Four days before the official declaration of war on Germany by the Government of the United States, President Wilson made a speech before the American Congress which contained the following passage:43 “We shall fight ... for Democracy ... for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.” A few months later the same spokesman of a free people declared:44 “They (men everywhere) insist ... that no nation or people shall be robbed or punished because the irresponsible rulers of a single country have themselves done deep and abominable wrong.... The wrongs ... committed in this war ... cannot and must not be righted by the commission of similar wrongs against Germany and her allies.” Later still, when the victory of Democracy had become certain, a forecast of the terms of peace was given by the same authoritative voice:45 “In four years of conflict the whole world has been drawn in, and the common will of mankind has been substituted for the particular purposes of individual States. The issues must now be settled by no compromise or adjustment, but definitely and once for all. There must be a full acceptance of the principle that the interest of the weakest is as sacred as the interest of the strongest. That is what we mean when we speak of a permanent peace.”

These and a number of similar utterances had produced a deep effect throughout the world. The ruling classes in Europe professed to regard them as merely propaganda, and not to be taken seriously, but they could not escape the uneasy consciousness that their own methods in the past were being arraigned before an unpleasantly public court of justice. Moderate opinion in all countries was disposed to welcome these bold statements of democratic principles as furnishing a convenient bridge to a more advanced stage in political evolution, views which would have been condemned as sentimental, and even anarchic, in a humbler social reformer, on the lips of a President were considered as a statesman’s recognition of the logic of hard facts. The masses thought they were the “plain people,” for whom and to whom the President had spoken, and in their hearts had risen a great hope.

When Mr. Wilson first arrived in Europe huge crowds acclaimed him, and, making due allowance for the cynical, the curious and indifferent, these crowds contained a far from insignificant proportion of ardent, enthusiastic spirits, who welcomed him not as a President or a politician, but as the bearer of a message, not as a Rabbi with a doctrine made up of teachings in the synagogues, but as a latter-day Messiah come to drive forth the money-changers and intriguers from the temple of a righteous peace. Eager idealists believed that the victory of democracy had set a period to the evils resulting from autocratic forms of government, that with the termination of the war the topmost block had been placed on a pyramid of errors, that a real master-builder had appeared, who would lay the foundations of a cleaner, better world. They saw in him the champion of decency and morality, a doughty champion, strong in the backing of millions of free people, who had seen liberty in danger, and had sent their men across an ocean to fight for freedom in an older world in torment. They were grateful and offered him their services, loyally and unreservedly, asking but one thing—to be shown the way. History contains no parallel to this movement. Savanarola and Rienzi had appealed to local, or at most national feeling. Here was a man who stood for something universal and inspiring, who was more than a heroic priest, more than the Tribune of a people, a man who, while enjoying personal security, could speak and act for the welfare of all peoples in the name of right. For such causes, men in the past have suffered persecution and have been faithful unto death.

No Peace Conference has ever undertaken a more stupendous task than that which confronted the delegates of the Allied States in Paris in January, 1919. Central Europe was seething with revolution and slowly dying of starvation. Beyond lay Russia, unknown yet full of portents, more terrible to many timorous souls than ever Germany had been. The war had come to a sudden and unexpected end, and enemy territory had not been invaded save at extremities which were not vital points. The Central Empires and their Allies had collapsed from internal causes. Germany and Austria could not, for the moment, oppose invasion, which had lost all its terrors for distracted populations, who hoped that French and British soldiers would, by their presence, maintain law and order and ensure supplies of food. On the other hand, neither the Serbs nor the Rumanians had had their territorial aspirations satisfied during the progress of the war. Both races had followed the usual Balkan custom by invading the territories they claimed during the armistice; this method, when employed against Hungarians, involved the use of force; it also embittered relations between themselves where, as in the Banat, their claims clashed and overlapped. Further north, the Czecho-Slovaks had proclaimed their independence, and Poland was being resurrected; the frontiers of both these States were vague and undefined, but their appetites were unlimited, and Teschen, with its coalfields, was a pocket in dispute.

Not only had the Peace Conference to endeavour to prevent excessive and premature encroachment on enemy territory by Allied States, it had also to compose serious differences between the Western Powers in regard to the Adriatic coast, Syria, and Asia Minor arising out of secret treaties.

These considerations, though embarrassing for the representatives of Great Britain, France and Italy, did not affect President Wilson to the same extent; in fact they rather strengthened his position and confirmed the expectation that he would be the real arbiter of the Conference. His speeches had, in the opinion of innumerable men and women, indicated the only solution of the world-problem. The “Fourteen Points” had outlined, without inconvenient precision, a settlement of international questions; he was the head of a State untrammelled by secret treaties, the only State not on the verge of bankruptcy, a State which could furnish both moral and material aid. When M. Albert Thomas said that the choice lay between Wilson and Lenine, he may have been guilty of exaggeration, but he expressed a feeling which was general and real. Whether that feeling was justified, the future alone will show.

In the Declaration of September 27, 1918, President Wilson stated: “All who sit at the Peace table must be ready to pay the price, and the price is impartial justice, no matter whose interest is crossed.” Later on in the same Declaration he added: “the indispensable instrumentality is a ‘League of Nations,’ but it cannot be formed now.” Five conditions of peace were set forth; of these, the third laid down that there could be no alliances or covenants within the League of Nations, and the Declaration concluded with an appeal to the Allies: “I hope that the leaders of the Allied Governments will speak as plainly as I have tried to speak, and say whether my statement of the issues is in any degree mistaken.”

The inference, drawn by the ordinary man after perusing this Declaration, was that its author expected the Conference to deal with each and every question on its merits, that the “League of Nations” would eventually be the instrument employed in reaching the final settlement, and that, following on the establishment of the League, all previous alliances would cease to exist and future alliances would be precluded. The questioning form of the concluding sentence suggested doubts as to the attitude of the Associated Powers, but the presence of the President at the peace table served as presumptive evidence that those doubts had been set at rest.

A “League of Nations” was, undoubtedly, the ideal instrument for achieving a just settlement of the many and varied questions which confronted the Peace Conference, but a “League,” or “Society of Nations” as defined by Lord Robert Cecil,46 could not be created before the conclusion of a Preliminary Peace with Germany and her Allies, with, as its corollary, the inclusion of, at least, Germany, Austria, and Hungary within the League. In the words of Lord Robert Cecil, such a Society would be incomplete, and proportionately ineffective, unless every civilized State joined it.

The formation of a full-fledged League required time. Further, in the frame of mind which prevailed in all the Allied and Associated States, a real “Society of Nations,” implying “friendly association” with the enemy peoples, as distinguished from their late “irresponsible Governments,” was impossible. An alternative did, however, exist—an alternative for which a precedent could be found and which needed moral leadership rather than cumbrous machinery for its application. This alternative would have consisted of three processes: the conclusion of a Preliminary Peace with Germany and her Allies, combined with suspension of blockade; the admission to the Peace Conference of delegates representing the different parts of the German Empire, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey; collaboration with these delegates in the settlement of territorial readjustments in accordance with the principles enunciated in President Wilson’s speeches and the “Fourteen Points.” The Congress of Vienna had set the precedent by admitting to its councils Talleyrand, the representative of a conquered State which had changed its form of government in the hour of defeat. The conclusion of a “Preliminary Peace” presented no difficulty. Germany had reached the lowest pitch of weakness; her military and naval forces had ceased to exist, her population was dependent on the Allies for supplies of food, she was torn by internal dissensions, and the Socialist and Democratic parties had gained the upper hand. Bavaria was showing separatist tendencies, and her example might be followed by other German States. The same conditions prevailed in the other enemy countries to an even more marked degree. In short, the Allies could have counted on acceptance of any preliminary peace terms which they might have chosen to impose. They could have ensured their fulfilment, not only by the maintenance of military forces on provisional and temporary frontiers, but also by the threat of a reimposition of an effective blockade. In an atmosphere free from the blighting influences of an armistice, dispassionate treatment of a mass of ethnical questions would have been possible. An appeal could have been made to the common sense and interests of the enemy peoples, through their statesmen and publicists, which would have disarmed reaction, and which would have made it possible to utilize the more enlightened elements in the key-States of Central Europe for the attainment of a durable peace. A Peace Conference so composed would have been the embryo of a true “Society of Nations,” a fitting instrument for the practical application of theories not new nor ill-considered, whose development had been retarded in peaceful, prosperous times, and which now were imperatively demanded by multitudes of suffering people weighed down by sorrow and distress.

Mr. Wilson does not seem to have considered any alternative to the immediate formulation of a covenant of the “League of Nations.” He left the all-important question of peace in abeyance, and devoted his energies to the preparation of a document which would serve as an outward and visible sign of personal success. Perhaps he was dismayed by the opposition, in reactionary Allied circles, to moral theories considered by officials to be impracticable and even dangerous, however useful they might once have been for purposes of propaganda. He may have been paralysed amid unaccustomed surroundings where he was not the supreme authority. At any rate, he neglected to use a weapon whose potency he, of all rulers, should have known—the weapon of publicity, which was, as ever, at his service and would have rallied to the causes he espoused the support and approval of sincere reformers in every class. He worked in secret and secured adhesion to a draft of the covenant of the “League of Nations,” whose colourless and non-committal character betrayed official handiwork.

The man who had arrived in Paris as the bearer of a message whose echoes had filled the world with hope, left France the bearer of a “scrap of paper.” He returned to find his authority lessened. Before, he had stood alone; he came back to take his place as one of the “Big Four.” It is given to few men to act as well as to affirm.

Mr. Lloyd George was unable to help the President; his election speeches had been the reverse of a moral exposition of the issues, and the Parliamentary majority they had helped to create allowed no lapses into Liberalism. More than a year had passed since the Prime Minister of Great Britain had stated that the British people were not fighting “a war of aggression against the German people ... or to destroy Austria-Hungary, or to deprive Turkey of its capital or of the rich and renowned lands of Asia Minor and Thrace which are predominantly Turkish in race.” Teschen had not been heard of then, and the demands of Italy and M. Venizelos were either forgotten or ignored. Mr. Lloyd George’s native sense and insight would have avoided many pitfalls; the Bullit revelations did no more than bare justice to his acumen in regard to Russia, but he was terrorized by a section of the British Press, which held him relentlessly to vote-catching pledges, however reckless or extravagant.

The Prime Minister of the French Republic was pre-occupied with revenging past humiliations, with retrieving the fortunes of his country and making it secure. He did lip-service to the “League of Nations,” but talked of it with sardonic humour, and did it infinite harm. A dominating personality and a prodigious intellect enriched by wide experience were lost to the cause of human progress. No rare occurrence, when the possessors of these gifts are old.

With the progress of the Conference, M. Clemenceau’s influence became stronger. He had made fewer public speeches than his colleagues, and perhaps that simplified his task. “Certain it is that words, as a Tartar’s bow, do shoot back upon the understanding of the wisest, and mightily entangle and pervert the judgment.”

While precious months were being devoted to framing the draft covenant of the League of Nations, Commissions appointed by the Peace Conference had been busy preparing reports on multifarious points of detail. These reports were the work of experts, and could not fail to influence the final decisions of the Supreme Council; as a matter of fact, they were followed textually in some of the weightiest decisions reached. The men who prepared them were in no sense statesmen, they were trammelled by official routine and exposed to all manner of outside influences. The whole tone of life in Paris was inimical to an objective attitude. Clamours for vengeance distorted the natural desire of honest men in France and Belgium for security against future aggression by a resuscitated Germany. The big industrial interests wanted to stifle German trade and at the same time exact a huge indemnity; they exploited the expectation of the working classes that, as a result of victory, Allied industry would be given a fair start in future competition with the enemy States.

In the absence of any higher guidance, either moral or informed, statecraft was entirely lacking in the proceedings of the Conference, yet the situation was such that, if adroitly handled, measures were possible which would have contributed powerfully to the security of France and Belgium, by attenuating and dissipating reactionary elements in the German Empire. Advantage might have been taken of the distrust inspired by Prussia in the other German States, to create autonomous and neutral zones in the Palatinate and the territory formerly comprised in the Hanseatic League, to assist Bavaria to shake off Prussian hegemony, and become a component with German Austria of a new Catholic State in South-Eastern Europe, where conflicting national aims and unruly populations needed a counterweight.

No such measures were taken. The Conference was obsessed with details. Every conceivable question was discussed before the one that was most urgent—the conclusion of some form of peace which would let the world resume its normal life. A state of affairs was protracted which encouraged the greedy and unscrupulous, which checked any expression of opinion by the “plain people” of President Wilson’s speeches, which gave an opening to militarists, jingo journalists, and politicians, whose ideas were those of German Junkers and who still believed in war.

Jungle law reasserted itself. In an allegoric sense, the Conference was like a jungle through which a forest fire had passed, destroying the scanty verdure it had once possessed, leaving bare, blackened stumps too hard to burn. Some of the larger, fiercer beasts had been expelled; a few remained, and they, too, had been changed. A solitary eagle had descended from his distant eyrie and, like a parrot, screeched incessantly. “Fiume, Fiume, Fiume”—a chuckle followed, it said—“Fourteen Points” but this was an obvious aside. The performance was disappointing; polished and well-turned phrases had been expected from so great a bird. The lion’s majestic mien had altered somewhat, his movements were uncertain; from time to time his eyes sought, furtively, a pack of jackals, who should have hunted with him, but, of late, they had grown insolent to their natural leader and reviled him in a high-pitched, daily wail. An old and wounded tiger roamed about the jungle; his strength, so far from being impaired, had become almost leonine; sometimes the jackals joined his own obedient cubs, and then he snarled contentedly while the lion roared with jealousy and rage. The bear was absent; he had turned savage through much suffering, and the wolves who prowled around the outskirts of the jungle prevented him from entering; they howled with terror whenever he approached, and wanted the lion and the tiger to help to kill this dangerous type of bear. A yellow dragon moaned in the far distance, but was unheeded; he was no more a peril and had little left for the other beasts to steal. Jubilant and shrill, the crowing of a cock was heard above the babel of the jungle, announcing, to all who cared to listen, the dawn of fifteen years of liberty in the valley of the Saar.

The Peace Treaties promulgated by the Conference at Paris are impregnated with the atmosphere in which they were drawn up—an atmosphere charged with suspicion and hatred, fear and greed; not one of them is in the spirit of the League of Nations. The Treaty with Germany, in particular, discloses the predominance of French influence in Allied councils. An old French nobleman once remarked, “Les Bourgeois sont terribles lors qu’ils ont eu peur.” The conditions imposed on a democratized and utterly defeated Germany are terrible indeed, but curiously ineffective; they are a timid attempt to modify vindictiveness by a half-hearted application of President Wilson’s ethical principles; they satisfy no one; this is their one redeeming feature, since it shows that they might have been even more vindictive and still more futile for the achievement of their purpose, which was, presumably, a lasting peace. Militarists and reactionaries could not conceive a state of peace which did not repose on force and the military occupation of large tracts of German territory. They were twenty years behind the time. They did not realize that armies in democratic countries consist of human beings who observe and think, who cannot be treated as machines, and bidden to subordinate their reasoning faculties to the designs of a few selfish and ambitious men. Liberal thinkers, on the other hand, were shocked at Treaties which inflamed the hearts of seventy million German-speaking people with hatred and a desire for revenge, which cemented German unity, which aroused a widespread irredentism and gave an incentive to industrious, efficient populations to devote their time and efforts to preparations for a future war and not to the arts of peace. Such men were neither visionaries nor sentimentalists, they were practical men of affairs, who foresaw that security could not be attained by visiting the sins of outworn mediaeval Governments on the heads of their innocent victims throughout Central Europe; that by the employment of such methods the “League of Nations” was turned into a farce; that exasperation would foster and provoke recalcitrance; that Germany would be a magnet to every dissatisfied State; that other leagues and combinations might be formed, on which it would be impossible to enforce a limitation of their armaments. They pointed out that the imposition of fabulous indemnities was two-edged, that payment of nine-tenths of the sums suggested would have to be made in manufactured goods or raw materials, a mode of payment which, in the end, might be more profitable to those that paid than to the peoples who received.

Inaugurated in an idealism which may have been exaggerated but was none the less sincere, the Peace Conference has blighted the hope and faith of “plain people” everywhere, and has consecrated cant. Respectability has been enthroned amid circumstances of wealth and power; in its smug and unctuous presence morality has found no place. The foundations of a clearer, better world have not been laid; the apex has been placed on a pyramid of errors, on which nothing can be built.

Versailles was chosen as the setting for a historic ceremony—the signature of the Peace Treaty with what was still the German Empire, though the imperial throne was vacant and a workman presided at the councils of an Imperial Government. The choice was not without significance. Democracy had triumphed, and, in the hour of victory, had followed the example of autocratic rulers when making peace with other autocrats. It was therefore only fitting that this Peace Treaty, whose terms are inspired by the spirit of the past, should be signed in a palace of the Kings of France.

A palace on an artificial eminence, where once had been flat marshes and wild forest land, built by a monarch to whom nothing was impossible, and for the indulgence of whose whims no cost was deemed excessive, either in money or in human lives. Viewed from the west on misty autumn evenings, it seems an unearthly fabric; the exquisite harmony of its line crowns and completes the surrounding landscape, floating, as by enchantment, above the tree tops, as light in texture as the clouds. A palace such as children dream of, when fairy stories haunt their minds, peopling the world with princes young and valiant, princesses beautiful and wayward, whose parents are virtuous Kings and Queens and live in palaces like Versailles.

Below the terraces, a broad alley stretches westward and meets the horizon at two poplars. Beyond these isolated trees an empty sky is seen. The poplars stand like sentinels guarding the confines of a vast enclosure, where art and nature have conspired to shut out the ugly things in life. A French Abbé, whose cultured piety ensures him a welcome in this world and admission to the next, said that the royalty of France had passed between and beyond those poplars—into nothingness.

Amid a galaxy of statues of monarchs, statesmen, warriors, goddesses and nymphs, only one piece of sculpture serves as a reminder that a suffering world exists—the face of a woman of the people, graven in bass-relief upon the central front. An old and tragic face, seamed with deep wrinkles, sullen, inscrutable, one can imagine it hunched between shoulders bowed by toil and shrunk by joyless motherhood. The eyes of stone, to which a sculptor’s art has given life, are hard and menacing, hopeless but not resigned; beneath their steadfast gaze has passed all that was splendid in a bygone age, the greatest autocrats on earth and women of quite a different sort.

There were many faces in France and other countries which wore this same expression, even after the triumph of Democracy over the autocrats of Central Europe. They were not to be seen, however, on the terraces of the palace when the Treaty of Peace with Germany was signed in the “Hall of Mirrors,” where men in black were met together on yet another “Field of Blackbirds,” where, after months of bickering, the larger birds were expounding to their weaker brethren the latest infamies of Jungle Law. The well-dressed men and women who thronged those terraces were something between the proud aristocrats who created the legend of Versailles and the masses of the underworld who have survived them, and yet they seemed further from the two extremes than the extremes were from each other; they were not of the stuff of leaders and were too prosperous to be led; their manner was almost timid to the soldiers on duty at this ceremony, who, though men of the people, were disdainful to civilians after four years of war. One felt that this was a class which might, at no distant date, attempt to imitate some Roman Emperors and pay Pretorian Guards. A catastrophic war had contained no lesson for these people; for them, its culmination at Versailles was far more a social than a political event; they took no interest in politics, they wanted security for property and a Government of strong men who would keep the masses well in hand. They were not real democrats, and they cheered both long and loud, when the men, who between them had betrayed Democracy, emerged from the stately palace to see the fountains play.