were discussed out-of-doors by an interested and watchful public, and
the conviction was profound and widespread that the President, having
set his hand to the plow so solemnly and publicly, and having promised a
harvest of far-reaching reforms, would not look back, however
intractable the ground and however meager the crop. But confronted with
serious obstacles, he flinched from his task, and therein, to my
thinking, lay his weakness. If he had come prepared to assert his
personal responsibility, to unfold his scheme, to have it amply and
publicly discussed, to reject pusillanimous compromise in the sphere of
execution, and to appeal to the peoples of the world to help him to
carry it out, the last phase of his policy would have been worthy of
the first, and might conceivably have inaugurated the triumph of the
ideas which the indolent and the men of little faith rejected as
incapable of realization. To this hardy course, which would have
challenged the approbation of all that is best in the world, there was
an alternative: Mr. Wilson might have confessed that his judgment was at
fault, mankind not being for the moment in a fitting mood to practise
the new tenets, that a speedy peace with the enemy was the first and
most pressing duty, and that a world-parliament should be convened for a
later date to prepare the peoples of the universe for the new ordering.
But he chose neither alternative. At first it was taken for granted that
in the twilight of the Conference hall he had fought valiantly for the
principles which he had propounded as the groundwork of the new
politico-social fabric, and that it was only when he found himself
confronted with the insuperable antagonism of his colleagues of France
and Britain that he reluctantly receded from his position and resolved
to show himself all the more unbending to the envoys of the lesser
countries. But this assumption was refuted by State-Secretary Lansing,
who admitted to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the
President's Fourteen Points, which he had vowed to carry out, were not
even discussed at the Conference. The outcome of this attitude--one
cannot term it a policy--was to leave the best of the ideas which he
stood for in solution, to embitter every ally except France and Britain,
and to scatter explosives all over the world.
To this dwarfing parliamentary view of world-policy Mr. Lloyd George
likewise fell a victim. But his fault was not so glaring. For it should
in fairness be remembered that it was not he who first preached the
advent of the millennium. He had only given it a tardy and cold assent,
qualified by an occasional sally of keen pleasantry. Down to the last
moment, as we saw, he not only was unaware that the Covenant would be
inserted in the Peace Treaty, but he was strongly of the opinion, as
indeed were M. Pichon and others, that the two instruments were
incompatible. He also apparently inclined to the belief that spiritual
and moral agencies, if not wholly impotent to bring about the requisite
changes in the politico-social world, could not effect the
transformation for a long while to come, and that in the interval it
behooved the governments to fall back upon the old system of so-called
equilibrium, which, after Germany's collapse, meant an informal kind of
Anglo-Saxon overlordship of the world and a _pax Britannica_ in Europe.
As for his action at the Conference, in so far as it did not directly
affect the well-being of the British Empire, which was his first and
main care, one might describe it as one of general agreement with Mr.
Wilson. He actually threw it into that formula when he said that
whenever the interests of the British Empire permitted he would like to
find himself at one with the United States. It was on that occasion that
the person addressed warned him against identifying the President with
the people of the United States.
In truth, it was difficult to follow the distinguished American
idealist, because one seldom knew whither he would lead. Neither,
apparently, did he himself. Some of his own countrymen in Paris held
that he had always been accustomed to follow, never to guide. Certainly
at the Conference his practice was to meet the more powerful of his
contradictors on their own ground and come to terms with them, so as to
get at least a part of what he aimed at, and that he accepted, even when
the instalment was accorded to him not as such, but as a final
settlement. So far as one can judge by his public acts and by the
admissions of State-Secretary Lansing, he cannot have seriously
contemplated staking the success of his mission on the realization of
his Fourteen Points. The manner in which he dealt with his Covenant,
with the French demand for concrete military guaranties and with secret
treaties, all afford striking illustrations of his easy temper. Before
quitting Paris for Washington he had maintained that the Covenant as
drafted was satisfactory, nay, he contended that "not even a period
could be changed in the agreement." The Monroe Doctrine, he held, needed
no special stipulation. But as soon as Senator Lodge and others took
issue with him on the subject, he shifted his position and hedged that
doctrine round with defenses which cut off a whole continent from the
purview of the League, which is nothing if not cosmic in its
functions.[115] Again, there was to be no alliance. The French Premier
foretold that there would be one. Mr. Wilson, who was in England at the
time, answered him in a speech declaring that the United States would
enter into no alliance which did not include all the world: "no
combination of power which is not a combination of all of us." Well,
since then he became a party to a kind of triple alliance and in the
judgment of many observers it constitutes the main result of the
Conference. In the words of an American press organ: "Clemenceau got
virtually everything he asked. President Wilson virtually dropped his
own program, and adopted the French and British, both of them
imperialistic."[116]
Again, when the first commission of experts reported upon the frontiers
of Poland, the British Premier objected to a section of the "corridor,"
on the ground that as certain districts contained a majority of Germans
their annexation would be a danger to the future peace and therefore to
Poland herself, and also on the ground that it would run counter to one
of Mr. Wilson's fundamental points; the President, who at that time
dissented from Mr. Lloyd George, rose and remarked that his principles
must not be construed too literally. "When I said that Poland must be
restored, I meant that everything indispensable to her restoration must
be accorded. Therefore, if that should involve the incorporation of a
number of Germans in Polish territory, it cannot be helped, for it is
part of the restoration. Poland must have access to the sea by the
shortest route, and everything else which that implies." None the less,
the British Premier, whose attitude toward the claims of the Poles was
marked by a degree of definiteness and persistency which could hardly be
anticipated in one who had never even heard of Teschen before the year
1919, maintained his objections with emphasis and insistence, until Mr.
Wilson and M. Clemenceau gave in.
Or take the President's way of dealing with the non-belligerent states.
Before leaving Paris for Washington, Mr. Wilson, officially questioned
by one of his colleagues at an official sitting as to whether the
neutrals would also sign the Covenant, replied that only the Allies
would be admitted to affix their signatures. "Don't you think it would
be more conducive to the firm establishment of the League if the
neutrals were also made parties to it now?" insisted the
plenipotentiary. "No, I do not," answered the President. "I think that
it would be conferring too much honor on them, and they don't deserve
it." The delegate was unfavorably impressed by this reply. It seemed
lacking in breadth of view. Still, it was tenable on certain narrow,
formal grounds. But what he could not digest was the eagerness with
which Mr. Wilson, on his return from Washington, abandoned his way of
thinking and adopted the opposite view. Toward the end of April the
delegates and the world were surprised to learn that not only would
Spain be admitted to the orthodox fold, but that she would have a voice
in the management of the flock with a seat in the Council. The chief of
the Portuguese delegation[117] at once delivered a trenchant protest
against this abrupt departure from principle, and as a jurisconsult
stigmatized the promotion of Spain to a voice in the Council as an
irregularity, and then retired in high dudgeon.
Thus the grave reproach cannot be spared Mr. Wilson of having been weak,
vague, and inconsistent with himself. He constituted himself the supreme
judge of a series of intricate questions affecting the organization and
tranquillity of the European Continent, as he had previously done in the
case of Mexico, with the results we know. This authority was accorded to
him--with certain reservations--in virtue of the exalted position which
he held in a state disposing of vast financial and economic resources,
shielded from some of the dangers that continually overhang European
nations, and immune from the immediate consequences of the mistakes it
might commit in international politics. For every continental people in
Europe is in some measure dependent on the good-will of the United
States, and therefore anxious to deserve it by cultivating the most
friendly relations with its chief. This predisposition on the part of
his wards was an asset that could have been put to good account. It was
a guaranty of a measure of success which would have satisfied a generous
ambition; it would have enabled him to effect by a wise policy what
revolution threatened to accomplish by violence, and to canalize and
lead to fruitful fields the new-found strength of the proletarian
masses.
The compulsion of working with others is often a wholesome corrective.
It helps one to realize the need of accommodating measures to people's
needs. But Mr. Wilson deliberately segregated himself from the nations
for whose behoof he was laboring, and from some of their authorized
representatives. And yet the aspirations and conceptions of a large
section of the masses differed very considerably from those of the two
statesmen with whom he was in close collaboration. His avowed aims were
at the opposite pole to those of his colleagues. To reconcile
internationalism and nationalism was sheer impossible. Yet instead of
upholding his own, taking the peoples into his confidence, and sowing
the good seed which would certainly have sprouted up in the fullness of
time, he set himself, together with his colleagues, to weld
contradictories and contributed to produce a synthesis composed of
disembodied ideas, disintegrated communities, embittered nations,
conflicting states, frenzied classes, and a seething mass of discontent
throughout the world.
Mr. Wilson has fared ill with his critics, who, when in quest of
explanations of his changeful courses, sought for them, as is the wont
of the average politician, in the least noble parts of human nature. In
his case they felt especially repelled by his imperial aloofness, the
secrecy of his deliberations, and the magisterial tone of his judgments,
even when these were in flagrant contradiction with one another.
Obstinacy was also included among the traits which were commonly
ascribed to him. As a matter of fact he was a very good listener, an
intelligent questioner, and amenable to argument whenever he felt free
to give practical effect to the conclusions. When this was not the case,
arguments necessarily failed of their effect, and on these occasions
considerations of expediency proved a lever sufficient to sway his
decision. But, like his more distinguished colleagues, he had to rely
upon counsel from outside, and in his case, as in theirs, the official
adviser was not always identical with the real prompter. He, too, as we
saw, set aside the findings of the commissions when they disagreed with
his own. In a word, Mr. Wilson's fatal stumble was to have sacrificed
essentials in order to score on issues of secondary moment; for while
success enabled him to obtain his paper Covenant from his co-delegates
in Paris, and to bring back tangible results to Washington, it lost him
the leadership of the world. The cost of this deplorable weakness to
mankind can be estimated only after its worst effects have been added up
and appraised.
In matters affecting the destinies of the lesser states Mr. Wilson was
firm as a rock. Prom the position once taken up nothing could move him.
Their economic dependence on his own country rendered their arguments
pointless and lent irresistible force to his injunctions. Greece's
dispute with Bulgaria was a classic instance. The Bulgars repaired to
Paris more as claimants in support of indefeasible rights than as
vanquished enemies summoned to learn the conditions imposed on them by
the nations which they had betrayed and assailed. Victory alone could
have justified their territorial pretensions; defeat made them
grotesque. All at once, however, it was bruited abroad that President
Wilson had become Bulgaria's intercessor and favored certain of her
exorbitant claims. One of these was for the annexation of part of the
coast of western Thrace, together with a seaport at the expense of the
Greeks, the race which had resided on the seaboard for twenty-five
hundred consecutive years. M. Venizelos offered them instead one
commercial outlet[118] and special privileges in another, and the
plenipotentiaries of Great Britain, France, and Japan considered the
offer adequate.
But Mr. Wilson demurred. A commercial outlet through foreign territory,
he said, might possibly be as good as a direct outlet through one's own
territory in peace-time, but not in time of war, and, after all, one
must bear in mind the needs of a country during hostilities. In the
mouth of the champion of universal peace that was an unexpected
argument. It had been employed by Italy in favor of her claim to Fiume.
Mr. Wilson then met it by invoking the economic requirements of
Jugoslavia, and by declaring that the Treaty was being devised for
peace, not for war, that the League of Nations would hinder wars, or at
the very least supply the deficiencies of those states which had
sacrificed strategical positions for humanitarian aims. But in the case
of Bulgaria he was taking what seems the opposite position and
transgressing his own principle of nationality in order to maintain it.
Mr. Wilson, pursuing his line of argument, further pointed out that the
Supreme Council had not accepted as sufficient for Poland an outlet
through German territory, but had created the city-state of Dantzig in
order to confer a greater degree of security upon the Polish republic.
To that M. Venizelos replied that there was no parity between the two
instances. Poland had no outlet to the sea except through Dantzig, and
could not, therefore, allow that one to remain in the hands of an
unfriendly nation, whereas Bulgaria already possessed two very
commodious ports, Varna and Burgas, on the Black Sea, which becomes a
free sea in virtue of the internationalization of the straits. The
possession of a third outlet on the Ægean could not, therefore, be
termed a vital question for his protégée. Thus the comparison with
Poland was irrelevant.
If Poland, which is a very much greater state than Bulgaria, can live
and prosper with a single port, and that not her own--if Rumania, which
is also a much more numerous and powerful nation, can thrive with a
single issue to the sea, by what line of argument, M. Venizelos asked,
can one prove that little Bulgaria requires three or four exits, and
that her need justifies the abandonment to her tender mercies of seven
hundred and fifty thousand Greeks and the violation of one of the
fundamental principles underlying the new moral ordering.
Compliance with Bulgaria's demand would prevent Greece from including
within her boundaries the three-quarters of a million Greeks who have
dwelt in Thrace for twenty-five centuries, preserving their nationality
intact through countless disasters and tremendous cataclysms. Further,
the Greek Premier, taking a leaf from Wilson's book, turned to the
aspect which the problem would assume in war-time. Bulgaria, he argued,
is essentially a continental state, whose defense does not depend upon
naval strength, whereas Greece contains an island population of nearly a
million and a half and looks for protection against aggression chiefly
to naval precautions. In case of war, Bulgaria, if her claim to an issue
on the Ægean were allowed, could with her submarines delay or hinder the
transport and concentration in Macedonia of Greek forces from the
islands and thus place Greece in a position of dangerous inferiority.
Lastly, if Greece's claims in Thrace were rejected, she would have a
population of 1,790,000 souls outside her national boundaries--that is
to say, more than one-third of the population which is within her state.
Would this be fair? Of the total population of Bulgarian and Turkish
Thrace the Turks and Greeks together form 85 per cent., the Bulgars only
6 per cent., and the latter nowhere in compact masses. Moreover--and
this ought to have clinched the matter--the Hellenic population formed
an absolute as well as a relative majority in the year 1919.
These arguments and various other considerations drawn from the
inordinate ambitions, the savage cruelty,[119] and the Punic faith of
the Bulgars convinced the British, French, and Japanese delegates of the
soundness of Greece's pleas, and they sided with M. Venizelos. But Mr.
Wilson clung to his idea with a tenacity which could not be justified by
argument, and was concurrently explained by motives irrelevant to the
merits of the case. Whether the influence of Bulgarophil American
missionaries and strong religious leanings were at the root of his
insistence, as was generally assumed, or whether other considerations
weighed with him, is immaterial. And yet it is worth recording that a
Bulgarian journal[120] announced with the permission of the governmental
censor that the American missionaries in Bulgaria and the professors of
Robert College of Constantinople had so primed the American delegates at
the Conference on the question of Thrace, and generally on the Bulgarian
problem, that all M. Venizelos's pains to convince them of the justice
of his contention would be lost labor."[121]
However this may be, Mr. Wilson's attitude was the subject of adverse
comment throughout Europe. His implied claim to legislate for the world
and to take over its moral leadership earned for him the epithet of
"Dictator," and provoked such epigrammatic comments among his own
countrymen and the French as this: "Louis XIV said, 'I am the state!'
Mr. Wilson, outdoing him, exclaimed, 'I am all the states!'"
The necessity of winning over dissentient colleagues to his grandiose
scheme of world reorganization and of satisfying their demands, which
were of a nature to render that scheme abortive, was the most
influential agency in impairing his energies and upsetting his plans.
This remark assumes what unhappily seems a fact, that those plans were
mainly mechanical. It is certain that they made no provision for
directly influencing the masses, for giving them sympathetic guidance,
and enabling them to suffuse with social sentiments the aspirations and
strivings which were chiefly of the materialistic order, with a view to
bringing about a spiritual transformation of the social basis. Indeed we
have no evidence that the need of such a transformation of the basis of
political thought, which was still rooted in the old order, was grasped
by any of those who set their hand to the legislative part of the work.
These unfavorable impressions were general. Almost every step
subsequently taken by the Conference confirmed them, and long before the
Treaty was presented to the Germans, public confidence was gone in the
ability of the Supreme Council to attain any of the moral victories over
militarism, race-hatred, and secret intrigues which its leaders had
encouraged the world to expect.
"The leaders of the Conference," wrote an influential press organ,[122]
"are under suspicion. They may not know it, but it is true. The
suspicion is doubtless unjust, but it exists. What exists is a fact; and
men who ignore facts are not statesmen. The only way to deal with facts
is to face them. The more unpleasant they are the more they need to be
faced.
"Some of the Conference leaders are suspected of having, at various
times and in various circumstances, thought more of their own personal
and political positions and ambitions than of the rapid and practical
making of peace. They are suspected, in a word, of a tendency to
subordinate policy to politics.
"In regard to some important matters they are suspected of having no
policy. They are also suspected of unwillingness to listen to their own
competent advisers, who could lay down for them a sound policy. Some of
them are even suspected of being under the spell of some benumbing
influence that paralyzes their will and befogs their minds, when high
resolve and clear visions are needful."
Another accusation of the same tenor was thus formulated: "In various
degrees[123] and with different qualities of guilt all the Allied and
Associated leaders have dallied with dishonesty. While professing to
seek naught save the welfare of mankind, they have harbored thoughts of
self-interest. The result has been a progressive loss of faith in them
by their own peoples severally, and by the Allied, Associated, and
neutral peoples jointly. The tide of public trust in them has reached
its lowest ebb."
At the Conference, as we saw, the President of the United States
possessed what was practically a veto on nearly all matters which left
the vital interests of Britain and France intact. And he frequently
exercised it. Thus the dispute about the Thracian settlement lay not
between Bulgaria and Greece, nor between Greece and the Supreme Council,
but between Greece and Mr. Wilson. In the quarrel over Fiume and the
Dalmatian coast it was the same. When the Shantung question came up for
settlement it was Mr. Wilson alone who dealt with it, his colleagues,
although bound by their promises to support Japan, having made him their
mouthpiece. The rigor he displayed in dealing with some of the smaller
countries was in inverse ratio to the indulgence he practised toward the
Great Powers. Not only were they peremptorily bidden to obey without
discussion the behests which had been brought to their cognizance, but
they were ordered, as we saw, to promise to execute other injunctions
which might be issued by the Supreme Council on certain matters in the
future, the details of which were necessarily undetermined.
In order to stifle any velleities of resistance on the part of their
governments, they were notified that America's economic aid, of which
they were in sore need, would depend on their docility. It is important
to remember that it was the motive thus clearly presented that
determined their formal assent to a policy which they deprecated. A
Russian statesman summed up the situation in the words: "It is an
illustration of one of our sayings, 'Whose bread I eat, his songs I
sing.'" Thus it was reported in July that an agreement come to by the
financial group Morgan with an Italian syndicate for a yearly advance to
Italy of a large sum for the purchase of American food and raw stuffs
was kept in abeyance until the Italian delegation should accept such a
solution of the Adriatic problem as Mr. Wilson could approve. The
Russian and anti-Bolshevists were in like manner compelled to give their
assent to certain democratic dogmas and practices. It is also fair,
however, to bear in mind that whatever one may think of the wisdom of
the policy pursued by the President toward these peoples, the motives
that actuated it were unquestionably admirable, and the end in view was
their own welfare, as he understood it. It is all the more to be
regretted that neither the arguments nor the example of the autocratic
delegates were calculated to give these the slightest influence over the
thought or the unfettered action of their unwilling wards. The
arrangements carried out were entirely mechanical.
In the course of time after the vital interests of Britain, France, and
Japan had been disposed of, and only those of the "lesser states," in
the more comprehensive sense of this term, remained, President Wilson
exercised supreme power, wielding it with firmness and encountering no
gainsayer. Thus the peace between Italy and Austria was put off from
month to month because he--and only he--among the members of the Supreme
Council rejected the various projects of an arrangement. Into the merits
of this dispute it would be unfruitful to enter. That there was much to
be said for Mr. Wilson's contention, from the point of view of the
League of Nations, and also from that of the Jugoslavs, will not be
denied. That some of the main arguments to which he trusted his case
were invalidated by the concessions which he had made to other countries
was Italy's contention, and it cannot be thrust aside as untenable.