in the interest of France, who could not brook a powerful united
Teuton state. The wishes of the Austrian-Germans and the principle of
self-determination accordingly went for nothing. The representations of
Italy, who pleaded for that principle, were likewise brushed aside.
But what the delegates appear to have overlooked was the decisive
circumstance that they had already "on strategic grounds" assigned the
Brenner line to Italy and together with it two hundred and twenty
thousand Tyrolese of German race living in a compact mass--although a
much smaller alien element was deemed a bar to annexation in the case of
Poland. And what was more to the point, this allotment deprived Tyrol of
an independent economic existence, cutting it off from the southern
valley and making it tributary to Bavaria. Mr. Wilson, the public was
credibly informed, "took this grave decision without having gone deeply
into the matter, and he repents it bitterly. None the less, he can no
longer go back."[97]
Just as Tyrol's loss of Botzen and Meran made it dependent on Bavaria,
so the severance of Vienna from southern Moravia--- the source of its
cereal supplies, situated at a distance of only thirty-six
miles--transformed the Austrian capital into a head without a body. But
on the eminent anatomists who were to perform a variety of unprecedented
operations on other states, this spectacle had no deterrent effect.
Whenever a topic came up for discussion which could not be solved
offhand, it was referred to a commission, and in many cases the
commission was assisted by a mission which proceeded to the country
concerned and within a few weeks returned with data which were assumed
to supply materials enough for a decision, even though most of its
members were unacquainted with the language of the people whose
condition they had been studying. How quick of apprehension these envoys
were supposed to be may be inferred from the task with which the
American mission under General Harbord was charged, and the space of
time accorded him for achieving it. The members of this mission started
from Brest in the last decade of August for the Caucasus, making a stay
at Constantinople on the way, and were due back in Paris early in
October. During the few intervening weeks "the mission," General Harbord
said, "will go into every phase of the situation, political, racial,
economic, financial, and commercial. I shall also investigate highways,
harbors, agricultural and mining conditions, the question of raising an
Armenian army, policing problems, and the raw materials of Armenia."[98]
Only specialists who have some practical acquaintanceship with the
Caucasus, its conditions, peoples, languages, and problems, can
appreciate the herculean effort needed to tackle intelligently any one
of the many subjects all of which this improvised commission under a
military general undertook to master in four weeks. Never was a chaotic
world set right and reformed at such a bewildering pace.
Bad blood was caused by the distribution of places on the various
commissions. The delegates of the lesser nations, deeming themselves
badly treated, protested vehemently, and for a time passion ran high.
Squabbles of this nature, intensified by fierce discussions within the
Council, tidings of which reached the ears of the public outside,
disheartened those who were anxious for the speedy restoration of normal
conditions in a world that was fast decomposing. But the optimism of the
three principal plenipotentiaries was beyond the reach of the most
depressing stumbles and reverses. Their buoyant temper may be gaged from
Mr. Balfour's words, reported in the press: "It is true that there is a
good deal of discussion going on, but there is no real discord about
ideas or facts. We are agreed on the principal questions and there only
remains to find the words that embody the agreements."[99] These tidings
were welcomed at the time, because whatever defects were ascribed to the
distinguished statesmen of the Conference by faultfinders, a lack of
words was assuredly not among them. This cheery outlook on the future
reminded me of the better grounded composure of Pope Pius IX during the
stormy proceedings at the Vatican Council. A layman, having expressed
his disquietude at the unruly behavior of the prelates, the Pontiff
replied that it had ever been thus at ecclesiastical councils. "At the
outset," he went on to explain, "the members behave as men, wrangle and
quarrel, and nothing that they say or do is worth much. That is the
first act. The second is ushered in by the devil, who intensifies the
disorder and muddles things bewilderingly. But happily there is always a
third act in which the Holy Ghost descends and arranges everything for
the best."
The first two phases of the Conference's proceedings bore a strong
resemblance to the Pope's description, but as, unlike ecclesiastical
councils, it had no claim to infallibility, and therefore no third act,
the consequences to the world were deplorable. The Supreme Council never
knew how to deal with an emergency and every week unexpected incidents
in the world outside were calling for prompt action. Frequently it
contradicted itself within the span of a few days, and sometimes at one
and the same time its principal representatives found themselves in
complete opposition to one another. To give but one example: In April M.
Clemenceau was asked whether he approved the project of relieving
famine-stricken Russia. His answer was affirmative, and he signed the
document authorizing it. His colleagues, Messrs. Wilson, Lloyd George,
and Orlando, followed suit, and the matter seemed to be settled
definitely. But at the same time Mr. Hoover, who had been the ardent
advocate of the plan, officially received a letter from the French
Minister of Foreign Affairs signifying the refusal of the French
government to acquiesce in it.[100] On another occasion[101] the Supreme
Council thought fit to despatch a mission to Asia Minor in order to
ascertain the views of the populations of Syria and Mesopotamia on the
régime best suited to them. France, whose secular relations with Syria,
where she maintains admirable educational establishments, are said to
have endeared her to the population, objected to this expedient as
superfluous and mischievous. Superfluous because the Francophil
sentiments of the people are supposed to be beyond all doubt, and
mischievous because plebiscites or substitutes for plebiscites could
have only a bolshevizing effect on Orientals. Seemingly yielding to
these considerations, the Supreme Council abandoned the scheme and the
members of the mission made other plans.[102] After several weeks'
further reflection, however, the original idea was carried out, and the
mission visited the East.
The reader may be glad of a momentary glimpse of the interior of the
historic assembly afforded by those who were privileged to play a part
in it before it was transformed into a secret conclave of five, four, or
three. Within the doors of the chambers whence fateful decrees were
issued to the four corners of the earth the delegates were seated,
mostly according to their native languages, within earshot of the
special pleaders. M. Clemenceau, at the head of the table, has before
him a delegate charged with conducting the case, say, of Greece, Poland,
Serbia, or Czechslovakia. The delegate, standing in front of the stern
but mobile Premier, and encircled by other more or less attentive
plenipotentiaries, looks like a nervous schoolboy appearing before
exacting examiners, struggling with difficult questions and eager to
answer them satisfactorily. Suppose the first language spoken is French.
As many of the plenipotentiaries do not understand it, they cannot be
blamed for relaxing attention while it is being employed, and keeping up
a desultory conversation among themselves in idiomatic English, which
forms a running bass accompaniment to the voice, often finely modulated,
of the orator. Owing to this embarrassing language difficulty, as soon
as a delegate pauses to take his breath, his arguments and appeals are
done by M. Mantoux into English, and then it is the turn of the French
plenipotentiaries to indulge in a quiet chat until some question is put
in English, which has forthwith to be rendered into French, after which
the French reply is translated into English, and so on unendingly, each
group resuming its interrupted conversations alternately.
One delegate who passed several hours undergoing this ordeal said that
he felt wholly out of sympathy with the atmosphere at the Conference
Hall, adding: "While arguing or appealing to my country's arbiters I
felt I was addressing only a minority of the distinguished judges, while
the thoughts of the others were far away. And when the interpreter was
rendering, quickly, mechanically, and summarily, my ideas without any of
the explosive passion that shot them from my heart, I felt discouraged.
But suddenly it dawned on me that no judgment would be uttered on the
strength of anything that I had said or left unsaid. I remembered that
everything would be referred to a commission, and from that to a
sub-commission, then back again to the distinguished plenipotentiaries,"
Another delegate remarked: "Many years have elapsed since I passed my
last examination, but it came back to me in all its vividness when I
walked up to Premier Clemenceau and looked into his restless, flashing
eyes. I said to myself: When last I was examined I was painfully
conscious that my professors knew a lot more about the subject than I
did, but now I am painfully aware that they know hardly anything at all
and I am fervently desirous of teaching them. The task is arduous. It
might, however, save time and labor if the delegates would receive our
typewritten dissertations, read them quietly in their respective hotels,
and endeavor to form a judgment on the data they supply. Failing that,
I should like at least to provide them with a criterion of truth, for
after me will come an opponent who will flatly contradict me, and how
can they sift truth from error when the winnow is wanting? It is hard to
feel that one is in the presence of great satraps of destiny, but I made
an act of faith in the possibilities of genial quantities lurking behind
those everyday faces and of a sort of magic power of calling into being
new relations of peace and fellowship between individual classes and
peoples. It was an act of faith."