The principal Allied and Associated Powers, who took upon themselves the entire responsibility for imposing and securing the execution of the Treaty of Versailles, sent an exhaustive reply to the German counter-proposals on June 16, in which, as we have seen, some concessions were made in details, modifying the draft treaty. But these were slight. In this reply they said:

They [the victors] believe that it is not only a just settlement of the great war, but that it provides the basis upon which the peoples of Europe can live together in friendship and equality. At the same time it creates the machinery for the peaceful adjustment of all international problems by discussion and consent, whereby the settlement of 1919 itself can be modified from time to time to suit new facts and new conditions as they arise. It is frankly not based upon a general condonation of the events of 1914–1918. It would not be a peace of justice if it were. But it represents a sincere and deliberate attempt to establish “that reign of law, based upon the consent of the governed, and sustained by the organized opinion of mankind,” which was the agreed basis of the peace. As such the treaty in its present form must be accepted or rejected.

In the light of these words, uttered by the Big Four at a solemn moment, we must examine the main features of this treaty. And lest it be thought that the American President did not approve of the treaty as signed, but agreed to it, as General Smuts did, only in the hope of its immediate and radical revision by the League of Nations, it is fair to quote the opening paragraph of Mr. Wilson’s speech at Kansas City on September 6, 1919. He said:

I came back from Paris, bringing one of the greatest documents of human history. One of the things that made it great was that it was penetrated throughout with the principles to which America has devoted her life. Let me hasten to say that one of the most delightful circumstances of the work on the other side of the water was that I discovered that what we called American principles had penetrated to the heart and to the understanding, not only of the great peoples of Europe, but to the hearts and understandings of the great men who were representing the peoples of Europe.

The Treaty of Versailles, containing 440 articles, with annexes, constitutes a large sized volume. Its first twenty-six articles contain the Covenant of the League of Nations. Then follow the boundaries of Germany; political clauses for Europe; German rights and interests outside Germany; military, naval, and air clauses; prisoners of war and graves; penalties; reparation; financial clauses; economic clauses; aërial navigation; ports, waterways, and railways; labor; guarantees; miscellaneous provisions.

The underlying idea of the treaty is that the Germans are a guilty and vanquished people, who are indefinitely compelled, without appeal, to put at the mercy of the conquerors their lives, their property, their territory. A reading of the treaty will convince the fair-minded man that its many “jokers” are so cleverly scattered through the treaty as to nullify what provisions it does contain for setting dates for the termination of the penalties and limitations imposed upon Germany. I saw many of these “jokers” when I read the treaty. They were patent. But a clever lawyer would find many more.

The late Senator Philander C. Knox, who had read the treaty through, told me in the autumn of 1919 that, from a legal point of view, there was no hope whatever of Germany’s being able to fulfil the obligations placed upon her. He brushed the economic questions aside, and showed me how Germany was trussed by the treaty in such a way that no matter what she did towards fulfilment she would still be in default. “With all the power and authority and good will in the world,” said our former secretary of state, “no nation on earth could ever acquit herself of the obligations of such a treaty. If Germany were a small nation, and her enemies bound together permanently by common interests, central Europe, under this treaty, would become within a decade a huge region inhabited by millions of slaves. As it is, the treaty indicts those who drew it up. It is a crime against civilization.” This comment was provoked when I was trying to argue with the senator that the treaty ought to be ratified with reservations.

Eight months later, on May 5, 1920, Senator Knox said publicly, addressing the Senate:

The Treaty of Versailles is almost universally discredited in all its parts. The majority of its negotiators concede this. Its economic terms are impossible; its League of Nations is an aggravated imitation of the worst features of the ill fated and foolish holy alliance of a century ago. It promises little but mischief unless recast on such radical lines as will entirely obliterate its identity.... We must proceed in accordance with the established beneficent and enlightened rules and principles of international law as they have heretofore obtained between civilized Christian nations.

The principal features of the Treaty of Versailles are the exclusion of Germany from the League of Nations; the failure to establish or promise reciprocity in any of its provisions that would otherwise have been for the common good of the world; the violation of the principle of self-determination where it was to the interest of the victors to ignore it; the elimination of Germany from cultural and economic participation in the development of the world; and the consecration of the principle of the right of the victors in a war to confiscate the private property of the vanquished. Let us take up these features one by one, with examples.

The Exclusion of Germany from the League of Nations. Article IV of the Covenant provides for a council of nine members, five of whom are permanent “representatives of the principal Allied and Associated Powers.” The four minority members “shall be selected by the Assembly from time to time in its discretion.” It is true that the Council “may name additional members of the League whose representatives shall always be members of the Council,” and that new members of the League may be admitted on a two thirds vote of the Assembly. But the jokers that exclude Germany from membership in the League as well as in the Council are the qualifying clauses providing that a new member “shall give effective guarantees of its sincere intention to observe its international obligations” and that each member of the Council possesses an absolute veto. It is easily seen that these jokers put the admission of Germany entirely in the hands of France, who can be sole judge of Germany’s worthiness. This same handicap holds in regard to Russia. And no student of world affairs believes that the League of Nations can become anything else than the subservient tool of the Entente powers, unable to move in anything against their interests or wishes, unless Germany and Russia are permanent members of the Council.

The Failure to Establish or Promise Reciprocity in Any of Its Provisions That Would Otherwise Have Been for the Common Good of the World. The Treaty of Versailles contains many good points, such as its penalties; the restoration of plunder taken from other countries during previous wars as well as during the recent war; the military, naval, and air clauses; the resurrection of Poland; the erection of mixed arbitral tribunals; aërial navigation clauses; ports, waterways and railways clauses; labor clauses; and other minor points. But all these features, good in themselves, are not written in the treaties for the purpose of establishing improved international relations but as additional means of crippling and punishing Germany. None of them are contractual, in the ordinary sense; that is, they bind only one party. Reciprocity is not provided for, even in the future. The result is not only to put Germans in a position of inferiority to citizens of neighboring nations for the time being but to give them no hope that this condition will ever be remedied. For the numerous jokers take away the effectiveness of the time-limits provided in some instances for withholding reciprocity.

It is inconceivable that officers and men of Allied armies had not been guilty of violations of international law during more than four years of fighting. But only Germans were to be tried, and the German Government bound itself to hand over for trial before Allied tribunals all whose names should be handed in. This impossible provision in itself put Germany in hopeless default from the moment her representatives signed the treaty. Only if the Germans had been an uncivilized tribe of savages could such provisions have been executed. Similarly, the trial of Kaiser Wilhelm, too, before an impartial tribunal would have been a splendid measure. But the treaty bound the Germans to an unheard-of thing in international relations. They were obliged to confess their rulers’ guilt and their own, as a people, before the trial! And the treaty gave no promise, as it should have done, that the question of the responsibility for the war would be fairly gone into by a court of justice, with all the evidence before it. If the purpose of the men who made the Treaty of Versailles was not vindictiveness but a desire to get at the truth, they would have coupled their demand for the trial of the Kaiser with a guarantee that all the documentary evidence on both sides should be brought into court. Only in this way could a fair trial have been had. The penalties clauses of the treaty, therefore, violate the accepted principles of law as well as the dictates of fair play and common sense.

If the treaty had limited itself to the restoration of the loot of the recent war, no exception could have been taken. But Germany was summoned to give up art treasures and other plunder of the long ago. Was this done because the restitution was a matter of justice or to remove ancient grievances that stood in the way of the reconciliation of peoples? If so, the victors should have promised to give back to one another and to neutral nations—and in many instances to the vanquished—the more notorious examples of loot in their own national galleries and museums. This was a trifling matter, but it showed the spirit of the treaty.

Permanent peace could never come from a one-sided application of the principle of disarmament, especially when it was coupled with the guarantees clauses. History does not record an instance where a great people, deprived of its means of defense, with portions of its territory under military occupation and neighboring enemy countries still armed to the teeth, did not find some means, internally or through alliances, to break the grip of its enemies. In 1870, by annexing Alsace-Lorraine, Bismarck made an armed camp of Europe. In 1919, by occupying the Rhine and disarming Germany without promising themselves to disarm, the Allies, in the Treaty of Versailles, laid the foundation for a greater and more dangerous unrest than Europe has known in modern times. Lack of reciprocity in the military, naval, and aërial clauses was practicable only (a) if the enemies of Germany were ready to form a permanent alliance and keep several million men under arms, or (b) if they were willing to kill indefinitely all male children born in Germany—and also the existing male population under twenty-five.

The resurrection of Poland could have been a glorious and blessed result of the Paris settlement had it been conceived and carried out in the interests of the Poles. But the resurrection of Poland, as provided for in the Treaty of Versailles and the supplementary treaty, was an attempt to create an artificial state for old-fashioned “balance of power” purposes. The real interests of the Poles were not considered at all. Their only hope of succeeding in rebuilding their national life lay in having boundaries that would not in the future create against them fatal antagonism on the part of their two powerful neighbors, Germany and Russia. Had Polish and not French interests been considered in writing the Treaty of Versailles, the new Poland would not have been saddled with the Danzig corridor, and Upper Silesia would have remained German territory. A combination of fear and greed, without statesmanlike vision, made a Poland that can never last. The frontiers of Poland, as drawn in the Treaty of Versailles, heralded war and not peace. They were a perpetuation of the worst evil from which Europe had been suffering. The corridor and the “free port of Danzig” were declared to be necessary in order to give Poland an outlet to the sea, despite the fact that Danzig is an indisputably German city. But the same men at the same time took away Trieste and Fiume from Austria and Hungary, despite the dependence of their hinterland upon them, invoking the argument of the population of the ports, the validity of which was hotly denied by them when Germany invoked it!

The erection of mixed arbitral tribunals for adjustment of war claims of private citizens put a premium upon the appeal to force. What it meant was that, if your country was successful in fighting, you had a valid claim against a citizen of a defeated country, and that your claim would be adjusted by arbiters appointed by your own country. The important thing, then, according to the Treaty of Versailles, was not the sanctity of private contracts entered into between individuals of different nations, but citizenship in a winning nation.

In aërial navigation and in ports, waterways, and railways, the right of the victors to transit across and privileges on German soil were affirmed without reciprocity. Not only were the Germans denied the right of transport by air and water and rail, on equal terms with other nations, outside their own country, but they were required to open up Germany to Allied control and to concede special privileges in waterways and ports, to facilitate the passage over their territory of international trains—all this without reciprocity. The time-limits set gave no reasonable hope of a change; for the removal of disabilities depended upon the integral observance of all the other treaty obligations.

The Violation of the Principle of Self-Determination Where It Was to the Interest of the Victors to Ignore It. On the ground that Alsace-Lorraine had been forcibly taken from France against the will of the inhabitants in a previous war, it was altogether just that France should receive back her “lost provinces” without a plebiscite. Even had one been taken, the result would not have been in doubt. France would have won by an overwhelming vote. It was just also to stipulate the return to Denmark of indisputably Danish territory, with a plebiscite for doubtful border districts. The other territorial provisions were open to question.

The most flagrant violation of the principle of self-determination was in the matter of the detachment for fifteen years (with a plebiscite at the end of that time) of the Saar Valley from Germany. This wholly German district of over half a million souls was put under the League of Nations, but really given to France to run, as compensation for the destruction of coal-mines in northern France. That the treaty of peace should have contained provisions for adequate compensation—ton-to-ton replacement—for the French losses in coal was to be expected. But the Saar arrangement was political and not economic,5 and, as far as the inhabitants of the region were concerned, its practical application meant for them what the Treaty of Frankfort had meant for Alsatians nearly half a century earlier. The Saar clauses constitute a shameful betrayal of the high ideals for which the war was fought. Confirmation of this statement is easily obtained. Let the reader go to the Saar and talk with the people. Violence has been done to their most sacred sentiments. Two wrongs do not make a right.

In the House of Commons on May 9, 1923, Mr. Edward Wood, a member of the Bonar Law Cabinet, who presided over the meeting of the Council of the League in April, 1923, told how the Council had virtually washed its hands of the Saar. The Commission consisted of a French president, with four assistants, a Belgian, a Dane with a French name, a Canadian, and a representative of the Saar population. The Canadian sided with the local representative in trying to prevent the oppression of the people, who were being ruled in a way that provoked them to appeal for redress to the Council. The President of the Commission had explained to the Council that the decrees, adopted by the majority of the Commission, were “not illegal” and were justified on the ground that they were adopted “to meet exceptional circumstances.” It developed in the debate that one of the decrees imposed penalties of imprisonment and fine for certain “crimes,” without hearing or trial or resort to appeal. Among the “crimes” was casting discredit on the Treaty of Versailles. The inhabitants of the Saar are not allowed to discuss publicly the régime that governs them or their future. Sir John Simon told the Commons that this measure was a “most astounding abuse of legislative power,” and Mr. Asquith called it a “monstrous and ridiculous decree” for the like of which “one might ransack the annals of despotism in the worst days of Russia’s oppression of Finland without finding a more monstrous specimen of despotic legislation or one more suppressive of the elementary rights of free citizenship.” Lord Robert Cecil, just back from his American tour in favor of the League of Nations, declared that the action was worthy of militarism at its worst, and that he had always had grave doubts of the wisdom of making the League responsible for the Saar régime.

The cession of Malmédy and Eupen to Belgium was clearly against the wishes of the inhabitants of those regions. During the peace negotiations I visited these places, and I visited them afterward, just as I did the Saar. The people told me that they were Germans and wanted to remain Germans. They were not given the opportunity, any more than the people of the Saar were, to vote upon their detachment from Germany. The treaty provided for registers at Malmédy and Eupen, in which, within a fixed time, any inhabitant of these regions could write down his desire to return to German sovereignty. The defenders of the treaty, by virtue of this curious provision, declared that the people had a chance to decide. Did they? Any one who dared to sign those registers was expelled and his property confiscated. After two or three examples of this sort, nothing more was done. It was like the right of our negroes to vote in the South. In these cases I have the facts, names, dates, and particulars of each instance.

The plebiscite for Upper Silesia contained a joker that was afterward invoked, when the decision went against Poland, by reason of which the Entente Powers were at liberty to disregard the vote if it seemed best to do so. No opportunity was given to the inhabitants of the Polish corridor, separating East and West Prussia, to vote on their own destinies. Mr. Lloyd George had secured a modification of the original draft, by which plebiscites were allowed for the Marienwerder and Allenstein regions. Although the commission on Polish frontiers at the Paris Conference had recommended the detachment of these regions from Germany, declaring that they were “predominantly Polish,” they voted 98 per cent and 95 per cent respectively to remain with Germany, and this under Allied military occupation and supervision! There is little doubt that if a fair plebiscite had been held everywhere, as had been promised, there would have been no corridor, and Poland would have received a much more limited frontier in Posen than she got. I was in Kattowitz, in Upper Silesia, when that city, despite its vote for Germany was allotted to Poland. A prominent citizen told me: “You have created another open sore, which will be healed only by a new war.”

If the Paris Conference was actuated by the desire to secure the fulfilment of the ideals for which we fought, rather than the triumph of the principle that might makes right, in taking away Trieste and Fiume from Austria and Hungary, these ideals were violated by taking away Danzig and Memel from Germany. I have found no apologist for the Treaty of Versailles who, when confronted with the deadly parallel here, has not admitted that different weights and different measures were applied in these cases. There is no more striking proof than Danzig and Memel, as opposed to Trieste and Fiume, of the judgment passed upon the Treaty of Versailles by Mr. Ray Stannard Baker in his recent defense of President Wilson, that the treaty was a piece of hasty patchwork, imposed at the point of a bayonet, whose terms were simply and solely due to the national interests of the victors.

In the provisions of the treaty relating to countries other than Germany, the principle of self-determination was ignored in regard to China, Morocco, and Egypt. The Chinese arguments about Shantung were not answered. The Egyptians sent a delegation, representing their National Assembly, to protest against the recognition of the British protectorate. But they were not given a hearing, and this provision, although there had been wide-spread riots in Egypt against the British military occupation, was put into the treaty.

The Elimination of Germany from Cultural and Economic Participation in the Development of the World. For more than a hundred years before the World War, the European nations had come to realize that their prosperity depended upon contacts with the extra-European world. These contacts they had established at the cost of great sacrifices, through colonial wars, wars with one another, and the gradual building up of investments, banks, shipping, and trading companies in all parts of the world. Because of her later unification and slower industrial development, Germany was a late comer in world politics. She struggled under great handicaps in finding a large part of the world already preëmpted when she began to look for colonies, coaling-stations, and fields for investment and economic development. But her progress in the few decades preceding the World War had been marvelous, and her whole economic structure was built, like that of England, upon foreign trade. Her population had gone beyond the number that could be sustained by home markets.

The greatest blow to Germany in the Treaty of Versailles was the ban it placed upon her contacts with the outside world. She was compelled to give up her colonies; to renounce her commercial treaties and concessions in every country in the world except a few South American countries that had not declared war upon her; and to surrender everything that she had built up in the way of import and export markets, by the confiscation of her shipping, foreign investments, banking and commercial establishments, concessions, privileges, etc. The aim of the treaty was to eliminate Germany as a competitor in world markets, and to make it impossible for German capital to accomplish anything in the future in Africa and Asia. Germany was called upon, also, to renounce her treaties and private concessions, her loans, and everything else that she had acquired in her relations with her former allies. Her nationals were barred from Turkey, from former German colonies, and from French and British protectorates in Africa and Asia. Her mission work in foreign countries was to be given up entirely and not renewed. Her missionaries, Catholic and Protestant, were never again to return to their field. Provisions were inserted in the treaty by which the victors had the right to bar German newspapers and magazines and books, as well as German goods, without reciprocity. Some one at Paris—I forget which of the outstanding figures it was—said that in the Treaty of Versailles we had reverted to the law of the jungle. The papal nuncio, Monsignor Ceretti, told me that the devil at his worst could hardly have conceived so thorough a destruction of the soul of mankind.

In connection with the various clauses throughout the treaty, which, in their ensemble, cut Germany off from the rest of the world and make her a pariah for ever among nations, an interesting dilemma faces those who hope to profit by the treaty. If they are able to enforce its provisions, do they still expect to have large reparations from a Germany bound hand and foot in the matter of her foreign trade, while enjoying the advantages in their own foreign trade of having her no longer for a competitor? And, if so, will not the example of a Germany without colonies, army, fleet, political and economic contacts with Asia and Africa, paying not only her own expenses but a huge surplus for reparations, refute the time-worn argument of economic imperialism, that a nation must have all these things to live? The answer to the former question is an economic one, difficult to explain and uphold, whether you say yes or no. The answer to the second question, if in the affirmative, proves that the greater part of our national expenditures are money wasted, and, if in the negative, that the Treaty of Versailles was a sentence of death passed upon a great nation, affecting not so much those guilty of the war as their progeny and an unborn generation.

The Consecration of the Principle of the Right of the Victors in a War to Confiscate the Private Property of the Vanquished. It is impossible to deny that the Treaty of Versailles infringes upon the age-old principle of the sanctity of private property. A study of its reparations and economic clauses reveals that the greatest damage done to the world during the riot of ungoverned passions at Paris was the attack made in the treaty upon the fundamental bases of society. The Treaty of Versailles assumes the dangerous doctrine that the state is all-powerful and has the right to dispose of the property of its citizens, and that a government can not only levy taxes on capital and property of a confiscatory character but is able to give a clear title to the confiscation by others of its subjects’ property.

I am sure that I have not exaggerated, or stated unfairly or extremely, this feature of the Treaty of Versailles. During the last five years I have had the opinion of a dozen international lawyers, French and British and American, who are agreed that this feature of the Treaty of Versailles, if applied, would lead to departures in existing notions of property and the rôle of the state so startling as to be subversive of the existing social order. The boomerang is evident. If Germany has a right to confiscate or assent to the confiscation of private property for the purposes of reparation, if the assent and carte blanche of the German Government to confiscation by the Allies gives a valid title, if taxes on capital can be levied by the German Government—all this without ruining industry in Germany—why are not these measures legal and practicable against private property and capital in other countries?

The heart of the Treaty of Versailles lay in its reparations clauses. A Reparations Commission was created, which, like the armies of occupation, was to be maintained at the expense of Germany. Not until May, 1921, was it to decide upon the amount Germany owed and could pay. The commission was given sweeping powers over Germany’s finances, internal and external. It would fix the amounts in money and kind of German reparations deliveries. Against the amounts fixed the German Government had no appeal. If it did not do as the Reparations Commission ordered, the commission had the power, by a majority vote, to declare Germany in default on reparations. Then the treaty provided that the victors could take what measures they decided upon to penalize Germany for the default and to collect their claims. Since no appeal or arbitration was provided for, the Treaty of Versailles gave no protection to the debtor against the rapacity and vindictiveness of the creditors. Sums due were not agreed upon by mutual consent; they were fixed by the victors. There was no protection in the treaty against possible abuse of this privilege, and no definition of the measures to be taken after default. The Treaty of Versailles thus put Germany at the absolute mercy of her conquerors, without appeal, legal or otherwise. By taking away the security of German territory, the treaty made impossible the revival of German prosperity and the fulfilment of the obligations of the treaty.

Last of all, the most curious feature of the treaty was its failure to provide the machinery for its enforcement. The Germans had been able during more than four years to withstand their enemies. And it is certain that the Entente powers could not have dictated a victors’ treaty without the coöperation of the United States. Germany signed the treaty because she was forced to do so. And, as it was a one-sided and humiliating treaty, giving the Germans no hope whatsoever for the future as an encouragement to fulfil its terms, the victors ought to have realized the necessity of providing, jointly, for the permanent maintenance of a huge standing army to keep the Germans in submission. A document of the nature of the Treaty of Versailles was worthless unless coercion, permanent coercion, was provided for. As events have proved, the assumption of the Paris peacemakers, i. e., that they would stick together, was wrong. What other result could be expected, then, from the Treaty of Versailles than that the Germans would obey the treaty only in so far as force was employed? The spirit of the treaty is not peace but war. The Germans were to be considered permanently as enemies. They were not to be allowed to become friends.

When you have an enemy, you do not have peace.

When you cannot count upon remaining friends with one another, and you are confronted with an unknown factor like Russia, you read over again the Treaty of Versailles and say to yourself: “If I ever believed that any good could come of it, I must have been of unbalanced judgment, owing to the passions of the moment. Certainly those who made the treaty were!”