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Title: Some Problems of the Peace Conference

Author: Charles Homer Haskins

Robert Howard Lord

Release date: March 22, 2022 [eBook #67688]
Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Harvard University Press, 1920

Credits: Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOME PROBLEMS OF THE PEACE CONFERENCE ***

SOME PROBLEMS

OF THE

PEACE CONFERENCE

BY

CHARLES HOMER HASKINS

AND

ROBERT HOWARD LORD

CAMBRIDGE

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

1920

COPYRIGHT, 1920
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

TO
ARCHIBALD CARY COOLIDGE

PREFACE

The purpose of the lectures here published is to give a rapid survey of the principal elements in that territorial settlement of Europe which has been pronounced “the most reasonable part of the work of the Conference”[1] of Paris. Each problem is placed in its historical setting, while at the same time the effort is made to view it as something demanding practical solution in the treaties of peace. The perspective of proceedings as seen at Paris has been kept in mind throughout, although the authors have not felt at liberty to enter into the details of negotiations which may have become known to them in their official capacity. Limits of time and space restrict the treatment to Europe, and to those parts of Europe which came before the Conference for settlement. Hence Russia is necessarily omitted.

The lectures are printed substantially as delivered at the Lowell Institute last January, with only incidental revision. In the spelling of place names the official local usage has been followed except where there is a well established English form.

The first four chapters were prepared by Mr. Haskins, the last four by Mr. Lord.

Where material has been gathered from such a variety of sources, detailed acknowledgment is impossible. The bibliographical notes at the end of the several chapters are meant merely to indicate the more obvious references for readers who may wish to follow out particular topics. The authors desire to express their indebtedness to their colleagues on the ‘Inquiry’ and the territorial section of the American Commission to Negotiate Peace, and their appreciation of many courtesies from the experts of the Allied delegations. They are under special obligations to the hospitality of the American Geographical Society and its Director, Dr. Isaiah Bowman. Mr. George W. Robinson has made valuable suggestions in correcting the proof sheets. While grateful for assistance from many sources, each of the authors bears sole responsibility for the opinions he has here expressed.

C. H. H.
R. H. L.

Cambridge, May 1920.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Charles Seignobos, in The New Europe, March 25, 1920.

CONTENTS

I
Tasks and Methods of the Conference | 3-35
The Tasks | 3
The Problem of Frontiers | 10
Organization of the Conference | 23
Bibliographical Note | 33
II
Belgium and Denmark | 37-73
Schleswig | 37
The Kiel Canal and Heligoland | 46
Belgium | 48
Position at the Conference | 49
Malmedy, Eupen, and Moresnet | 54
Luxemburg | 57
Limburg and the Scheldt | 60
Bibliographical Note | 72
III
Alsace-Lorraine | 75-116
The Historical Background | 75
The Franco-German Debate | 84
The Armistice and the Treaty | 105
Bibliographical Note | 115
IV
The Rhine and the Saar | 117-152
The Rhine | 117
The Left Bank | 123
The Saar Basin | 132
Bibliographical Note | 151
V
Poland | 153-200
The Resurrection of Poland | 153
The Western Frontier and Danzig | 172
Galicia | 188
The Eastern Frontier | 195
Bibliographical Note | 199
VI
Austria | 201-229
The Collapse | 201
Czecho-Slovakia | 213
The Germans in Bohemia | 216
The Austrian Republic | 222
Klagenfurt | 223
The Italian Frontier | 224
Bibliographical Note | 228
VII
Hungary and the Adriatic | 231-262
The End of the Old Hungarian State | 231
Hungary’s Losses | 237
The Slovaks | 237
The Ruthenians | 238
The Roumanians | 239
The Yugo-Slavs | 241
The Adriatic Question | 244
Gorizia, Trieste, and Istria | 249
Dalmatia | 251
Fiume | 256
Bibliographical Note | 261
VIII
The Balkans | 263-290
Bulgaria and her Neighbors | 263
The Macedonian Question | 267
The Dobrudja | 275
Bulgaria’s New Losses | 276
The Aspirations of Greece | 277
Epirus and Albania | 278
Thrace | 281
Constantinople | 285
Bibliographical Note | 288
INDEX | 291-307

MAPS

I. | Belgium and her Neighbors | 74
II. | Alsace-Lorraine and the Saar Valley | 152
III. | Poland | 200
IV. | Territories of the Former Austro-Hungarian Monarchy | 242
V. | The Adriatic | 262
VI. | The Balkans | 290

SOME PROBLEMS
OF THE
PEACE CONFERENCE

I
TASKS AND METHODS OF THE CONFERENCE

Great peace conferences are proverbially slow bodies. The negotiators of Münster and Osnabrück spent five years in elaborating the treaty of Westphalia; the conferences of Paris and Vienna labored a year and a half at undoing the work of Napoleon. Judged by these standards, the Peace Conference of 1919 was an expeditious body. It began its sessions January 18 and adjourned December 9. It submitted the treaty with Germany, including the covenant of the League of Nations, May 7; the treaty with Austria June 2 and July 20; the treaty with Bulgaria September 19; the treaty with Hungary in November. In the early summer it prepared various treaties with Roumania and the new states of eastern Europe. The heaviest part of its work was done in less than six months, before the departure of President Wilson on June 28.

Judged by its output in a given time, the Conference must also be pronounced a businesslike and efficient body. Whereas the treaty of Vienna covers some seventy pages of print, and the related conventions perhaps a hundred and fifty pages more, the published works of the Paris Conference fill several volumes. The treaties which it drew up were long and detailed, each of the major treaties running to a couple of hundred pages and comprising some hundreds of articles and annexes—territorial, political, financial, economic, naval, and military—besides the provisions respecting labor and the League of Nations which are common to all.

The Conference of Paris was likewise a laborious body. The gaiety of the Congress of Vienna has become proverbial. “The Congress does not march,” said the Prince de Ligne, “it dances.” “Everybody dances save Talleyrand, who has a club foot. He plays whist.” It is probable, as recent historians of the Vienna assemblage have pointed out, that “the unending series of balls, dinners, reviews, and fêtes did not greatly hinder the work of those whose industry was important.”[2] Nevertheless the presence of a crowd of kings and princes and great ladies—the Prince de Ligne wore out his hat taking it off at every turn—gave the Congress of Vienna an air of splendor and gaiety which was conspicuously lacking at Paris. There were no kings at the Paris Conference, indeed there were few kings left anywhere in Europe by January 1919. There were no balls, no great festivities. If the Conference did not always advance, at least it did not dance. The Marne was too near for that, in space as well as in time. Armageddon was just past. The Germans had barely missed marching up the Champs-Elysées and under the Arc de Triomphe. The American delegates were within an hour’s ride of Château-Thierry and Belleau Wood, where their countrymen had, only a few months before, done “the things that can’t be done.” Two hours would take them to the heart of the devastated region, refugees from which still filled Paris. The regiments of poilus that marched by with steady stride had looked into the mouth of hell, and their eyes showed it. The Paris which Castlereagh had found “a bad place for business” in 1814 was a better place for business in 1919. The world wanted peace, and it wanted it soon.

It was also a hungry world. Pliny tells of a fabled people of the East so narrow-mouthed that they lived by the smell of roast meat. Even that gladsome and satisfying odor had long since disappeared from the nostrils of a great part of Europe, and the mouths had not shrunk. “If they have no bread, let them eat cake,” a great lady had said at the time of the French Revolution. The cake had gone with the bread. “The wolf,” said Mr. Hoover, “is at the door of the world.” More than once the Peace Conference had to turn from other matters to feed the peoples whose frontiers it was drawing, to deal earnestly and under pressure with problems of blockade and rationing, of transportation by land and sea.

Back of hunger lay anarchy. Great states were on the verge of dissolution, and it was doubtful who, if anyone, could sign the treaty on their behalf. There were times when the Conference had also to interrupt its labors to consider the chaos into which the world seemed to be drifting. The day after the Bolshevist revolution in Hungary one of the sanest of American journalists remarked, “In the race between peace and anarchy, anarchy seems today to be ahead.”

No peace congress had ever confronted so colossal a task. The assembly at Paris met to end a world war, then in its fifth year, which had destroyed 9,000,000 lives and untold billions of property, and left the world staggering under a crushing burden of debt and destruction. It had in the first instance to liquidate the affairs of three bankrupt empires, the German, the Austro-Hungarian, and the Turkish. The peoples which they had held in unwilling subjection were to be set free, and either attached to the neighboring peoples from which they had once been torn, or established firmly as independent and self-governing states. “As Lord Bryce had predicted, the most knotty disputes which faced the Conference were ‘nearly all problems that involve the claims of peoples dissatisfied with their present rulers and seeking either independence or union with some kindred race.’” Several thousand miles of new boundaries had to be drawn, marking new frontiers, and if possible these frontiers must be just and lasting. Provision must be made for restoring the lands laid waste by war and reëstablishing the normal commercial and industrial life of the warring countries. Those responsible for the war must pay, and they must be punished. Finally, if possible, effective measures must be taken to prevent the recurrence of a similar war, whether brought about by Germany’s lust of conquest or by any other state. If war could not be prevented, it must at least be rendered more difficult and more abhorrent to the common moral sense of mankind.

Far beyond the more immediate and necessary tasks of the Conference rose the dreams of those who looked for the dawning of a new age of peace and justice, a new social and economic era. The downtrodden and the oppressed looked toward Paris. Visions of peace were confused with visions of the millennium. “We were told,” said a Scotch mill-worker, later in the winter, “that the peace would bring in the New Jerusalem. We want some of that New Jerusalem.” The day President Wilson sailed for Brest, a worker at the Twenty-third Street Ferry, speaking for the early crowd hurrying to their long hours in New York sweatshops, pointed to Hoboken and said, “There goes the man who is going to change all this for us.” Beautiful, extravagant, heart-breaking hopes were centred on the Conference at Paris, most of all on the leader of the American delegation and his programme. And such hopes were in large measure inevitably doomed to disappointment. The congress could not create a new heaven and a new earth; it could at best only make some short advance on the road thither and show the way along which further advance lay. Renan tells of a devout soul, who, seeing so much evil about him, was periodically afflicted with doubts concerning the goodness of an all-powerful God. “Perhaps,” his parish priest would answer, “you have too high an idea of God and what he can do.” “It was an old world,” writes Mommsen of the age which just preceded the Christian era, “and even Caesar could not make it young again.”

A just peace, a durable peace, if possible a quick peace, could these ends be secured? The task was one which called for compromise and adjustment, it called also for organization. There is said to have been a plan for quick preliminaries which should end the state of war, followed by the leisurely and expert working out of details. If such a course had been possible, it would probably have been the best. Germany would have accepted terms in January at which she howled in June, while the Allied peoples might thus have avoided the long agony of doubt and postponement which delayed the resumption of normal activities and the rehabilitation of the devastated regions. The world that was malleable after the armistice soon grew cold and hard. It is, however, a matter for serious question whether an agreement upon such preliminaries was possible. The problems were too varied and intricate, the conflict of interests too acute, the new ideas too new, to admit of even provisional adjustment in a few weeks. The Conference seemed long, too long, to the outside world which waited. If it did not dance, like the Congress of Vienna, neither did it always seem to march, like the Congress of Berlin, which had a cut-and-dried programme. At times it was undoubtedly too slow; at times certain special problems, like Fiume, consumed energy altogether out of proportion to their importance; yet the Conference made steady and on the whole rapid progress. It was a hard-working body, and its scanty time was well spent.

It will be many years before the history of the Peace Conference can be written. Its work was too vast and too varied; its records are too scattered and too inaccessible, many of them still unwritten. We are still too near for a true perspective. For some time we must be content with fragmentary, partial, provisional, journalistic accounts, and we do well to keep to the main lines of unmistakable fact. The most obvious results of the work of the Conference, though not necessarily the most permanent results, are its territorial decisions, the readjustment of boundaries and sovereignties, the calling of new states into being. These, so far as they go, are clear and definite. They can be expressed on a map, their origin and occasion can be traced, their nature explained. It is these, the territorial results of the Conference, with their consequences and implications, which form the subject of this volume. The treatment is further limited to Europe, omitting the problems of Asia, Africa, and the isles of the Pacific.

There are those who maintain that the territorial results are unstable and hence relatively unimportant, liable to speedy readjustment in a fluid state of international relations, subordinated in ever increasing degree to economic and social influences which transcend national boundaries. All this the future must determine. For the present the decisive fact for many millions of Europeans is that they are on one side or another of a political frontier, members or not of the state to which their natural allegiance gravitates; and this is a matter of specific boundary. One may deplore the rivalries over small bits of territory, which acquire a factitious significance in the course of the dispute, but they cannot be ignored. The possession of land is still a passion of peoples, and even of what our census calls ‘minor civil divisions,’ and the history of individual ownership shows that such passions do not grow less with the growth of other interests. So long as states continue to exercise authority within definitely recognized frontiers, the establishing of their territorial limits must remain a fundamental problem of international relations. If an illustration of the meaning of frontiers is desired nearer home, one has only to look at the two sides of the Rio Grande.

Reduced to their lowest terms, the elements which enter into a national boundary are two, the land and the people; and an ideally perfect frontier would be at the same time geographic and ethnographic. Such coincidences are, however, relatively rare, and the problem varies from age to age as different geographical considerations change in relative importance and as the human elements of race, language, and nationality develop, shift, and grow more complex.

Thus a glance at the map of Europe shows that certain frontiers apparently have been drawn by nature, while others are clearly the work of man. The Spanish peninsula, Italy, the British Isles, and the Scandinavian lands are set apart from the mass of the Continent by broad boundaries of sea or mountain which have come to form permanent political frontiers. On the other hand no such obvious natural obstacles separate France from Germany, Germany from Russia, Belgium from Holland, Austria from its neighbors, Serbia from Bulgaria. So far as the boundaries have been drawn by geographic forces, the forces are less obvious; if they have been drawn by the course of history, this requires explanation and elucidation. It so happened that the Paris congress had to do, not with the outlying regions where the physical and the political maps generally coincide, but with those lands of central and eastern Europe where the adjustment is most complicated. We shall understand its work more clearly if we pause to analyze briefly this problem of frontiers.

Of the geographical elements which go to form frontiers, the most obvious, after the sea, is constituted by mountains. The Pyrenees are a perfect example of a natural frontier which is also an actual frontier, and so in a lesser degree are the Alps and the Carpathians. Mountains inevitably divide, turning peoples different ways, in spite of modern means of communication, and they have always been valued as military barriers. Rivers, on the contrary, although they have military value, unite rather than divide, so that we need not be surprised if we find no important instances of a river frontier in present-day Europe, save along the Danube and where the Rhine separates Alsace and Baden. Most frontiers are neither mountain ranges nor rivers, yet they are often adjusted to lesser features of topography, with reference either to defence or to means of communication. Communication notably, with the growth of modern systems of transportation, bears an intimate relation to boundary problems. Access to the sea, either directly or by neutralized or internationalized rivers, has become a prime necessity for most states, and occupied the Conference especially in the cases of Poland and Czecho-Slovakia. Even railroad lines, especially where they monopolize natural routes, have their place in frontier adjustments, as in Carinthia or between East and West Prussia.

Another geographical element, essentially modern in its significance, is found in natural resources. This has never been wholly absent from boundary problems, at least in its early form of fertile or less fertile land, but it has taken on a preponderant importance with the growth of modern industrialism. Each state has been anxious to bring within its limits supplies of mineral resources, and especially of that foundation of modern industry, coal. Now it so happens that some of the most important deposits of coal and mineral wealth lie on or near disputed frontiers. The coal of Upper Silesia, Teschen, Limburg, and the Saar, the iron of Briey and annexed Lorraine, the potash of Upper Alsace, the mercury mines of Carniola, are all cases in point. Prussia was affected by such considerations in drawing the frontiers of 1815 and 1871; other countries had learned the lesson by 1919.

The human elements in frontier-making are still more complex than the geographical. Obviously we have to do not with individuals but with groups, and with those larger groups which have acquired a full measure of what the sociologists call ‘consciousness of kind,’ to the point of constituting some kind of national unity or national organization. We speak of the self-determination of peoples, but what is a people? Is it created by race or language or political allegiance, or only by that more subtle compound which we call nationality? How large must a people be to have a right to stand alone? Can it stand alone without certain economic and even military prerequisites? How far can we go in breaking up states in order to give effect to self-determination?

Such general principles might have a very wide application. Formulated with special reference to the Central Powers, self-determination was seized upon by men who had a case to urge in any part of the world—in Ireland, in Egypt, in the Philippines. A German map of last spring even represented Hawaii, St. Thomas, Florida, and Texas as trying to escape from their unwilling subjection to the United States[3]—a curious evidence that German mentality had not changed since the notorious Zimmermann note of 1917. More than once it was necessary to point out that the function of the Paris Conference was not to do abstract justice in every corner of the earth, but to make peace with Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey. Many causes perhaps excellent in themselves were not the business of the Conference.

Even within the self-imposed limits of the Conference, there were difficulties. “Self-determination,” President Wilson had said, “is not a mere phrase, it is an imperative principle of action.” But President Wilson had also said that self-government cannot be given but must be earned; that “liberty is the privilege of maturity, of self-control,” that “some peoples may have it, therefore, and others may not.”[4] However just and admirable self-determination might be, it could be fully applied only to peoples who had some experience in self-government and thus some means of political self-expression. For this reason it was not applicable to the downtrodden natives of the German colonies. And even among self-governing peoples there are practical limitations. Self-determination may be only another name for secession, and we fought the Civil War to prevent that; we have been none too successful in securing the subsequent self-determination of the negroes in the southern states. Sometimes a people may be too small to stand alone, and sometimes, as in parts of the Balkans and Asia Minor, the mixture of peoples may defy separation. In western Asia, notably, national aspirations have outrun the social organization.

Wherever you apply it, self-determination runs against minorities. Ireland has its Ulster, Bohemia its Germans, Poland its Germans and Lithuanians. There are minorities along every frontier. Some one remarked that there was need of a fifteenth point, the rights of minorities. The Conference found this out, and upon the newly established states of eastern Europe were imposed special treaties safeguarding the rights of minority peoples—Jews, Germans, Russians, etc.—whom past experience had shown to need such guarantees.

Of these human elements in frontier-making we may begin by eliminating race, for in Europe race is a matter of no importance in drawing national lines. This point is emphasized, here and later, because there has been a great deal of loose talk about race, notably on the part of German writers. So far as it is an exact term at all, race is a physical fact, dependent upon certain elements of stature, color, and shape of the skull which occur and are transmitted in certain fixed combinations or racial types. There are three such types in Europe, the Teutonic, the Alpine, and the Mediterranean, most prevalent respectively in northern, central, and southern Europe. But in no country do they appear in pure or unmixed form. Migration and conquest have intermingled them to such an extent as to leave no sharp racial frontiers and to make the people of every country a mixture of two or three races. Thus the central or Alpine type is widely prevalent in the south and west of Germany, and the Teutonic type in the north and east of France. Furthermore these physical types are quite without political significance—no one cares whether his neighbors are tall or short, blonde or brunette, round-headed or long-headed. So far as Europe is concerned, all talk of race has to be eliminated from serious international discussion.

Language, on the other hand, is a matter of prime importance. Speech is a fundamental element in creating consciousness of kind: the man in the street knows whether he can understand the speech of his neighbor, and has always had opprobrious epithets for those who speak an alien tongue, from the ‘barbarians’ of the Greeks and the ‘Welsh’ of the Teutonic Middle Ages to the ‘dagoes’ and ‘gringoes’ and ‘wops’ of current parlance. Even differences of dialect engender similar terms, as when the people of the Right Bank are called Schwob in Alsace and the Alsatians are stigmatized as Wacke by those beyond the Rhine.

Still, language has its pitfalls as a guide to national lines of cleavage. To begin with, while in the country districts it is singularly persistent, it can also be learned and unlearned by a new generation, especially when the resources of universal education are wielded by the compulsive power of the modern state. The German schoolmaster has labored to reduce the area of Danish in Schleswig and of French in Alsace-Lorraine. The Russians have checked German in the Baltic provinces. In the British Isles Celtic speech is far less widespread than Celtic blood. Moreover, if the government cannot always drive out minority languages, it can at least make its own language statistics. It is easy for the census-taker to impose on the weak or ignorant, to interpret all doubtful cases in one direction, to adopt definitions which fall on one side. The statistics of Polish-speaking districts in Prussia and of Italian-speaking elements in Austria-Hungary are well known examples.

Again, language statistics, even when trustworthy, do not necessarily yield a sharp dividing line. There may be more than two significant elements in the population, or, as in parts of the Balkans and Asia Minor, villages of different speech may be interspersed in a checkerboard fashion.

Finally, language, even when accurately ascertained, is not a certain test of political affiliation. There has been a strong pro-French tradition among the German-speaking Alsatians. The small German-speaking districts of Belgium are not pro-German.

After all, it is the opinion of the people concerned which we wish to ascertain with respect to a given frontier, and language is important chiefly as a guide to that. Unequivocal expressions of popular opinion are, however, hard to reach, especially in times of stress and in regions that are under dispute. At best a plebiscite may be but a poor indication of real opinion, and the opinion it registers well may be only transitory. Moreover, caution may be required in giving effect to a vote or an otherwise well ascertained expression of opinion. Thus it is open to debate whether the vote of a small district should necessarily carry with it the disposal of a great key deposit of mineral wealth which concerns a much wider constituency. It is also possible that in the long run commercial intercourse and economic interest may create ties more lasting than language or national sentiment, and that a given boundary may do more ultimate harm by violating the fundamental economic interests of a region than by violating its momentary political sentiments.

Again, the political sentiment of the moment may run counter to strong historic forces, as in Bohemia, where the considerable German element has been settled for centuries, so that its incorporation with adjacent German-speaking countries would tear apart the historic unity of the Czech state. Indeed, it is a nice question how far it was the task of the Peace Conference to right ancient territorial wrongs. “The wrong done to France by Prussia in 1871 in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine” was a clear case for rectification, if only because, in President Wilson’s phrase, it had “unsettled the peace of the world for nearly fifty years.” Much the same could be said for the restoration of North Schleswig, seized by Prussia in 1864, and even for Poland, though its destruction dates back to the eighteenth century. On the other hand, more recent acts of injustice, such as the Prussian annexations of 1814, the Conference left untouched, except on the Belgian frontier, evidently considering them as internal German questions which time had adjusted. Some notion of prescription had evidently to be admitted, else in seeking to right ancient wrongs the Conference would have done a greater wrong by introducing confusion into every part of the world. The only noteworthy attempt to reach far back into history would be the restoration of the Jews to Palestine, now inhabited by a preponderantly Mohammedan and Christian population. Here, as in many parts of eastern Europe, religion becomes an important element in national cleavage.

In general, the Paris Conference was disposed to give more weight to the principle of nationality, in its broader historic sense, than to economic or strategic considerations. This idea of nationality runs through the programme of President Wilson, which the members of the Conference had accepted in advance. It is, of course, easier to set peoples free from their rulers than from economic necessity, and the creation of new political frontiers undoubtedly complicates questions of trade and commercial policy. Nevertheless, it is a curious inconsistency that some who are most eager to find discrepancies between the programme of the Conference and its achievements should at the same time propose to destroy the economic and political independence of the newly liberated peoples of central Europe and the Balkans by imposing on them a compulsory customs union after the manner of Germany’s Mitteleuropa.[5]

Finally, the nature of the frontiers to be drawn at Paris depended on the kind of world for which they were to be made. If Europe was to continue to be an armed camp, divided between two competing systems of alliances, then the strongest possible military frontiers would be required—along the Rhine and the Danube, in the Alps and in the Balkans—, and the strategic element must preponderate in every boundary. If, on the other hand, some better form of international organization could be found through a League of Nations, however rudimentary, strategic considerations could drop into the background in favor of the economic convenience and the political desires of the people concerned. If colonial rivalries were to be reduced in the interest of world peace, the German colonies ought to be subjected to some international control, and they could not be internationalized without creating some international authority. An international control of ports and rivers might affect the whole problem of access to the sea, while areas of special tension or perplexity, like Danzig or the Saar valley, might be placed under some form of international administration such as commissions of the League of Nations. This explains why the problem of the League could not be postponed until after the conclusion of peace, but formed an integral part of the negotiations and of the treaty itself. At every turn the problem of the League of Nations obtruded itself, and the elaboration of the plan for a League facilitated, instead of hindering, the work of the Conference.

In addition to the fundamental principle of self-determination expressed in President Wilson’s speeches, Germany and the Allies had accepted his specific Fourteen Points as the basis of the negotiations. This immensely simplified the task of the Conference in certain directions, and gave a firm ground for discussion wherever these applied; but much was required in the way of interpretation, extension, supplementing, and application before the two pages of the Fourteen Points could grow into the two hundred pages of the treaty with Germany and the correspondingly long texts of the other treaties. The Fourteen Points did not cover the whole field, and even where they were clearly and directly applicable, much knowledge and much negotiation were required to put them into effect.

The Congress of Vienna had its Statistical Commission, one of the most successful parts of the Congress, which collected the statistical data for parcelling out peoples among the various princes. It was limited, however, to statistics of population, the counting of heads being the only basis there admitted in the balancing of territorial adjustments. The Paris Conference needed a far larger and more varied body of knowledge, not only because it covered every part of the world, but because its declared principles necessitated information of every sort respecting the history, traditions, aspirations, ethnology, government, resources, and economic conditions of the peoples with which it was to deal.

Information the Conference had in huge quantities, literally by the ton. It came in every day in scores of foreign newspapers, in masses of pamphlets, in piles of diplomatic reports and despatches. Every special interest was on hand, eager to present its case orally to the Conference or its commissions, to enlighten personally the commissioners or their subordinates, to hand in endless volumes of more or less trustworthy ethnographical maps and statistics, of pictures and description, of propagandist matter of every conceivable sort. A steady head, a critical judgment, and a considerable background of fact were required to keep one’s vision clear amidst this mass of confusing and conflicting material.

The collecting and sifting of such information for the Conference had begun years before. The French, systematic as always, had appointed governmental commissions, economic, military, geographic, and had also a special university committee with Professor Lavisse as chairman, the Comité d’Etudes, which prepared two admirable volumes, with detailed maps, on the European problems of the conference. The British had printed two considerable series of Handbooks, one got out by the Naval Intelligence Division under the guidance of Professor W. McNeil Dixon of Glasgow, the other prepared in the Historical Section of the Foreign Office under the editorship of Sir George Prothero. The United States had put little into print, but more than a year before the armistice, by direction of the President, Colonel Edward M. House had organized a comprehensive investigation, known as the ‘Inquiry,’ with its headquarters at the building of the American Geographical Society in New York City, whose secretary, Dr. Isaiah Bowman, served as executive officer. It enlisted throughout the country the services of a large number of geographers, historians, economists, statisticians, ethnologists, and students of government and international law; and carloads of maps, statistics, manuscript reports, and fundamental books of reference accompanied the American Commission to Paris. The specialists who went along or were later brought together were organized into a group of economic advisers—Messrs. Baruch, Davis, Lamont, McCormick, Taussig, Young, and their staffs—; two technical advisers in international law—Messrs. David Hunter Miller and James Brown Scott—with their assistants; and a section of territorial and political intelligence.

Peace conferences are always represented as sitting around green tables, and this pleasant fiction is perpetuated with reference to Paris in the widely circulated advertisement of a well known fountain pen. Now the Paris Conference never sat around a table. It is true that for certain formal sessions of the whole Conference there was arranged a long table lining three sides of the principal room in the French Foreign Office on the Quai d’Orsay, and that the delegates could be packed in here twice as close as nature meant them to sit. But there were very few formal meetings of this sort, and they could not by any stretch of the imagination be thought of as round-table conferences, if indeed as conferences at all. Certain leaders delivered prepared speeches, and rarely did lesser lights venture to break the prearranged course of the proceedings.

It was early apparent that the Conference could not profitably meet and do business as a whole. Twenty-seven different states were represented, besides the five British dominions. There were seventy authorized delegates. Such a body would have become a debating society; it would still be in session, its labors scarcely begun. Some guiding or steering executive committee was obviously required, and it was early found in the delegates of the five chief Powers: America, England, France, Italy, and Japan.

The five Great Powers themselves had thirty-four delegates, and it was plain that this also was too large a body for doing ordinary business. So there was early organized a Committee or Council of Ten, each state having two members, ordinarily the chief delegate and the foreign secretary; and this became the active agency of the Conference. It had a secretariat; and expert advisers, civil or military, attended as they were needed. If a military matter came up, Marshal Foch would be on hand, member of the Conference in his capacity of Commander-in-Chief, with his curving shoulders, fine face, and clear eye. A naval question brought in the British sea lords, Admiral Benson, and a keen-looking lot of Japanese. When economic questions were to the fore, the American delegation bulked large, with the square jaw of Mr. Herbert Hoover well in evidence.

Even the Council of Ten was not seated about a table, although it is so imagined in an ‘inside history’ of the Conference by one who was never inside.[6] Nor did the American delegation meet around a table, notwithstanding the preparation of an official picture which represents the members in a room where they never met, seated at one end of a table and backed by an imposing array of secretaries and assistants. The Council of Ten sat along three sides of the pleasant office of M. Pichon, the French Foreign Secretary, its walls covered with bright tapestries after the style of Rubens, its windows looking out over a beautiful French garden which tempted the roving eye while a long speech was being translated. M. Clémenceau presided, a tiger at rest, his eyes mostly on the ceiling, sometimes bored but always alert and never napping. Others sometimes appeared to sleep or to distract themselves as best they could; but no one lost touch with the proceedings. Certainly the President of the United States, long trained by golf, kept his eye steadily on the ball.

The Council of Ten met almost daily at three. Each special interest, each minor nationality, had a chance to come forward and state its case, usually at considerable length. Whatever was said in French was translated into English, and vice versa. The sessions grew long and tiresome, and progress was slow. More and more people were called in. One of them remarked that he would not have missed his first meeting for a thousand dollars, but would not give ten cents to see a second! For its last two sessions the Council moved into the large room reserved for the plenary sessions of the Conference. One of these meetings was reported at length in the Paris papers, and it was alleged that undue publicity, as well as undue prolixity, was responsible for the sudden change on March 24. After that date the Council of Ten ceased to meet. Cartoonists represented it as seeking a bomb-proof shelter. At times thereafter the foreign ministers met as a Council of Five. But the real power rested with a new body, the Council of the four principal delegates of England, France, Italy, and the United States—Messrs. Lloyd George, Clémenceau, Orlando, and Wilson.

The Council of Four left the spacious quarters of the Quai d’Orsay. Sometimes it met in M. Clémenceau’s office at the Ministry of War, sometimes at Mr. Lloyd George’s apartment, most frequently at President Wilson’s residence, either in his study, or, when several outsiders were present, in the large drawing-room. The meetings in the study were not always “private and unattended,” nor were the occasional conferences upstairs the confused gatherings which an infrequent spectator has pictured.[7] Outsiders were called in as needed, but ordinarily the Four met by themselves, with a confidential interpreter, Captain Mantoux, very able and very trustworthy. There was no stenographer, not even a secretary, though secretaries were usually outside the door to execute orders. The meetings were quite conversational, and the records necessarily fragmentary. But the Council at least worked rapidly, sometimes perforce too rapidly. Steadily the main lines of the treaty emerged.

By March the expert work of the Conference had been largely organized into commissions, not systematically and at the outset, as the French had proposed in January, but haltingly and irregularly, as necessity compelled. Foresight and organizing ability were not the strong points of the congress. One by one there were created commissions on Poland, on Greece, on Morocco, on Roumania, etc., on reparation, finance, waterways, and the principal economic problems of the conference. Ordinarily a commission consisted of two members from each of the five great powers, with a secretary from each and special advisers as required. Their proceedings were regularly noted, and formal minutes of each session were approved in print. Each country expressed its opinion, but efforts were made to reach and report a unanimous conclusion. On one occasion a Japanese delegate, perplexed by a detailed problem of local topography, gave as his vote, “I agree with the majority.” As the commission had just divided, two to two, he scarcely clarified the situation.

Some of the best work of the Conference was done in these commissions, and it is to be regretted that the system was not organized earlier and used more widely. Some matters were never referred to commissions, delicate questions like Fiume and Dalmatia and the Rhine frontier being reserved for the exclusive consideration of the Four. Problems of an intermediate sort were sent to special committees, extemporized and set to work at double speed. Such were the Saar valley and Alsace-Lorraine, referred to a committee of three, Messrs. Tardieu, Headlam-Morley, and Haskins. Not being an organized commission, this body had no secretariat. Economic and legal advisers might be present, but often there were only the three. This committee met for a certain period very steadily, sometimes twice a day. It reported unanimously the chapters of the treaty on the Saar and Alsace-Lorraine, and was present at the meetings of the Council of Four each time these questions came up.

One naturally asks how far the recommendations of these commissions and special committees were followed in framing the final draft of the treaty. To this it is hard to give a general answer, for in the nature of the case there was no uniform policy. The printed minutes of the commissions will some day be public and can then be compared with the several clauses of the treaty. In general, the territorial commissions were thought of in the first instance as gatherers and sifters of evidence, rather than as framers of treaty articles, questions of policy being reserved for the ultimate consideration of the Council of Ten. As time went on, the commissions tended to acquire more responsibility and to throw their reports into the form of specific articles or sections of a treaty. These naturally required coördination with the work of other bodies, such as the commissions on finance, reparation, or waterways, and a general correlation of the territorial reports was attempted by a Central Territorial Commission of five. Some final suggestions were also made by the Drafting Commission. The reports of the commissions were, however, first made directly to the Ten or the Four or the Five, as the case might be. Each report had its place on the docket, and the members of the commission were then present, each at the elbow of his principal, to furnish any necessary explanations in his ear, but not to speak out. Later in the summer members of the commissions were allowed to take part in the discussions of the Council of Five.

Sometimes the report, presented in print, would be accepted without debate. Sometimes a particular question would be considered at length, perhaps with the result of recommitting the report. Unanimous reports were likely to go through rapidly. A session of the Council of Four might take an important report clause by clause, with explanations from the committee and suggestions from members of the Council, but without fundamental modifications. On the other hand important changes in one chapter of the treaty were made at the last moment by the Four without any consultation of the commission concerned.

In general, the American delegation was disposed to trust its experts, both on matters of fact and on matters of judgment, and trusted them in greater measure as the Conference wore on. It did not dictate or even suggest their decisions, but left them free to form their opinions on the basis of the evidence. They could have been used to better advantage if they had been set to work earlier, and there were unfortunate instances where they were consulted too late; but in general this is to be explained by the haste and confusion inevitable in the rapid movement of events rather than by any desire to ignore the facts or the judgment based upon them. Certainly none of the chief delegates was more eager for the facts of the case than was the President of the United States, and none was able to assimilate them more quickly or use them more effectively in the discussion of territorial problems.

The treaty of Versailles, like the other treaties drawn up at Paris, is by no means a perfect instrument. Those who took part in framing it would be the last to believe it verbally inspired. It is necessarily a peace of compromise and adjustment, and that means that it does not embody completely the desires of any one person or any one country. It was also framed rapidly, not always with sufficient preliminary study, and in some places it bears the marks of haste. But it represents an honest effort to secure a just and durable settlement, and neither the Conference in general nor the United States in particular need be ashamed of it. It is easy to criticise in detail, easy to magnify the defects and forget the substantial results achieved, just as it was easy to criticise the Constitution of the United States when it issued from the Convention of 1787, and to discover therein dangers which history has shown to be imaginary. For one result of the Paris treaties, however, their framers are not responsible, namely the delays in ratification and enforcement. The treaties were drawn for the world of 1919 by men of 1919, on the assumption that what was needed was an early peace as well as a just settlement. The governing commissions and mandates were to begin at once, the plebiscites were to be held as soon as possible, the disarmament of Germany was to be prompt and real, the difficult work of reparation was to be taken up immediately. None of these expectations has been realized, and the responsibility lies less with the Peace Conference than with the failure of America to ratify the treaties and to take part in carrying out their provisions.

In one fundamental respect the treaties drawn up at Paris differ from all such instruments in the past: they do not pretend to be final. The treaty of Vienna lasted, in many respects, for a hundred years, and parts of it are still in force, unchanged by the war or the Conference. For all this the Congress of Vienna deserves its full measure of credit, but it must be remembered that it provided no method of change or adjustment. Only a new war could undo its provisions, and more than one such war proved necessary. At Paris it was recognized from the start that much of the treaty must be temporary and provisional. No one could determine in advance how peoples would vote, or just how much of an indemnity Germany could pay, or whether she would endeavor to execute or to avoid the obligations she there assumed, or what would happen in Austria or in Turkey. Some means of amendment, adjustment, correction, and supplementing was required, and this was found primarily in the League of Nations. In the League the treaties possess the possibility of their own betterment, the starting-point of a new development. Hence, unlike all previous treaties, those of 1919 are dynamic and not static: they are constructive and not merely restorative; they look to the future more than to the past.

Bibliographical Note

The published records of the Paris Conference are limited to the official reports of the plenary sessions and the official text of the treaties, in French and English, with authoritative maps, subject to correction after the frontiers have been fixed on the spot. The proceedings of the Council of Ten and the Council of Five were kept by a regular secretariat, those of the Council of Four less officially and systematically; these minutes were manifolded but not printed. The minutes of the various commissions, while printed, have not been made public.

The German and Austrian treaties and related documents are printed as supplements to the American Journal of International Law since July 1919. The German treaty is also printed as a Senate Document and as a publication of the American Association for International Conciliation. The entire series of treaties is best available in the British Parliamentary Papers, Treaty Series, 1919 and 1920. A bibliographical list of all these treaties by Denys P. Myers is to be published by the World Peace Foundation, League of Nations Series, iii, no. 1. Documents and Statements relating to Peace Proposals and War Aims, December 1916 to November 1918, have been edited by G. Lowes Dickinson (London and New York, 1919).

There is as yet no memoir literature by members of the Conference. Some confidential papers are printed in the Hearings before the Committee on Foreign Relations of the United States Senate (Washington, 1919), but these do not concern territorial problems. Some things touching France will be found in the report of the Barthou committee to the Chamber of Deputies, supplemented by the articles of A. Tardieu in L’Illustration since February 1920. The official German criticisms of the Treaty of Versailles were published in various languages and have been freely reproduced by pro-German writers in other countries. A Kommentar in six volumes has been prepared by one of the German delegates, Walter Schücking.

So far the printed accounts of the Conference are the work of journalists, who from the nature of the proceedings cannot be fully informed. The most direct information was perhaps possessed by Ray Stannard Baker, chief of the American service of publicity, but his volume, What Wilson did at Paris (New York, 1919), is ex parte and very brief. E. J. Dillon, The Inside History of the Peace Conference (New York, 1920), is a diffuse composite of hearsay and newspaper clippings; it is anti-French but in general friendly to small nations. H. Wilson Harris, The Peace in the Making (New York, 1920), is an intelligent account by a fair-minded British Liberal. Sisley Huddleston, Peace-Making at Paris (London, 1919), is more impressionistic. J. M. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (London and New York, 1919), is the brilliant but untrustworthy work of a British financial expert who finally repented of the treaty. Influenced by German propaganda, it is in general anti-French, anti-Belgian, and anti-Polish, and disparages political self-determination in favor of economic frontiers. Of the various critiques which the book has called out, the most searching is that of David Hunter Miller, in the New York Evening Post, February 6 and 10, 1920, and in separate pamphlets.

A volume on the Conference, with an elaborate atlas, is announced by an American territorial expert, Isaiah Bowman; a fuller work is in preparation by British and American experts under the editorship of Harold W. V. Temperley, of Peterhouse, Cambridge.

Of the material collected in France for the Conference, the only systematic publication is the Travaux du Comité d’Etudes, in two volumes with an atlas (Paris, 1919). Most of the British material was printed but not published, a useful exception being C. K. Webster, The Congress of Vienna (Oxford, 1918). The Foreign Office series of Handbooks has now been made public (London, 1920). The most important American publication of the sort is the Atlas of Mineral Resources to be issued by the United States Geological Survey (Washington, 1920).

There is no entirely satisfactory discussion of the general problem of frontiers. T. L. Holdich, Political Frontiers and Boundary Making (London, 1916), is concerned chiefly with ‘natural’ frontiers outside of Europe. For the facts of race, see W. Z. Ripley, The Races of Europe (New York, 1899). Leon Dominian, Frontiers of Language and Nationality in Europe (New York, 1917), is convenient. A more authoritative work on the linguistic side is A. Meillet, Les langues dans l’Europe nouvelle (Paris, 1918). Experience with plebiscites is brought together in Miss Sarah Wambaugh’s elaborate Monograph on Plebiscites (New York, 1920). A. Toynbee, Nationality and the War (London, 1915), is an attempt to state the territorial problems in the early months of the war; L. Stoddard and G. Frank, Stakes of the War (New York, 1918), seeks to sum them up at its close. The relation of certain of these problems to a league of nations is discussed in The League of Nations, edited by Stephen P. Duggan, with references (Boston, 1919); and by Lord Eustace Percy, The Responsibilities of Peace (London and New York, 1920).

FOOTNOTES:

[2] Webster, The Congress of Vienna, p. 93.

[3] Was von der Entente übrig bliebe wenn sie Ernst machte mit dem “Selbstbestimmungsrecht” (Berlin, D. Reimer).

[4] Atlantic Monthly, xc, pp. 728, 731 (1902).

[5] Keynes, Economic Consequences of the Peace, p. 265.

[6] Dillon, The Inside History of the Peace Conference, p. 151.

[7] Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, pp. 30-32. M. Mantoux asserts that Mr. Keynes never attended a regular session of the Council of Four. London Times, February 14, 1920.

II
BELGIUM AND DENMARK

Our examination of the specific territorial problems of the Conference may most conveniently begin with the simplest, the frontier between Germany and Denmark. This had been established by force of arms when Schleswig was taken from Denmark in 1864, while a promise made in 1866 to consult the population had never been fulfilled. Only at the close of the World War did an opportunity come to fix the boundary in accordance with the will of the inhabitants. The duty of the Conference was to provide the means of giving effect to their desires.

The territory of the former duchy of Schleswig comprises the portion of the peninsula of Jutland lying between the Danish frontier on the north and the River Eider and the Kiel Canal on the south. Called by the Danes South Jutland (Sönderjylland), it is similar in most respects to Denmark, being chiefly agricultural, with a fishing population on the Frisian islands to the west and a considerable shipping industry in its principal town, Flensburg, a town of 63,000 at the head of the Flensburg fiord. The region has an area of 3385 square miles, and 474,355 inhabitants, not far from twice the extent and population of the state of Delaware. About one-third of the people speak Danish; these are chiefly in the northern portion of the province. The rest, save for an isolated group of Frisians on the west coast, speak German.

The earlier history of Schleswig would take us into the tangled history of the Schleswig-Holstein question, which is for present purposes unnecessary. Suffice it to say that, whatever the previous rights of the king of Denmark may have been, the attempt to unite the duchy of Schleswig fully to the kingdom of Denmark by the constitution of 1863 led in the following year to war with Austria and Prussia and to the defeat of Denmark, whose king, by the treaty of Vienna, renounced all rights over Schleswig, Holstein, and Lauenburg. In 1866, at the conclusion of the war between Austria and Prussia, the treaty of Prague transferred the rights of Austria to the king of Prussia, with the reservation that the “inhabitants of North Schleswig shall be again reunited with Denmark if they should express such a desire in a vote freely given.” Nothing could be clearer, and nothing more ineffective, for the article was contained in a treaty between two powers neither of which had the slightest interest in the performance of the obligation. As a matter of fact, the provision had been suggested by Napoleon III, but the interested parties, Denmark and the inhabitants of the district, were not put in a position to secure its execution. Bismarck, who seems at first to have expected a referendum, maintained in 1867 that the people as Prussian subjects had no right to demand it, the only right to such a demand resting with the emperor of Austria. Prussia made no effort to put the article into effect, and in 1878 it was abrogated by agreement with Austria.

So, since 1864, Schleswig has been under Prussian rule, and since 1867 an integral part of the kingdom of Prussia. Once probably wholly Danish, it had been subject for centuries to penetration from the south, and by this time possessed a large German element which henceforth had the active support of the Prussian government. The history of the attempt to Germanize Schleswig is, on a smaller scale, much the same as the history of the Germanization of Prussian Poland. Efforts at replacement of the population by Germans had little success, but the spread of German culture and the suppression of Danish culture were everywhere steadily pushed. German was made compulsory in the schools, the courts, and the churches; Danish was put under the ban in public meetings and theatres; and the Danish press and Danish societies were subjected to various forms of persecution. Intercourse with Denmark was in various ways restricted or made difficult. Constant war was waged against the Danish flag, and even against dresses which displayed the red and white colors of Denmark. It was even said that the owner of a white dog was obliged to repaint his red kennel! The regular agents of Prussian policy were omnipresent: the police, the pastor, and the schoolmaster. The officers’ duty was chiefly negative, the suppression of Danish tendencies; the schoolmaster’s was more positive, to instil Germanism into the rising generation, partly by teaching only in the German language save for a small amount of religious instruction, partly by the well known propagandist methods of German history and patriotic songs. Thus all were compelled to sing, “Ich bin ein Preusse, will ein Preusse sein”; and if a little girl should say, “Ich bin kein Preusse, will kein Preusse sein,” she was whipped and sent home.

Inevitably the zone of German speech crept gradually northward. In some villages of central Schleswig which spoke only Danish half a century ago, it is said that the language has disappeared save among the very old. Still the process of Germanization was slow, and as time went on active resistance was organized in the three great societies of the Language Union, the School Union, and the Voters’ Union. Leaders found in Denmark the Danish education which was forbidden them at home, and kept alive a strong tradition of Danish speech and Danish sympathies. A local political party was maintained, and the Danish vote increased after 1886, although under the German gerrymander of 1867 it was still allowed to return only one member of the Reichstag, and that in the extreme north. Treasonable acts were in general avoided, but the hope of reunion with Denmark was never entirely lost.

The fortunes of the World War gave at first but little hope to the pro-Danish Schleswigers. They served in the German army up to their full capacity; probably, as is stated, their losses were proportionately greater than those among purely German troops. If they were not fighting their own kin and friends, like the soldiers of Alsace-Lorraine, they were at least fighting in another’s cause. Denmark, too, walked warily during the war, with the fate of other small nations ever before her eyes and the profits of German friendship dangled in front of her. It was no time for Schleswig to look for help in this quarter. With the armistice, matters took on a new aspect. Foreseeing that the Schleswig question would be raised at the peace table, Germany proposed a separate arrangement with Denmark, and it was some time before Denmark readjusted her policy to correspond to a world in which the victorious Allies were able to impose terms on a defeated Germany. Even then the readjustment was incomplete. Germany might become powerful again, and Denmark must beware, so many thought, of laying up vengeance for the future by acquiring territory which Germany might demand back. In many quarters there seemed to be genuine terror lest the Allies might impose territory and obligations upon an unwilling Denmark. A natural hesitation over absorbing alien elements was accompanied by a fear lest many new voters might upset the party balance in a small country. In determining the future of Schleswig, it appeared that the timidity of Denmark was to have its weight, as well as the hopes of the population. The Radical party, then in power, wished only limited accessions of population in the region of North Schleswig; while the Conservatives favored a more decided policy extending into southern Schleswig, though few went so far as to demand outright the ancient frontier of the Eider or even the old rampart of the Dannevirke.

No mention had been made of Schleswig in President Wilson’s Fourteen Points, but a just determination of the question was promised by him in a letter to certain Danish-Americans just after the armistice (November 21). Diplomatic conversations had indeed already begun, and February 21 the Danish government formally placed the matter before the Peace Conference in an exposé made to the Council of Ten by its minister in Paris, Chamberlain Bernhoft. It asked for a plebiscite as soon as possible in the region of unquestioned Danish speech north of a line stretching west from the head of the Flensburg fiord to the north of the island of Sylt in the North Sea, a line which had been demanded, November 17, 1918, by the North Schleswig Voters’ Union at Aabenraa. By February sentiment was ready to ask for a plebiscite also in a zone to the south, which included Flensburg and certain adjacent territory. In order that all possibilities of pressure might be removed, the evacuation of German troops and German higher officials was requested in a considerable strip of territory farther south.

The commission to which the Conference referred the Schleswig problem heard delegates from the different parts of the territory, as well as reports of the various points of view in Denmark. The commission saw no reason why the right of voting should be refused to any part of the region to be evacuated, though it was plain that some judgment would need to be used in drawing a frontier upon the basis of the voting, so as to avoid enclaves and inconvenient meanderings. Definite evidence was before it of a desire to vote on the part of many persons in south Schleswig. Accordingly its report, incorporated in the draft treaty submitted to the Germans in May, provided for a plebiscite by three zones, so that the frontier between Germany and Denmark might be fixed in conformity with the wishes of the population. In the first or northernmost zone, where the voting was supposed to be largely a matter of form, the plebiscite was to take place for the whole district within three weeks of the German evacuation. In the second zone of mixed speech in middle Schleswig, where opinion was likely to vary in different districts and to be affected somewhat by the result in the first zone, the voting was to occur not more than five weeks later and to be taken commune by commune. The same method was to be applied two weeks thereafter in the third zone, which comprised the remainder of the evacuated territory extending to the Eider and the Schlei, a region of predominantly German speech, where the Danish tradition had been greatly weakened in course of time and where the people would likewise want to know the result in the neighboring zone to the northward. Within ten days of the coming into force of the treaty German troops and higher officials were to evacuate the whole territory north of the Eider and the Schlei, and the administration was to be carried on by an International Commission of five, one appointed by Norway, one by Sweden, and three by the Allied and Associated Powers. This commission was to hold the plebiscites in accordance with provisions which had been suggested by the Danish government; and upon the result of the voting, with due regard to geographic and economic conditions, recommend a permanent boundary to the Allied and Associated Powers. The whole plan was carefully drawn to secure as full and free an expression as possible of the desires of the population.

Opposition came from two sources. The German criticisms, as handed in to the Conference in May, had little weight. They proposed to limit the voting, and hence any possible loss of German territory, to a portion of the first zone, on the ground that only there did more than half of the population speak Danish. Apart from the fact that this affirmation was based on the official language statistics of the Prussian census, which was notoriously unfavorable to non-German elements, the proposal started from two inadmissible assumptions: one that language is the sole test of political sympathy; the other that no region where Germans were in a majority should be allowed self-determination, for, it was implicitly believed, no German could possibly want to leave the Fatherland. Germany thus sought to prevent free expression of opinion where it might turn to Germany’s disadvantage, at the very moment she clamored for it in Upper Silesia, where it might possibly turn out in her favor. How Germany hoped to control the plebiscite appeared from another proposal, namely that, all German officials still remaining in the country, the administration and the voting should be in charge of a commission of Germans and Danes, with a Swedish chairman!

The Danish objection, as voiced by the majority Radicals, was against the inclusion of the third zone in the voting. The reason most generally given was that districts in this zone might vote for Denmark from purely economic motives, especially the desire to escape German war taxes and war indemnities, and thus form an irredentist minority in a country with which they were not really in sympathy. Probably also there was still the lurking fear of the powerful neighbor of the past and the future, as well as some measure of friendliness for the new regime in Germany.

To such arguments the Conference yielded, cutting out of the final treaty the plebiscite in the third zone and its evacuation as well. The change was made at the last moment, without readjustment of the other provisions, so that this section of the treaty shows certain signs of haste. The effect was to take away all opportunity for self-determination in the third zone and to leave the German troops and administration here in a position to exert pressure on the region to the northward.[8]

The vote in the first zone, held February 10, 1920, resulted in a decisive Danish majority of three to one, and led to occupation by Denmark, as the treaty had provided. Feeling ran high in the second zone, where the German government sought to influence the decision by threats in the Reichstag; the struggle centred around Flensburg, certain in either event to be a frontier town now that the third zone had been eliminated. The plebiscite, held March 14, resulted decisively for Germany, the vote in Flensburg being overwhelming and only a few scattered villages on the islands voting for Denmark. The result failed to satisfy either party entirely, a large Danish group still wanting Flensburg, while in the first zone the Germans wished to recover Tönder, where the voting had favored Germany. Indeed it remains to be seen whether German hopes of recovery will be limited to Tönder.

One question of which Denmark and the Schleswigers showed great desire to keep clear was the Kiel Canal. Even the widest limit of evacuation proposed carefully left a belt of Schleswig territory between its southern border and the canal, lest what was fundamentally a question of popular rights might become complicated with a wholly distinct international problem. Only in case of the internationalization of the canal would its fate have reacted on the Schleswig problem by leaving an isolated strip of German territory to the north which might then have been separated from Germany and attached to the adjacent Danish territory. Whatever might have been said for the internationalization of this great waterway, the question was not seriously considered at the Conference. The parallel to Suez and Panama was too close! The treaty leaves the canal under German control, but provides that it shall be open on terms of entire equality to the vessels of commerce and of war of all nations at peace with Germany.[9]

The island of Heligoland, which England had seized from Denmark in 1807 and ceded to Germany in exchange for Zanzibar in 1890, is not restored to either of its former owners. Instead it is stipulated that all fortifications and harbor works there shall be destroyed by German labor and at Germany’s expense, and that no similar works shall be constructed in the future.[10] Immunity for the future might do something to offset the great price which England had paid for Zanzibar throughout the World War.

The case of Belgium at the Peace Conference was widely different from that of Denmark. Denmark had remained neutral; her neutrality had been respected by others, and had even been a source of commercial profit; and at the end of the war, without the slightest effort on her part, she saw all her desires gratified in Schleswig. Indeed, her only fear was lest she should receive more territory than she wanted. The neutrality of Belgium, specially guaranteed by an international treaty, and thus far more binding on her neighbors than that of Denmark, had been violated by Germany at the very outbreak of the war. Belgium had suffered more than four years of German occupation, including the systematic spoliation of her farms, her factories, and her railroads, and the deliberate attempt to divide her people into two separate Walloon and Flemish states; she had barely escaped permanent incorporation with Germany. Yet all this time she had fought as best she could beside the Allies; she had made heavy sacrifices; she had stood for international right. Belgium expected much from the peace, and Belgium was in large measure disappointed.

Belgium was disappointed on the economic side, for she was flooded with depreciated German currency which the Allies did not take over, and her hopes for full priority on the account of restoration and reparation were not entirely fulfilled. Indeed, it soon became apparent that the general bill for reparation would far exceed the ability of Germany to pay, and that there were not resources enough in all Germany to meet that restoration of invaded territory upon which President Wilson had declared “the whole world was agreed.” Belgium had suffered less than France by the destruction of war itself, for her territory, save in the case of the Meuse fortresses and the battle zone in Flanders, had not been fought over; but the German occupation which she had borne in equal measure was relatively far more serious, for it affected the whole country and not merely a part, and it produced stagnation of industry and cessation of commerce on a scale that destroyed enterprise and left idleness as well as poverty in its stead.

In territorial matters Belgium’s desires, save for a small correction of the German frontier, concerned neutral powers, Holland and Luxemburg, which were not members of the Peace Conference and not subject to its jurisdiction. The most that the Conference could do was to help in the adjustment of Belgium’s claims, and Belgium feels strongly that the Conference did not help enough.

Finally, Belgium was dissatisfied with her whole position at the Conference. During the war she had acted as one of the Allies and had her representation in the Allied councils. At Paris she was only a small power, limited to three delegates—at first even to two—and excluded from the guiding and deciding group of the Five Great Powers. Even the decisions which directly concerned her were taken by the Council of Ten or the Council of Four. She was outside, while Italy and Japan were inside. Individually her delegates sat on important committees, but there were times when Belgium must have felt far removed from the central tasks of the Conference, in the outer limbo occupied by Liberia, Panama, and Siam. A Belgian told the story of an officer who had lost both legs. “You will always be a hero,” said a consoling friend. “No,” replied the officer, “I shall be a hero for a year and a cripple for the rest of my life.” Belgium felt that the days of her position as a hero were over. You will recall Mr. Dooley on Lieutenant Hobson: “I’m a hero,” said the Lieutenant. “Are ye, faith?” said Admiral Dewey, “Well, I can’t do anything f’r ye in that line. All th’ hero jobs on this boat is compitintly filled be mesilf.”

Let us call to mind so much of Belgium’s history as is necessary to approach her modern problems. Belgium as a separate and independent state has existed only since 1830, but her national history goes back into the Middle Ages. Easy of access from both the Rhine and the north of France, the territory of modern Belgium has always been a highroad of peoples, for migration, commerce, and war, and the natural meeting-point of races and civilizations from north and south. It formed a part of the great middle kingdom created between France and Germany by the partition of the Frankish empire in the ninth century, and with the break-up of the middle kingdom it became a natural object of ambition from both sides. The various feudal principalities which shared this territory in the Middle Ages divided their allegiance between the king of France and the German emperor; and it was not till the fifteenth century that the rise of a new middle kingdom under the dukes of Burgundy brought the region of the Netherlands, northern as well as southern, under a single hand and made them for practical purposes independent of France and Germany. Enlarged toward the east by the Emperor Charles V in the sixteenth century, the territories of the Netherlands comprised seventeen provinces and included substantially what is now Holland and Belgium.

By the marriage of Mary, heiress of Burgundy, to Maximilian of Austria in 1477 the seventeen provinces of the Netherlands passed to the house of Hapsburg, and thus to their grandson, the Emperor Charles V. Upon the division of his possessions in 1556 they went with Spain to the so-called Spanish branch of the family, represented by Philip II. Religious and political reasons led to the great revolt against Philip II in 1568, a movement in which the whole seventeen provinces joined. The skilful policy of Philip’s general, Alexander Farnese, succeeded in detaching the southern provinces, which had remained for the most part Catholic, from the Protestant, or United, Netherlands of the north, and from 1579 on the southern provinces led a separate existence under Spanish rule, being generally known as the Spanish Netherlands. In this period they lost considerable territory on the north to the Dutch and on the south to the French.

Upon the division of the Spanish dominions by the treaty of Utrecht in 1713, the Spanish Netherlands were in the following year transferred to Austria, and were known as the Austrian Netherlands until their conquest by the armies of the French Revolution in 1794. They were then incorporated with France (1795) and organized into nine departments, a state of affairs which lasted until 1814.

By the Congress of Vienna in 1815 the northern and the southern Netherlands were reunited, under the rule of a king of the house of Nassau. After a separation of one hundred and thirty-five years the union proved unsatisfactory to the southern population. Marked differences of religion, economic interest, and language produced friction from the start, which was aggravated by the exclusive policy of the Dutch, who, though a minority, monopolized the higher offices and enforced the use of the Dutch language. The revolutionary movement of 1830 kindled a revolt in the southern provinces, and a separate government was organized under a constitutional monarch, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg. The separation was declared “final and irrevocable” by a convention of representatives of the five Great Powers meeting in London in 1831, and the treaty was accepted by Holland in 1839. The boundaries of the new kingdom were, as we shall see, drawn in a manner quite unsatisfactory to the Belgians.

The treaty of 1839 guaranteed the independence and the neutrality of Belgium, while at the same time it placed restrictions on the new state. By Article VII it was provided that

Belgium ... shall form an independent and perpetually neutral state. It shall be bound to observe the same neutrality toward all other states.

It will thus be seen that, while the roots of Belgian nationality lie deep in the past, the modern state was established in a somewhat artificial form, its boundaries drawn and its international status fixed by the Powers, not by Belgium itself. Its frontiers are in no direction ‘natural’ frontiers. At the same time Belgium is dependent in the closest way upon the outside world. It possesses the densest population of any country in Europe—the same number of inhabitants as the state of Pennsylvania, with one-fourth the area. In spite of a highly intensive cultivation, the soil is unable to produce sufficient food, so that sixty per cent of the consumption of cereals is imported. For this large importation Belgium is unable to pay in minerals, its only considerable underground resource being coal, of which there has been no surplus for export since 1910. It must consequently pay for its imports by exports of manufactured products, for which the raw materials are likewise for the most part imported.

Belgium is thus a highly industrialized country, with a large manufacturing population. Its principal industries are iron furnaces and rolling mills, zinc works, machinery, arms, and tools; textiles, especially cotton goods; glass, cement, and ceramic wares; leather; and chemical products. Commerce is also of the highest importance in the economic life of Belgium. She requires foreign imports of raw materials and foreign markets for her manufactured articles. She has a very large transit trade, en route to and from Germany and northern France. In volume of trade Antwerp is one of the greatest of European ports, abreast of Hamburg and London. The system of railways and canals is elaborate, with the highest per capita mileage in Europe.

Of the territorial adjustments desired by Belgium, the least considerable concerned her Prussian frontier. Belgium (or at that time the Belgian part of Holland) and Prussia became neighbors in 1815, in consequence of the Prussian annexations on the left bank of the Rhine. The boundary then drawn was not based upon considerations of language or history, still less upon any expressed desire of the inhabitants, but was fixed primarily so as to give Prussia a certain number of people as compensation for her failure to receive Saxony. She thus acquired the eastern part of the lands of the abbey of Stavelot-Malmedy; the territory of St. Vith, which had belonged to Luxemburg; and a portion of Limburg in the region of Eupen. This land was largely hill and forest, of no great economic value, and it was used by Prussia chiefly for military purposes. Strategic railroads, of little importance in time of peace, were constructed along the Belgian and Luxemburg frontiers, and the great military camp of Elsenborn was built in this very region to serve for the concentration of troops against the invasion of Belgium. Liège, Belgium’s great industrial center, was only eighteen miles from the German border, and the taking of Liège in 1914 opened up the whole valley of the Meuse.

Belgium asked a minimum of protection for the future. It was plain that such protection could not come from any considerable advance of the frontier on the part of so small a state, but must be found chiefly in the demilitarization of the Left Bank and in measures for general peace. At least, however, Belgium might ask control over some of the military railroads and over the camp of Elsenborn.

If purely strategic arguments had prevailed, they would have carried the Belgian frontier forward to the Rhine or to the mountain range of the Eiffel. Within the narrower limits chosen, the strategic considerations were reënforced by others: the economic orientation of this region toward Belgium rather than toward Germany; the historic connection before 1815; and the opportunity for reparation, for this sparsely peopled territory was rich in forests, which might serve to replace the Belgian forests which had been systematically destroyed by Germany during the war, leaving a frontier line which can be followed for miles by the standing timber on the German side and its absence on the Belgian. The linguistic line was less sharp. German was spoken in certain districts on the Belgian side; while, in spite of a century of Germanization, Walloon still prevailed in Malmedy and the neighboring Prussian villages. Indeed, Malmedy was in many ways like a Belgian town, and German troops in 1914 are said to have begun pillaging here under the impression that they were already in Belgium.

The actual wishes of the population in the ceded districts had not been expressed, so it was provided in the treaty that during the six months after its coming into force the Belgian authorities should open registers in which the inhabitants might record a desire to have any part of the ceded territory remain under German sovereignty, the results to be passed upon by the League of Nations. It would have been more consistent with the rest of the treaty if the League had also been entrusted with securing the original expression of opinion. The territory transferred by the treaty comprised 376 square miles with a population of 61,000, constituting the Kreise of Malmedy and Eupen, whose administrative limits were preserved in order to interfere as little as possible with local conditions.[11]

The treaty also settled an old controversy in this region respecting the district of Moresnet, disputed between Belgium (until 1839 Holland) and Prussia since 1815, when two inconsistent boundary lines of the treaty of Vienna left in doubt the sovereignty over a triangular area of about 900 acres which contained the valuable zinc mine of Vieille Montagne. Neither side would yield, and a convention of 1816 which provided for the neutralization of the area under a condominium or joint administration lasted until the war. With the exhaustion of the mine the district has declined in importance, but the anomaly needed clearing up, as the Germans had frequently declared. The treaty assigns the disputed territory to Belgium, and adds a square mile or so in Prussian Moresnet, comprising the domanial and communal woods.[12]

Far more important for Belgium was the question of her relations with another eastern neighbor, the duchy of Luxemburg. An integral part of the southern Netherlands until the French Revolution, Luxemburg had in 1815 been made into a grand duchy and handed over to the king of Holland. It revolted with Belgium in 1830 and sent members to the Belgian Parliament, but on the final separation of Belgium and Holland in 1839 it was divided, the western or Walloon portion going to Belgium, and the eastern or German-speaking portion continuing as the grand duchy. The dynastic union with Holland came to an end in 1890, when a divergence in the laws of succession established a separate line of grand dukes.

The neutrality of Luxemburg was specially and perpetually guaranteed by the Powers, Prussia included, in 1867; but the state was not in every respect independent. Cut off from its Belgian markets by the separation of 1839, it entered three years later the German Zollverein, of which it continued a member until the close of the World War. Its railroads also passed under German control in 1871, with a proviso that they should not be used for military purposes. They were nevertheless extended and double-tracked in the direction of France and Belgium, for military reasons which became clearly apparent in 1914. August 1 of that year the German occupation of Luxemburg began, and the country remained a base of military operations throughout the war. Unlike Belgium, Luxemburg made no resistance. Indeed, its government was considered very friendly to Germany—une dynastie boche, the French called it—and the final victory of the Allies was followed January 15 by the abdication of the grand duchess, Marie Adelheid, in favor of her sister Charlotte.

It was plain that the Allies, Belgium and France most of all, could not permit a return of Luxemburg to German control; and it was equally plain that, whatever political independence the grand duchy retained, it could not stand economically alone. With but 260,000 people and 1000 square miles of territory, it was not large enough for that; and its principal industry, iron, needed the coal and the markets of adjacent lands. Belgium felt that Luxemburg would naturally turn to her. The people were Catholic; the language of government and of the educated classes was French; there were strong ties of tradition and sentiment between the two countries. Belgium counted, counted too confidently, on the result. She forgot the strong feeling for local independence among the Luxemburgers, who, as their national song runs, ‘want to remain what they are’; she forgot the strength of dynastic tradition and clerical influence. For any union with Belgium spelled the end of the local dynasty and of national identity, and might, it was feared, mean the swallowing up of a conservative Catholic people by a larger and more Socialistic neighbor.

France also wanted Luxemburg. She wanted it for purposes of defence, so as to prevent a repetition of 1914; she wanted its iron mines and blast furnaces. And, unlike the Belgians, she knew how to wait. The treaty of peace merely insisted upon the permanent detachment of Luxemburg from the Zollverein, and the abandonment of all German control over its railways.[13] It did not touch the dynasty; it compelled no new attachments. Meanwhile France, in the full glamor of victory, with a brilliant staff quartered in the duchy itself, dazzled the imagination of the Luxemburgers. They were brought to think that, while any arrangement with Belgium threatened their independence, this could be amply safeguarded in a merely economic union with France. In the winter French troops even suppressed a little revolution against the dynasty. And when the plebiscite came, September 28, 1919, a decided majority pronounced for the reigning duchess and for a customs union with France. Women voted for the first time in this election, and while no separate returns were made of their votes, it is not likely that they diminished the proportion of votes for the duchess.

Of all the German ruling families which were in power in 1918, the sole survivor today is that of the grand duchess of Luxemburg. And the only surviving Austrian prince is her consort, Prince Felix of Bourbon-Parma, naturalized as a Luxemburger November 5, 1919, by a close vote in the Chamber and married the following day. And if some time these two should disappear in another revolution, the republic which would follow seems likely to seek support from France rather than from Belgium.

Belgium’s chief territorial difficulties lie on the side of Holland, which controls the lower courses of her two great rivers, the Scheldt and the Meuse, and hems in Belgium on her northeast corner in Limburg and on her northwest corner in Flanders. The embarrassment is partly strategic, limiting Belgium’s freedom in time of war, partly economic, restricting the foreign commerce which is the lifeblood of the Belgian people. From any point of view, the Dutch-Belgian frontier is unnatural. It requires explanation as soon as you see it on the map. No one would draw such a frontier if he were starting afresh. But it is an historic frontier, and the ancient frontiers of a neutral power are hard things for a peace congress to disturb.

The long tongue of land which constitutes the southern prolongation of Dutch Limburg has diverse historical origins. Its chief town, Maestricht, with parts of the adjacent country, has been Dutch since the seventeenth century. Other parts belonged to the southern Netherlands, and were acquired by the king of Holland as ‘compensation’ in 1839. Like Luxemburg, Limburg joined in the Belgian revolution of 1830 and had representatives in the Belgian parliament until 1839. But in the final separation the peninsula was given to Holland, greatly to Belgium’s dissatisfaction. An outlying region, it complained of neglect by the Dutch government, and its economic relations were rather with the adjacent lands of Belgium and Germany on either side. Recently, with the development of its important coal mines, the Dutch have taken much more interest in Limburg, and active efforts have been made to counteract pro-Belgian tendencies.

The grievances of the Belgians respecting Limburg are twofold. From a military point of view, it cannot be defended by Holland, whose troops were withdrawn therefrom early in the late war. The Dutch claimed that its neutrality was a protection for Belgium. The Belgians, with no illusions as to German respect for neutral territory, replied that they had no permanent assurance of this, and that Limburg would have been crossed in 1914 if a breach had not finally been forced at Liège. They made much of the fact that after the armistice German troops, to the number of some 80,000, had been allowed to go home with their booty by this route, thus escaping capture or internment in Holland. The explanations of the Dutch were lame, but the offence could hardly be said to merit severe punishment. The economic grievances of the Belgians were more serious. Astride the Meuse at Maestricht, the Dutch have delayed improvement and hindered canal navigation. In eight miles of canal there are four sets of customs formalities, consuming several days. Moreover, the best route for a Rhine-Scheldt canal, to the construction of which Germany consented in the treaty,[14] lies via Limburg, the levels across the region of the upper Meuse being too difficult. If Belgium could not have Limburg, she at least wanted military guarantees and economic facilities.

Important as is the Meuse to Belgium, her great highway is the Scheldt. To all intents and purposes an arm of the sea, the Scheldt is navigable for ocean-going vessels as far as Antwerp, 55 miles from its mouth. Without it, Belgium becomes practically an inland country, for its 42 miles of North Sea coast have no harbors of value. Yet the lower Scheldt is not Belgian nor even neutral; it belongs to Holland, through whose territories it passes for 45 miles of its course. And it has belonged to Holland since the sixteenth century, when the weakness of Spain and the strength of the Dutch fixed the northern boundary of the Spanish Netherlands. When the treaty of Westphalia (1648) confirmed the northern provinces in the possession of the left bank of the Scheldt, it also gave them the right to close completely the mouths of the river and its tributaries. The purpose of this was to favor Amsterdam and Rotterdam, and in consequence grass grew in the streets of Antwerp. The revival of Belgium’s great port became possible only with the French Revolution, which reopened the river, while the treaty of Vienna declared navigation free on the Scheldt as well as the Meuse. The existing state of affairs on the Scheldt was established by the treaty of 1839, which created “a special regime which is neither that of the sea nor that of ordinary rivers.”

The regime created by the treaty of 1839 has never been satisfactory to the Belgians. One of its provisions reads:[15]

So far as regards specially the navigation of the Scheldt and of its mouths, it is agreed that the pilotage and the buoying of the channel, as well as the conservation of the channels of the Scheldt below Antwerp, shall be subject to a joint superintendence, and that this joint superintendence shall be exercised by commissioners to be appointed for this purpose by the two parties. Moderate pilotage dues shall be fixed by mutual agreement.

The Dutch have interpreted this strictly as giving the joint commission control only over the pilotage (two concurrent services) and over keeping the channels open and properly marked and buoyed. The Belgians, on the other hand, have contended that the commission should have cognizance of matters upon which the extent and security of the channels depend, such as diking, drainage, encroachments on the river and its accessory waters, etc., their ground being that the Scheldt constitutes a single hydrographic problem, no portion of which can be properly treated without reference to the whole. They allege the failure to make sufficient modern improvements on the western Scheldt because of the indifference of the Dutch authorities, and they also complain of the serious difficulties of drainage in Belgian Flanders caused by raising the level of the Dutch lands between it and the Scheldt. Being interested in the use of the river to a far greater degree than the Dutch, the Belgians find it intolerable to be dependent on Dutch consent to every act of maintenance or improvement. Belgium pays the entire cost of improvements, but the consent of Holland is necessary. Thus the Terneuzen canal, which connects Ghent with the Scheldt, was built by Dutch engineers but at Belgium’s expense, and the Dutch portion does not correspond to the portion south of the frontier. Holland’s position throughout is essentially negative. The Scheldt furthers no major interest of hers; she has no important towns along its banks, no foreign trade which it carries; its improvement benefits only a commercial rival.

In time of war Holland interprets her sovereignty as compelling her to close the river to belligerents. In August 1914 English reënforcements were thus forbidden to relieve Antwerp, although their purpose was to maintain Belgian neutrality, while Belgian troops were denied exit by the river and forced, to the number of several thousand, to suffer internment in Holland. Such control of the river nullifies the centre of Belgium’s defensive system at Antwerp; it might also permit the turning of her Flemish defences in case of a war with Holland. The Dutch maintain that the neutrality of the Scheldt during the Great War was of real assistance to the Allies, who would otherwise have suffered from German submarine bases along its banks; but the Belgians point out that the closing of the river in war destroys at one blow the whole foreign commerce of Antwerp, a result that might ensue even in a war in which Holland was a party and Belgium neutral.

The simplest solution of the problem of the Scheldt would be the elimination of Holland from its southern shore, which she has held for more than three hundred years. This land, called Maritime or Zealand Flanders (Flandre zélandaise, Ryksvlaanderen), has an area of 275 square miles and a population of 78,677, chiefly Catholic. Its economic relations are mainly with Belgium, but it has manifested no desire to change its political affiliations, and has recently been assiduously cultivated by Holland. A less drastic measure would be the admission of Belgium to co-sovereignty on the lower Scheldt, leaving Holland in possession of its banks. Still another possibility would be the complete internationalization of the river, under the League of Nations. These solutions, especially the first two, have been energetically opposed in Holland as infringements on her sovereignty. The question of her boundaries was not, she declared, a matter for the Peace Conference.

It was indeed suggested at Paris that Holland might be induced to relinquish Zealand Flanders and Limburg in return for a compensation in the Prussian territory on her eastern frontier, either in East Friesland or in the region of Cleves and Wesel on the lower Rhine, districts which once had much in common with the adjacent portions of the Netherlands. There was, however, no indication of any desire on the part of the inhabitants of these territories to change their political allegiance, nor was Holland in the least disposed to face the uncertainties arising out of any such exchange. The whole idea smacked too strongly of the methods of the Congress of Vienna.

One matter affecting Holland did, however, concern the Conference, namely Belgium’s compulsory and guaranteed neutrality, and it was the Belgian contention that this involved also her frontiers. The international status of Belgium rests upon the three treaties of April 19, 1839, one between the Five Great Powers and Belgium, one between these powers and Holland, and one between Holland and Belgium. These documents, in substance identical, fix the boundaries of Belgium at the same time that they establish her as an independent and perpetually neutralized state, “bound to observe the same neutrality toward all other states.” This whole system of neutrality collapsed in 1914, and Belgium wanted no more of it. By the time of the Peace Conference Prussia, Austria, and Russia were certainly in no position to guarantee Belgium’s neutrality, while France and England joined with Belgium in considering a revision of the treaties necessary. Upon the advice of its Commission on Belgian Affairs, the Conference took the position that the treaties, as constituting a single entity, should be revised in the entirety of their clauses, at the joint request of these three powers, and that Holland as a signatory of one of the treaties should take part in the revision, together with the Great Powers whose interests were general. The declared object of the revision was “to free Belgium from that limitation on her sovereignty which was imposed on her by the treaties of 1839, and, in the interest both of Belgium and of general peace, to remove the dangers and disadvantages arising from the said treaties.” Belgium and Holland were accordingly invited to appear before the Conference in order to set forth their views with regard to such a revision.

This action was taken by the Council of Ten March 8; but the Conference was busy with more pressing things, and it was not until May 19 and 20 that the representatives of the two countries were at last heard. The Belgians maintained that Belgium had been given weak frontiers in 1839 on the ground that she was to be protected by the Powers; such protection having failed disastrously in 1914, she should be given frontiers which would enable her to hold her own with her neighbors, in war and in peace. The unlimited sovereignty which had been promised her in President Wilson’s seventh point ought to carry with it the frontiers denied her in the days of her weakness. Holland had no objection to the abandonment of Belgium’s neutrality, which had been guaranteed to her as well as to Belgium, but she would not consider for a moment any cession of her own territory. She declared, however, that she was ready to discuss amicably with Belgium any adjustments of the conditions of navigation, etc.

A commission was then appointed, representing Belgium and Holland as well as the principal Allied and Associated Powers, but its field was specifically restricted to “proposals involving neither transfer of territorial sovereignty nor the creation of international servitudes.” As any thoroughgoing settlement satisfactory to Belgium could not help touching in some way the sovereignty of Holland, and as the regime of the Scheldt already constituted an international servitude, the terms of reference were generally regarded as a triumph for the Dutch. The commission went to work in the summer in two sections, one military and the other economic, but no final results had been reached when the Peace Conference dissolved in December. The reference of such outstanding matters to the governments concerned is another victory for Holland, who desires no change in the existing situation. In these matters Belgium has derived little advantage from the support of her allies. Holland still holds the lower Scheldt and the lower Meuse; Luxemburg seems permanently lost; except in the matter of her neutrality, Belgium stands substantially where she stood in 1839.

If the territorial status of Belgium has not been essentially bettered by the war, her economic status is certainly worse. No share in a problematic indemnity will compensate her for her direct losses, not to speak of her other expenses—the stripping of her resources, the enforced idleness of her factories, the disappearance of her foreign markets and her transit trade. Dependent in an extraordinary degree on the outside world, Belgium was cut off from it for nearly five years, and it is a question how fully she can recover her previous position. A hero in 1914, is Belgium to remain a cripple for the future? The German is gone, but he left ruin and disillusion behind him. Small wonder that many a Belgian asks whether it was all worth while, as he contrasts his lean and hungry country with the prosperity of neutral Holland. Small wonder that the neutral world, as it looks to the future, is encouraged to imitate the Holland that stood pat, the Luxemburg that succumbed, rather than the Belgium that resisted. The neutral is more prosperous than the ally.

In order to get a just perspective in the face of such considerations, it is necessary to go back a few months. Germany’s plan was not merely to use Belgium as a highroad to France, but to make Belgium permanently subject to German interests, if not politically subject, at least under complete military and economic control. The German literature of the war, official and unofficial, is full of plans for the permanent control of Belgium—political annexation, at least of that great Flemish-speaking half of the country which the German administration had separated from the rest of Belgium, and which, if not annexed outright, was to remain apart as the great support of German policy in the Belgium of the future; military control, of railroads and telegraphs, perhaps of the Flemish coast and the fortresses of the Meuse; economic control, through a customs union, railway tariffs, port privileges, and the domination of Belgian industrial enterprises. Now Belgium has at least escaped all this. She has maintained her independence while she has saved her soul. When discouraged about the present state of the world, it is well to remind ourselves that the war accomplished, at least for the time being, one great thing it set out to secure, the destruction of German militarism and the protection of small states against the imperial ambitions of Germany. Belgium has also improved her colonial position, not only by frustrating German plans against the Belgian Congo, but by receiving a mandate over an adjacent portion of German East Africa.

For the future Belgium’s security lies in a strong League of Nations and in what such a League stands for. At first Belgian statesmen took the League somewhat coldly, for the treaty of 1839 was an international covenant, and they had ample experience of the futility of mere paper guarantees. If the League covenant were merely another piece of paper, they would be right. The hopeful side of the League lies rather in its assurance of general coöperation, its growth as an administrative and informing body, its development of an international habit of mind and an international conscience. After all, it was the sense of international right that brought the world to Belgium’s side in the Great War, and it is in the broadening and deepening of that sense that the chief hope lies in the future. For centuries the position of Belgium surrounded by France, Germany, and England has made it the battleground of Europe, and it is only by diminishing the likelihood of battles that it can hope to escape this fate. The best guarantees of the security of small states are a stronger sense of right and justice throughout the world.

Bibliographical Note

On the problem of Schleswig the best collection is the Manual historique de la question du Slesvig, ed. F. de Jessen (Copenhagen, 1906); supplemented by Le Slesvig du Nord, 1906-1914 (Copenhagen, 1915). For a German view, see E. Daenell, Das Dänentum in Nordschleswig seit 1864 (Kiel, 1913). After the armistice Daenell protested strongly against the surrender of any part of Schleswig to Denmark: Has Denmark a claim to North Sleswick? (Münster, 1918). For a summary of conditions under Prussian rule, see L. M. Larson, in American Historical Review, xxiv, pp. 227-252 (1919); and M. Mackeprang, Nordslesvig (Copenhagen, 1910; German translation, 1912). For the Danish discussion in 1919, see Miss Karen Larsen, in Political Science Quarterly, December, 1919. G. Rosendal’s Sönderjylland (Odense, [1919]) contains convenient maps and statistics. See also the British Handbook.

For the history of Belgium, the standard work of H. Pirenne has not advanced beyond 1648; there are brief sketches by L. van der Essen (Chicago, 1916) and L. Vander Linden (Paris, 1918). General economic conditions are described by W. Bürklin, Handbuch des belgischen Wirtschaftslebens (Göttingen and Berlin, 1916); and by Gehrig and Wäntig, Belgiens Volkswirtschaft (Leipzig, 1918). An admirable special study of Belgian commerce will be found in A. Demangeon, “Le port d’Anvers,” in Annales de géographie, 1918, pp. 307-339, elaborated in the second volume of the Travaux du Comité d’Etudes. For Belgium’s coal and mineral resources, see P. Krusch, Die nutzbaren Lagerstätten Belgiens (Essen, 1916). The British Handbook on Belgium (1920) is particularly convenient, as are the related pamphlets in the same series.

German plans for permanent control of Belgium are illustrated in S. Grumbach, Das annexionistische Deutschland (Lausanne, 1917; abbreviated translation, New York, 1917); and in Notestein and Stoll, Conquest and Kultur (Washington, 1918). A specimen of this vast literature of annexation may be seen in the work of a Bonn professor: E. Zitelmann, Das Schicksal Belgiens beim Friedensschluss (third edition, Munich, 1917), where the systematic subjection of Belgium is planned. The exploitation of the Flemish question by the Germans is described by F. Passelecq, La question flamande et l’Allemagne (Paris and Nancy, 1917).

The problems of Belgium’s frontiers are not covered in any single book. The Belgian point of view will be found in P. Nothomb, La barrière belge (Paris, 1916); one chapter also as Histoire belge du grand duché de Luxembourg (Paris, 1918). See also E. Bourgeois, La frontière orientale du royaume de Belgique, in Travaux du Comité d’Etudes, ii. For Luxemburg in general, see Miss Ruth Putnam, Luxemburg and her Neighbors, with bibliography (second edition, New York, 1920). The question of the Scheldt is summarized by A. Rotsaert, L’Escaut depuis le traité de Munster (Brussels and Paris, 1918); numerous documents in Guillaume, L’Escaut depuis 1830 (Brussels, 1903). For a Dutch view, see Den Beer Poortugael, La neutralité sur l’Escaut (The Hague, 1911). For this question at Paris, cf. Cammaerts and Geyl in The New Europe, July 31 and August 14, 1919. On Belgian neutrality and the treaties of 1839, see F. L. Warrin, Jr., The Neutrality of Belgium (Washington, 1918).

The history of Belgium’s frontiers can be traced in the following historical atlases: L. van der Essen, Atlas de géographie historique de la Belgique (Brussels and Paris, 1919-), notably Map 10 (1786) by F. L. Ganshof; Geschiedkundige Atlas van Nederland (The Hague, 1912); Geschichtlicher Atlas der Rheinprovinz (Bonn, 1898-), especially the maps of 1789.

BELGIUM AND HER NEIGHBORS

FOOTNOTES:

[8] Articles 109-114, with official map.

[9] Articles 380-386.

[10] Article 115.

[11] Articles 34-39, with official map.

[12] Articles 32, 33.

[13] Articles 40, 41.

[14] Article 361.

[15] Article 9, § 2.

III
ALSACE-LORRAINE

The fate of Alsace-Lorraine was, in general, a problem of the war rather than of the Peace Conference. Nothing had done more, in President Wilson’s phrase, “to unsettle the peace of the world for nearly fifty years”; nothing was more earnestly discussed throughout the World War; nothing was settled more simply and quickly once the war was over. The completeness of the Allied victory and the immediate evacuation of Alsace-Lorraine required by the terms of the armistice left no doubt of the return of the lost provinces to France. The Peace Conference had only to determine certain necessary details. “The territories which were ceded to Germany in accordance with the Preliminaries of Peace signed at Versailles on February 26, 1871, and the Treaty of Frankfort of May 10, 1871, are restored to French sovereignty as from the date of the Armistice of November 11, 1918.” So runs Article 51 of the treaty of Versailles, and the rest follows from that.

Nevertheless, no account of the territorial problems of the Peace Conference would be complete which did not treat the question of Alsace-Lorraine and its background, and treat it with sufficient fulness to give the proper perspective to this major issue of the war. Moreover, Alsace-Lorraine is the necessary basis for any consideration of the whole matter of the Franco-German frontier, with its specific issues of the Rhine, the Left Bank, and the Saar valley. Let us begin with a minimum of history and description, followed by a fuller analysis of the recent aspects of the problem.

Alsace-Lorraine (German Elsass-Lothringen) was an imperial territory (Reichsland) of the German empire formed in 1871 by the union of the two districts then taken from France. It had an area of 5600 square miles (Connecticut and Rhode Island 6000) and a population in 1910 of 1,874,000 (Connecticut and Rhode Island 1,657,000). On the east the Rhine separates it from the grand duchy of Baden; on the south it touches the Swiss frontier; on the north it was bounded by the Palatinate, Prussia, and the grand duchy of Luxemburg. The French frontier on the west was formed in the south by the summit of the Vosges and farther north by an artificial line of demarcation drawn in 1871.

Geographically considered, Alsace consists of the eastern slopes of the Vosges and the rich plain of the valley of the Rhine and its tributary the Ill, Lorraine of a plateau cut in the west by the Moselle. Alsace is a rich agricultural region, producing grain, potatoes, hay, tobacco, and wine; it has also important manufactures in its towns, cottons being a specialty of Mulhouse and other towns of Upper Alsace. Lorraine is less productive in agriculture but richer in mineral resources and the furnaces and iron mills which these support. Alsace has important oil wells at Pechelbronn, and one of the richest potash deposits in the world at Wittelsheim. Lorraine has important salt mines, and valuable coal fields lie on its border in the valley of the Saar; and on its western edge it shared with France the ‘minette’ iron field, the greatest iron deposit in Europe, from the German portion of which before the war came 74 per cent of all the iron mined in the German empire.

The people of Alsace and eastern Lorraine are preponderantly German-speaking; those of western Lorraine speak French. French is also much spoken in the towns of Alsace. 76 per cent of the whole population is Catholic, 22 per cent Protestant.

Alsace-Lorraine as a single political division was a creation of the German government in 1871; the two districts have different origins and a different history, indeed each of them is made up of parts with histories still further separate and distinct. All have in common the fact that they form part of a region which since the ninth century has been debated ground between Germany and France. In the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries the territory which now forms Alsace and Lorraine was acquired bit by bit by France; in 1871 it was transferred in one lump to the new German empire.

In the later Middle Ages Lorraine formed a duchy, within which lay a number of small and in some cases independent feudal states and the city of Metz, a free city of the Holy Roman Empire whose people spoke French. In 1552, on the petition of certain German Protestant princes, Metz was placed under the protection of the king of France, who took possession of the city and the surrounding territory subject to it. In 1613 the bishopric of Metz and its lands were taken over by the French king, the whole being combined with Toul and Verdun into the province of the Three Bishoprics (Trois Evêchés), and the cession was confirmed by the Emperor in the treaty of Westphalia of 1648. Further acquisitions made in the seventeenth century, notably Sierck and Saarlouis, gave France a strategic line of communication through Lorraine to Alsace. The duchy of Lorraine, which had likewise been dependent on the Holy Roman Empire, was declared free by Emperor Charles V and was gradually drawn into the French sphere of influence. Relinquished by its Hapsburg duke in 1736, in 1738 by the treaty of Vienna it was handed over to a Polish duke, Stanislas Leszcynski, on condition that at his death it should pass to his son-in-law, Louis XV of France, by whom it was accordingly acquired in 1766. Certain small enclaves within Lorraine did not pass to France until the Revolution.

Alsace, except the city of Mulhouse, was annexed to France in the course of the reign of Louis XIV. The Middle Ages had broken the country up into a great variety of feudal states and free cities; the Reformation divided it still further by religious dissensions. In the Thirty Years’ War France intervened on the side of the Protestant princes of Germany; at its close France received considerable possessions in Alsace, in much the same way that Brandenburg (the future Prussia) then secured valuable additions in the north. The treaty of Westphalia (1648) assured to France certain lands and certain governmental rights possessed by the Emperor in his imperial capacity and as head of the house of Hapsburg, but the provisions were, possibly with intention, left vague at certain points and became the occasion of protracted legal and historical disputes. By a combination of undoubted grants, more or less justified legal interpretations, and the direct seizure of the city of Strasburg, Louis XIV rounded out his possession of the whole of Alsace. The sole exception, Mulhouse, allied with the Swiss Confederation, voluntarily offered itself to France in 1798.

Thus united to France, Alsace and Lorraine retained their boundaries until the treaty of Vienna. The general principle of the territorial adjustments of 1814 was to leave to France its frontiers of 1792; after Napoleon’s return and defeat at Waterloo the treaty of 1815 was supposed to reduce these to the limits of 1789. In Alsace and Lorraine two deviations were made from this principle, both to the disadvantage of France. At the northern end of Alsace France lost to Bavaria the territory between the Lauter and the Queich, including the fortress of Landau which she had possessed in 1789. On the northern border of Lorraine the frontier was readjusted to the advantage of Prussia, partly for strategic reasons, in connection particularly with the fortress of Saarlouis, partly in order to take away from France the valuable coal deposits of the Saar valley.

At the close of the Franco-Prussian war Germany required of France the cession of Alsace and Lorraine, with a boundary on the west which was defined by the treaty of Frankfort in 1871.

In the next forty years Alsace-Lorraine passed through various stages of government, from military dictatorship through a certain amount of territorial independence to the definite constitution imposed by the Reichstag in 1911. Those who had hoped for autonomy were disappointed in this instrument, which failed to elevate the Reichsland to the position of a federated state of the empire, although an anomalous provision was made for its representation in the Bundesrat. Legally Alsace-Lorraine was still a subject territory of the empire.

Under the constitution of 1911 the emperor possessed supreme executive authority, exercised chiefly through a governor (Statthalter) appointed and recalled by the emperor and resident in Strasburg. Legislative power was entrusted to a bicameral Diet (Landtag). The upper house (First Chamber) consisted of forty-six members, half of them named directly by the emperor, the others made up of certain ecclesiastical dignitaries, the president of the Superior Court, and representatives of cities and economic interests, so that the majority was under the emperor’s control. The sixty members of the lower house (Second Chamber) were elected by universal male suffrage. The emperor possessed the right of veto over the legislative acts of the Landtag; he could levy taxes if it refused to pass the budget; and he could prorogue it and issue decrees with the force of law during its recess. Independent in local matters of the Reichstag, the Reichsland was far from independent of the emperor.

In imperial matters Alsace-Lorraine had three representatives in the Bundesrat, appointed by the Statthalter and thus ultimately by the emperor; but “their votes were counted only when it made no difference how they were cast.”[16] Alsace-Lorraine had sent representatives to the Reichstag since 1874; these numbered fifteen, elected by all male citizens over the age of twenty-five.

For local government Alsace-Lorraine consisted of the three districts (Bezirke) of Upper Alsace (capital Colmar), Lower Alsace (capital Strasburg), and Lorraine (capital Metz). Each of these fell into circles (Kreise), cantons, and communes (Gemeinden). The presidents of the districts and the directors of the circles were named by the emperor, as were also the directors of police. The organization of the local bodies and the distribution of their functions were similar to the system prevailing in Prussia.

The internal history of this half-century of German rule is a most interesting chapter, which we must pass over in order to gain time for an analysis of the question about which that history revolved. Taken as a whole, the period must be regarded as an unsuccessful attempt on the part of the rulers to assimilate by force an unwilling population. The German government had great resources on its side—compulsory education on the German model and in the German tongue, the repressive measures of the greatest army and the strongest administrative system in Europe, the influx of immigrants from beyond the Rhine, the development of communication with the other parts of the empire, an extraordinary material prosperity in which the Reichsland shared. Its policy alternated between harsh repression and clumsy efforts to win the people’s good will. There were periods when it seemed to be making headway, by the mere lapse of time and the apparent hopelessness of resistance, if by nothing else; the argument from prosperity had its effects; the protesting leaders turned toward more immediate measures of amelioration within the empire. Then an episode like the Zabern affair of 1913 would occur to show that the country was still governed by military force, and the pro-French feeling would blaze out again.

The relative strength of the French and German parties was a subject of acrimonious and inconclusive debate. The fact remained that there was a large French party, just how large nobody knew, which maintained a vigorous tradition of French speech and sympathies, by the fireside, among the clergy, in intercourse with France itself. Its existence was shown in the midst of the war by a project brought before the Reichstag for colonizing Alsace-Lorraine with ‘reliable’ subjects. The survival of this French party through fifty years of persecution is one of the finest public examples of the triumph of the inner over the outer life. A peasant who was waving an old French flag at Strasburg at the great reception to the French troops in November 1918 was asked how he had obtained it. “My father,” he said, “in 1871 put this under a plank of his barn, and every Sunday of his life he knelt over it in prayer for the return of Alsace to France. When he died, he handed on the charge to me to keep until that day should come.” The two elements in the population are well illustrated at Metz, where a German-speaking majority of soldiers, officials, and tradesmen came in, and a new quarter sprang up about the railroad station in the latest and heaviest style of neo-German architecture, but the old French town still remained, with its narrow streets, its mediaeval gates (especially that great eastern portal called the ‘German Gate’), its hôtel de ville, and its Gothic cathedral. And the three ages of Metz may be typified by this French cathedral of the thirteenth century, with the statue of William II as a prophet filling a niche in one of its portals, and the final inscription below this figure, attached by handcuffs after the armistice, “Sic transit gloria mundi!”

For more than half a century the problem of Alsace-Lorraine has been debated back and forth with arguments which have had no effect on the opposite sides of the controversy.

To Germans the Reichsland is a German country, save for the French-speaking strip along the western border. It was occupied by German tribes in the fifth century; its speech is German; it was a portion of the mediaeval Empire until violently torn away in the seventeenth century; in 1871 Germany was simply reclaiming her lost provinces. Furthermore, as stated in 1871, Metz and the Vosges were a necessary defence of the Fatherland against French aggression, which had been experienced under the two Napoleons and might be expected again. Finally, as stated now but not openly in 1871, the iron of Lorraine was absolutely necessary to the economic life of modern Germany. Germany held Alsace-Lorraine by right of nationality and by right of conquest, the symbol of her national unity achieved in the war by which it was recovered; it was a part of Germany, not an international question, and she would not give it up or discuss giving it up.

To the French Alsace and Lorraine had become and remained fundamentally French, having been assimilated gradually and without violence in the eighteenth century, French most of all by having entered fully into the spirit of the French Revolution and taken an active part therein. They begged to remain a part of France in 1871, as the unanimous protests of their representatives show, and they continued French at heart against the strongest pressure in the opposite direction. In spite of differences of language, such as exist in other parts of France, Alsace and Lorraine were French in social structure, in political ideals, and in the sympathies of the population. Without these lost provinces France was a mutilated country, not fully France. Furthermore, the possession of Metz and the Vosges by a military power like Germany constituted a standing menace to a peaceful country like the French Republic; it also menaced the economic life of France and its defence by making possible, as in 1914, immediate seizure of the richest part of its iron supply. France was robbed of these provinces by force in 1871, and the wrong had to be righted, not only in the interest of France but for the sake of the inhabitants.

There was a growing disposition to recognize that the problem of Alsace-Lorraine concerned not merely France and Germany and the inhabitants of the territory itself, but the world at large. The settlement of this question became of international moment partly as it affected the military and economic balance of power between France on the one hand and a Germany dangerous to international peace on the other; partly as a vindication of international right, violated by the forcible annexation of the two provinces in 1871 in defiance of the express protests of the population; partly in order to eliminate, in the interests of permanent international order, an issue which had “unsettled the peace of the world for nearly fifty years.” Whatever the solution, international interests had to be guarded.

Of the arguments which have been brought forward in support of the respective points of view, that of race is the least significant. It is true that most German writers have urged that the people of Alsace-Lorraine are of Germanic race, akin to the other peoples of the German empire; but this view lacks support from the anthropologist. Neither the tall, fair-haired Teuton nor the short, round-headed Alpine type dominates Alsace-Lorraine. The population is clearly mixed, with racial affinities reaching in both directions and resulting from the survival of an original Gallo-Roman substratum in the uplands along with a considerable infiltration of Teutonic invaders in the valleys. Whatever the exact percentage of the two races in Alsace-Lorraine, the fact has no demonstrable historical or political importance. Both Germany and France are, racially considered, strongly mixed peoples, all three races being well represented in France, and the non-Teutonic type in Germany being marked in the southwest and also in the Slavic regions of the east. To argue from race on either side proves either too much or too little—too much, if all people of Teutonic type (as in England, Scandinavia, and northern France) are claimed for the German empire; too little, if either Germany or France were to be limited to the regions where the Teutonic or the Alpine type respectively predominates.

The question of language is more difficult. It is the German view that Alsace and Lorraine (at least that larger part of Lorraine which speaks German), as German-speaking countries, ought to belong to Germany. The French point out that this theory breaks down in principle in the French-speaking districts of Lorraine; they emphasize the importance of the French-speaking minority in Alsace as a leading force and the strong pro-French feeling in a large part of the German-speaking population; and they deny that language is the proper test of political allegiance.

By a curious paradox, language is one of the most changeable and one of the most permanent facts in European history. It is changeable in that it can be quickly learned or unlearned, especially from one generation to another, as is convincingly illustrated by European immigrants to the United States. It is permanent in that the line of demarcation in the open country shows surprisingly little variation over a period of several centuries. Hence it is highly important to distinguish conditions in the towns and among the more conservative peasant population.

As regards the open country, the linguistic frontier between French and German shows very slight changes since the Middle Ages, when it was fixed in each region by the relative preponderance of the Latin-speaking Gauls or of the Teutonic invaders. Slight advances of German in the Middle Ages and of French since the sixteenth century are traceable at certain points, but are relatively unimportant. The present line of division has never been absolutely determined, but a local study was made by C. This in 1886 and 1887 on the basis of personal examination, and his results have been generally accepted by both French and German scholars. The line follows the political frontier, here the crest of the Vosges, only for about sixty miles in Upper Alsace. In the south it includes two districts to the east, Eteimbes and Montreux, while it dips still farther to the east in the upper valleys of the Weiss and the Breusch and the middle valley of the Liepvrette, all of these districts speaking French. In Lorraine the linguistic frontier lies well to the east of the political boundary, running in a zigzag fashion from Mount Donon to the northwest across the open country through or near Sarrebourg and southwest of Thionville to the Luxemburg boundary. About 6 per cent of the area of Alsace and about 46 per cent of the area of Lorraine thus contain a French-speaking majority.

It must not, however, be supposed that the cleavage is adequately described by any such line. In towns the influence of commerce, education, government, et cetera, often forms a considerable class whose speech differs from that of the surrounding country. In the long period of French occupation a French-speaking class was in this way created in Strasburg, Colmar, Mulhouse (notably), and many other towns of Alsace. After 1871 the large immigration of soldiers and officials to Metz made it appear as a German town in the official statistics (78 per cent German-speaking in 1910). The German majority in Metz has disappeared automatically with the withdrawal of the German garrison and civil government, but the French-speaking element in Alsace showed extraordinary persistence and vitality in the face of every measure of repression. In spite of the compulsory study of German in all schools and the official support of their language by all the agencies of the government, the official German returns show no significant diminution in the percentage of the French-speaking population since exact statistics have been kept:

|  | 1900 | 1905 | 1910
Lower Alsace
| German | 95.77 | 95.77 | 95.80
| French | 3.72 | 3.61 | 3.80
Upper Alsace
| German | 93.31 | 93.42 | 93.00
| French | 5.59 | 5.66 | 6.10
Lorraine
| German | 70.59 | 71.30 | 73.50
| French | 25.87 | 23.78 | 22.30
Alsace-Lorraine
| German | 86.79 | 86.80 | 87.20
| French | 11.60 | 11.03 | 10.90

No map of the distribution of language, however exact, would tell the whole story. Community of language is undoubtedly an important influence in producing that ‘consciousness of kind’ upon which nationality rests, and in facilitating the common life of the modern state. We prefer our neighbors to speak our language, however indifferent we may be respecting the shape of their skulls. Community of language is not, however, a necessary basis for a sound national life, as appears in such countries as Belgium and Switzerland. The distinction must also be noted between the local patois and the general national language taught in schools, for in many European countries these are quite different. Thus in Italy a north-Italian cannot understand a Sicilian speaking the local dialect, and there are also regions where French and German are spoken. In Germany there are marked differences between the official High German and the Low German dialects, not to mention the languages of the subject populations. In France languages quite distinct from French exist in Brittany, Provence, the Basque region, and the Flemish territory around Dunkirk, without weakening French nationality or destroying French unity.

In the case of Alsace-Lorraine, it is of fundamental importance to recognize that sympathy for France or Germany did not follow linguistic lines. While few of the French-speaking population were attracted to Germany, there was a very considerable element among the German-speaking population which favored France. Even German observers found French sympathies far more widespread than the French language. It is a well known fact that the anti-German movements of recent years have been more pronounced in Alsace, especially Upper Alsace, than in Lorraine with its larger French-speaking population.

Moreover, language, like race, is a two-edged sword for Germany. If Alsace ought to be part of the empire because it speaks chiefly German, so ought the German-speaking portions of Austria and Switzerland. And if France ought to have given up hope of Alsace because of its German-speaking population, Germany should make no complaint over the parallel renunciation of Prussian Poland or Upper Silesia. Germany cannot ask to apply the principle in the west and reject it in the east.

As a matter of history, the linguistic frontier between French and German has rarely coincided with the political frontier. The national lines, so far as national lines have been drawn, have been drawn by other forces. Language is an important element in national life, but it is not the only element, and in Alsace-Lorraine it has been subordinated to other considerations. Alsace, in spite of its German speech, was reasonably contented under French rule. It never became fully reconciled to German rule, in spite of a large measure of community of language. The causes for its aspirations and sympathies lie deeper than dialect. Although surer and clearer than race, language proved an illusory and insufficient basis for solving the problem of Alsace-Lorraine.

When we come to the historical tradition and affinities of the district, we find that German writers urge the long membership of Alsace and Lorraine in the mediaeval Empire down to 1648, the place of Alsace in the history of German literature, and its affinities with the German culture of the valley of the Rhine. The French bring out certain connections of Alsace and Lorraine with France before Louis XIV, but they urge especially the transformation of these provinces during the French Revolution into a people profoundly imbued with the French conceptions of liberty and democracy, in contradistinction to the political and social traditions and organization of Germany.

Arguments of this sort are by their nature less specific and tangible than those based upon the concrete facts of language and race, and judgments in relation to them are likely to be subjective. At certain points, however, they admit of objective analysis, particularly as regards political affiliations.

There is, in the first place, no question that both Alsace and Lorraine formed part of the mediaeval Empire from the tenth century on. It is also equally clear that the Empire of the Middle Ages was in no way comparable to the national states of modern Europe, but was a loose union of tribal duchies which were later dissolved into a mass of petty feudal states and free cities. The Emperors never succeeded in establishing a strong monarchy or real national unity, being, by virtue of their imperial title, often more interested in asserting a shadowy supremacy over Italy and the valley of the Rhone. In the broader sense the Empire covered at one time or another a considerable part of Europe, as, for example, central and northern Italy and eastern France; in the narrower sense the German kingdom comprised under its loose and ineffective sway the territory of modern Holland, eastern Belgium, a good part of Switzerland, Austria, Bohemia, et cetera. As time went on, the principalities and towns became more rather than less independent, until the treaty of Westphalia (1648) recognized the territorial sovereignty of such princes as had not already established it. Membership in so large and unconsolidated a body would not establish the German character of any particular member, else it would be necessary to incorporate many parts of Europe which have long enjoyed complete independence of Germany.

Moreover, it is important to note that the present German empire is not a continuation of the mediaeval Empire or a successor thereto. The old Empire came to an end in 1806, when Francis I laid aside the imperial crown and assumed the title of emperor of Austria. The modern German empire was created by Prussia in 1871 as a federation of German states from which Austria was carefully excluded. If the mediaeval Emperors had a legitimate successor, it was the Hapsburgs, not the Hohenzollerns, who were in the days of the older Empire merely one of many lines of feudal and electoral princes. The Hapsburgs made over to France their claims to Alsace and Lorraine, to Alsace and Metz in 1648, to the duchy of Lorraine in 1738.

On the other hand the cultural ties between Germany and Alsace, and in some measure between Germany and Lorraine, were stronger than the political. Alsace had its share in the literary and artistic development of the Rhine valley, and this, while affected by the French influences which spread eastward in the later Middle Ages, was preponderantly German. In the matter of speech French historians admit that “Alsace at the beginning of the seventeenth century was an absolutely German country,” and its local dialect was the vehicle of its vigorous local traditions. “At the moment when it passed under French rule it belonged to Germany in language, habits, institutions, and feeling.”[17]

The French government from 1648 to 1789 was tender to the traditions of the conquered territory. Except for the prescription of French in the courts, no restrictions were put on the use of the German language, although French naturally made rapid progress in the towns. There was little change in local institutions. In spite of its centralized monarchy, France itself abounded in local customs, privileges, and jurisdictions, and it was natural and prudent to allow even greater toleration in a newly conquered territory. Subject to the Sovereign Council and the intendant, local affairs went on very much in their old way and in large measure in the German tongue. Much was accomplished for the material wellbeing of the country, and the inhabitants came to recognize certain advantages in French rule. The old regime was a period of gradual assimilation without violence.

The institutions which the old regime tolerated in Alsace, the Revolution swept away. German historians naturally emphasize the excesses and violence of the Revolution, French historians its social and political reforms; but there is general agreement that it took long and rapid strides in the direction of making the country French. “It made an end of all the German mediaeval institutions which remained,” is the sad summary of Meyer’s Handlexikon.[18] The Revolution destroyed privilege, abolished seigniorial rights and jurisdictions, and established a democratic social order as fully in Alsace and Lorraine as in the rest of France. There was of course opposition, and the anti-religious policy of the Revolution was steadily resisted by this strongly Catholic population, but in general Alsace and Lorraine moved with the new movement. The Marseillaise was first sung at Strasburg; Alsatians served in great numbers in the armies which carried the principles of 1789 across Europe; and names like Kléber and Ney illustrate the share of these provinces in the wars of the Napoleonic era. The acceptance of the Revolution in Alsace and Lorraine made them at last one with France. “It is the Revolution, not Louis XIV, which made Alsace French,” wrote Fustel de Coulanges in 1870. “Since that moment Alsace has followed all our destinies, it has lived our life. It has shared all our thoughts and feelings, our victories and defeats, our glory and our defects, all our joys and all our sorrows.”[19] By 1813, confess the German historians of Alsace, “all feeling for Germany had been lost,” and “no trace remained of the ancient community of race between the Alsatians and their German brothers.”[20]

This participation in the life and ideals of France continued until 1871. There was, it is true, a considerable feeling of particularism in Alsace, and to a lesser extent in Lorraine, as well as some natural sympathy between the Protestant minority in Alsace and the Protestants beyond the Rhine; but there was no movement for separation from France and no desire manifested therefor. Toward 1870 the desire for the recovery of these ‘lost provinces’ became more pronounced in Germany, and it was fanned into flame as the war of 1870 progressed; but this nationalistic movement found little or no response among the Alsatians whom it claimed as long-lost kinsmen. If they were still German “socially and ethically,” “politically and nationally they were thoroughly French.” They were Germans as members of the family, Frenchmen as members of the nation.[21] The Germans freely admitted in 1871 that the Alsatians did not yet desire reunion with Germany, but this was laid to their French education, and time and experience of the blessings of German rule were expected to work a rapid change in their desires. The state of opinion in Alsace at the time of the Franco-Prussian war is excellently shown by an outside observer, Sir Robert Morier, then British secretary of legation at Darmstadt, whence he had opportunity to follow closely the events of the war and the course of German opinion. Strongly pro-German and anti-French throughout, he made it his business to inquire from the best German sources whether there was any party in Alsace which desired annexation to Germany, and the answer was uniformly in the negative. Among others he interrogated the Grand Duke of Baden, who had led an army in Alsace, and “had given himself the greatest trouble to ascertain the feeling of the population in regard to Germany and ... had come to the conclusion that not only no annexationist party existed, but that the strongest possible national French feeling pervaded the whole population.”[22]

The usual German justification of the seizure of Alsace and Lorraine may be summed up in the words of the historian Ranke in 1870, “We are fighting Louis XIV.” These provinces had been taken from Germany in the seventeenth century; they must now be taken back by their rightful owner. To many people this is still the essence of the problem of Alsace-Lorraine. Now if the world had not moved in the interval between Louis XIV and 1871, there would be little to say in answer to this argument. In the seventeenth century lands and peoples were passed from one sovereign to another like pieces on a chessboard, and what had been lost in one game might well be retaken in the next. But as regards this question the world had changed in three important respects:—

Germany had changed. The Germany which lost these provinces to Louis XIV was, as we have seen, a jumble of small states, loosely united under the ineffective headship of the Hapsburgs. The Germany which reclaimed them was a Hohenzollern empire from which much of the old empire, including the Hapsburgs, had been separated or excluded.

Alsace and Lorraine had changed. They had lost their German institutions and political sympathies and had become in all political respects French as the result of two centuries of membership in the French state, and especially of their share in the French Revolution.

European public opinion had changed through the growth of nationality, and was coming to regard peoples as entitled to determine their own destiny, or at least to be consulted regarding it. To tear away people from the country of which they formed a part in order to unite them with a state to which they had belonged two centuries before was becoming an anachronism.

It is quite true, then, that Germany in 1871 was fighting Louis XIV, but in the spirit of Louis XIV rather than that of the later nineteenth century. Its appeal to history was in reality a denial of the facts of historic change, in that it asserted the predominance of the older historic tradition against the newer and more vital historic tradition created during the union of Alsace and Lorraine with France. Only a clear pronouncement of the inhabitants themselves in favor of such a transfer could justify it to the thinking of a later age. Yet a popular vote was neither permitted nor desired by Germany in 1871 or at any time between 1871 and 1918.

In all such discussions of the affinities of Alsace and Lorraine, the outsider is struck with the failure of French and German to meet each other’s arguments. The truth seems to be that the disputants move in different realms of thought and feeling. To the Germans the German character of Alsace is accepted as self-evident, so that any connection with France appears unnatural and contrary to all national life. To the French the community of political and social ideas gained by long union with France seems the determining element, and subjection to Germany seems something monstrous.

In spite of all that has been written about the supposed affinities and desires of the population of Alsace-Lorraine, it must not be forgotten that the national interests of Germany and France are vitally concerned in its possession, not merely in the general sense of the desire to keep or to recover something which has been fought over as a matter of national honor, but in the very definite respects of military advantage and economic power. And there have been times when these considerations were put nakedly in the foreground as the dominant motives. Thus Emperor William I wrote to Empress Eugénie October 26, 1870: “The required cessions of territory have no other purpose than to set back the point of departure of the French armies which will come to attack us in the future.”[23] German blood, said Bismarck, “was shed not for the sake of Alsace-Lorraine, but for the German empire, its unity, and the protection of its frontiers.”[24] Stern treatment of its people he defended on the ground that it was the glacis of a fortress, to be used for the benefit of the Fatherland behind it, irrespective of the desires of the conquered.[25]

The military purpose of the annexation was also evident from the boundaries of the ceded territory. The frontier of the Vosges, of obvious advantage to Germany from a strategic point of view, might also be argued for on other grounds as the natural line of demarcation between Alsace and France—the watershed between two river systems, in part the boundary between French and German speech, etc. No such ‘natural’ or linguistic argument, however, could be urged for the annexation of French Lorraine. Here the obvious and declared object was the fortress of Metz, dominating the approaches to the upper Rhine by way of the Saar and to the middle Rhine by way of the valley of the Moselle. Bismarck, it is generally understood, wished to take only Alsace and feared the danger of a French population in the west, but Moltke and the military party insisted on Metz and had their way.

Still another consideration had weight in drawing the frontiers of 1871, namely the iron deposits of Lorraine. Apart from the potash of Upper Alsace, it so happens that the great natural resources of Alsace-Lorraine lay on its outer edges, in the coal of the Saar valley and the iron of the Lorraine border. The problems of the Saar will be discussed in the next chapter in relation to the frontier of 1814; those of the Lorraine frontier are particularly instructive in connection with our present subject.

The iron which forms the greatest mineral resource of Alsace-Lorraine is a part of the minette district, about forty miles in length and fourteen miles in breadth, lying on the borders of France and Luxemburg. The Franco-German frontier of 1871 divided this area nearly equally between the two countries, save for a small strip on the north extending beyond the Luxemburg line. Most of this ore is strongly phosphoric (minette), and could not be worked advantageously until the invention in 1878 of the Thomas process for dephosphorization. The ores are not relatively rich, the average iron content being 33 to 35 per cent; but they are easily mined and are sufficiently porous to be easily crushed, while a limestone which fluxes easily occurs either with the ore, as at Briey, or in the immediate neighborhood.

In 1913 German Lorraine produced 20,600,000 long tons, or three-fourths of the iron mined in Germany. French Lorraine in the same year produced 19,400,000 tons, or 90 per cent of the product of France, of which a considerable portion was exported to Germany. Of the world’s total production of iron in 1913, 29 per cent came from the minette district, i. e., 12 per cent from German Lorraine, 12 per cent from French Lorraine and 5 per cent from Luxemburg. The rest of Europe furnished 24 per cent. The reserves have been estimated as 3000 million tons for French Lorraine and 1830 million tons for German Lorraine; more recent estimates make the two more nearly equal, but with the preponderance in favor of the French. The whole constitutes by far the richest iron supply in Europe and one of the three or four greatest in the world.

This enormous development of the minette district was quite unforeseen in 1871, yet we know that even then the Germans were not blind to the importance of its iron. The iron deposits of the region were carefully studied by German geologists for their government, with the result that the German territorial demands were shaped with the purpose of including the best of them and were further increased between the preliminaries of Versailles and the final treaty of Frankfort. Hence the meanderings of the frontier then drawn. It was believed that the main vein had been secured, comprising the ores near the surface which alone appeared workable with profit, and that nothing valuable in the deposit had been omitted. Only later was it discovered that the dip of the strata toward Briey and Longwy concealed an even richer field on the French side which could be worked to a considerable depth. Moreover the German geologists of 1871 were especially interested in the phosphorus-free ore and could not foresee the value which the Thomas process would give the minette. Lamentations over their shortsightedness were heard before the war,[26] and in August 1914 German engineers hastened to occupy Briey and Longwy, whose ores are valued not only for their content but for mixing with the less calcareous German ores. It was frequently declared in Germany that without this occupied territory the production of German munitions would have to cease, although this is hardly justified by the facts now available concerning the actual use which was made of minette ore for this purpose.

Moreover, it is well to remember that readjustments of the Lorraine frontier at the expense of France were a constant objective of the Germans throughout the war. At times these were sketched broadly as part of a general advance of the German boundary along the whole front from Belfort to the mouth of the Somme, but more frequently they are described as “improvements” of the frontier in Lorraine, with the minette area of French Lorraine and the great border fortresses as the definite objectives. The acquisition of Briey and Longwy figured in all the principal programs of annexation, especially those of the great economic interests, which went so far as to declare that a war which did not secure them for Germany would be a failure. The object was clearly economic, or rather, in view of the place of iron and steel in modern warfare, military-economic.

More specifically military was the demand for the great fortresses of this part of the French frontier: Belfort, commanding the ‘Burgundian’ gate leading from Upper Alsace to the valleys of the Doubs and Saône, and still left in French hands after its heroic resistance of 1871; Epinal, on the Moselle; Toul, commanding the passage from the Moselle to the Meuse; and Verdun on the Meuse, whose importance was made clear to the world in the great operations of 1916-17. The strength of these positions is evident from the fact that the French hold on them remained unshaken during more than four years of war. Their importance is further indicated by the German demand, made at the outbreak of hostilities, that Toul and Verdun be handed over as guarantees of French neutrality. Such conditions of peace kept reappearing, sometimes under the specious suggestion of a “slight rectification of frontier” without indicating the decisive value of a few miles of territory in this region.

The day of such Pan-German dreams is over. They are mentioned merely to indicate the nature of the German war aims, and the fact that German interest in Alsace-Lorraine was not dictated wholly by motives of the language, race, or historic affinities of the population.

During the war the German attitude on Alsace-Lorraine was to stand pat, while at the same time taking stronger measures for destroying the local opposition. The Germans refused, as before, to admit that there was anything to discuss, much less anything to yield. Autonomy[27], even, was not officially proposed until the last month of the war, in a last effort to save Germany’s pride and iron mines. The German peace terms sent to President Wilson in December 1916 are said to have conceded to France only the small portion of Upper Alsace which had been held by French troops throughout the war. The support of “the just claims of France respecting Alsace-Lorraine”[28] which formed part of the terms proposed by the Austrian emperor in 1917 was promptly disavowed by Germany. Only rare Minority Socialists dared support the idea of a plebiscite.

All this changed with the armistice and the requirement of evacuation of the Reichsland by German troops and officials. The whole of Germany became suddenly enamored of the virtues of a plebiscite. President Wilson’s programme was invoked, on the alleged ground that the wrong done to France in 1871 lay simply in not calling for a popular vote, and the German government declared itself ready to right the wrong now by means of such a vote. The alternatives proposed for the voting were union with Germany, union with France, and an independent state free to form a customs union with either country. If Germany could not keep the Reichsland itself, she might perhaps thus keep its iron and its trade! To such proposals the French turned a deaf ear. Those who had opposed a plebiscite before the victory were not likely to support it now, and doubt disappeared before the reception which Strasburg gave the French troops and the President and Premier. “This is the best of plebiscites,” said President Poincaré in the midst of his tumultuous welcome by the Alsatians, and there were few to deny it. The Germans were genuinely surprised at the warmth of the popular enthusiasm, and began to ask themselves why after fifty years they had failed to get the sympathy of the people.

During the war the idea of a plebiscite in Alsace-Lorraine had been popular with certain sections of Allied and neutral opinion, both as a form of self-determination and as a means of settling finally and conclusively this ancient dispute. Such a decision would be democratic, and it would be final. Against it had been urged the grave practical difficulties which stood in the way of any free expression of the real opinion of the real inhabitants, particularly in view of the emigration of about half a million since 1871, the coming in of some hundreds of thousands from Germany, and the wholesale condemnations and deportations during the war. A popular vote under these conditions would have opened a wide field to bribery, intimidation, and influence of every sort, and would have engendered great bitterness and recrimination. A serious objection of principle was also raised on the part of the French, who felt they would thus be recognizing Germany’s legal right in the Reichsland. The will of the people, they said, had been expressed by the unanimous declarations of their elected representatives in the French Parliament in 1871 and in the German Reichstag in 1874, yet it had been openly flouted by Germany so long as she had any chance of retaining the Reichsland by other means. Germany could not be permitted to ignore a principle at one moment and to invoke it at another when it might possibly be manipulated in her favor, a system of “heads I win, tails you lose.” Such a proceeding was plainly unfair to France, and it also set a bad example of international morality by leaving Germany a chance to profit by her violation of international right in 1871. Under the guise of popular rights this would really sanction an international wrong. Some even maintained that, the treaty of Frankfort having been torn up by Germany in 1914, Alsace and Lorraine therewith reverted to France, ipso facto disannexed. To accept a plebiscite as the basis of restoration was to admit the lawfulness of the act of violence by which they had been seized.

These arguments were hard to answer save on the ground of a strongly expressed demand on the part of the people of Alsace-Lorraine, and, whatever their opinion, no such general demand was forthcoming. Certainly Germany’s record of oppression and failure as a ruler was sufficient to forfeit whatever claims she might justly have had upon the Reichsland, and she had formally accepted President Wilson’s demand that “the wrong done to France in 1871 should be righted.” That wrong consisted, not in failing to hold a plebiscite, but in contemptuously disregarding the unmistakable expressions of popular opinion then and thereafter expressed.

French Socialist opinion still wanted a plebiscite, but the purpose was plainly to satisfy a theoretical scruple, which required a popular vote for any change of sovereignty. For good or ill, Alsace-Lorraine came back to France without a popular consultation; it was administered by France in the interval between the armistice and the treaty of peace; and the treaty recognized French sovereignty as beginning with the armistice, November 11, 1918. The deed of Frankfort was thus undone. A plebiscite seemed impracticable, unless as a mere matter of form, and in that case it was unnecessary. There was something to be said for summoning a popular assembly for other purposes which might easily have expressed the opinion of the people, but this again would have been chiefly a matter of form, to forestall future objections.

So the fundamental provisions of the treaty which concern Alsace-Lorraine consist merely of a preamble by which the high contracting parties, Germany thus included, recognize “the moral obligation to redress the wrong done by Germany in 1871 both to the rights of France and to the wishes of the population of Alsace and Lorraine,” and the article[29] restoring to France the territories ceded by the treaty of Frankfort. The other articles[30] are, essentially, consequences and applications of this act of restoration. Some of them merely reproduce, in the opposite sense, clauses of the treaty of 1871. In general, however, the Paris articles are fuller and more complicated, partly because they had to be adapted, either by reference or by way of exception, to the other provisions of the instrument in which they are contained, partly because the restoration of territory after half a century necessarily raises questions not involved in the original cession.

Such a question was that of citizenship, which is regulated by an elaborate annex, adjusted to the complex conditions of citizenship and nationality which had arisen in the Reichsland. The general principle adopted is, broadly speaking, that French nationality is acquired ipso facto by those who had lost it in 1871 and by their descendants, except the offspring of a native mother and a German father who had come to the Reichsland subsequently to the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war; that it may be claimed before the French authorities by all others save Germans and the descendants of Germans who have come in since 1870; and that such German immigrants and their descendants can acquire French citizenship only by the process of naturalization. The purpose of the whole was to admit on the basis of domicile before 1870, and to exclude, for the present, the Germans, with their descendants, who had come to the Reichsland in large numbers since the German conquest.

The economic provisions had to consider not only the status of such individual matters as debts and contracts, pensions and suits at law, but also the new relations created in the region as a whole. Thus France acquired the public property, including the railroads, without any payment, and no share of the German public debt or war indemnity was attached to the transferred territory—arrangements which offset in some measure the principal and interest of the five milliards of war indemnity imposed by Germany in 1871. German economic penetration is restricted not only by the liquidation of existing enterprises but by the right to prohibit new participation in public utilities, mines, quarries, and metallurgical establishments. Important temporary provisions guard against the effects of a sudden interruption of relations between the Left and Right Banks in such matters as ports, terminals, and water power, and in respect to customs tariffs, a period of five years being set during which free exportation is permitted into Germany and free importation of textile materials from Germany into Alsace and Lorraine. This last is particularly important, for the Reichsland enjoyed profitable markets in Germany, and its economic prosperity was constantly urged as an argument for remaining under German rule. Whether or not France can furnish equally good outlets for local manufactures, she must at least provide a reasonable period for readjustment of the lines of trade.

The largest economic question involved in the return of the lost provinces to France is not mentioned in the treaty, namely the enormous transfer of mineral resources. By securing the potash of Upper Alsace France halves the German supply and thus breaks the German monopoly of the world’s mineral potash; by joining the iron of Lorraine to the iron of Briey, Longwy, and Nancy, France obtains, save for the small share of Luxemburg, full control of the greatest iron field in Europe. The minette ore is no longer shared between France and Germany, it is monopolized by France. If France had Germany’s coal, she might try to establish an economic supremacy as great as that possessed by Germany at the outbreak of the war. Late in 1918 one began to hear suggestions for some sort of condominium in Lorraine, or for a guarantee of German participation in its mine and furnaces; but such proposals found no favor with the French government. No such arrangements had been made for the benefit of France in 1871, and she saw no reason for making them now. And if other great powers had pointed out the danger of so great a monopoly in the world, the French might have replied that they had little coal, less oil, and no copper. After all, the nub of the situation is that France needs coal and Germany needs iron, and sooner or later it will be necessary to exchange one for the other. The sooner this natural necessity is recognized in a modus vivendi, the better for all concerned. If the compelling forces of trade are not allowed to assert themselves with reasonable freedom, the matter may well cause grave international difficulty.

Nor did the conference concern itself with other internal matters which had been much discussed before the armistice. During the forty-seven years of separation, France and the Reichsland had necessarily diverged in many matters of institutions, legislation, and social conditions, so that several difficult problems of readjustment were presented. The law of the new German civil code of 1900, the German organization of local government, the German systems of taxation and social legislation were well established in Alsace-Lorraine, and could not immediately be rooted up, if indeed their abolition was always desirable. Perhaps the most striking point of divergence was to be found in the relations of church and state. The Reichsland had preserved the system of the Concordat of 1801 and analogous measures for the Protestant and Jewish religious bodies, so that the government maintained religion from public funds and exercised direct authority over the appointment of the clergy. In France the Separation Laws of 1905 and 1907 had carried through the complete separation of church and state, so that the state relinquished the nomination of the higher clergy and discontinued the payment of clerical salaries, at the same time taking over ecclesiastical property. France had also suppressed the teaching religious orders and put all education into lay hands in so-called ‘neutral schools.’ These measures were viewed with grave disapproval in Alsace-Lorraine, a deeply religious country where the great majority of the schools are under the control of religious bodies and much of the lower education is still in the hands of nuns. Serious difficulty would be encountered in extending the French system to Alsace-Lorraine, and in this, as in other fields, some measure of local independence is required, at least for the present.

In adjusting their relations with the restored provinces the French will need an uncommon measure of tact, sympathetic understanding, and breadth of view, and any mistakes will be viewed critically in the country itself and magnified beyond the Rhine. Nevertheless, the questions are not now international, and it is earnestly to be hoped that they may not become international. They may best be left in the hands of those directly concerned, the people of France, including henceforth, for this as for all other purposes, the three departments of the Haut-Rhin, the Bas-Rhin, and the Moselle, which were once known as Alsace-Lorraine.

Bibliographical Note

The best history of Alsace is R. Reuss, Histoire d’Alsace (11th edition, Paris, 1916). There is no analogous work for Lorraine; see C. Pfister, La Lorraine, le Barrois, et les Trois Evêchés (Paris, 1912). A good recent book in German is lacking; see Lorenz and Scherer, Geschichte des Elsass (Berlin, 1886). For the seventeenth century, see R. Reuss, L’Alsace au xviiᵉ siècle (Paris, 1897-98). On the cession of 1871, see G. May, Le traité de Francfort (Paris, 1909); and for the fixing of the frontier, A. Laussedat, La délimitation de la frontière franco-allemande (Paris, 1901), with facsimile of the original map showing the changes between the preliminaries of Versailles and the final treaty.

There is a vast literature of the period since 1871 and the ‘question’ in all its aspects. Convenient accounts in English are B. Cerf, Alsace-Lorraine since 1870 (New York, 1919); C. D. Hazen, Alsace-Lorraine under German Rule (New York, 1917); C. Phillipson, Alsace-Lorraine (London, 1918); and E. A. Vizetelly, The True Story of Alsace-Lorraine (London, 1918). Examples of the literature are: H. and A. Lichtenberger, La question d’Alsace-Lorraine (Paris, 1915), by two fair-minded Frenchmen of Alsatian origin; the various books of the Alsatian nationalist, Abbé E. Wetterlé; S. Grumbach, Das Schicksal Elsass-Lothringens (Neuchâtel, 1915), by an Alsatian Socialist; D. Schäfer, Das Reichsland (Berlin, 1915), Pan-German; H. Wendel, Elsass-Lothringen und die Sozial-Demokratie (Berlin, 1916), Social Democrat; H. Ruland, Deutschtum und Franzosentum in Elsass-Lothringen (Colmar, 1908); E. Florent-Matter, Les Alsaciens-Lorrains contre l’Allemagne (Paris, 1918). The brilliant statement of the French case in the letter of Fustel de Coulanges to Mommsen (now in his Questions historiques, Paris, 1893, pp. 505-512) has lost none of its point with time. A. Schulte, Frankreich und das linke Rheinufer (Stuttgart, 1918), is an historical polemic against French claims.

A good manual of the government under German rule is O. Fischbach, Das öffentliche Recht des Reichslandes (Tübingen, 1914).

The human geography of the whole region is admirably discussed in P. Vidal de la Blache, La France de l’Est (Paris, 1917). There is a good general article by L. Gallois in the Geographical Review, vi, pp. 89-115 (1918). There are excellent discussions of resources, as well as of frontiers, by eminent geographers and historians in the first volume of the Travaux du Comité d’Etudes: L’Alsace-Lorraine et la frontière du Nord-est (Paris, 1918).

On the iron of Lorraine see The Iron Resources of the World (Stockholm, 1910); the Atlas of Mineral Resources of the U. S. Geological Survey; E. Gréaux, Le fer en Lorraine (Paris, 1908); F. Engerand, L’Allemagne et le fer (Paris, 1916); H. Schumacher, Die westdeutsche Eisenindustrie (Leipzig, 1910); P. Krusch, in Petermann’s Mitteilungen, lxiii, pp. 41-44 (1917).

The formation of Alsace and Lorraine is traced, from the point of view that they are naturally German, in Boeckh and Kiepert, Historische Karte von Elsass und Lothringen (Berlin, 1870); and in Droysen, Historischer Handatlas (1886), no. 41. For the changes of 1789-1815, the Atlas of the Comité d’Etudes is convenient, as also for mineral resources. There is a good map of the minette field in Petermann’s Mitteilungen, 1917, plate 8. The linguistic maps of C. This will be found in Beiträge zur Landes- und Volkskunde von Elsass-Lothringen, parts 1 and 5 (1887, 1888); those of H. Witte, showing the modifications of the linguistic frontier, in Forschungen zur deutschen Landes- und Volkskunde, viii, x. A percentage map based on the German census of languages is given by Langhans, in Deutsche Erde, 1910, plate 1; cf. 1909, plate 3. See also Gallois’ maps in Annales de géographie, ix, nos. 4, 5; and Gröber, Grundriss der romanischen Philologie (Strasburg, 1904-1906), i, end.

FOOTNOTES:

[16] Laband, Deutsches Reichsstaatsrecht (Tübingen, 1912), p. 190.

[17] R. Reuss, L’Alsace au xviiᵉ siècle (Paris, 1898), i, p. 720; ii, p. 186.

[18] Edition of 1890, i, p. 383, removed from later editions.

[19] Questions historiques (Paris, 1893), p. 509.

[20] Lorenz and Scherer, Geschichte des Elsass (Berlin, 1872), p. 441.

[21] Quoted as the opinion of a liberal German advocate of Mainz, who had “a perfect knowledge of Alsace,” in Memoirs of Sir Robert Morier (London, 1911), ii, p. 184.

[22] Memoirs of Sir Robert Morier, ii, pp. 185 ff.

[23] Printed from the original in Revue historique, cxxvii, p. ii (1918).

[24] Die politischen Reden, vi, p. 201; see also v, p. 56; vi, pp. 31, 32, 167; xiii, p. 347.

[25] Die politischen Reden, xiii, pp. 375, 26, 27; vii, p. 414.

[26] “Unfortunately the theory [that only a zone of two kilometres was workable] was held by the German geologists who were consulted in fixing the frontiers of the treaty of Frankfort, and hence led to the present course of the Franco-German frontier.” H. Schumacher, Die westdeutsche Eisenindustrie (Leipzig, 1910), p. 147; and in Grumbach, Das annexionistische Deutschland, p. 172.

[27] Annexation to Prussia was even urged, as by Laband, in Deutsche Revue, June 1917, much as by Treitschke in 1870 (Preussische Jahrbücher, xxvi, pp. 398 ff.).

[28] Facsimile in L’Illustration, January 3, 1920.

[29] Article 51.

[30] Articles 52-79 and annex.

IV
THE RHINE AND THE SAAR

If Alsace-Lorraine occupied the attention of the Peace Conference in far less measure than it had occupied the attention of Europe during the preceding half-century, quite the contrary is true of the related questions of the Rhine, the Left Bank, and the Saar valley. By the recovery of Alsace France found herself once more on the Rhine; she demanded a corresponding voice in Rhenish affairs. By regaining her boundaries of 1870, she was in a position to reopen the question of her boundaries of 1814, of those northern appendages of Alsace and Lorraine which she had lost to Prussia in 1815 and which contained the coal so much needed for the restoration of France. By defeating Germany decisively she was able to demand military guarantees on the Left Bank against another German invasion, perhaps even special privileges as well. French imperialism, French reparation, French self-defence were all in some degree involved in these problems of the Rhine and the intervening lands.

Let us look at these matters in their historical setting. To German geographers and historians the Rhine is a German river, by nature and by history, its valley forming a physiographic unity, itself the great highway of Germany. It is true, they sadly admit, that the upper third of the valley has been in course of time almost wholly withdrawn from Germany to fall under Swiss domination, but this still remains, in culture if not in politics, almost purely Germanic, like the lower Rhine in Holland. The common German view was summed up a century ago in the phrase of Arndt, so often repeated in 1870, “Der Rhein Deutschlands Strom, nicht Deutschlands Grenze.”

Since the seventeenth century there have not been lacking in France certain historians and geographers who have maintained that the Rhine was the natural frontier of France, as it had been of Roman Gaul. “Rhenus finis Germaniae,” said the contemporaries of Louis XIV, while a century later Carnot and Danton spoke of the Rhine as the natural limit of France. Scholars of this way of thinking have insisted upon the fundamentally Celtic character of the Left Bank, if not of the Rhine itself—is not der Rhein, der deutsche Rhein, originally a Celtic word?—and have emphasized French elements in Rhenish culture and French influence upon its political life. During the war men of this school organized the Comité de la Rive Gauche du Rhin and published a fair amount of propagandist literature which sought to reclaim the Left Bank for France; but while the group included some scholars of eminence, it cannot be considered representative of the great body of French historians.

To one who approaches the matter without any nationalistic prepossessions the fate of the Rhine valley seems to have been determined, not by any geographic necessity, but by the vicissitudes of history. France has no such clearly marked frontier on the northeast as it possesses in other directions, for the Rhine, like other rivers, unites more than it divides, while a mountain range like the Vosges, strongly recommended by German writers in the region of Alsace, fails as we proceed northward. As a matter of history, whatever value the Rhine frontier possessed in Roman days disappeared with the Germanic invasions, and ever since the partitions of the Frankish empire in the ninth century the lands between the Rhine and the Meuse have been debated between France and Germany. There is no racial frontier, for the region is one of mixed Teutonic and Alpine types, whose distribution was more affected by highland and valley than by any considerations of east and west. There is a linguistic frontier, which has scarcely changed in the open country since the early Middle Ages, and French and German speech have naturally been the vehicles of their respective civilizations; but the linguistic and the political frontiers have rarely coincided, and “the linguistic frontier has never determined the political.”[31] The decisive considerations have been political pressure and military force, and in the more recent period political affinities and economic relations.

At first Germany had the advantage, if we mean by Germany that loose congeries of tribal duchies and later of feudal principalities which made up the mediaeval Empire. Thus the partition of Meersen (870), which you will seek in vain in the text of Freeman’s Geography or in Schrader’s Atlas historique, is often cited by German scholars as fixing a permanent line of demarcation to Germany’s advantage, and was even invoked by Brockdorff-Rantzau in May 1919 as the original basis of the German title to the Saar valley. Yet this same line would give to France Maestricht, Liège, and the mouths of the Rhine! After the disintegration of the Empire in the later Middle Ages, French advance began actively in the sixteenth century in the region of the Three Bishoprics. In the seventeenth century Louis XIV intrenched himself on the Saar at Saarlouis, and piece by piece gained possession of Alsace. The Revolution carried the tricolor down the Rhine from Landau to the Dutch border. Then came the treaty of Vienna, setting France back to the limits of 1789 and even farther, and the treaty of Frankfort by which France lost all contact with the Rhine. The victory of 1918 again put France on the Rhine. A German medal of 1917 represents an exhausted France driven to her death by England at Verdun, while on the obverse under the insignia of peace the German Rhine flows calmly on—“und ruhig fliesst der Rhein.” The French flag now floats not only over Verdun but over Metz and Strasburg as well. The Rhine still flows on but in its Alsatian portion it is no longer the German Rhine; it is “Deutschlands Grenze, nicht Deutschlands Strom.”

With France once more a Rhine power, the perspective requires certain readjustments. First of all, there is the question of navigation. Freedom of commerce on the Rhine was established in 1815 by the treaty of Vienna, but it has been exercised for the benefit of the states bordering on the river, who drew up in 1868 at Mannheim the convention which has since regulated navigation on the river. France was one of the signatories, but dropped out with the loss of her riparian status in 1871, when a representative was assigned to the Reichsland. Of the others,—Baden, Bavaria, Hesse, Holland, and Prussia—Holland and Prussia were the most important, but the small states were in a position to delay and hinder. The executive organ, the Central Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine, sat semiannually at Mannheim, but had little coercive power over members. Complaint was made of discrimination against the vessels of other states and against certain cities, notably Strasburg. Switzerland, obviously a Rhine power, asked in vain for admission. In spite of the enormous growth of trade on the Rhine, the whole system belonged to an earlier age, and its reform was required in the general interest as well as in the interest of France.

Besides the general provisions of the Paris treaty securing freedom of transit and travel across German territory and prohibiting discrimination against the nationals of the Allied and Associated Powers in German ports and German rivers, a special chapter deals with the Rhine and its tributaries.[32] Pending the making of a general convention relating to international waterways, the convention of Mannheim is modified by granting France representation equal to the total number of delegates of the German riparian states (four), as well as an additional member as President of the Commission, while to the two representatives of the Netherlands are added an equal number from Switzerland and from Belgium, whose interests in the Rhine are thus recognized, and from two outside powers of large commercial interests, Great Britain and Italy. At the same time the jurisdiction of the Commission is extended to cover the upper Rhine between Basel and Lake Constance, if Switzerland consents, the lower Moselle, and tributary canals and artificial channels. The headquarters of the Commission are transferred from Mannheim to Strasburg, which is evidently meant to play a large part in the future development of the river. In order that Strasburg may not suffer while its port and terminal facilities are being developed to correspond to the new needs, the opposite port of Kehl in Baden is combined for seven years into a single port with Strasburg, the whole under the supervision of the Central Rhine Commission.[33]

Another problem of the upper Rhine is that of its water power, a matter which had proved difficult to adjust between Baden and the Reichsland and was likely to make greater trouble between two sovereign and antagonistic states. Alsace had complained that the Grand Duchy opposed plans for the utilization of the Rhine, and France proposed to take no chances of future disagreement. So Germany agrees that, subject to the approval of the Central Commission, France may build dams and take water from the Rhine on the whole course of the river between the extreme points of the French frontier, acquiring for proper compensation the necessary supports and rights of way on the Right Bank, with the understanding that Germany has a right to the value of half the power thus produced. Germany binds herself not to derive canals from the Rhine opposite the French frontiers.[34] Henceforth the Rhine is to be harnessed to serve the needs of Alsace.

If participation in the affairs of the upper Rhine was incidental to the recovery of Alsace, the lower course of the river was quite another matter. Between the Rhine and the Franco-Belgian frontier lay a belt of German territory, varying in breadth from fifty to one hundred miles, with an area of about 10,000 square miles, and a population of five and a half millions. Of these, nearly a million were in the Bavarian Palatinate, 50,000 in the principality of Birkenfeld, about 400,000 in Hesse; the rest, the great majority, were in the Rheinprovinz of Prussia. Practically all of them spoke German. They had been under their existing governments for at least a century; they had been under some sort of German government far longer.

Down to 1789 this region was parcelled out among a great number of petty principalities, lay or ecclesiastical, from the considerable dominions of the archbishoprics of Mainz, Trier, and Cologne, and the bishoprics of Speier and Worms, to the minute lay states of a few villages which can scarcely be distinguished on the map. A careful historian has counted ninety-seven such independent states on the Left Bank in 1789. Swept away by the Revolution, most of them were never restored. The chief exception was the Palatinate, which had passed about from one branch of the reigning family to another, and came back to Bavaria in 1815 as a well rounded territory under the house of Zweibrücken. The Congress of Vienna also handed over the valley of the Nahe to Hesse-Darmstadt, and gave the duke of Oldenburg a compensation of 25,000 souls to be furnished by Prussia, 20,000 of which were found on the Left Bank and formed into the principality of Birkenfeld.

The great gainer by the new arrangements was Prussia. Before the Revolution her only possessions on the Left Bank, namely Cleves, Mörs, and Prussian Guelders, were on the lower Rhine. At Vienna, as a compensation for the Saxony which was refused her, she was given the greater part of the Left Bank, her territory now reaching from the valley of the Saar to the Dutch border. For the first time Prussia and France were neighbors. However German these lands may have been, they had never been Prussian, and the bargain by which they were handed over to Prussia took no account of past history or the desires of the population. If the Paris Conference was to undo the historic wrongs perpetrated at Vienna, it could well begin here.

A wrong a hundred years old, however, is not easily undone, and its undoing may constitute an even greater wrong. Particularist at the outset, the Rhineland had been assimilated by Prussia and by the new German empire, partly through the agencies of government and administration, still more perhaps through its participation in the great economic development of modern Germany. It had become the seat of world industries: iron and steel mills, sugar refineries, textile manufactories, and chemical plants. It was served by an excellent railroad system, and by the shipping of the Rhine and its tributaries. Its rapidly growing cities lay on both banks of the river. It was in the closest connection with Westphalia, Prussia’s other great industrial province. Since 1815 the population of the Rheinprovinz had quadrupled, until it was one of the most densely peopled regions of Europe. Under Prussia it had prospered and waxed fat, and prosperity had reconciled differences. Then, if the Rhineland was to be taken from Prussia, to whom could it be given? No one wanted to return to the feudal lords, lay or spiritual, of the old regime and the simple life. Could the land go back to France?

For twenty years only had the Left Bank belonged to France, from 1794 to 1814. These years, however, were a period of rapid and far-reaching change. In place of the ninety-seven petty principalities four French departments had been organized and then incorporated into France, in many instances upon the petitions of the inhabitants themselves. Feudalism and ecclesiasticism had given way to democracy, the local laws had been superseded by the Code Napoléon, which survived on the Rhine till 1900. The younger generation learned French and looked toward France. The Prussians in 1814 were by no means generally welcomed. Small wonder that, when a new victory opened the way to the Rhine, the memories of a French Rhineland should suggest that the work of 1794 might be repeated and the new generation taught once more to turn to France. Small wonder that there were French who forgot, not only how quickly the French traditions had faded out after 1815, but also how the great industrial development of the nineteenth century had bound the Left Bank to the Right by bands of steel which only military force could destroy. Such force some were willing to apply, but others trusted still to the influence of the French language and the popularity and adaptability of a French occupation. They needed to ponder the prudent words of a French historian: “If it is well for public men to know a bit of history, this should be only on condition that they do not allow themselves to be dominated by their recollections of the past.”[35] He is a wise man indeed who can always distinguish between things as they are and things as he wishes them to be.

In the French projects respecting the Left Bank there was of course something more than sentiment, and there was also something more than mere imperialism, whether economic or political. It was in this region that France must needs seek something of that reparation for the devastation of war which Germany seemed unable to furnish elsewhere. And it was here that France would also seek means of defence and guarantees against a new German invasion. For any particular plan more than one of these reasons might be urged, and it was not always possible to distinguish what was imperialistic by nature from what was necessary to the restoration and protection of France. It was not the least of the services performed for France by that shrewd old man, Georges Clémenceau, that he refused to be swept on by the extremists and limited his ultimate demands to the substantial results which the treaty secured.

Comparatively few Frenchmen demanded the outright annexation of the Left Bank, nor was the number large of those who wished to prepare for it by an indefinitely prolonged military occupation. Nevertheless, the annexationist group was much in evidence, and conducted an active campaign. It was a Conservative and Nationalist body, whose opinion was expressed by journals like the Echo de Paris and the Libre Parole. It had also strong support in high military quarters, which desired a long military occupation of the country, particularly of the Rhine itself and its bridges. It was urged that, however the historical question might lie, the Rhine was the obvious military frontier of France, the one advanced line which could not be turned and which guaranteed France against invasion. It was even maintained that this was the real frontier of all the Allies, the front line that must be held at all cost against Germany. It need not even be held in force, for Allied control of the nine great Rhine bridges would suffice to prevent invasion. Germany must lose her springboard for jumping into France!

As to the intervening territory, a favorite French solution was that of an independent buffer state under French protection. And since such a state, in spite of its great resources, would not be large enough to maintain its economic independence, it was thought preferable that it should lie within the French customs zone. The political status of such a state was variously viewed as one of entire independence, as a French or Allied protectorate, or as a federal state of the German empire entirely detached from Prussia. At one time there were even signs of a movement toward separation, for the Catholic Rhineland was inclined to resist the programme of the Majority Socialists, and there were French Catholics who would have welcomed its affiliation to France. Separatist tendencies were not, however, encouraged by England and the United States, and they never reached serious proportions. The most notable example of such a movement was in the Palatinate, where French troops were in possession. Moreover an economic protectorate recalled too directly the history of the German Zollverein, and even certain economic aims of Germany during the world war. The only definite advance which France made in this direction was the severance of Luxemburg from the German customs union by the treaty, and its subsequent entry into the French customs union by popular vote of its inhabitants the following September.

However little sympathy might be felt with the various projects for the military or economic aggrandizement of France on the Left Bank, there was one French argument that was unanswerable: the Left Bank and the Rhine must not be made the basis of a new attack against France and thus against the world’s peace. Here Prussian militarism had used its opportunities to the full. The Rhine valley was covered with munition factories, with forts and garrisons and parade grounds, with bridges and strategic railroads, furnished with long detraining platforms in the open country or great camps like Elsenborn on the Belgian frontier. And the campaign of 1914 had shown to what use all this could be put in sudden attack. “Not another German soldier on the Rhine,” was a common form of the French demand. The demilitarization of the Left Bank was an elementary demand of national, and international, security.

The clauses to this effect in the treaty are brief but full of meaning:

Article 42.

Germany is forbidden to maintain or construct any fortifications either on the left bank of the Rhine or on the right bank to the west of a line drawn 50 kilometres to the East of the Rhine.

Article 43.

In the area defined above the maintenance and the assembly of armed forces, either permanently or temporarily, and military manoeuvres of any kind, as well as the upkeep of all permanent works for mobilization, are in the same way forbidden.

Article 44.

In case Germany violates in any manner whatever the provisions of Articles 42 and 43, she shall be regarded as committing a hostile act against the Powers signatory of the present Treaty and as calculated to disturb the peace of the world.

In order to insure immediate and full effect to these articles, the provisions respecting guarantees of the whole treaty involve the occupation of this very region. German territory west of the Rhine, together with the Rhine bridgeheads, is to be held for fifteen years by Allied and Associated troops. In case of faithful execution of the treaty, this region is to be evacuated by these troops in three successive zones at intervals of five years; in case of non-execution, the territory may be reoccupied and the period of occupation extended.[36] A further agreement, of even date with the treaty, provides for the administration of the occupied territory under a civilian Inter-Allied Rhineland High Commission representing France, Belgium, Great Britain, and the United States, subject to whose authority the German local administration is maintained. Neither the military occupation nor the civilian Commission covers the demilitarized zone on the Right Bank, a gap between the two systems of administration which was to prove particularly serious in the region of the Ruhr, the principal source of the coal on which France and other Allies had an option under other clauses of the treaty, a district liable to serious industrial disturbances for the suppression of which the German government would demand the right to use troops.

Finally, as a more positive and direct guarantee of the country which had borne the brunt of Germany’s aggression, Great Britain and the United States agreed to come to the aid of France in case of an unprovoked attack by Germany.[37] Designed to offer adequate assurance during the transitional period while the League of Nations was getting under way, this supplementary treaty recognized not only the peculiar dangers of France, exposed directly to the full force of a German offensive, but also the general interest in her full security and protection. To the French this was an essential part of the peace settlement, and without it they would have insisted on more direct and more material guarantees of their own.

Another matter affecting the Left Bank came into prominence at the conference, namely the valley of the Saar. From one point of view this was a phase of the question of Alsace-Lorraine, for a portion of the Saar basin had once been a part of Lorraine and the recovery of the lost provinces revived the question of their historic boundaries. It was also part of the problem of the Left Bank, for the territory belonged to Prussia and Bavaria and was inhabited by a population of predominantly German affinities, and any annexation here was subject to the same objections as elsewhere on German soil. Lastly, the coal mines of the valley raised a more special question, for they adjoined immediately the new boundary of France, and thus offered an easy source of reparation for the destruction and devastation of French territory.

At the outbreak of the French Revolution neither Alsace nor Lorraine possessed a clearly defined frontier toward the north. In each case the boundary had arisen historically, without any large measures of readjustment or delimitation, in a region of minute subdivisions and overlapping claims; and the result was a tortuous, broken line, with enclaves on either side, which defied geographical and administrative convenience. At certain points the limits of sovereignty were in dispute, and the boundary cannot everywhere be defined with certainty. In Alsace, beyond the present limit of the river Lauter, lay the enclave of Landau, an old Alsatian city which had passed to France in 1648, while the intervening territory obeyed the bishop of Speier, the duke of Zweibrücken, or the Elector Palatine. To the north of Lorraine Louis XIV had established French influence on the Saar and constructed his new town of Saarlouis, as an outpost to insure the military control of the valley. The acquisition in the eighteenth century of the duchy of Lorraine, already traversed and cut up by pieces of French territory, carried the French frontier well to the north and east of Saarlouis, while at the same time it left the German county of Saarbrücken astride the Saar on either side of the town of the same name. A glance at the map will show the impossible character of the resulting frontier, which had not been greatly improved when the armies of the Revolution poured over it and added the whole region to France. That its incorporation was not a simple act of violence appears from various petitions of 1797 asking for the privileges of French citizenship, among them a long list of signers from the canton of Saarbrücken.[38]

In 1814 the first treaty of Paris had as its primary task to reëstablish the limits of France. As the basis of its work it took the frontier of January 1, 1792, as anterior to the revolutionary wars of conquest. In this region, this did not differ from the frontier of 1789. It was, however, recognized that the old frontier had become an impossibility in the region of Alsace-Lorraine, and required straightening and adjustment to adapt it to modern conditions. Accordingly enclaves were abandoned on either side. Toward the Rhine the new arrangement took away certain French dependencies in the neighborhood of Wissembourg and Landau, but left France those towns and added a connecting strip of territory extending east to the Rhine. In the region of the Saar France lost the outlying lands to the north and gained the valley of the river above Saarlouis, including Saarbrücken and the region round about. In area the adjustments roughly balanced, but in resources France had received an advantage because of the coal deposits thus retained. As a geographic frontier, the new line of 1814 was a great improvement, but it was never laid out on the spot or put into actual effect.

In the frontier imposed upon her in 1815 France paid the penalty for Napoleon’s Hundred Days of glory. Toward the Rhine Landau was taken, and her territory was cut back to the Lauter. In Lorraine she lost the whole middle and lower portion of the Saar valley, including not only the new acquisitions about Saarbrücken but the town of Saarlouis, which had been French since its foundation. In theory the frontier of 1815 was to reëstablish the France of 1789. In fact it left France smaller than in 1789. And what was taken was given, not to the former rulers, still less to the inhabitants, but to Prussia. Whatever may be said against the claims of France in this region, Prussia had no rights there of any sort. Her nearest Rhenish possessions in 1789 had been a hundred and fifty miles away. She was established on the Rhine, not because the people wanted her, but because she wanted territory—Saxony, if possible, if not, something else—and because the Allies wanted somebody to watch France.

So the reasons of the boundary line of 1815 are not far to seek. Landau and Saarlouis were fortresses of Vauban, defences of which it was thought prudent to deprive France, and this strategic argument has always been emphasized. We now know that the coal of the Saar was also a reason. This was openly stated by German historians before the war, and is supported by the correspondence of Heinrich Böcking, an agent of the German family of Stumm, still one of the great manufacturing firms of the region. Made commissioner of the mines in 1814, he followed the Prussian commissioners to Paris in the following year, and urged large annexations for Prussia at the expense of the Palatinate and France. In 1802 the French had opened a mining school at Geislautern, near Saarbrücken, and developed considerably the mines and industries of the region. Their careful surveys of the coal field were insistently demanded by the Prussians, and finally acquired in 1817. Some petitions from the inhabitants were received by the Prussians from Saarbrücken, but then there had been petitions in the opposite sense in 1797.

The loss of the frontier of 1814 to Prussia remained a sore point with France until it was swallowed up in the greater loss of 1871. When the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine in 1918 revived the question of their former boundaries, it was natural to inquire what the intervening century had brought forth. In the region of Landau there has been little change. A town of 5000 in 1815, it had grown only to 18,000 in 1910. The surrounding region of farm and forest had likewise altered little. The Saar valley, on the other hand, had shared the industrial development of the most prosperous parts of the Rheinprovinz. Its coal mines, and those of the neighboring villages of the Palatinate, had come to produce eight per cent of the huge output of the German empire. About this supply of fuel had grown up numerous industrial establishments—pottery and glassware to some extent, but especially blast furnaces and great iron and steel plants at Dillingen, Völklingen, Burbach, and Neunkirchen, busy on tasks of war as well as on those of peace. Great names in the German iron and steel industry stand out as the proprietors—Böcking, Röchling, Mannesmann, Stumm. Saarbrücken, a town of perhaps 5000 in 1815, had a population of 105,000 in 1910. To the north and to the west the lines of industrial towns were almost unbroken. 355,000 people now lived between the Saar frontiers of 1814 and 1815; and as many more in the adjoining regions which depended on the valley’s coal and manufactures. The Prussian railroad system threw its network over the basin. Prussian legislation provided houses and schools and social insurance for the workmen. Save perhaps for the beautiful state forests which ran to the edge of the towns and the mines, the whole character of the country recalled the great industrial region of the lower Rhine. Over the border of the Palatinate matters moved a bit more slowly, after the Bavarian fashion. The towns were not quite so spick-and-span, the model dwellings were not so much in evidence, the local capital, Zweibrücken, preserved the flavor of a Residenzstadt of the old regime. But the flavor was German not French. In the western part of the valley French names could still be found, notably in Saarlouis, which kept much of the appearance of an old French town, with its hôtel de ville, its great public square, and along the river front the remains of its fortifications built by Vauban. And there were those who had not wholly forgotten that Saarlouis was the birthplace of Marshal Ney.

In France, at least, there were many who had not forgotten. The demand for the frontier of 1814 was noticeably greater than that for other parts of the Left Bank. It was partly historic, a desire to reclaim what had once been French and had played its part in the great deeds of French history. This was not confined to partisans of the old regime: Aulard, historian and upholder of the Revolution, urged the return of Saarlouis and Landau on the ground that they had sworn the great revolutionary covenant of 1790 and had been torn from France by violence in 1815, as were Alsace and Lorraine half a century later.[39] Popular interest would have been greater if the frontier of 1814 had been a real line separating peoples for a term of years, instead of a provision on paper. And the historic frontier of 1792, the actual boundary during the eighteenth century, had become impossible; no one asked for that. The best historic argument for the frontier of 1814 was that it had then been considered a just and practical equivalent for the line of 1792; in that sense it represented the peace of justice, while the line of 1815 was clearly the peace of violence.

Stronger than the historic argument was the economic: France, a country poor in coal, had been forcibly despoiled of the Saar mines in 1814; she needed them back; and her need was now much greater since the wanton and systematic destruction of her mines in the Nord and Pas-de-Calais by the Germans. The two arguments did not entirely coincide, so far as the Saar was concerned. The historic argument was strongest in respect to the district of Saarlouis, where there was little coal. Saarbrücken, the centre of the coal field, had been French only for a brief period, 1793-1815. Moreover, the frontier of 1814 did not cover the whole of the mining area, perhaps a third of which lay to the north toward Ottweiler and to the east in the Palatinate, and its reëstablishment would have disrupted the economic life of the region.

Many Frenchmen were genuinely opposed to any annexations of territory beyond the Alsace-Lorraine of 1871, as contrary to the principles on which the war had been fought. They had not, they said, been fighting for the Rhine or the Saar. This was the Socialist contention, and it was shared by many Republicans who were not Socialists. All, however, who looked facts in the face felt the need of the coal. “If we could only get the coal without the people,” said a distinguished Socialist early in the winter. “We must have the coal, and we must find some arrangement to get it without annexing the population,” a great historian said a little later.

The people were overwhelmingly German. A considerable directing element of capitalists, engineers, and officials had come from other parts of the empire, but the great majority were natives of the region. The mining population of 56,000 included surprisingly few foreigners or even Germans from a distance. Many had their cottages with a plot of ground about, going to and fro daily on workmen’s trains or returning home for the week-end. The ruling element was strongly Prussian, a part of the great administrative machine directed from Berlin. The regular local administration existed, but only as a part of the Rheinprovinz and of a Regierungsbezirk administered from Trier. The adjoining portions of the Palatinate were governed from Munich and Speier. The economic unity of the region had no corresponding political organization, as was admitted by German officials. The mass of the people were particularly interested in their labor organizations and in their rights under German labor legislation. If they had been consulted, they would doubtless have voted to remain with Germany. But it was at least debatable whether they had a right at the same time to vote to Germany the mines which she had taken in 1815 without consulting anybody. The control of key deposits of minerals by the small population which happens to live over them is not a necessary part of the principle of self-determination, particularly when this population forms part of a state which has been destroying the mines of others. The separation of mines from people may sometimes be governed by international considerations.

The coal field of the Saar is the northern outcrop of a considerable deposit which extends in a southwesterly direction across Lorraine to the Moselle in the neighborhood of Pont-à-Mousson. Toward the southwest, however, the strata dip so deep as to be unworkable. The practicable part of the field is in the Saar valley, partly on the edge of annexed Lorraine, chiefly in Rhenish Prussia, with a small strip in the adjoining part of the Palatinate. The total output in 1913 was seventeen and a half million tons, of which two-thirds was mined between the frontiers of 1814 and 1815. It was understood, however, that production had been artificially restricted in the interest of the Westphalian field, and the proportion of the actual coal reserve was much greater. Any estimates of reserves are necessarily approximate, but in 1913 it was calculated that the Saar field contained seventeen billion tons, equal to 22% of the total German reserve, and more than the whole known supply of France, a country relatively poor in coal. No wonder the French found it hard to forget the loss of 1815! Moreover, all the mines in operation lay within a dozen miles of the new French frontier in Lorraine.

France not only needed this coal, she had a strong claim to it. The chief French mines, those of Lens and Valenciennes on the Belgian border, had been in German hands for more than four years and had been deliberately flooded and rendered unworkable by the occupying armies. The period of restoration was variously estimated; it has since been fixed by German engineers at eight years at the least, and the total property loss has been estimated at eighty per cent. For this definite reparation in kind could be exacted in the Saar field. But that was not all. Germany had agreed to compensate for all damage done to the civilian population and their property, yet conservative estimates of the bill for general reparation in northern France far exceeded any available means of payment on Germany’s part, even when the payment was spread over a long series of years and thus reduced in actual restorative power. Proposals to take over German enterprises like railroads or factories were impracticable, not only because of the political difficulties of operating them on German territory but because this would interfere with Germany’s ability to earn her annual payments of indemnity. The Saar mines, on the contrary, lay on the outer edge of Germany; they were already linked with the industries of Lorraine, henceforth French; they were, with two exceptions (Frankenholz and Hostenbach), the property of the Prussian and Bavarian states. Always supposing that they were properly credited on the reparation account, no better means of payment could be found for a debt which Germany had agreed to pay.

Accordingly, it was agreed in principle, late in March 1919, that the full ownership of the coal mines of the Saar basin should pass to France, to be credited on her claims against Germany for reparation. With full and unencumbered property in the mines the treaty gave the fullest economic facilities for their exploitation, including the acquisition of all subsidiaries and dependencies, freedom of transportation and sale, exemption from other than local taxes, and full mobility of labor. The mines were placed within the French customs union, and payment in connection with their operation might be made in French money. The elementary justice of this transfer of the mines to France has become increasingly clear in the past few months. Out of the crumbling uncertainties of reparation for war damage, France secures one solid asset, and she secures it in a form absolutely essential for the revival of her wrecked industries. Those who have urged that she ought to have been satisfied with a coal contract instead, a claim for delivery rather than mines to be worked, have been refuted by the decreasing production of coal in Germany and the growing unwillingness of the Germans to make the deliveries of coal to which they obligated themselves in the treaty. A mine in hand is worth many contracts to deliver.

The transfer of the Saar mines and their appurtenances to the French state raised a difficult question of administration. If the German government retained the full power to fix the conditions of exploitation, transportation, and sale, and if German legislation was to be carried out by Prussian officials, the conditions of operation could easily be made impossible, and the ownership of the mines prove nugatory. On the other hand, if the government were handed over, either temporarily or permanently, to France, the inhabitants lost their political rights and were subjected to an alien rule. It was the old question, how to transfer the mines without subjecting the people.

The solution of this conflict of rights and interests was found in the international organization of the League of Nations. Germany agreed to hand over the government of the territory, but not the ultimate sovereignty, to the League of Nations as trustee, and the League is to administer it through an international Governing Commission. This commission consists of five members, one a native inhabitant of the Saar territory, one a Frenchman, the others representing other nations. Sitting in the territory, it has all powers of government hitherto belonging to the German empire, Prussia, and Bavaria, and full power to administer the local public services. It must maintain the existing system of courts and local officials, and must consult an elective assembly with respect to new taxes or legislation. Subject to its control, “the inhabitants will retain their local assemblies, their religious liberties, their schools, and their language.” They keep also their German nationality, their rights under German labor legislation, their pension rights and accrued pensions. They lose only their right to vote for representatives in the Reichstag and the Prussian and Bavarian diets; their participation in self-government is much greater than that of the inhabitants of the District of Columbia! They gain the advantages of a governing body resident in the territory and familiar with its special needs, in place of an administration from Berlin and Munich. They also gain exemption from military service and other than local taxes, and from contribution to the German war indemnities, besides favorable adjustments of customs duties.

This system will have a fifteen years’ trial, at the end of which the people are to be called on to vote, district by district, as to their future political status. The alternatives will be reunion with Germany, union with France, or continuance under the League of Nations with such modifications of the regime as may be necessary to adapt it to permanent use. Voting is open to all of the age of twenty who were resident in the territory at the date of the signature of the treaty of Versailles, and to these only, so that all temptation to colonize voters is thus removed, whether on the French or on the German side. The League of Nations shall take the necessary measures to put these votes into effect, making such decisions as may be necessary to adjust boundaries, etc. In any portion of the territory which votes to return to Germany, the German government shall buy back the mines, so as to remove any danger of friction over their operation. No such purchase is required in territory which may become French or remain under the League.[40]

The territory of the Saar basin thus created by the treaty of Versailles and governed by the International Commission covers 700 square miles with a population of 650,000—more than the population of Rhode Island, with two-thirds the area. Its boundaries were carefully drawn so that, while following as far as possible the lines of existing administrative divisions, they should include only the region economically dependent on the coal of the basin. It takes in the valley of the Saar from the point below Sarreguemines where its right bank ceases to be French territory to Saarhölzbach, where the narrows of the mountains close in and the workmen’s trains stop. To the north it covers only the area for which coal concessions have been granted and within which local industries live from the coal, the whole being belted by a connecting series of railroad lines. On the east it enters the Palatinate sufficiently to include the coal mines along the border and the railroad junction of Homburg which links up the railroads of the eastern part of the basin. The territory has an economic unity, ignored by its previous administrative organization, but recognized by those familiar with local conditions. Petitions to join the Saar basin have since been made to the League of Nations by inhabitants of Britten, Losheim, Wadern, and Weisskirchen, which adjoin the district on the north in Prussia.

Whether the lot of the Saar territory will appear enviable to other neighboring districts, it is still too soon to say. In spite of the misrepresentation of this chapter of the treaty by German and pro-German writers, an examination of its provisions shows that the rights and interests of the inhabitants have been carefully safeguarded under international guarantees. Indeed their position has so many advantages as compared with their neighbors in France and Germany that there were those at Paris who predicted that the plebiscite of 1935 would declare for the maintenance of an independent status under the League of Nations, free from outside responsibilities, both military and fiscal. Undoubtedly the issues will be economic as well as political, and much of the success of the new regime will depend on the economic and social policy of the Governing Commission. During the delays of ratification and organization the labor legislation of the district necessarily stood still at the point reached at the time of the Armistice, and a considerable task of readjustment and reconstruction falls on the new Commission, in a region inhabited by a concentrated mining and industrial population with a strong local organization of its own. It should be noted that, besides the general obligation to consult a local legislative assembly, it is provided that “in fixing the conditions and hours of labor for men, women, and children, the Governing Commission is to take into consideration the wishes expressed by the local labor organizations, as well as the principles adopted by the League of Nations,”[41] so that a progressive policy is clearly laid down. Moreover, by virtue of its geographical position, the labor of the Saar should be able to secure conditions at least as favorable as in adjoining regions, while, with a plebiscite in view, the French state administration of the mines will have every reason to maintain good relations with the mining population. At the same time neither France nor the Commission will have any reason for holding back the production of coal or the general industrial development of the district in favor of the mines and factories of Westphalia. In any event the people of the Saar will be in a position to decide for themselves, district by district, after actual experience of the new regime; nor are they likely to welcome the proposal of an ardent revisionist of the treaty of Versailles, who, while admitting that the arrangements respecting the Saar should stand for ten years, would take away from the inhabitants all opportunity of voting as to their future.[42] If government by the League of Nations is as “odious” as the German delegates declared at Versailles, then ten years of it is as indefensible in principle as fifteen. But if perchance the League’s Commission should prove less odious than its enemies anticipate, the fact will be worth recording for the sake of the League as well as of the people directly concerned.

The government of the Saar basin by a commission of the League of Nations is a very interesting experiment in international administration. Granted the prompt organization of a League such as the treaty contemplates, this experiment in commission government has a fair chance of success, and while the difficulty has been rendered greater by delay, it is not insoluble. By its success or failure in such matters the League will be in large measure judged in western Europe. There is reason to believe that its effectiveness depends likewise largely upon such permanent activities. Its Assembly will meet rarely, its Council not frequently, only its secretariat and its administrative organs will be constantly at work, and it is their action that will bring the League home to the peoples under its immediate control. Curiously enough, those who were most eager for the programme of an ambitious League were the first to criticise the creation of such commissions and their tasks. But if one of the chief objects of such an organization is to promote world peace, surely the Franco-German frontier is an important point for it to watch. And if the League can ease the strain here by acting as a sort of shock-absorber, protecting at the same time the property rights of France and the personal rights of the inhabitants, it will serve another interest no less important than peace, namely the cause of justice. If the League is not ready for this test, it is certainly not ready to become a super-state. The super-state can wait, but justice and peace are matters of today.

The Saar Commission, the Governing Commission for the occupied territory, the new Central Rhine Commission, all are manifestations of international interest in the Franco-German frontier, and efforts to relieve the strain in this area of high national tension. The demilitarization of the Left Bank and the river and the guarantee of France against unprovoked aggression from the east are likewise plainly in the interest of international peace. Even the most definitely national measure of all, the restoration of Alsace-Lorraine, was called for, according to President Wilson, not only to right the wrong done by Prussia in 1871, but “in order that peace may once more be made secure in the interest of all.” The League of Nations in the valley of the Rhine is the symbol of a new order.

Bibliographical Note

The history of the Left Bank is examined from various points of view by the Comité d’Etudes, i: L’Alsace-Lorraine et la frontière du Nord-est (1918). E. Babelon, Le Rhin dans l’histoire (Paris, 1916-17), is the fullest account from the point of view of the Rhine as the historical frontier of France. See also L. Madelin, in the Revue des deux Mondes, December 1, 1918; the pamphlets of Babelon, Driault, de Grailly, Milhaud, Stiénon, etc., issued in the same years; and the enquête published by the Libre Parole in February 1919. For a sane French criticism see Pfister, in Revue historique, cxxvi, pp. 334-338. A. Schulte, Frankreich und das linke Rheinufer (Stuttgart, 1918), is largely a critique of French writers.

For the important period 1794-1814 the best German accounts are C. T. Perthes, Politische Zustände und Personen in Deutschland zur Zeit der französichen Herrschaft (Bonn, 1862); and J. Hashagen, Das Rheinland und die französische Herrschaft (Bonn, 1908). An excellent French monograph is Ph. Sagnac, Le Rhin français pendant la Révolution et l’Empire (Paris, 1917). On Landau and Saarlouis, see Aulard, in Revue de Paris, March 15, 1919. J. Hansen (ed.), Die Rheinprovinz 1815-1915 (Bonn, 1917), is a comprehensive treatment of the Prussian period, with brief bibliographies. For a sketch of economic conditions, see Yves Guyot, La province rhénane et la Westphalie (Paris, 1915). On the Palatinate, see H. Schreibmüller, Bayern und die Pfalz, 1816-1916 (Kaiserslautern, 1916).

The French side of the negotiations respecting the ‘guarantees’ on the Left Bank is given by A. Tardieu, in L’Illustration, February 14, 1920. Nothing has as yet been published by the British or American negotiators.

The commerce of the Rhine is well studied by E. J. Clapp, The Navigable Rhine (Boston, 1911). Cf. P. Vidal de la Blache, La France de l’Est (Paris, 1917); and the studies of de Martonne and Gallois in the volume of the Comité d’Etudes. For a Swiss view of the problem, see V. S. Rualens-Marlier, Le Rhin libre (Paris and Neuchâtel, 1916).

In the Saar valley the events of 1814-15 are narrated by A. Ruppersberg, Geschichte der Stadt Saarbrücken (Saarbrücken, 1913). Böcking’s correspondence will be found, with other important material, in A. Krohn, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Saargegend, in Mitteilungen des historischen Vereins für die Saargegend, viii (1901). Cf. F. Engerand, L’Allemagne et le fer (Paris, 1916), ch. 2. For a general sketch, see E. Babelon, Sarrelouis et Sarrebruck (Paris, 1918). Of the German literature touching this part of the treaty examples are F. Meinecke, Geschichte der linksrheinischen Gebietsfragen, with maps; and the articles in Die Woche, March 8, 1919.

On the Saar coal field, see The Coal Resources of the World (Toronto, 1913); the Atlas of Mineral Resources published by the U. S. Geological Survey; the study of Gallois, in Travaux du Comité d’Etudes, i, and Annales de géographie, July 15, 1919; E. de Margerie, in Enquête sur les richesses minérales du Nord-est de la France et des régions voisines, with maps (Paris, 1918); Friedrich A. Schmidt, Der Saarkohlenbergbau in Lothringen (Strasburg diss., 1914); and the local geological surveys and mining reports. On the growth of manufactures, see J. Kollmann, Die Grossindustrie des Saargebiets (Stuttgart, 1911).

An admirable presentation of the historical geography of the Left Bank will be found in the Geschichtlicher Atlas der Rheinprovinz (Bonn, 1898-). For the frontiers of 1814 and 1815, see the Atlas of the Comité d’Etudes.

ALSACE-LORRAINE AND THE SAAR VALLEY

FOOTNOTES:

[31] Dietrich Schäfer, “Die deutsch-französische Sprachgrenze,” in Internationale Wochenschrift, vii, p. 19 (1912).

[32] Articles 354-362.

[33] Article 65.

[34] Articles 358-360.

[35] E. Denis, in Travaux du Comité d’études, i, p. 414.

[36] Articles 428-432.

[37] These treaties, the American one not yet ratified, and the agreements concerning occupation of the Rhine will be found in the Supplement to the American Journal of International Law, xiii, pp. 404-416.

[38] Facsimiles in Atlas of the Comité d’Etudes.

[39] “Landau et Sarrelouis villes françaises,” in Revue de Paris, March 15, 1919.

[40] Articles 42-50 and annex, with official map.

[41] Annex to the Saar section of the treaty, § 23.

[42] Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, p. 263.

V
POLAND

Among all the results of the War and of the Peace Treaties, there is, perhaps, none which would have caused our forefathers greater joy or greater astonishment than the resurrection of Poland. It is heartening to dwell for a moment on the moral significance of this great event, and to recall what the name of Poland stood for down to the time when Bismarck banished sentiment from politics and attempted to exorcise the idea of an ‘immanent justice’ in history.

To every generation of the nineteenth century, down to 1870 at least, Poland furnished the supreme example both of what people then called ‘the crimes of despotism,’ and of a liberty-loving nation struggling with unsurpassed heroism against wellnigh insuperable odds. The restoration of Poland signified something more than the mere revival of a vanished state: it stood for the triumphant righting of the greatest political wrong that Europe had witnessed, the vindication of the principles of justice in international relations, a decisive victory for the cause of universal liberty. Hence the Polish cause called forth a unanimity of sympathy from all civilized nations which no other similar movement, not even the Italian one, was able to command. In England, France, and Italy, liberals, conservatives, and clericals alike—men of such diverse opinions as Gladstone and Disraeli, Montalembert and Victor Hugo, Mazzini and Pius IX—were very much of one mind with respect to Poland. In France particularly every success or reverse of the Polish cause was greeted as if it were a triumph or a defeat for France herself. It is said that after the fall of Warsaw in 1831 the gloom and consternation at Paris were greater than after Waterloo. Even in Germany Bismarck felt bound to reproach his compatriots of the 1848 period for being more concerned about the liberty of Poland than about their own national problem. There too people sang of Poland:

“Dein Sieg is ein Völkersieg,
Dein Krieg ist ein heiliger Krieg.”

And from America also one might cite many expressions of such sentiments. Jefferson denounced the partition of Poland as a “baneful precedent,” a “crime,” and an “atrocity.” Henry Wharton called it “the most flagrant violation of natural justice and international law which has occurred since Europe first emerged from barbarism.”

But unanimous as was the opinion of the public regarding the justice of the Polish cause, among statesmen and politicians the idea was scarcely less general that from a practical standpoint that cause was hopeless. Lord Salisbury in a famous essay attempted to prove that the restoration of an independent Poland was “a mere chimera.” Guizot in his Memoirs demonstrated in his most magistral fashion that the difficulties in the way of the Polish patriots were incomparably greater than those that beset any other national movement: for here it was a question of liberating a people, not from one foreign oppressor, but from three, and those three the strongest military monarchies in Europe, permanently united by their common interest in keeping their victim enchained. No other power in Europe was strong enough to liberate Poland, and it was doubtful whether all the other powers together were strong enough to do so. At all events, the thing could not be done without a general war, involving the entire continent and upsetting the whole existing political system. And as time wore on, as one insurrection after another failed and one hope of foreign intervention after another proved delusive, the Poles themselves came to pin their faith chiefly to some such catastrophic solution. Sixty or seventy years before it came about, their poets began to prophesy a day of conflict such as the world had never yet seen, and in that day should Poland rise again and triumph. Mickiewicz, in that “Litany of the Polish Pilgrim” which is the most poignant expression both of the sufferings and of the undying hopes of his people, inserts the prayer:

“For a universal war for the freedom of the nations,
We beseech Thee, O Lord.”

“The great far-off divine event,” thus dimly forecast, has been realized before our eyes. And however obdurate fate might hitherto have been to the Poles, it must be admitted that during the World War all things have worked together marvellously to serve the cause of Poland. By an irony of fortune, the Partitioning Powers themselves were the first to proclaim the principle of the restoration of Poland, although in half-hearted and ambiguous fashion. The Russian Revolution removed the great obstacle to an honest treatment of the Polish question by the Entente. Through President Wilson’s efforts, the principle of the restoration of a united and independent Poland was definitively and unequivocally inscribed among the war aims of the Allies; and the collapse of the Central Powers afforded the possibility of carrying out this principle with a completeness which two years ago few friends of Poland could have believed possible.

But granted that Poland was to be restored, what was Poland? What territory should it include, and what were its proper boundaries? As to such questions it may be doubted whether any Allied statesman or the public in any of the Allied countries two years ago had any very definite ideas. Italia Irredenta, Greater Greece, Greater Roumania, Yugo-Slavia, even Czecho-Slovakia—those were concepts simple and familiar in comparison with that of Poland reincarnate. For Poland had been erased from the map so long that it had come to be regarded as a name, a memory, a cause, rather than a country. Poland was a ghost roaming around in the Sarmatian plain, somewhere between Germany and Russia. But what were the limits of its habitat few persons knew, nor what this disembodied spirit would look like if clothed again in flesh and blood.

Moreover the problem was in itself very difficult. Geographically, Poland is one of the hardest countries in the world to define. Clearly marked natural frontiers are lacking; or else, when they can be discerned, they do not coincide with the historic political boundaries or with present ethnographic ones. The Carpathians, for instance, seem to offer an admirable natural frontier on the south; nevertheless the boundaries of the old Polish state overlapped this mountain range for a considerable distance, and so does the Polish linguistic frontier today. On the north the Baltic ought to form the natural limit of Poland; but historically Poland had seldom held more than a narrow frontage upon that sea, and today the area of Polish-speaking population touches the Baltic only along a short stretch of coast just west of Danzig. On the east and west no natural barriers whatever are to be found in the vast unbroken plain which stretches across northern Europe from the Low Countries to the Urals.

It is true that Polish geographers are accustomed to treat the whole region between the Baltic, the Carpathians, the Dvina, and the Dnieper as one country; to claim for it a high degree of physical unity with respect to its structure, climate, productions, river systems, and other features; and to argue that this entire area ought likewise to form a political unit—Poland. ‘Geographic Poland’ thus defined is practically identical with the historic Polish state as it was in its later period (a coincidence which may be explained as an illustration, either of the effects of geographic laws on history, or of the workings of historic facts on the minds of geographers). It must be admitted that Russian scientists have demonstrated with equal ease that nearly all of the region in question is geographically a part of Russia; while the patriotic scholars of Kiev and Lemberg have proved that nature intended a great part of this same region to belong to neither Poland nor Russia, but to a tertium quid called the Ukraine.

‘Ethnographic Poland,’ i. e., the region which has a majority of Polish-speaking population, is an area easier to define. It includes nearly the whole of the so-called ‘Congress Kingdom’ of Poland (that small realm which was set up by the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and suppressed by Russia a few years later); most of the former Prussian province of Posen; parts of the Prussian provinces of East and West Prussia and Silesia; most of the duchy of Teschen in Austrian Silesia; and the western part of Galicia. Ethnographic Poland thus defined has an area of about 82,000 square miles: i. e., it is about as large as Kansas or Minnesota, or three-fourths as large as Italy. It had a population in 1910 of twenty millions. About sixty per cent of it belonged to Russia; twenty-five per cent to Prussia; fifteen per cent to Austria.

In addition, there are many Polish enclaves scattered about in eastern Galicia and in the Russian provinces to the east of the Congress Kingdom. For these adjacent provinces on the east, the Russian nationality statistics are so grossly inaccurate and fraudulent that we are left in great uncertainty as to the real ethnographic situation and the exact relative strength of the numerous races[43] which inhabit this debatable region (Poles, Lithuanians, White Russians, Jews, Ukrainians, etc.). There is much reason to suppose, however, that if ever an honest census is taken here, the eastern limits of the Polish ethnographic area will be extended considerably beyond the boundaries of the Congress Kingdom.

Historically, the name Poland has been applied to a state with very widely fluctuating frontiers. The original Polish kingdom, as it grew up in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries under its first dynasty, the house of the Piasts, was a comparatively small state. It embraced the area which forms ethnographic Poland today, and also the rest of Silesia and Pomerania. Having the Oder for a part of its western boundary and a broad strip of Baltic coast line, Poland in its earliest period enjoyed better natural frontiers than it was ever later to possess.

Unfortunately, during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the realm was rent asunder by partitions and civil wars among its princes, and weakened by the invasions and devastations of the Mongols. Taking advantage of this situation, the Germanic Drang nach Osten, which the Poles had hitherto arrested at the cost of much hard fighting, set in with redoubled vigor and unparalleled success. It was at this time that Pomerania and Silesia were lost to Poland,—although in Upper Silesia a large and compact Polish population has for six hundred years successfully resisted that process of more or less violent Germanization to which so many of the western Slavs succumbed. It was at this time also that the Germans, led by the Teutonic Knights, succeeded in planting a colony in Prussia, thus cutting off Poland from the sea and inaugurating that struggle for the mouth of the Vistula which has gone on intermittently ever since.

When Poland in the fourteenth century regained her unity and strength, it was now too late to recover most of the territories thus lost: it was rather a question whether the shattered kingdom could even defend what was left to it against the Germanic onrush. Seeking resources and allies for that struggle, Poland turned to the East. The conquest of the principality of Halicz (Eastern Galicia) in 1340 marked the beginning of Polish encroachments upon the Ukrainian nationality. Still more important was the union effected in 1386 between Poland and Lithuania. For the Lithuanian empire, built up with such amazing rapidity during the fourteenth century, included nearly the whole area inhabited by the Ukrainian and White Russian races; it spread from the Baltic to the Black Sea and far beyond the Dnieper. Through the union concluded in 1386 there arose a realm which was to be for several centuries the strongest power in Eastern Europe, and which remained down to the time of the Partitions the second or third largest state on the Continent.

The most immediate result of this union was that Poland and Lithuania combined could renew their traditional struggle against the Teutonic Knights and fight it through to a successful conclusion. Not the least of the circumstances that contributed to their victory was the fact that, in the crisis of the conflict, the majority of the German nobles and cities of Prussia deserted the Knights and joined King Casimir, preferring the liberty which Poland could offer them to the tyrannous rule of the Teutonic Order. This was the second of those voluntary unions which form so striking and peculiar a feature of Polish history. By the peace of Thorn (1466), which ended this Hundred Years’ War, Danzig and West Prussia were incorporated in Poland, although with guarantees for a large measure of self-government, while East Prussia was left to the vanquished Knights to be held as a fief of Poland. Thus the mouth of the Vistula and a frontage upon the Baltic had been recovered and were to remain in Polish possession for the next three hundred years. Unfortunately for the peace of Europe, however, the Prussian question was not completely liquidated, as it might have been both in 1466 and on several later occasions. With a generosity or a lack of foresight which later historians have found it very hard to excuse, the Polish government in 1525 permitted the Teutonic Grand Master, Albert of Hohenzollern, to secularize East Prussia and turn it into a duchy hereditary in his family, though still a fief of Poland; and on the extinction of his line in 1618, Poland was induced to allow the transfer of the duchy to the Brandenburg branch of the family—the first great step towards the building up of that Hohenzollern monarchy which was to be the worst foe of Poland.

Another most important result of the union of 1386 was the gradual fusion of Lithuania with Poland. History affords few stranger spectacles than this process by which the much larger and originally stronger state voluntarily submitted to being assimilated and absorbed by the smaller one. That result was due to the attractions which the more advanced civilization of Poland possessed for the upper classes in the Lithuanian realm; to the desire of the Lithuanian noblesse to secure the liberties and privileges of the Polish nobles; and to the remarkable tact, cleverness, and perseverance with which for centuries the Poles pursued the aim of binding their somewhat wayward neighbor irrevocably to their side. The union between the two states, originally based solely on the person of the common ruler, was steadily strengthened until by the agreement of 1569 it was turned into a permanent organic union—a partnership which was to last through good days and through evil until the Partitions.

In this combined state the nobility and to a large extent the bourgeoisie of the non-Polish races came spontaneously to adopt the Polish language, customs, religion, nationality—became in fact quite Polonized. The institutions of Lithuania were assimilated in all respects to those of Poland; Polish culture became predominant from Kiev to Wilno, from Livonia to the Carpathians—in short, this composite and originally so heterogeneous state became essentially a Polish one. Thus, by statesmanship and tenacity, by the higher culture they could offer and the liberties they extended, the Polish race had peaceably conquered a great empire in the east, a realm twice the size of the modest Poland of the Piasts; and a vast field was opened up for colonization and the extension of Polish nationality.

The hundred years of Russian rule since the Partitions and violent attempts at Russification have by no means destroyed, although they have in part impaired, the results of four centuries of Polonization in the eastern territories. Even today, in Lithuania proper and in large areas of White Russia and the western Ukraine, the country gentry and the non-Jewish population of the towns are predominantly Polish; Wilno, the ancient capital of Lithuania, is still almost as much a Polish city as Warsaw; Polish colonies are thickly scattered about in the rural districts; and socially, intellectually, and economically, the Poles remain the most important element in the population.

It would probably be true to say that the average Pole has today, at the back of his head, the feeling that his country is not merely the modest area of ethnographic Poland, but the whole wide expanse of historic Poland—Poland as it was in 1772, just before the Partitions. This conception is based partly upon the principle that the Partitions, as acts of lawless usurpation, could have no legal validity, so that de jure Poland still exists within her frontiers of 1772; partly upon the view that the lands between the Carpathians, the Baltic, the Dnieper, and the Dvina possess so high a degree of geographical, economic, and cultural unity that they deserve to be considered as one country. But above all, it is a matter of historic traditions, of time-hallowed associations and sentiments, of deeply rooted habits of thought. It would be difficult for Poles today to forget that for centuries their race has been as much at home in Wilno, Mohylew, Minsk, or Kamieniec, as in Cracow or Warsaw; and that half of the greatest figures in Polish history have come from these eastern lands beyond the pale of ethnographic Poland. Kosciuszko, their national hero, and Mickiewicz, their national poet, were both from Lithuania. The two men at the head of the Polish state in the past year, Pilsudski and Paderewski, come, the one from Lithuania, the other from the Ukraine. For generations Poland has spent an infinite amount of effort in organizing and civilizing these eastern territories and in defending them against Swedes and Muscovites, Turks and Tartars. Their churches are full of the tombs of Polish heroes, and their fields are soaked in Polish blood.

Moreover, one cannot ignore the feeling with which the present generation looks back upon the Polish state of the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. For most outsiders the Partitions have overshadowed all the preceding period of Polish history. Such observers have fastened their eyes too exclusively upon the deplorable conditions into which Poland had fallen just before her dismemberment, and have concluded that her history is chiefly made up of a tissue of mistakes, sins, and follies, interesting only as furnishing a terrible example of how a state ought not to be governed and of how badly a people can mismanage its national life. But the Poles, while conscious enough of the mistakes in question, point out that their decadent period of a hundred years or so just before the Partitions ought not to obscure or outweigh the record of the three glorious centuries preceding the decline; and in that earlier better period they find much reason for cherishing feelings of pride, veneration, and piety towards that old republic which has been so much condemned and so much misunderstood. And there is much to justify such an attitude.

The old Polish state was an experiment of a highly original and interesting character. It was a republic both in name and in fact, although nominally it had a king as its first magistrate. It was the largest and most ambitious experiment with a republican form of government that the world had seen since the days of the Romans. Moreover, it was the first experiment on a large scale with a federal republic down to the appearance of the United States. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries this republic was the freest state in Europe, the state in which the greatest degree of constitutional, civic, and intellectual liberty prevailed. In an age of religious persecution and chronic religious wars, Poland knew no such troubles; it offered almost complete toleration and an asylum to those fleeing from persecution in all western lands. Like the United States today, Poland was at that time the melting-pot of Europe, the haven for the poor and oppressed of all the neighboring countries—Germans, Jews, Czechs, Magyars, Armenians, Tartars, Russians, and others. The complications of the nationality problem in Poland today are due in no small measure to the great numbers of aliens who here found a refuge from political and religious persecution. Finally, the old republic represented an effort to organize the vast open plain between the Baltic and the Black Sea—a region containing so many weak and undeveloped races and a region so much exposed to Germanic ambitions on the one side and to Turco-Tartar onslaughts on the other side—into a compact and powerful realm, which was directed indeed by the strongest and most advanced race within its borders—the Poles—but which in its better period allowed a genuine equality to the other races and extensive self-government to some of them.

A great enthusiasm for freedom in almost every branch of life; the principle of the sovereignty of the nation, calling the citizens to participate in the responsibilities of government; the conception of the state as not a thing existing for itself, but as an instrument serving the wellbeing of society; aversion to absolute monarchy, standing armies, and militarism; disinclination to undertake aggressive wars, but a remarkable tendency to form voluntary unions with neighboring peoples—such are some of the hallmarks of the old Polish state, which make it stand out as a unique exception among the rapacious and militaristic monarchies of that age. The Poles have been only too frequently reproached for having created such a state and for not having imitated the institutions and the spirit of their neighbors; but today, after a war in which Prussia symbolized precisely the principles which Poland is blamed for not having adopted, and the Allies have stood for ideals closely akin to those of old Poland, it would seem that the time has come for a revision of our judgments about the old Polish republic.

For some such reasons the Poles today, while recognizing the many blemishes that crept into the republic, particularly in its later period, are still inclined to hold that this Polish-Lithuanian-White Russian-Ukrainian-Prussian federation—which the old republic really was—represented a political organization so entirely adapted to the needs of that part of Europe, so much in the nature of things, that its violent disruption at the hands of its neighbors must be a matter of regret, and its restoration, in part, at least, on some twentieth century basis a goal to be kept in view.

Since the Partitions the situation has, of course, been very substantially modified. The partitioning governments have not labored in vain to break down or destroy Polish influences in many parts of the former republic; and in recent decades strong nationalist movements have also grown up among two of the races once united to Poland, the Lithuanians and the Ukrainians. Hence no one in Poland today believes it possible or desirable simply to incorporate all the lands of the old republic in the new Polish state. No one proposes to compel the other races which have developed pronounced nationalist movements to unite with Poland against their will.

But it is, I think, the general desire of the Poles to save as much of their ancient heritage as can legitimately be done. Most of them seem to feel that those eastern territories of the old republic in which Polish culture is still predominant, and in which there is no indigenous nationalist movement, ought to return to Poland. Many Poles hope that the Lithuanians and possibly even the Ukrainians can be won over to voluntarily accepting a federal union with Poland. Doubtless this federal idea lies behind the demand recently presented to the Bolsheviki by the Polish government: the demand that Soviet Russia should renounce its claim to all territories west of the old Polish frontiers of 1772. Ever since 1863, at least, it has been a favorite thesis of Polish democrats and even Socialists that the only way to effect a solution of the problem of the debatable eastern territories, in accordance both with outraged legality and with the principle of national self-determination, is to force Russia to renounce what she usurped at the time of the Partitions, and then to leave the liberated populations free either to renew their historic federal union with Poland or to make any other political arrangements that they choose.

There is no need to pass judgment here upon the justice or expediency of such ideas. But they cannot be ignored; and it certainly does not advance us toward a solution of these questions, nor is it a sign of insight or fair-mindedness, to brand these ideas as due simply to ‘Polish imperialism’ or ‘chauvinism’ or ‘megalomania,’ as our Liberal journals are fond of doing; or to castigate the Poles for claiming a single mile of territory outside the area where—according to the statistics prepared by governments hostile to them—there is demonstrably a Polish-speaking majority. No nation with a thousand years of history behind it could be expected to rise to such heights of self-abnegation.

The wide dispersion of the Polish race, the divergence between what is ethnically Polish today and what was historically, and still is in part culturally, Polish; the lack of adequate data as to the ethnic makeup and political gravitation of so many of the border populations; the lack of clear-cut, natural frontiers—such are some of the difficulties in the way of defining Poland’s proper boundaries.

The Allied statesmen met at Paris already committed to the programme of the restoration of a “united and independent Poland.” President Wilson in the Fourteen Points had laid down the principle that “an independent Polish state should be created which should include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations, which should be assured a free and secure access to the sea and whose political and economic independence and territorial integrity should be guaranteed by international covenant.” The prime ministers of Great Britain, France, and Italy, in their declaration of June 3, 1918, had also affirmed that “the creation of a united and independent Polish state with free access to the sea constitutes one of the conditions of a solid and just peace and of the rule of right in Europe.”

It may be that, when it came to the test, some of the Allied statesmen, out of a desire to create a Polish state capable of becoming a useful ally against Germany, were inclined to go beyond the limits of these definitions; and that other Allied statesmen were tempted to do somewhat less than they had promised, for fear of pressing Germany too hard and of incurring liabilities in the East that might be onerous in the future. Nevertheless, these tendencies very largely neutralized each other; and the outcome has been a settlement of the Polish territorial problems which, in so far as it has been completed, may be regarded as an honest application of the principles laid down in the Fourteen Points.

The settlement is necessarily incomplete because the Conference could make definitive arrangements only with regard to Prussian and Austrian Poland. We were not at war with Russia; the Conference had neither the right nor the wish to dispose of Russian territory without Russia’s consent; and there was no recognized Russian government with which a voluntary settlement could be negotiated. It was possible to assume that Russia had renounced all claims to Warsaw and to the so-called Congress Kingdom, because the government of Prince Lvov, in March 1917, had spontaneously accepted the principle of “an independent Polish state including all regions with an indisputable Polish ethnic majority.” But it has been impossible down to the present to assign definitive limits to this state on the east, in those debatable regions where the ethnographic situation and the wishes of the population are so doubtful, and where Polish, Russian, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian claims all come into collision.[44] Hence Poland so far has boundaries fixed only on the west, northwest, and south.

Of all the parts of the Versailles Peace Treaty, there is perhaps none which it required greater moral courage to make or which it may be more difficult to uphold than the Polish-German settlement. That settlement has, I think, been not a little misunderstood; and a certain section of the press in this country and in England has frequently denounced it as one of the great iniquities of the Peace Treaty, the spoliation of Prussia, the sacrifice of millions of innocent Germans to the Moloch of Polish imperialism. It is, of course, true that the Germans do not like it, and that none of the other territorial sacrifices imposed upon them have called forth such indignation and rage. But could anyone expect that they would like it? Since the rise of Prussia was accomplished mainly by the spoliation of Poland, could anyone hope to effect a genuine restoration of Poland without taking a great deal of land away from Prussia?

It is also true that the treaty incorporates a good many Germans into the new Polish state. In the provinces ceded outright to Poland, the ratio is about 1,000,000 Germans to 1,800,000 Poles. If all the plebiscites provided for go against Germany, the total of the territories which Poland will have acquired from Prussia will contain about 2,100,000 Germans as against 3,400,000 Poles.[45]

Regrettable as this may be, the following observations may be made upon it. In the first place, if the real facts were known, the ratio would undoubtedly be found to be much more favorable to the Poles. For the figures just cited are based upon the Prussian official language statistics; and it has been demonstrated by the most painstaking and detailed investigations—and it is admitted by honest people even in Germany—that these statistics are grossly inaccurate, are in fact deliberately falsified for the purpose of making it appear that Prussia’s Germanizing policy in her ‘Eastern Marches’ has been more successful than is actually the case. Some idea of the discrepancy between fact and fiction may be gathered by comparing these linguistic statistics with the Prussian school census, which is equally official but less distorted for political purposes. One finds, for instance, such glaring contradictions as that the circle of Lyck contains only 51% of Poles according to the linguistic census, but 79% according to the school census; Sensburg has 49% of Poles according to the linguistic census, but 78% according to the school census; Lötzen 35% of Poles according to the linguistic census, but 70% according to the school census. The Peace Conference, although knowing the character of the Prussian language statistics, nevertheless adopted them as its criterion in order to be scrupulously fair to the Germans; but the facts just cited suggest that the real number of Germans transferred to Poland is far less than Prussian-made statistics would indicate.

Furthermore, a large number of these Germans have, so to speak, no right to be there. Everyone knows with what infinite patience, vast expenditure of money and effort, and perfect indifference to justice or morality, the Prussian government has worked to fill its eastern provinces with Germans and to dispossess the Poles of a land which has been theirs for a thousand years. The chef d’oeuvre of this policy has been the work of the Imperial Colonization Commission, which in the last thirty years has spent over 500,000,000 marks in buying up property in the eastern provinces and settling German colonists upon it. Over 100,000 Germans have been brought in in this way. Half a dozen other official and semi-official organizations have been at work for the same purpose. In addition, the host of government functionaries and servants in these provinces, the administrative, judicial, financial, railroad, telegraph, postal, forest, school officials and employees, have been recruited almost exclusively from the Germans, and very largely from Germans brought in from the west by the promise of higher pay and other special privileges. It has been estimated that in the various districts of the east, from one-fifth to one-third of the German population is made up of those dependent for their livelihood upon the state—people brought in from outside or maintained for the sole purpose of impressing an artificial German character upon a Polish land. There is little reason to grieve very much over the prospect of seeing this more or less parasitical population faced with the alternative of submitting to the rule of the majority among which they live or else of returning to where they came from.

It is true, of course, that after making all such deductions, there will still remain in the provinces that have been or may be transferred to Poland, a much larger number of Germans than one would like to find there. But this is unavoidable. For centuries these territories have had a very mixed population. Old Poland opened her frontiers freely to German settlers, refraining from any effort to denationalize them, extending to them a tolerance, a liberality, a wide measure of local self-government which presents the most striking contrast to the treatment the Poles have received since the Germans have become the masters. As result of these earlier centuries, as well as of the work which the Prussian government has since carried on, the two races are everywhere intermingled. There are many German enclaves, towns and small districts of German majority embedded in the predominantly Polish areas. But how these ubiquitous German minorities and these isolated islands of German majority can be left to Germany without leaving a much larger number of Poles out of Poland, it is not easy to see. No large compact blocks of German population have been annexed to Poland. No territories have been awarded to Poland simply on the basis of historic rights. What the Peace Conference attempted to do was to disentangle two inextricably interlocked races, as far as that could be done; to define what might be considered—in spite of numerous German enclaves—the area of Polish majorities; and then to make the political boundary coincide with this ethnographic one, as far as was practicable. Since this ethnographic frontier presents an extraordinarily jagged and tortuous contour, some deviations from it had to be made in order to obtain a relatively straight and simple boundary; and naturally the effort was also made to avoid cutting railway lines too frequently. In spite of much that has been said, in the final delimitation of the frontier strategic interests were practically left out of consideration.

But what was most characteristic of the desire to be completely fair to the Germans is the fact that two large areas of incontestably Polish majority were not transferred to Poland, as they might well have been according to the Fourteen Points. Since there was a possibility of doubt as to the wishes of their populations, their fate has been left to popular vote.

The settlement is, on the whole, a pretty complicated one, too complicated perhaps. It deals in varying ways with six territories, each of which has its peculiarities and special problems, and each of which, for the sake of clearness, must be discussed separately.

Five-sixths of the old province of Posen has been ceded outright to Poland. Even the German delegates at Versailles did not very seriously contest the justice of this award. Posen was the cradle of the Polish race and of the Polish state; it belonged to Poland uninterruptedly down to the Second Partition in 1793; it has always retained a strong Polish majority; and that majority has furnished the most conclusive proof of its Polish patriotism and its detestation of German rule. Posen is entirely an agricultural province, the loss of which will reduce Germany’s ability to feed herself from her own resources, but will not otherwise cripple her seriously. The acquisition of the province will be a great gain to Poland, however, since the Posnanian Poles, in the struggle which they have carried on for thirty years against the Prussian government, have learned to equal or surpass the Germans in the qualities of industry, thrift, organizing ability, and general economic efficiency—qualities which are not too well developed among the other Poles.

In West Prussia the problem was much less simple. West Prussia holds a position of such pivotal importance that it has been for six hundred years a battleground between German and Slav. Polish down to the beginning of the fourteenth century; seized by the Teutonic Knights in 1308; voluntarily reunited to Poland in 1454; Polish down to 1772; annexed by Frederick the Great at the time of the First Partition—such is the outline of its history. For centuries the province has been the meeting-place, the point of collision, between two streams of colonization—the German current from west to east along the coast of the Baltic, and the Polish current from south to north down the valley of the Vistula. As a result, the ethnographic map of West Prussia is almost as intricate a mosaic as that of Macedonia. Nevertheless, the general result is clear. West Prussia tails into three zones. The zone along the western border is predominantly German; and so is the northeasterly part, on the right bank of the Vistula. But the central zone and the southeast are predominantly Polish. There thus exists to the west of the Vistula an unbroken corridor of Polish-speaking territory extending through to the Baltic. In the collision referred to between the two streams of colonization, the south to north movement has been the stronger. The Germans have not succeeded in bridging the gap between the old German lands of the west and the isolated German colony in East Prussia. This is the first and principal reason for the establishment of the much discussed Polish couloir to the Baltic.

Poland needs territorial access to the sea—of that there can be no question. But the Peace Conference would probably not have granted her this wish, had it not been justified in doing so on ethnographic grounds. The Conference did not invent the couloir: that already existed and is written plain on every honest linguistic map of this region. The Conference merely recognized the fact, and drew the necessary conclusion by awarding to Poland that middle zone of West Prussia, which forms a compact, though rather narrow, corridor through to the Baltic.

There has been much criticism of this decision, on the ground that East Prussia, most of which will still remain to Germany, is thereby separated from the rest of the Fatherland—an anomalous and unjust arrangement, it is said, which the Germans can never be expected to put up with. Certainly it would be an undesirable arrangement if there were any just way of avoiding it. But it may be remarked, in the first place, that this is the only solution of the problem that corresponds to the ethnographic situation, to the unhappy way in which Germans and Poles have come to be distributed here as the result of centuries of conflict. This solution merely restores the territorial situation that existed for three hundred years down to the time of the First Partition. Moreover, the continuity of German territory cannot be maintained without denying Poland access to the sea. Either East Prussia will have to trade with Germany across Polish territory or Poland will have to trade with the outside world across German territory. It is a question of balancing the respective interests at stake. And who will argue that the right of the million and a half Germans in East Prussia[46] to have a land connection with Germany (they will always have easy communication by sea) outweighs the right of over twenty million Poles in the hinterland to a secure access to the Baltic? Clearly the Polish interest involved is incomparably the greater and ought to take precedence. Every effort has been made in the Peace Treaty to assure untrammeled railway and trade communications between Germany and East Prussia across the intervening Polish territory. Further than that its seems unnecessary to go to secure the interests of the rather small, detached German colony around Königsberg.

The question of the Polish corridor is closely bound up with the thorny problem of Danzig.

Historically Danzig has in the main passed through the same vicissitudes as West Prussia, of which it is the capital. It is an old Polish city, transformed into a German-speaking one since the fourteenth century. Nevertheless, German Danzig distinguished itself in the past by its loyalty to Poland. It took the lead and fought gallantly to effect the reunion of West Prussia with Poland in the fifteenth century. During the ensuing period of Polish rule, it was prosperous and contented. The whole sea-borne trade of Poland passed through its hands; it ranked as wellnigh the first port of the Baltic; and the wide measure of autonomy which Poland allowed it drew Danzig to her by affection as well as by interest. It was not without staunch resistance that the city surrendered to the Prussian usurpation in 1793, and as late as 1813 the City Council besought the Powers of Europe to reunite Danzig to Poland and not to incorporate it with Prussia.

Today the problem of Danzig revolves around two essential facts. The city itself with a population of about 170,000, is overwhelmingly German (over 90%), and so is the small district immediately surrounding it.[47] On the other hand, economically and geographically, Danzig belongs to Poland.

The city derives its importance almost wholly from the fact that it is the natural port of the Vistula valley: it is to that river what Marseilles is to the Rhone or Alexandria to the Nile.[48] Supremely prosperous during the best days of its union with Poland, Danzig has decayed and stagnated under Prussian rule. It has sunk to be a third-rate port, far outdistanced by Hamburg, Bremen, Stettin, or even Königsberg. It is doubtful whether it would have any future at all, if it were left as a German city, almost surrounded by Polish territory and cut off by political and economic barriers from the hinterland on which its life depends.

For Poland this is almost the most crucial of all questions. Poland is essentially the valley of the Vistula. That river has always been the main artery of the country’s economic life, and scarcely any other European nation has its settlements concentrated in one river valley in like degree. The Vistula is a magnificent river system, a basin of 60,000 square miles with 3100 miles of navigable streams, and a possibility of opening good and easy connections with the Dnieper, the Dniester, and the Niemen—i.e., with half of eastern Europe. But the utilization and proper development of this unique system of transcontinental waterways by Poland depends on her control of the great port at the mouth of the Vistula. Moreover, Danzig is not only the natural outlet to the sea for this whole country, but it is the only outlet that is in any sense available. The narrow strip of coast which Poland has received to the west of Danzig contains no real ports, and it is doubtful whether any satisfactory port can be developed there.

It has, of course, been suggested that even if Danzig were left Germany, Poland could enjoy free use of the port by special commercial treaties guaranteed by the League of Nations. But on this very question Poland has had such sad experiences of the way in which Germany keeps treaties that she cannot rely on such arrangements. And whatever may be one’s hopes as to the League of Nations, in the present state of the League it is scarcely fair to ask a nation to stake its most vital interests upon the efficiency of such a guarantee.

It is well known that the Danzig question led to something of a contest at Paris. On the one hand, Poland had received the promise of a free and secure access to the sea; on the other hand, it was difficult to transfer to her outright the Danzig territory with a solid population of about 300,000 Germans. Finally a compromise was agreed upon, a solution intended to safeguard both the national rights of the Danzig Germans and the economic interests of Poland.

According to the new arrangement, Danzig and its territory are to be entirely separated from Germany and to be organized as a free city under the protection of the League of Nations. In economic matters, however, this small republic will be very closely connected with Poland through a treaty to be drawn up by the Allied and Associated Powers. This treaty will have for its object to include the Free City within the Polish customs area, and to insure to Poland complete control over the railways, posts, telegraph lines, waterways, and port facilities of Danzig.

If this arrangement is honestly put into practice, it will restore substantially the relation which existed so happily between Poland and Danzig from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, for Danzig was at that time virtually a free city under the protectorate of Poland. This historical precedent has helped a good deal to reconcile the Poles to the compromise, and there is reason to think that a considerable section of the Danzigers are rather well satisfied with it.

Posen, part of West Prussia, and the Danzig territory are the only regions which Germany has definitively lost to Poland. There are, however, three other territories which Germany may lose, since in all of them plebiscites are to be held to determine whether their inhabitants wish to remain with Germany or to be united with Poland.

The first of these plebiscite areas is the Marienwerder district on the right bank of the Vistula in the northeastern corner of West Prussia. This small territory is of much importance to Poland, since it borders upon the Vistula and, if left in German hands, might menace the security of communications along that river. Moreover, the most direct and convenient railway from Danzig to Warsaw runs across this territory. Nevertheless, since the district contained in 1910 about 114,000 Germans as against only 24,000 Poles, the Conference decided to refer its fate to a plebiscite. Apart from Danzig, this is the only considerable district with a German-speaking majority which may be taken away from Germany.

A plebiscite is also to be held in the southern zone of the province of East Prussia, in the territory commonly known as Mazuria. This secluded region of forests, lakes, and marshes has a decided majority of Polish-speaking population. The ancestors of these Poles were called into the country in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries by the Teutonic Knights to replace the original Prussian population, which the Knights had largely exterminated. The Mazurian Poles have remained politically separated from the rest of their nation for six hundred years; since the sixteenth century they have become Protestants, while almost all the other Poles are Catholics; and because of these facts and also because of their economic, intellectual, and spiritual dependence on their German landlords, teachers, and pastors, the Mazurian Poles have long been completely estranged from the rest of the Polish nation. They have on the whole shown no very marked signs of Polish national consciousness, and there was room to doubt whether they desired reunion with Poland. Hence, a plebiscite was clearly in order here.

The third plebiscite area is in Upper Silesia. In this case, likewise, there was an indisputable Polish-speaking majority: 65.6% of Poles for the region as a whole, and in many districts 80 or even 90%. So strong was the Polish claim that the original decision of the Peace Conference was to award Upper Silesia to Poland outright. It is well known, however, that, as a result of the vehement objections raised by the German delegation at Versailles, this decision was ultimately modified. The territory in question was extraordinarily rich in minerals and important industrially. In the period just before the outbreak of the War, its coal production was 44,000,000 tons a year—three times as great as that of the Saar basin, 23% of Germany’s total output of coal. It also furnished 34% of her production of lead ore; and 81% of her zinc. The loss of so immensely valuable a territory would mean a severe blow to the economical life, as well as to the pride, of the German people. It was a sacrifice that could be fairly demanded only if the majority of the population in Upper Silesia clearly and unmistakably desired union with Poland. As to the wishes of that population, the evidence available was strongly in favor of Polish claims, but it was not absolutely conclusive. Hence the Conference finally resolved that in so grave a matter the decision must be left in the hands of the people themselves through a plebiscite.

To sum up, Germany has definitively lost about 17,500 square miles of territory and about 2,900,000 subjects. If all the plebiscites go against her, her total losses in the east will amount to an area of about 27,500 square miles and a total population of nearly 5,800,000. In other words, she risks losing in the east an area five times as great as Alsace-Lorraine, and a population three times as great.

There is no denying that this is serious business. The Powers who have decreed and sponsored these arrangements have thereby assumed responsibilities and liabilities, the gravity of which ought not to be overlooked or minimized. There is a common belief in Germany (though a wrong one) that Prussia has never permanently lost any territory she has once held, and that after every Jena comes a Leipzig or a Waterloo. And what must be the feeling of true-blue Prussians over the loss of these ‘Eastern Marches’ on the maintenance of which, Prince von Bülow was wont to declare, “the fate of Prussia, of the empire, nay of the whole German nation depends”? The resulting dangers to the peace of Europe are obvious. But it should not be imagined that these dangers would have been avoided, or even much reduced, if the Allies had demanded less for Poland. Without a far greater change in German mentality than we have had any evidence of as yet, any territorial cessions at all in favor of the despised Poles were sure to be fiercely resented. Even Professor Delbrück, one of the most moderate of Prussian politicians, declared years ago, “All Germany would have to be hewn in pieces before we would allow even Posen to be taken away from us.” The Paris Conference was always faced by the dilemma that ‘the peace of reconciliation,’ of which the Germans talked, would have been one that left Germany intact, unpunished, and impenitent; while the peace of justice, demanded by the principles which the Allies had proclaimed, raised the vision of an embittered Germany thirsting and plotting for revenge.

At all events, one may rejoice in the fact that, in spite of the risks involved, the Peace Conference had the courage to carry through a Polish-German settlement based on principle and not upon expediency or selfish convenience, a settlement which, in Mr. Lloyd George’s phrase, “leaves Germany no just grievance,” and which does right a great wrong from which the conscience of Europe has suffered for one hundred and fifty years.

Turning to the territories that belonged to the late Hapsburg monarchy, we may note that Poland has had an unhappy dispute with Czecho-Slovakia over the duchy of Teschen and the small territories of Zips and Arva, which lie south of the Carpathians. After two weeks of fighting and nine months of negotiation, it has now been settled that the populations of these districts are to decide by plebiscite to which of the two new republics they wish to belong.

Much more serious and difficult has been the problem presented by Galicia. The western part of this province was from the earliest times an integral part of Poland and is overwhelmingly Polish today. There is no real question here, and the possession of Western Galicia has already been assured to Poland. But with the remaining two-thirds of the province, the case is altogether different.

Eastern Galicia was originally settled by a population historically known, and still commonly known as Ruthenians. They are a branch of that Little Russian race for which the general name Ukrainian is now coming into use. After belonging to various Ruthenian principalities in the early middle ages, Eastern Galicia was conquered by Poland in 1340; it remained a part of the Polish state down to 1772; and even under the Austrian rule the Poles have continued to be the dominant nation. Today the ethnographic situation in Eastern Galicia may be summarized by saying that the Ruthenians make up 59% of the total population, the Poles 27%, and the Jews 13%. Although usually in the minority, the Poles are found in large numbers in almost every part of the territory. Lemberg, the capital of the province, and most of the other large towns are mainly Polish and Jewish in population; and there are several large rural districts of Polish-speaking majority.

Socially and intellectually there is a striking contrast between the two rival races. The Ruthenians are almost entirely a peasant population, with only a small educated class of priests, lawyers, doctors, etc. The Poles are fairly evenly and normally divided among the various occupations and social classes. The difference may be shown by the fact that about 91% of the Ruthenian population is dependent upon agriculture for a living, and only 44% of the Poles; 39% of the Poles live by commerce and industry, but only 7% of the Ruthenians; 17% of the Poles are engaged in the liberal professions, but only 1% of the Ruthenians; 62% of the Ruthenians are illiterate, but only 23% of the Poles. In other words, the Poles are socially, economically, and intellectually the strongest element in the country, although in numbers they are considerably inferior to their rivals.

During the five or six centuries in which the two races have lived side by side, their relations have on the whole been relatively satisfactory and amicable. To a large extent they are so still, whenever the politicians do not intervene, as is shown, for instance, by the high percentage of mixed marriages. In the nineteenth century, however, a nationalist movement grew up among the Ruthenians, which assumed a marked anti-Polish tendency and which has led to the rather bitter racial feud that has raged in Eastern Galicia in the past thirty years. It is likely that this contest would never have assumed so fierce a character had it not been for the insidious activities of the Austrian government, which lost no opportunity to stir up the two races against each other, aiding now one and then the other in accordance with the traditional Austrian maxim, ‘divide and rule’. In the last twenty years the German government has also taken an active hand in the affair, secretly exciting and aiding the Ruthenians against the Poles; for the latter were always the enemy for Berlin, and decades before Brest-Litovsk German statesmen appreciated the possibilities of the ‘Ukrainian idea,’ which might be used with equal effect against both Russia and Poland.

Nevertheless, the Ruthenian movement remained rather ineffective, both because the Galician Ruthenians were the poorest, most ignorant, and most backward of all the races of Austria, and because they were divided among themselves as to their goal. Two distinct national movements have really existed among them, in a population of three and a half millions. Part of them, the majority, apparently, maintained that they were a branch of the Ukrainian nation, and that their goal must be the ultimate formation of an independent Ukrainian state. The minority, on the other hand, asserted that there was no such thing as a Ukrainian nation: that the Galician Ruthenians and the people of the Russian Ukraine alike were simply a branch of the one great Russian nation, which stretched unbroken from the Carpathians to the Pacific. For these people, in theory at least, the goal was the union of Eastern Galicia with Russia.

For a nation so backward in its development, so divided against itself, and so accustomed to look to Berlin and Vienna for aid and direction, the World War arrived at the wrong moment: the World War and then the collapse of Austria and the crisis that was to decide the fate of Eastern Galicia.

At the moment of Austria’s spontaneous dissolution, one Ruthenian party hastened to set up a ‘Republic of the Western Ukraine,’ and, with the aid of certain Ruthenian units in the old Austrian army, attempted to seize possession of all Eastern Galicia. This led to a prolonged and unhappy struggle with the Poles, who were not disposed to submit to such a settlement of the question. For many months the fighting centred around the city of Lemberg, which long defended itself almost single-handed and with great heroism against superior Ukrainian forces. When at last the Polish government was in position to send large reënforcements, the issue was quickly decided: in June, 1919, the Ukrainian resistance collapsed, and the Poles occupied the whole country as far as the Zbrucz.

The fate of Eastern Galicia was thus more or less settled vi et armis, without the Conference and at times to the lively displeasure of the Conference. That the Allied and Associated Powers nevertheless finally sanctioned the Polish occupation of Eastern Galicia and are now apparently intending to place that country, provisionally at least, under the sovereignty of Poland, is a fact which has called forth no little criticism. It has been denounced as a craven surrender in the face of a fait accompli, a betrayal of principle, the sacrifice of three and a half million Ukrainians to the ravenous Polish imperialists, and much more to the like effect.

The chief justification of the Conference, I think, is to be found in the hard facts of the situation. The Ruthenians are indeed the majority in Eastern Galicia; the majority ought to rule; but it was very difficult to apply this principle in this particular case.

The Ruthenian majority was not at all agreed as to what it wanted. The Ukrainophiles among them were for an independent Ukrainian state; but the other party was altogether opposed to such an idea. This second party, however, had no more practicable program to offer than that the Allied governments should occupy and administer Eastern Galicia until such time as Russia was on her feet again and in condition to take over the country. If one might judge from the relative strength of the two Ruthenian parties as they existed before the war, the party which wanted an independent Ukrainian state might be a majority among the Ruthenians, but was only a minority in the total population.

It was rather doubtful, moreover, whether the Ruthenians were capable of taking over the government of the country. They had had no independent state for nearly six hundred years, and their national development had been so retarded and unsatisfactory that it was not easy to believe that they were fitted for independent statehood today. Where were the elements on which a solid state could be constructed? Such elements were not to be found in the ignorant and inarticulate masses of the peasants nor in the small class of intellectuals. These intellectuals had already given the measure of their ability: for six months they had tried to run a government, and the result—nearly all the many Allied officers who were sent in to study the situation were unanimous in the opinion that this Ukrainian government had been, to put it mildly, a sorry failure; and that the majority of the population—Poles, Jews, and Ruthenians alike—were relieved when this government collapsed and the Polish troops came in.

Eastern Galicia had been fought over for four years by Austrians and Russians, and then for a fifth year by Poles and Ukrainians. The country had suffered more than any other part of Eastern Europe. The Conference was anxious to assure to this war-racked and desolated region a return to orderly government and stable conditions as quickly as possible. This could not be effected by handing back the country to the local Ukrainian politicians, who had tried and failed; nor by handing it over to the so-called Republic of the Great Ukraine, represented only by the will-o’-the wisp government of the peripatetic Petlura. The Russian solution was practically out of the question for the present. The plan of international occupation and administration was indeed discussed, but none of the powers felt able or willing to undertake such a burden in that remote and inaccessible corner of Eastern Europe. Hence, the only practical solution seemed to be to entrust the Poles with the occupation and administration of the country, subject to certain guarantees to be stipulated in favor of the Ruthenians. The country had belonged to Poland for four hundred years; the Poles were politically and economically the most active, experienced, and capable element of the population; they were actually in possession of the country; and their occupation seemed to meet with the rather general approval of the inhabitants.

The final settlement of this question has not yet been made, however. There have been long negotiations between the Allies and the Polish government as to the terms under which Poland may be entrusted with the administration of Eastern Galicia, the autonomy which that province is to enjoy, and the special guarantees for national rights to be insured to the Ruthenians. No definitive agreement has yet been reached.

The eastern frontier of Poland is also still undefined, for reasons already indicated. At any rate, the Polish armies are now occupying a very wide area in the east. A year ago the Bolshevik forces had advanced almost to the borders of Congress Poland: today, after a certain amount of fighting, the Poles have thrust them back almost to the Dnieper. The Poles are now in possession of most of the old Russian provinces of Grodno, Wilno, Minsk, and Volhynia: i. e., of a very large part of those eastern territories which belonged to the old Polish republic and which have been the object of an age-long dispute between Poland and Russia.

What the ultimate fate of these regions will be, it would be difficult to forecast. The various nationalist movements which have sprung up in this area are of such recent date and such uncertain strength, that it would require much boldness to prophesy the outcome. Will Lithuania, for instance, consolidate itself as an independent state, or renew its old federal union with Poland, or return to Russia? Will the Ukrainians unite once more with Russia or establish themselves as a new state of 40,000,000 people? What will become of the White Russians, of all the peoples in this region the most enigmatic? The western section of them, being Catholic, may perhaps gravitate towards Poland; the eastern section, being Orthodox, may perhaps cleave to the side of Russia. Or will they develop a national movement of their own? When and in what fashion will a reorganized Russia be able to reassert her voice effectively in these questions? Such are some of the uncertainties in the case.

At all events, for the time being the Poles are again in possession of a larger part of their ancient heritage, of the Poland that existed before the Partitions. They are in possession of territories which, taken together, must contain a population of over thirty millions. And whatever fluctuations may still take place in her frontiers, Poland is likely to remain the largest and in many respects the most important of the new states produced by the war, the sixth most populous state in Europe.

While it would doubtless be premature to hail in this state, restored only yesterday and still in process of construction, a new Great Power, it is not impossible that Poland may in time become one. For, assuming that Upper Silesia comes to her by plebiscite, her economic resources are magnificent. The richest coal reserves on the Continent; zinc, lead, iron, petroleum in abundance; highly developed industries in the Congress Kingdom, which was the Lancashire of the Russian empire, and in Upper Silesia, which was the Black Country of eastern Germany—such are some of the assets with which Poland resumes her national life.

The greatest problem lies in the people themselves. Of them a writer by no means prejudiced in their favor has recently declared:

“In all Europe there is no other people, with the possible exception of the French, which is naturally so gifted. No one can study Eastern Europe without feeling that they are infinitely the most attractive of the peoples with which he has to do. They are the only ones in whose composition there is included that subtle differentia which marks off the ‘big nation’ from the ‘small.’”[49]

On the other hand, it must be admitted that in the past the Poles have shown themselves deficient in organizing and administrative ability, in economic enterprise, in cohesion, solidarity, and discipline. A century and more of servitude to foreigners has not been the best of schooling for orderly and efficient self-government, nor has it permitted the nation to keep altogether abreast of the West in intellectual and economic progress. And Poland, wedged in between a vindictive Germany and a presumably none too friendly Russia, occupies what may fairly be called the most exposed and dangerous position in Europe.

Nevertheless, the brilliant and original genius of the Polish people; their ardent and unsurpassed spirit of patriotism; the lessons which they may be presumed to have learned from their misfortunes; the reassuring evidence supplied by their conduct during these last two critical years—all this affords ground for hope, not only that Poland has permanently recovered her independence, but that she is capable of becoming again what she was for so many centuries in the past: a bulwark of liberty, republicanism, and Western civilization in the troubled East of Europe.

Bibliographical Note

One of the most useful aids to the study of questions relating to Poland is Professor E. Romer’s admirable Geographic and Statistical Atlas of Poland, published in Polish, French, and German: Warsaw and Cracow, 1916. An English edition is soon to be issued.

Almost all sides of Polish life today, political, economic, intellectual, and artistic, are described in compendious and scholarly fashion, and with an abundance of maps, statistics, and historical information, in the works published during the War by the Committee for Encyclopaedic Publications on Poland. This Committee has published La petite Encyclopédie polonaise, Paris-Lausanne, 1916 (translated into English under the title: Poland, her People, History, Industries, Finance, Science, Literature, Art, and Social Development); and the larger Encyclopédie polonaise, Fribourg-Lausanne, 1917-19, of which vols. i (geography and ethnography), ii, pt. 3 (territorial development of Polish nationality—in four volumes), iii (economic life), and iv (political and administrative regime) have hitherto appeared.

A very convenient handbook of statistical data about Poland is the Annuaire statistique polonais by E. Romer and I. Weinfeld, Cracow, 1917.

E. H. Lewinski-Corwin’s Political History of Poland, New York, 1917, is perhaps the best account of the subject available in English, although marred by a certain amount of patriotic exaggeration and party prejudice.

Among works dealing with the several territories which have been in dispute, the following are notable:

On Prussian Poland: Ludwig Bernhard, Die Polenfrage. Leipzig, 1910. (A moderate German view.) Joseph Partsch, Schlesien, pts. 1-2. Breslau, 1896-1911. “Liber” (C. Andrzejewski), Das Deutschtum in Westpolen (Preussisch-Polen), seine Zahl, seine Gliederung, sein Stärkeverhältniss gegenüber den Polen. Posen, 1919.

On the Galician question: W. Lutoslawski and E. Romer, The Ruthenian Question in Galicia. Paris, 1919. H. Grappin, Polonais et ruthènes. La question de Galicie. Paris, 1919. Both these works are partisan statements from the Polish side. M. Lozynsky, Les “Droits” de la Pologne sur la Galicie. Lausanne, 1917. E. Levitsky, La Guerre polono-ukrainienne en Galicie. Berne, 1919. This and the preceding represent the Ukrainian point of view.

On the question of Poland’s eastern frontier: L. Wasilewski, Die Ostprovinzen des alten Polenreichs. Cracow, 1916. By all means the most complete and illuminating survey of Poland’s past relations with Lithuania, White Russia, and the Ukraine, and of the recent growth of nationalist movements in those regions. K. Verbelis, La Lituanie russe. Geneva, 1918. (Lithuanian views and claims.) T. Savtchenko, L’Ukraine et la question ukrainienne. Paris, 1918. (Views of a Ukrainian nationalist.)

POLAND

FOOTNOTES:

[43] Here and in the ensuing chapters the word ‘race’ is used in its popular sense, as virtually equivalent to ‘people’ or ‘nation,’ rather than in the strict sense in which the word is employed by ethnologists. R. H. L.

[44] The Peace Conference appears to have adopted last autumn some sort of a provisional boundary for Poland on the east. As far as I understand the matter, however, this boundary represents only a minimum line. Whatever lies to the west of it is indisputably Polish, and henceforth in the opinion of the Conference should belong unconditionally to Poland. It is not implied, however, that Poland may not have valid claims to additional territories farther east—claims which can only be settled by negotiations between Poland and Russia.

[45] If the territory of the Free City of Danzig be included in this reckoning, the number of Germans that may be separated from the Empire would rise to 2,400,000 in round numbers.

[46] This figure refers to that part of East Prussia which will unquestionably remain to Germany. If the Mazurian and Marienwerder plebiscite areas vote to remain with Germany, the number of Germans cut off from the Reich by the Polish couloir will be a little over 2,000,000.

[47] The total population of the city and its district in 1910 was 324,000, of which number only 16,000 were entered in the census as having Polish as their ‘mother tongue.’

[48] I owe the comparison to Mr. L. B. Namier’s excellent article on “Poland’s Outlet to the Sea,” in The Nineteenth Century, Vol. 81 (1), Feb. 1917.

[49] Ralph Butler, The New Eastern Europe, p. 4.

VI
AUSTRIA

The Prince de Ligne, dying in the midst of the carnival of revelry that marked the Congress of Vienna, declared that he was preparing a new amusement for the jaded appetite of that assembly: the obsequies of a Field Marshal, a Knight of the Golden Fleece. A no less unique, but far graver, spectacle was provided for the Peace Conference of Paris: the obsequies of a great empire, the oldest and proudest in Europe.

Even without deploring that event, one cannot be altogether untouched by the spectacle of the collapse of the Hapsburg monarchy, with its stirring historic past and its illustrious traditions, the state which in one sense could trace its genealogy back to Charlemagne and Augustus Caesar, the realm of Charles V, the Ferdinands, Maria Theresia, Joseph II; the old indomitable

“Oesterreich,
An Ehren und an Siegen reich,”

of Wallenstein and Prince Eugene.

Austria had a raison d’être, had she only known how to live up to it. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, she rendered a real service to the peoples of Central Europe in uniting them into one realm capable of checking and repelling the Turkish flood. And later on, when the Turks had ceased to threaten, she might have acquired a new right to existence by educating her various races to self-government, offering them the advantages of membership in a large political and economic union combined with local autonomy and due respect for the rights and individuality of each race, anticipating in this realm, which, with its medley of nationalities, was a kind of miniature Europe, the solutions which the League of Nations will have to seek. After all, it was a Czech patriot who declared that if the Austrian monarchy did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it.

But Austria has seldom risen to her opportunities. According to Napoleon’s well known saying, she was always just behindhand with an army or an idea. There was always something strangely inefficient, ill-adjusted, factitious, unhealthy, or fundamentally dishonest about her. As has often been remarked, Austria was not a nation, it was only a government—a dynasty, an aristocracy, a bureaucracy, and an army. A dynasty, which had an extraordinary passion and talent for acquiring land—“the most successful race of matrimonial and land speculators known to history,” someone has called them[50]—but which has shown very little constructive or executive ability in the tasks of internal government, and whose policy has been defined as simply one of “exalted opportunism in the pursuit of the unchanging dynastic idea”;[51] a kind of permanent camarilla about the throne, made up of sixty or seventy archdukes and archduchesses and a group of great aristocratic houses, so influential and exclusive that Mickiewicz described Austria as “an East India Company exploited by two hundred families”; a bureaucracy, dull, pedantic, arbitrary, and inefficient, whose ideal of government seldom rose above the typical Austrian motto “fortwursteln”—muddle along someway—; an army whose degree of internal cohesion is shown by the fact that its recruits swore allegiance to the emperor in nine languages, and which had an unequalled record for the number of its defeats; such were the chief forces that held this “ramshackle empire” together.

The task of maintaining and consolidating so motley a realm was, after the rise of the nationalist movements of the nineteenth century, increasingly and desperately difficult; but perhaps it would not have been an impossible undertaking, if the dynasty had only honestly carried out the principle of the equality of all the Austrian races, and if it had gone over, while still there was time, to a genuine federal state organization. But the Hapsburgs did neither. Instead they repudiated both ideas by adopting and for fifty years maintaining the Dualist system of 1867, which meant the division of the monarchy into two halves, each of which was to be ruled by a minority—the Germans in the one case, the Magyars in the other—at the expense, and in defiance of the wishes, of the Slavic and Latin majorities. That system has been called “the ruin of modern Austria.”

Of the workings of the system in Hungary something will be said in the next chapter. In the Austrian or Cisleithan part of the monarchy, Dualism led to incessant struggles, immense embitterment, and finally the virtual breakdown of constitutional government, and a return to a but slightly disguised absolutism.

The one thing that saved the system from total shipwreck was the antagonisms that existed, not only between the Germans and the majority opposed to them, but also between the various races of which that majority was composed. These antagonisms were sedulously fomented by the government itself. It is one of the worst sins of the Hapsburgs that, far from acting as peacemakers or even as impartial arbiters between their discordant races, they deliberately and systematically strove to aggravate national animosities and to fan the flames of discord, hoping to be able to play off one race against another in the authentic Turkish fashion, and seeming to imagine that Austria could subsist through internal dissensions, just as Poland was once thought to subsist through her anarchy. The Emperor Francis I congratulated himself that his peoples were aliens to each other and detested one another: each race could therefore be used as a jailer for some other race. “From their antipathies springs order,” he declared, “and from their mutual hatred the general peace.”[52] Francis Joseph might adopt as an official slogan Viribus unitis, but his practice was based much more upon the traditional maxim, Divide et impera. He and his agents are very largely responsible for that violent series of nationality conflicts which have raged in almost every province of the monarchy—that bellum omnium contra omnes, which has disgraced and poisoned the political life of Austria and paved the way for her complete disruption.

Out of these discords grew the World War, as a result of Austria’s effort to crush the most dangerous of the nationalist movements threatening her from within by striking at its outside source. But this War, which was to have saved her, turned out to be her ruin, not only by involving her in military disasters, but even more, perhaps, by accelerating her internal decomposition. Far from reinvigorating the monarchy by drawing all its races together in a great outburst of patriotism and a great common effort—as Teuton propagandists used to tell us that it had done—the War had just the contrary effect. The indignation of so many Hapsburg races at being forced to fight for a cause of which they disapproved; the attempt of the authorities to stifle this discontent by imprisoning, shooting, or hanging tens of thousands of people; the many signs that the Austrian Germans, intoxicated with enthusiasm for Prussia, were yearning to apply Prussian methods to their old domestic enemies and to make tabula rasa of those inferior peoples who, as a German writer put it, were “only a burden upon history,” and could “serve only as mortar for a nobler race”; the consciousness that in case of a victory for the Central Powers Austria would emerge bound hand and foot to the chariot of Germany and the anti-German races were doomed; finally, and not least, the psychological effects of war-weariness and economic misery, which have more or less shattered empires better knit together than this one—all these things combined to raise to a white heat the discontent of the majority of the Hapsburg races and to make them resolve that they would stand this Austrian nightmare no longer, if the Allies would only hold out to them a helping hand.

The Allies had certainly had little serious intention of disrupting Austria, at the beginning or throughout the greater part of the War. The traditional belief that Austria was a “European necessity,” the illusion that she could serve as a bulwark against the expansion of Germany towards the southeast or of Russia towards the Adriatic, the hope that she might be detached from Germany and persuaded to make a separate peace, the fear that the disappearance of the monarchy would lead only to the ‘Balkanization’ of Central Europe and to chaos worse confounded—such ideas seem to have predominated at London, Paris, and perhaps Washington, even down to the last year of the War. As late as January 8, 1918, President Wilson, in formulating the Fourteen Points, still disclaimed the thought of impairing the integrity of Austria, and asked for her subject races nothing more than autonomy.

But in the spring and summer of 1918 a great change came over Allied policy with respect to the Austrian question. It would be difficult to say how far this change was due to a growing realization on the part of the Allies of the essential justice of the claims of the Austrian subject races; or to the failure of all hopes of inducing Austria to make a separate peace; or to the very clever diplomacy of the Czecho-Slovaks and the obligations under which the latter had placed the Allies by their services in Siberia and Russia. I am inclined to think, however, that the change was caused in very large part by the gradually maturing conviction that, to use Mr. Henderson’s phrase, ‘Germany, if she had not yet conquered her enemies, had at least conquered her allies’;[53] that Austria’s independence, gravely and progressively impaired ever since the formation of her alliance with Berlin in 1879, had now become definitely a thing of the past, so that if she continued to exist at all, it would be only as a satellite and tool of Germany, a German bridge towards the Near East, the gangway of Mitteleuropa. Certain declarations made from the highest quarters in Austria in July, 1918, after a meeting of the two Kaisers—declarations announcing the intention ‘to tighten the bonds between the two empires in the sense of a durable fellowship in time of peace,’ confirmed the fear of the formation of a Central European bloc with a population of 120,000,000 and an active army of 12,000,000 men. If this scheme were realized, Germany would have doubled her power and won the War, even though she restored all the territory she had occupied. From all this the conclusion seemed plain that the only way for the Allies to defeat the Pan-Germanist plan and place a permanent check upon Prussian militarism was to disrupt Austria-Hungary and to form a series of national states along the eastern frontier of Germany. It was now the destruction of Austria that was a European necessity. Hence, in the summer of 1918, the Allied governments, one after the other, formally approved the claims of the two chief malcontent Hapsburg races, the Czecho-Slovaks and the Yugo-Slavs, to unity and independence, and the Czecho-Slovaks were even recognized as an allied and belligerent nation. These declarations, accompanied or soon followed as they were by the sudden change in the military situation, the rapid and unbroken series of Allied victories on every front, and the collapse of Bulgaria, sealed the fate of Austria-Hungary.

The dynasty did, indeed, experience a deathbed repentance. In that black month of October, when he was daily throwing himself on President Wilson’s doorstep, pleading his zeal for peace and his love for the Fourteen Points, Kaiser Karl was also promising mountains and marvels to his own subjects—the complete transformation of the monarchy into a federation of national states. Such a system adopted even a few years earlier might have saved Austria; but, as some one has remarked, at the point at which matters had arrived, ‘one might as well have talked of federating the Kilkenny cats.’[54] As the Czecho-Slovak National Council declared, the Austrian races were no longer to be duped by promises from Vienna, as to the value of which they had had a sufficiently long experience. “What we demand the government at Vienna will never give us, and couldn’t, if it wanted to.”[55]

In the course of thirty days the monarchy spontaneously split into fragments. Almost without opposition from the authorities, almost without a hand being raised in defence of the secular throne of the Hapsburgs, power passed to the National Councils improvised by the Czecho-Slovaks, the Yugo-Slavs, the Poles, the Ukrainians, the Roumanians, the Magyars, and even the German Austrians. November 12-13 the last of the Hapsburgs abdicated. It was a dissolution without a parallel, with the elemental force of a tidal wave.

When the Peace Conference met at Paris, it did not have to concern itself with the old question whether the maintenance of Austria was a European necessity. The Austrian peoples themselves had settled that question, with irrefragable logic and unmistakable finality. The territories of the defunct empire had already been partitioned, in rough, provisional fashion and not without a few miniature wars, among eight states corresponding to the eight principal nationalities of that Empire. Five of these states were reckoned at Paris as Allies—Italy, Roumania, Yugo-Slavia, Czecho-Slovakia, and Poland; two of them—Hungary and German Austria—ranked as enemies; while as to the Galician Ukrainians, Paris could never quite make up its mind whether to count them as friends, enemies, or neutrals. The main problem before the Conference, therefore, was, while making peace with the two enemy states mentioned, to effect a definitive division of the Hapsburg inheritance that would be just, practical, and conducive to the peace and security of Europe.

The difficulties of such a task are obvious enough, and will appear more fully in the discussion of the individual problems that follows. It is well known that Austria has been from the earliest times an open inn to half the travelling nations of Europe and Asia; that her rich plains are covered with ethnographic sediment deposited by a score of successive invasions; that her mountains, which are generally not too high and are pierced by plenty of easy passes, have served, not so much as barriers separating races, but rather as rallying places for weak or fugitive peoples seeking a refuge. Neither the Austrian Alps, nor the Carpathians, nor the mountains of Bohemia form an ethnographic frontier. Not one of the Austrian races is separated from its neighbors by really clearly marked natural boundaries. The historic political or administrative divisions are usually equally unsatisfactory as a basis for marking off the several nationalities from each other. In Hungary the county divisions are largely of very recent date, and really represent gerrymanders, intended, not to separate races, but to mingle them in such a way as to produce wherever possible a Magyar majority. In Austria almost all the political divisions were very old, and represented simply the débris of feudalism—the duchies, counties, and margraviates that took shape in the Middle Ages, when political formations had nothing to do with the principle of nationality. Of the seventeen crownlands or provinces of Austria, fourteen contained two or more races jumbled together. But however artificial and incongruous these provincial divisions might seem when judged from the standpoint of nationality, their very age or long continuance added another element of difficulty: it opened the door to claims based on ‘historic rights.’ Almost every one of the Hapsburg races had once had an independent state of its own; and where was the race so forgetful of its glorious past as not to claim the whole of every province which had once belonged to it, no matter what the present ethnographic situation might be? Indeed, since ‘ethnographic rights’ and ‘historic rights’ were so frequently in conflict, it was a common phenomenon that each race should use the one argument or the other alternately, as suited its purposes in each particular case, without much regard for that consistency which Bismarck called “the virtue of small minds.” The Czecho-Slovaks, for instance, claimed the whole of Bohemia, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia by virtue of historic rights, regardless of the strong German and Polish majorities in various parts of those provinces. But when it came to the northwestern parts of Hungary, where they had no historic claim, and the Magyars a very good one, they shifted their argument completely to the basis of ethnographic statistics. One need not, however, be very severe on our allies for such inconsequences. There was “a deal of human nature” about most of them; and they can scarcely be called more illogical than those critics of the Peace settlement, whose hearts bleed for Ireland, Egypt, and India, but who are inconsolable over the destruction of “venerable, old Austria,” and who would much have preferred that the large Polish majority in Upper Silesia, made up mainly of oppressed peasants and workingmen, should have remained in the grip of the German minority of feudal magnates and capitalists.

The decisions of the Paris Conference with regard to the liquidation of Austria-Hungary are embodied in the Versailles treaty with Germany of June 28, and the treaty with German Austria signed at Saint-Germain-en-Laye on September 10. Untoward events have delayed down to the present the conclusion of peace with Hungary. The settlements hitherto made have not decided the fate of certain extremely contentious territories, which have been placed at the disposal of the Principal Allied and Associated Powers. Such is the case with nearly all the Adriatic territories in dispute between Italy and the Yugo-Slavs; and with various districts where plebiscites are to be held: i. e., Teschen, Zips (Szepes), Arva, and Klagenfurt. At any rate, with these exceptions, one can now discern pretty clearly the new territorial settlement in the lands of the former Hapsburg monarchy.

The northwestern portions of the monarchy have organized themselves, with the sanction of the Conference, as the republic of Czecho-Slovakia. The Czechs and Slovaks are two brother races, established, the one in Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, the other in the northwestern parts of Hungary. According to the census of 1910, the Czechs numbered about six and one half millions; the Slovaks about two millions. Allowing for the peculiar methods of Austrian and Hungarian census-takers, one will hardly go far wrong in raising the total for the two peoples combined to about ten millions. This would make them the third, and perhaps even the second, largest nationality within the borders of the late empire.[56]

The degree of relationship between the Czechs and Slovaks is one not easy to define. According to the one view, which is popular especially among the Czechs, the two peoples represent an original ethnic and linguistic unit—a single race, which through historic accidents came to be separated for centuries and to be considerably differentiated in speech, customs, and character, although always preserving such close linguistic and moral ties that they deserve to be considered as one nation. According to the other view, which is advanced especially by certain Slovak scholars and politicians, the Czechs and Slovaks, in spite of all similarities and affinities, are, and always have been, two distinct and independent branches of the Slavic family, two nations, which have been drawn together chiefly by common misfortunes and common dangers and which may therefore, perhaps, find it expedient to contract a political union. At any rate, the following facts are clear. For many centuries the two peoples have had a common literary language; their writers and scholars long maintained that they were a single nation; and if in the last century an effort has been made to develop a distinct Slovak literary language, it has made no great progress. The two idioms today are so closely alike that the two peoples understand each other without difficulty. Politically, the Czechs and Slovaks have been separated throughout most of their history. After a brief period of union in the ninth and tenth centuries, they fell apart definitively in 1031. The Czechs continued to have a state of their own, the kingdom of Bohemia, while the Slovaks fell under the sway of the Magyars for the next nine hundred years. Nevertheless, geographic propinquity and linguistic, religious, and intellectual ties sufficed to keep up a strong sense of fellowship and interdependence between the two peoples. These feelings have been strengthened in recent years by the conviction that in their struggles against their respective tyrants—the Germans in the one case, the Magyars in the other—they were fighting a common battle and had better stand shoulder to shoulder. And when the World War brought an almost undreamed-of chance for complete liberation, Czechs and Slovaks were wise enough to see that the two peoples, so weak numerically and placed in so exposed and dangerous a position, had little chance of maintaining their independence unless they united. It is true that there has been a certain amount of friction, and that a section of the Slovaks have been protesting against what they call the absorption of their people by the Czech intruders. But this was inevitable. As far as one can learn, the majority of the Slovaks have accepted the union, whether as a marriage of reason or of affection; and the combination is so necessary, if both peoples are to escape being swallowed up again by the Magyars and Germans, that one can only hope that it will last. In sanctioning the idea for which the rather new name of Czecho-Slovakia was adopted, the Peace Conference assuredly believed that it was satisfying the wishes of both peoples, and confirming the only arrangement capable of insuring peace in this peculiarly important danger zone.

The main territorial problem that presented itself with respect to Czecho-Slovakia was whether the new state should, in its western, Cisleithan half, receive boundaries drawn to fit the ethnographic frontier, or whether it should obtain its historic boundaries—the boundaries of the old Czech kingdom, which included the whole of the provinces of Bohemia, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia.

The problem was a grave one. The Germans formed 37% of the population of Bohemia; 28% in Moravia; 44% in Silesia. The three provinces contained a total of three and one half million Germans according to the last census. What was worse, these Germans are very largely gathered in compact masses, in a zone which wellnigh encircles the Czech-speaking territory, and which, on its outer side, was everywhere contiguous with Germany or German Austria. It would have been difficult to form this rather narrow ring of territory into an independent republic of German Bohemia, as some of its leading politicians demanded. Such a state would have been a politico-geographical monstrosity. But the peripheral territories might have been lopped off and handed over, in part to Germany, in part to German Austria, as the principle of nationality might seem to require. Moreover, it could not be forgotten that the Czechs and Germans of Bohemia were separated by centuries of struggles and animosities. Nowhere else in Austria had there been so bitter a conflict of nationalities in recent decades. In the mixed districts every village, one might almost say every house and every yard of ground, had been fought over. It had come to the point where Czechs and Germans could scarcely be brought to work in the same factory; where a small town might have to have two railroad stations—one for each race; where the propagandists of the rival nationalities competed in proselytizing even the inmates of the insane asylums. For the past ten years the Provincial Diet of Bohemia had been practically closed because of the violence of the race feud. Under such circumstances, could one think of including three and one half million Germans in the new Czech state?

Not without hesitation, the Peace Conference decided to preserve the historic frontiers of the old kingdom of Bohemia. That decision has occasioned much criticism; and indeed, among the decisions of the Conference, there is scarcely any other instance where so large a number of people have been placed under the sovereignty of another race. Nevertheless, I think that there is much justification for this settlement.

First and foremost, it should be observed that a strictly ethnographic frontier would have given an almost impossible and fatal configuration to Czecho-Slovakia. Even as it is now constructed, this state presents a somewhat fantastic appearance on the map. It looks like a tadpole. It is a narrow couloir about 600 miles in length, but in its eastern districts hardly 60 miles wide; and in Moravia, the province which forms the link between Bohemia and Slovakia, it is only 100 miles across. Now, if the frontier had been drawn on the ethnographic basis, these defects would have been aggravated in very dangerous fashion. Prague, the capital, would have been brought within about 30 miles of the German frontier. The Moravian link would have been little more than 50 miles wide. The state would have been constricted in the middle until it had much the shape of an hour glass. Czecho-Slovakia occupies a very perilous position. It is a wedge thrust into the side of Germany. For a thousand years the Czechs have been engaged chiefly in beating off the German onslaughts, and it is to be feared that in the future they will not be free from the same danger. Surrounded as they are on three sides by Germany and German Austria, they would, indeed, be in the gravest peril if, in case of a conflict, their enemies needed only to join hands across a gap 50 miles wide in order to cut the Czecho-Slovak state in two. If this state was to be created at all, it had to be created in a shape that would give it some guarantees of viability.

In the second place, if there are any cases where ‘historic rights’ deserve to be respected, this is probably one. The Czechs were the first of the two races to settle the country. It was they who founded and maintained the kingdom of Bohemia, which had so glorious a history in the Middle Ages and down to the time when it succumbed to Hapsburg despotism in the seventeenth century. Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia were the three constituent parts of this realm; together they made up ‘the lands of the Crown of St. Wenceslaus’; and down to the beginning of the nineteenth century even the Hapsburgs admitted that they owed their sovereign rights over these lands solely to their position as kings of Bohemia. If in the nineteenth century the effort was made to sweep away all vestiges of that kingdom and to merge it in the Austrian empire, the Czechs steadily refused to recognize these changes. They insisted that the kingdom of Bohemia still existed as a distinct entity, legally bound to the other Hapsburg lands only by the person of the common ruler; and they have fought for this principle and for that of the integrity and indissolubility of their realm with such tenacity that these ideas have become veritable dogmas in their minds. In sanctioning a Czech state including the whole of Bohemia and Moravia and most of Austrian Silesia, the Conference is not setting up a new and artificial creation: it is merely renewing and confirming in its old territorial limits a state which existed for centuries and which de jure, perhaps, has never ceased to exist.

The German populations in this state are in the main descended from settlers who were brought in by the kings of Bohemia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to clear and colonize the forests and waste lands, which then formed a girdle around the borders of the kingdom. These people voluntarily established themselves in a Czech land, and their descendants have always been subjects of the Czech state, save possibly during the last century or so when it is a contentious question whether a Czech state existed. At any rate, these Germans have never, since their immigration, belonged to Germany. And it may perhaps be doubted whether the presence of this German fringe is a sufficient reason for dismembering so ancient a state or a country so clearly marked out by nature to be a unit.

For Bohemia (the territory chiefly in question) has an extraordinary physical unity—greater than is possessed by any other country in Central Europe. This appears in its unusual river system, with its radial convergence of all the water courses towards the centre of the country; and not less in the mountain walls which guard the four sides of this natural citadel, especially the sides turned towards Germany. Were the political boundary to be removed from these mountains and carried down into the plain where the ethnographic frontier lies, this would mean exchanging a boundary that is excellent alike from the geographic, the economic, and the strategic standpoint for one that is quite the reverse.

Finally, it may be said that German-speaking Bohemia would suffer if cut off from the rest of the country. It is one of the most highly industrialized territories of Central Europe, the chief manufacturing centre of the old Austrian empire; and as such it has always been dependent upon the Czech agricultural region for its food supply and, in large part, its laborers. Moreover, it needs the markets which Czecho-Slovakia can furnish it at home or can open up to it in the southeast. The natural economic ties are so strong that not a few German Bohemians have, since the Armistice, publicly declared that their future can lie only in union with the Czecho-Slovak state, and that union with Germany would mean ruin for them. And from the Czech point of view, it is clear that the new state would have entered on its career with an almost fatal handicap, had it been deprived of its chief industrial districts and its main supplies of coal and other minerals.

Such were the reasons that led the Conference to depart rather widely in this case from its usual principles of boundary-making. The settlement seems to have been accepted by the parties most concerned without serious trouble and with far less friction than might have been expected. While some mistakes may have been made at the start, the Czechs have in general facilitated the transition by treating their old enemies in that generous, tactful, and sensible spirit which they have shown in most other matters, and which enables one to form very favorable auguries as to the future of their young republic.

Leaving the boundary questions of Slovakia to be considered in connection with Hungarian problems, we now pass on to German Austria.

It was the German-speaking provinces of the Eastern Alps, with their centre at Vienna, which formed the cradle or nucleus of the Austrian monarchy. It was there that the house of Hapsburg began its rise in 1276. And it is to this small mountain territory that the once proud name of Austria is again restricted. The new republic inherits only about one-fourth of the area of the old Austrian or Cisleithan half of the late empire. It is supposed to have a population of about six and a half millions, whereas Austria had twenty-eight and a half millions in 1910. In shape it is almost as elongated, as thin about the waist, as Czecho-Slovakia. It looks like an inverted pistol with the point aimed at Switzerland.

The making of the new Austrian frontiers involved several vexatious problems. On the north, indeed, it was resolved without much controversy to accept as the frontier between Austria and Czecho-Slovakia the historic boundary between Bohemia and Moravia on the one side, and the provinces of Upper and Lower Austria on the other. Only two slight deviations were made, both at the expense of Austria, in order to avoid cutting important railway connections.

It was the southern boundary that occasioned difficulties. As between the Austro-Germans and the Slovenes, who were to be united to the Yugoslav state, the effort was made to keep strictly to the ethnographic frontier. But this was not easy in so mountainous a region, where racial frontiers may take no account of geography, but political boundary makers cannot afford to do so.

The worst problem was the basin of Klagenfurt. Here the narrow, encased valley of the Drave widens out into a long, fertile corridor, which is again closed at the lower end and which obviously ought to be treated as a political unit. Unfortunately the southern side of the valley is Slovene in population and the northern side German, and in between lies the city of Klagenfurt—with its 29,000 people a great metropolis for that region—which is hotly disputed. The Austrian census shows this city to have a German majority; but the Yugo-Slavs claim that it was Slovene fifty years ago and would be now, were it not for certain tricks played upon them by the Austrian government. Klagenfurt last year enjoyed much the same painful notoriety as Fiume, Danzig, or the Saar. I know not how many unhappy Allied Commissioners were sent down there to investigate, report, delimit provisional boundaries, or to restrain the German or Yugo-Slav rifles, which kept going off of themselves. Finally, the Conference decided to refer the matter to a plebiscite. By an arrangement which may, perhaps, be said to favor the Yugo-Slavs, the Klagenfurt basin is divided into two zones. In the first and larger zone, the more contested one, and indeed the only one in which there may be a Slovene majority, the vote is to be taken within three months after the Peace Treaty with Austria goes into force. If the outcome in this zone favors Austria, she will keep both zones without further formalities. If the vote favors Yugo-Slavia, the plebiscite will then be held in three weeks in the second zone, which is pretty purely German, but which is geographically so situated that it could not easily be separated from the first zone.

If this arrangement has provoked much dissatisfaction in Austria, that has been even more the case over the drawing of the new Austro-Italian frontier in the Tyrol.

The facts here are sufficiently simple and well known. Italy was concerned, in the first place, to liberate the 400,000 Italians in the Trentino, to which she had every right; and secondly, to secure a strong natural frontier on her most exposed side, on the side looking towards Germany. The frontier which she asked for, and which the Conference accorded her, was the crest of the highest east-to-west ranges in the Tyrol—the line of the Oetzthaler and Zillerthaler Alps and the Hohe Tauern—a line which cuts the great historic north-to-south corridor through the Tyrol, not in its wider southern section, but at its highest and narrowest point, the Brenner Pass. The new frontier is about the best one that could be drawn from the geographic standpoint, since it follows the natural line of division, the watershed between the rivers that flow south to the Adriatic, and those that flow north and east to the Danube. It also affords the strongest strategic barrier that Italy could find. It has, however, the drawback of including in Italy a compact German-speaking population of about 250,000; old German towns like Botzen, Meran, Brixen, and various localities famous in German song and story, the homes of Andreas Hofer, the Tyrolese hero of 1809, and of Walther von der Vogelweide. Whether among the several parallel ranges farther south than the Brenner a frontier might not have been found which would have afforded Italy tolerable guarantees of security without involving the necessity of her absorbing so many Germans, is a question on which a great deal might be said. Among the experts at Paris opinions were divided on that subject, but in the Supreme Council, already somewhat embarrassed, perhaps, by the Adriatic question, the Italian view prevailed.

If the national principle has been somewhat violated to Austria’s detriment in the south, it has been applied in her favor in the east. The adjacent border zone of Hungary had a solid German-speaking population; and, at a time when Hungary was being broken up along ethnographic lines, it seemed only fair to unite these Germans to Austria. Alone among the states of the defeated Alliance, Austria has thus emerged from the War with at least one territorial acquisition.

At any rate, under the new conditions one can no longer speak of ‘happy Austria’ or of the ‘gay Viennese.’ Almost ruined by the War and its aftermath, weighed down by the financial charges imposed by the Peace Treaty, prostrated by the separation of the heart of the old monarchy from most of the provinces which had nourished and sustained it, suffering terribly at present and utterly despondent about her future, Austria has become the Niobe of nations. Today she is forced to compete with Armenia as a supplicant for the charity of the world.

It has been commonly said in Vienna this past year that German Austria cannot exist alone, if only for economic reasons, and that there remain to it only two possibilities: either union with Germany, or some kind of a customs union with the new states that have grown out of the Hapsburg empire.

Union with Germany was very much in the air a year ago; indeed, one of the first acts of the Austrian National Assembly on November 11, 1918, was a vote in favor of such a union. But the Peace Conference vetoed the project. This was done by the rather indirect method of inserting in the Peace Treaty with Germany an article by which the latter had to bind herself to “respect strictly the independence of Austria” within the frontiers to be fixed by the Allied and Associated Powers, and to agree that “this independence shall be inalienable except with the consent of the Council of the League of Nations.”

This act of the Conference has been defended on the ground that, at the close of a war in which Germany has shown herself such a menace to the world, it is scarcely expedient or even safe to gratify her with the acquisition of over six million new subjects. It is only after she has successfully passed a period of probation and has shown that she has fundamentally changed her methods and her point of view, that the rest of the world can accord her such an aggrandizement, if the Austrians at that time still desire the union. I confess, however, that I cannot help feeling that in this case the more generous attitude would have been the wiser one. As long as the Allies insist on keeping Austria in a cell by herself, they are likely to have a chronic invalid on their hands. The effort to hold asunder even provisionally two branches of a people like the Germans may easily involve embarrassments greater than any advantages that are to be derived from it. And what is most important is the essential justice of the thing. It is the great merit of the Peace Conference that it endeavored, on the whole honestly and in such sweeping fashion as was never seen before, to apply the principle of nationality to the resettlement of Europe. One cannot but regret that this work should be tarnished by denying even temporarily to the German and German-Austrian peoples the right to work out their national unity.

Bibliographical Note

Joseph Chavannes’ Physikalisch-statistischer Hand-Atlas von Oesterreich-Ungarn, Vienna, 1887, is still the best cartographic introduction to Austrian problems.

Among the best general works dealing with the late Hapsburg monarchy, one would name: A. Chéradame, L’Europe et la question d’Autriche au seuil du XXᵉ siècle. 4th ed. Paris, 1906. B. Auerbach, Les Races et les nationalités en Autriche-Hongrie. 2d ed. Paris, 1917. H. Wickham Steed, The Habsburg Monarchy. 2d ed. London, 1914. V. Gayda, Modern Austria: her racial and social problems. New York, 1915. R. W. Seton-Watson, German, Slav, and Magyar. London, 1916.

The British Foreign Office Handbooks are a particularly convenient source of information about the former Hapsburg monarchy and its several constituent territories.

The history of the Czecho-Slovaks has been set forth for Western readers principally in the masterly works of Professor Ernest Denis: La Fin de l’indépendance bohème. 2 vols. Paris, 1890. La Bohème depuis la Montagne-Blanche. 2 vols. Paris, 1903. Les Slovaques. Paris, 1917.

Valuable descriptions of the progress and situation of the Czecho-Slovaks before the War are to be found in: W. S. Monroe, Bohemia and the Čechs. Boston, 1910. T. Čapek (ed.), Bohemia under Hapsburg Misrule. New York, 1915. Z. V. Tobolka (ed.), Das böhmische Volk. Prague, 1916. H. Rauchberg, Der nationale Besitzstand in Böhmen. 2 vols. Leipzig, 1905. (The most detailed and comprehensive study of the nationality situation in Bohemia.)

Czecho-Slovak claims and aspirations are well formulated by Dr. Edouard Beneš in Bohemia’s Case for Independence, London, 1917.

A detailed discussion of the new frontiers of German Austria (with a map) is contained in the article by Dr. E. de Martonne, “Le traité de St.-Germain et le démembrement de l’Autriche,” in Annales de géographie, Jan. 15, 1920. See also the article on “The New Boundaries of Austria” in The Geographical Journal, Nov., 1919, and N. Krebs, “Deutsch-Oesterreich,” in Geographische Zeitschrift, vol. xxv, 2-4 Hft.

The nationality situation in the regions most in dispute along Austria’s new frontiers is best described, perhaps, in: A. Brunialti, Le nuove Provincie italiane, i: Il Trentino. Turin, 1919. Montanus, Die nationale Entwicklung Tirols in den letzten Jahrzehnten. Vienna, 1918. M. Pirker, “Die Zukunft Kärntens,” in the Oesterreichische Rundschau, Dec. 1, 1918. J. Bunzel, “Das deutsche Westungarn,” in the same number of the review just cited.

FOOTNOTES:

[50] J. Ellis Barker, “The Ultimate Fate of Austria-Hungary,” in The Nineteenth Century, vol. 76 (2), p. 1006.

[51] H. Wickham Steed, The Habsburg Monarchy, p. 8.

[52] Cited in Chéradame, L’Europe et la question d’Autriche, p. 3.

[53] Cited in The New Europe, ii, pp. 30, 227.

[54] Francis Gribble in The Nineteenth Century, vol. 82 (2), pp. 883-884.

[55] Declaration of the Czecho-Slovak National Council, Sept. 19, 1918, cited from the Journal des Débats, weekly edition, Oct. 25, 1918.

[56] The Hungarian census of 1910 claimed that the Magyars in the lands of the Crown of St. Stephen numbered 10,050,575.

VII
HUNGARY AND THE ADRIATIC

Among all the states of Europe there are few which, from the historical, the geographic, or the economic point of view, might appear to have a better claim to existence than the thousand-year-old kingdom of Hungary. Nature would seem to have marked out for political unity this Pannonian basin, with its marvellously fertile plain of the Alföld in the centre, surrounded on almost every side by mountain walls and mineral-bearing highlands, with its roads and rivers all converging towards the great Danube waterway, and its various parts supplementing each other economically in so admirable a fashion. And here, for once, history and geography did not seem to be working at cross-purposes. Ever since the appearance of those gifted and valiant Asiatics, the Magyars, in the Danubian plain in the ninth century, the Pannonian basin has been united into a state which has shown a remarkable vitality and durability, and whose frontiers, in spite of some temporary fluctuations, have on the whole remained singularly unchanged. If ancient status of possession, economic cohesion, and what may be called the geographic fitness of things, were all the factors that need be taken into account, the Hungarian state, in spite of all its misdeeds, ought to have come through the World War intact. Unfortunately for it, however, there is another factor which counts for even more nowadays: the rights and aspirations of peoples.

Hungary has always been a polyglot state. The ruling race, the Magyars, a nation of mixed Finno-Ugrian and Turko-Tartar stock, are a people of the plains like their nomad ancestors. They are said to have a positive aversion for living more than 600 feet above sea level. Hence, except for a few scattered colonies, they have always remained quartered in the plain of the Alföld, leaving the peripheral highlands and the once swampy regions of the south to other races, whom they probably found in the country at the time of their arrival and whose numbers have certainly been increased by subsequent immigration. The Magyars are an island of Asiatics surrounded by a sea of Latins and Slavs.

This ruling race is probably only a minority of the total population. The earliest census of nationalities that we have and the only one that was taken by relatively impartial officials, the census of 1851, makes out the Magyars to be only 37% of the total population. It is true that since the Magyars have taken the census into their own hands, their percentage has risen steadily with each successive decade, until by 1900 they could claim a slight majority, and in 1910 they could boast of 54%. In this latter year they were reckoned at just ten millions, out of a population of eighteen millions for Hungary proper. Their astonishing gains at the expense of the other races were officially explained as due to “the peaceful propagation of Hungarian culture.” Of that “peaceful propagation” I shall speak in a moment; but it should be said here that scarcely any unprejudiced observer accepts Hungarian racial statistics at their face value, and that a more probable estimate would reduce the number of the Magyars to about eight millions. This would make them a minority even in Hungary proper, and much more so in the whole kingdom—i. e., with Croatia included—which had a population of twenty-one millions in 1910.

Among the subject races, the Roumanians probably numbered three to three and a half millions; the Slovaks two to three millions; the Ruthenians half a million; the Serbs and Croats three millions; the Germans two millions.

Like every other racially composite state, Hungary was placed before the gravest of problems by the nineteenth century revival of the submerged or long dormant nationalities. During the early and middle part of that century, this problem could seldom be seriously faced by the Magyars, for they were engaged in their own battle for constitutional rights against the despotic and centralizing policy of Vienna. In this struggle they displayed a vigor and a tenacity which won for them both the sympathy and admiration of the world and a reputation as liberals and democrats which they have since singularly belied. As soon as their victory over the imperial government was sealed by the Compromise of 1867, as soon as they found themselves masters in Transleithania, the Magyars set to work to deny to the other races of the kingdom all those liberties for which they themselves had been fighting. The programme, henceforth pursued with the most relentless rigor and the most unscrupulous methods, was to ‘assure the unity of the Hungarian State’ by Magyarizing the subject races.

One must not be taken in by such mere stage decorations as the Hungarian law of nationalities of 1868—in appearance the most generous measure that could be devised, but never put into practice; nor by the glib phrases of Magyar propagandists about the unparallelled freedom that existed in Hungary, and the zeal with which the government fostered the languages and culture of the non-Magyar races. Anything more insolently defiant of the truth could scarcely be imagined. What has really gone on in Hungary in the past fifty years—what “the peaceful propagation of Magyar culture” meant—is something not easy to condense into a few words. In the briefest summary, however, it includes:

The exclusion of the non-Magyar languages from all state schools, the courts of law, administrative intercourse, and every other kind of official use;

Scandalous violation of the rights of freedom of person, speech, meeting, and association;

Systematic and merciless persecution of every manifestation of non-Magyar national sentiment;

An exaggerated irritability or arrogance of power, which has led Magyar authorities to impose sentences totalling twenty-nine years of imprisonment on a few petitioners who ventured to complain to the Emperor-King; to expel schoolboys or seminarians merely for speaking Roumanian or Slovak in the streets; or to imprison a nursemaid for “conspiring against the state” by allowing a three-year-old child to wear a bow with the Roumanian colors;

The virtual exclusion of non-Magyars from public office;

A parliamentary franchise narrow and complicated beyond description, and so administered as regularly to assure to the Magyar minority all but about 10 of the 413 seats in Parliament, so that the other races were virtually disfranchised;

An unrivalled system of gerrymandering;

Parliamentary elections stained with every form of outrage, fraud, and illegality, with coercion so freely employed that the government itself boasted that at the last elections it had used only 194 battalions of infantry and 114 squadrons of cavalry, and it has often been said that Hungarian elections resembled nothing so much as a civil war.

Such are some of the features of what may fairly be called the most odious system of racial oppression known to modern Europe.

It is, of course, true that this system was the work of the ruling oligarchy—a class which showed itself averse to democratic progress in any form, and which also chastised the Magyar proletariat with whips, even if it reserved its scorpions for the non-Magyars. But that made little practical difference. The cardinal fact was that after standing this sort of thing for fifty years, the subject peoples had come to execrate the very name of Magyar. If a chance for liberation presented itself, then, as some one has said, not even an angel from heaven could have dissuaded them from seizing it.

Hence, during the general débâcle of the Quadruple Alliance in October-November, 1918, Hungary disintegrated almost as spontaneously and easily as Austria. It was in vain that the new republican government of Count Károlyi fought frantically to save the territorial integrity of the state by offering the non-Magyar peoples the widest and most sweeping concessions, going even so far as to propose the transformation of Hungary into a federation of national cantons on the Swiss model. Nothing could make the seceders believe that the Magyar could change his spots, or tempt them back into the cage.

Equally fruitless were the diplomatic or propagandist efforts to persuade the Allied Powers that Hungary had suddenly become a new creation, which could not be held responsible for the acknowledged sins of its former rulers, and ought to be let off intact and scot-free. It is scarcely necessary to enter here into the tangled and not quite edifying relations between the Allies and the various governments that have succeeded each other at Budapest: the genuinely democratic and reforming government of Count Károlyi (October 1918—March 1919); the Bolshevist interlude under Bela Kun (March—August); and the more recent cabinets made up of more or less unsmirched remnants of the old regime. These many changes of government have long delayed the conclusion of peace with Hungary.[57] At all events, the treaty is now apparently about to be signed; and it seems safe to assume that this treaty will embody the territorial arrangements which were decided upon at Paris in the spring of 1919 and which I shall now try briefly to describe.

The northwestern highlands of Hungary, which are inhabited mainly by Slovaks, are to be incorporated into Czecho-Slovakia. This state touches the Danube at one point through the acquisition of Presburg, the one-time capital of Hungary. Regrettable as it may be that so historic a city should be lost to its old owners, it must be said that Presburg was always rather German than Magyar in population; and that it will furnish the land-locked republic of Czechoslovakia with a much-needed port on the Danube and a means of commercial access to the Balkans and the Black Sea.

The half-million Ruthenians who inhabit the mountains of northeastern Hungary form a secluded and backward population which has hitherto been supremely indifferent to the affairs of the outside world. Alone among the races of Hungary, they had no national movement and probably very little consciousness of nationality. Before the War they had not a single school in which their language was taught, no political newspaper of any kind, and scarcely any educated class. What went on in these primitive and illiterate heads when the gospel of self-determination penetrated to them, it is difficult to guess. There are tales that within a very few weeks three so-called National Assemblies were held, each claiming to represent the ‘Carpatho-Ruthenian nation,’ and that these rival gatherings ‘self-determined’ their people, the one for union with Czecho-Slovakia, the second for union with Hungary, and the third for union with their kinsmen over the mountains in Galicia. At any rate, the Czechophile tendency appears to have been the strongest. Going on the best evidence it could get as to the preferences of this enigmatic population, the Peace Conference has decided to attach them to Czecho-Slovakia, though under the form of an autonomous province with generous rights of self-government.

An ideal which has haunted the minds of Roumanian patriots for a century, but which long seemed only an iridescent dream, has been realized by the annexation to Roumania of Transylvania and the adjacent zone of territory on the west. This aspiring kingdom has now very nearly attained the frontiers of Trajan’s province of Dacia; and everyone knows with what ardor the modern Roumanians claim that they are descended from the Roman colonists sent out to Dacia in Trajan’s time.

Contrary to what appears to be widely believed in this country, Roumania’s acquisitions, with the possible exception of some small contentious border districts, are based strictly upon the principle of nationality. They serve to liberate over three millions of Roumanians, who, among all the subject peoples of Hungary, were the race most hated and oppressed by the Magyars, because of their numbers and the tenacity of their patriotism. It is true that in eastern Transylvania several large compact bodies of Magyars and Germans (900,000 of the former, 200,000 of the latter) are now transferred to Roumanian rule. But this is unavoidable in the case of such isolated enclaves. The Germans apparently do not object seriously; and as for the Magyars, it would be impossible to leave them to Hungary without cutting off a far larger number of Roumanians from their mother country. But of all the dramatic changes of fortune in Eastern Europe, there is none more striking than this one, which has put down the mighty Magyars from their seats, and exalted the humble Roumanian, for eight hundred years a slave and an outcast in his own country.

Roumania and Serbia have had an unpleasant controversy over the former Hungarian territory called the Banat of Temesvár. Although this dispute had very nearly brought those two Allied nations to blows, when it was laid before the Peace Conference one distinguished prime minister burst out in an audible whisper, “Where on earth is the Banat?” The Banat lies just southwest of Transylvania. It is the quadrangle enclosed by the Danube, the Theiss, the Máros, and the Transylvanian mountains.

It would take over-long to set forth the arguments, historical, economic, geographic, ethnographic, and miscellaneous, with which the two rivals regaled the Peace Conference. The Conference gave what was, I think, a proof of its wisdom by repeating the judgment of Solomon and dividing the disputed object between the litigants. Roumania will receive the larger portion, most of which is overwhelmingly Roumanian in population. Serbia acquires the very motley western section, in which Serbs, Roumanians, Germans, and Magyars are terribly intermingled, but in which the Serbs are at least a plurality: she acquires a much-needed zone to protect Belgrade on the north and east, and a number of towns which have played so great a rôle in Serbian intellectual movements that they are considered the cradle of the Serb national revival.

Farther to the westward lies the historic kingdom of Croatia, which has for eight hundred years been bound to Hungary by ties which no one could ever quite satisfactorily define, but which have often been compared to the connection between England and Ireland. In the last half century at least, Magyar-Croat relations have been even less serene and amicable than Anglo-Irish ones. It goes almost without saying that Croatia has now, of her own choice, united with Serbia and the Slovene lands of Austria to form the new state popularly called Yugo-Slavia.

That state has also received Bosnia and the Herzegovina, two provinces which have been the Alsace-Lorraine of southeastern Europe ever since their ill-fated occupation by Austria-Hungary in 1878. Thus the unity of the Southern Slav race is very nearly completed.

Here again one is in the presence of another seemingly impossible dream realized. Only ten years ago the Yugo-Slavs were living under six different governments; and their deputies sat in fourteen different parliaments, national or provincial. To attain their unity they have had to disrupt two such empires as Austria-Hungary and Turkey.

Their present union into one state appears to be in every sense natural and desirable. For Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes are blood-brothers, three closely related branches of one family. Serbian and Croatian are virtually the same language, although written, the one in Cyrillic, the other in Latin, characters. If Slovene forms a rather different idiom or even language, it is quite intelligible to the other two peoples. The Southern Slavs, moreover, need to stand together. They occupy an extremely important and a dangerous position; they are the guardians of the gate that leads from Central Europe to Constantinople and Bagdad. For three small peoples, placed in such a position, the motto that “in union there is strength” cannot be too much emphasized.

It is, of course, true that the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes have been politically separated throughout their history, as a result of geography and such accidents as the Turkish, Magyar, and German conquests. It is also true that they have developed considerable differences in customs, grade of culture, and above all in religion. The Serbs are Orthodox; the Croats and Slovenes Catholics; and there are in Bosnia about 600,000 people who, though Serbs in race, are Mohammedans. In this new ménage, made up indeed of brothers, but of brothers who have all their lives been separated, it is only to be expected that there will be a certain amount of domestic friction. Nevertheless, I think the reunion of the family, which the Peace Conference sanctioned and indeed worked for, is to be considered one of the greatest gains effected by the World War.

To sum up, Hungary has lost more than half of her area and population. She is reduced to the lowland region around Budapest, which has always been the real home of the Magyar; she now has a population of only eight to nine millions. It is to be regretted that she has lost almost all her forests, her mineral wealth, her mountain sources of water-power, her access to the sea.

TERRITORIES OF FORMER AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN EMPIRE

Grievous as her fate may be, it can scarcely be called unmerited. Louis Kossuth, the idol of the modern Magyars, answering a deputation sent by the subject peoples in 1848 to plead for their national rights, retorted, “No, let the sword decide between us.” And that remained the attitude of this race, whose greatest patriot declared that ‘pride would be their ruin.’ One cannot forget that this was a Magyar, as well as a German, war; and that, as some one has said, ‘it was provoked by a ring of Magyar politicians who had mortgaged their very souls to the German cause in order to purchase a free hand for the oppression of the non-Magyars.’[58]

But one would prefer to regard the settlement of the Hungarian problem made at Paris not as a matter of retributive justice, but rather as a sweeping application of the principle of nationality in the region where that principle had been most trampled upon; as the only kind of settlement in any way acceptable to those peoples who were in the majority in the old Hungarian state; and therefore as the only plan that could restore peace to this sorely distracted part of Europe.

I now pass to the questions concerning the territories on the Adriatic coast, part of which formerly belonged to Austria and part to Hungary. All of these territories are in dispute between Italy and Yugo-Slavia; and their problems taken together make up the so-called Adriatic question, which among all the problems that the Peace Conference has had to face has shown itself the most delicate, difficult, and interminable.

The Adriatic question relates mainly to the following five territories:

(1) The province or ‘crownland’ of Gorizia and Gradisca; (2) Trieste; (3) Istria; (4) Dalmatia—these four all formerly parts of Austria; and (5) Fiume, which belonged to Hungary. In addition some small bits of the provinces of Carinthia and Carniola have been involved in the dispute.

All these territories have a certain geographic unity. They form a long, narrow fringe of coastland and islands, rigidly separated from the Yugo-Slav hinterland by the successive chains of the Julian Alps, the Karst, the Velebite Mountains, and the Dinaric Alps. These ranges, which are the continuation of the Italian Alps, seem to detach the eastern coast of the Adriatic from the world beyond the mountains and to orient it towards the opposite western shore, of which it appears to be, in many respects, only an extension. Indeed, in its climate, its physical aspect, its vegetation; in the customs and mode of life of its inhabitants; its seafaring and commercial activities, and its age-long reliance upon communications by water rather than by land, this littoral region resembles Italy much more than the Balkans.

History has conformed to this aspect of geography. Not only did Rome long hold the whole eastern coast and plant there Latin colonies and a Latin tongue which, in some spots at least, seem never to have disappeared; but Venice succeeded to the inheritance of Rome, and from the tenth century to the end of the eighteenth imposed her sway over a large part of the eastern littoral and the islands. The Slavs had, indeed, penetrated to the coast or near it, in the seventh century; and ever since it may be assumed that the bulk of the population in almost every province on this coast has been of Slavic stock. Nevertheless, the Italians remained the dominant race in every respect save numbers; theirs was the language of business, of politics, of society, of literature, the language which almost everyone understood and tried to speak, if he pretended to be anybody; Italian was the civilization which has left such splendid monuments in the duomi and palazzi, the loggie and the campanili, which adorn the coast cities from Trieste to Ragusa. It is no great exaggeration when Italians today talk of eighteen centuries of Italianità in the lands east of the Adriatic. Nor is it strange that in Dalmatia, with her vines and olives, laurels and cypresses, and here and there a palm; with her warm Mediterranean sun and ever-present vistas of blue waters; with her cities studded with Roman and Venetian remains, and the lion of San Marco guarding every older edifice; the present-day Italian should feel himself very much in his own country.

But the nineteenth century revivals of dormant nationalities have brought cruel trials to the defenders of historic civilizations. Since the middle of that century, the Adriatic lands have seen a bitter conflict between the resurgent Croats and Slovenes, who are in most cases the majority, and the Italians. This conflict has been complicated and envenomed by the insidious and sometimes violent interventions of the Austrian and Hungarian authorities, both anxious to maintain their hold upon the coast by playing off the two chief nationalities of that region against one another. At Fiume the Magyars systematically favored the Italians in order to prevent the control of Hungary’s one port by the Croatians. In the other coastal territories the Austrians generally supported and spurred on the Slavs, who were regarded as less dangerous than the obnoxious nation which had brought Austria to grief in 1859 and 1866. Hence at the present day both of the rival races can say that the natural course of development has been perverted: neither quite likes to accept the ethnographic status quo produced through fifty years of machinations or violence by Vienna and Budapest.

Down to the World War the contest remained pretty much a local one, attracting no great amount of attention from the Italians of the kingdom, or the outside Yugo-Slavs, or the world at large. The other Yugo-Slavs had more pressing problems nearer home. In Italy the Carbonari did, indeed, dream of an ‘Ausonian Republic,’ extending from Malta to the Trentino, and from Trieste to Cattaro; and such seems also to have been the ideal of Daniel Manin and other heroes of 1848. All Italians agreed that Gorizia, Trieste, and Istria belonged by nature to Italy as much as did the Trentino or Venetia. But Dante, in a much quoted passage, had described the eastern side of Istria as the natural limit of Italy: he had spoken of the

“Quarnaro che Italia chiude.”

Mazzini, the greatest Italian political thinker of the nineteenth century, had also taken this to be the eastern boundary of Italy, and had spoken in the loftiest terms of the union and fraternity that ought to reign between his countrymen and the Yugo-Slavs. There seems to be no evidence that Cavour thought seriously of claiming anything east of the Adriatic—certainly not Dalmatia.

The Italian public thus had no very clear idea as to how much rightfully belonged to their country on the east; and as time wore on after the close of the Risorgimento period, that public more or less forgot about the Italian colonies beyond the Adriatic, or else gave them up as indefensible positions which there could be little hope of saving. Thus the Great War caught both Italians and Yugo-Slavs rather unprepared, and without very definite ideas or clear-cut programmes with respect to the Adriatic question.

It is well known that the Italian government then, rather hastily perhaps, formulated its programme and its demands in the treaty of London, of April 26, 1915—the treaty signed by England, France, and Russia in order to secure Italy’s entry into the War. This treaty promised Italy, in case of victory, a new frontier including the southern Tyrol, all of Gorizia, Trieste, all Istria, northern Dalmatia as far as a line which cuts the coast just west of Traù, and several of the larger Dalmatian islands farther south, including Lissa and Curzola. It did not include Fiume, presumably because the assumption then was that Austria-Hungary would continue to exist after the War as a great power, which must have at least one port on the Adriatic.

This treaty, were it ever to be carried out, would incorporate in Italy about 800,000 Yugo-Slavs, nearly half of whom live in Dalmatia. It inevitably created great resentment at Belgrade and Agram, and helped to produce that regrettable state of relations between Italians and Yugo-Slavs which has had such unfortunate results in the past year. At any rate, during the negotiations of the past year the Italians themselves have elected not to adhere to the strict terms of the treaty of London, but have shown, I think it must be admitted, a genuine willingness to seek a compromise more acceptable to their opponents.

At this point, it becomes necessary to consider the questions at issue, region by region.

Gorizia, Trieste, and Istria are three small territories which, in Roman times, formed a part of Italy and of the province of Venetia, and which the modern Italians still call Venetia Julia. Most scholars will agree, I think, that geographically these territories belong to Italy, and that the Julian Alps and the Karst Mountains, which come down to the sea on the Quarnero, mark the natural frontier of Italy on the northeast.

Historically, Venice held the larger part of Istria and a small part of Gorizia for many centuries down to the fall of the republic in 1797. Trieste was an independent commune until in 1382 it came under Hapsburg rule. The larger part of Gorizia and eastern Istria, after passing for centuries from one German princeling to another, have been under the Hapsburgs since the close of the Middle Ages.

Ethnographically, Venetia Julia seems to show a slight Yugo-Slav majority (52%). In Gorizia there were in 1910 155,000 Slovenes against 90,000 Italians; in Trieste 119,000 Italians against 59,000 Yugo-Slavs; in Istria 203,000 Yugo-Slavs against 147,000 Italians. But the Italians, not without some show of reason, contest these figures as being much too favorable to their opponents, owing to the bias and the unscrupulous methods of the Austrian census-takers. Furthermore, it would be difficult for even an honest census to give an accurate picture of the racial complexities of a province like Istria, which has been said to contain more fragments of diverse nationalities than any other province of similar size in Austria, and fragments that generally do not get properly classified in the census because there is no rubric for them. What is one to do with such ethnographic curios as the Chiches, the Morlaks, the Rumenes of Istria—people who do not know what they are themselves, nor can any philologist tell them? One of the best observers of the region has discovered no less than thirteen “ethnographic nuances,” and such a confusion and intermixture of tongues that even educated people had difficulty in deciding what language they spoke. He found here Croaticized Slovenes, and Slovenized Croats; Croaticized Rumenes, Italianized Croats, and Croaticized Italians; finally a population of whom all that could be said was that their costume was Italian, their manners Slav, and their language a mixture of everything. Under such circumstances one cannot place great reliance on the census.

Perhaps it is more significant that just before the War, out of seventeen deputies elected from these three provinces to the Reichsrat, ten were Italians, and only seven Yugo-Slavs. In the provincial diets the Italians outnumbered the Slavs two to one. Seventy per cent of the communes are said to have had Italian administrations. Italian was indubitably the chief language of business, of administration, of the cities, and of the educated classes pretty generally, the one language that everybody knew and without which it was impossible to get along.

Under these circumstances, it has, in the first place, been settled that Trieste belongs to Italy. Of the Italian character and sentiment of that city throughout its history, there can be no doubt. If the Yugo-Slavs for a time laid claim to it, that was because the rural districts around it are Slovene and because Trieste is the natural port for the Slovene provinces in the interior. Nevertheless, it would appear that the Yugo-Slavs would have been wiser never to raise a claim so obviously doomed to defeat.

It appears probable that the whole of Gorizia and Istria will also go to Italy. This is, of course, a more questionable decision; but, in view of the geographic facts in the case, the solidly Italian population in the coastal districts, the preponderant position of the Italian language and civilization everywhere, and the apparent preponderance of Italian political sentiment as measured by the elections, this would seem to be a not unfair solution.

Much more serious are the problems presented by the remaining two territories: Dalmatia and Fiume.

As to Dalmatia the Yugo-Slav claim can be stated very simply. That province had in 1910 a population of 635,000, of whom 611,000 (96%) were Yugo-Slavs and only 18,000 (3%) Italians. Even if one admits some inaccuracy in these figures, the most extreme Italian claims do not rise above 60,000 (10% of the total population). All the deputies sent from Dalmatia to the Reichsrat for many years back have been Yugo-Slavs, and the latter control every commune in the province, save only the capital Zara. The Yugo-Slav predominance is so overwhelming that, at first glance, it is not easy to understand how the Italians can have any serious claim at all.

The Italians rest their case, in the first place, upon history. They point to the wellnigh eighteen hundred years of Latin rule in Dalmatia: the Roman period, the age of the independent Latin-Dalmatian communes, the long sway of Venice, inaugurated by the famous expedition of 998, in honor of which the Doge ever afterwards bore the title Dux Dalmatiae, and to commemorate which there was instituted the famous annual ceremony of the ‘wedding of the sea’ by Venice.

The Italians do not deny that the great majority of the Dalmatian population has for centuries been of Slavic speech. But they assert that in almost every other respect this population is Italian: in its customs, costumes, games, in its artistic, literary, and musical tastes—even in its cuisine. The whole civilization of the province is Italian. Even as regards language, there is no real barrier: the Slavs are, most of them, bilingual, and even their own dialect is studded with Italianisms.

Thirdly, while admitting that the harmony which long reigned between the two races has, since 1866, given way to bitter enmity, the Italians declare that this was mainly the work of the Austrian government. Now that that influence is removed, and if the church, the school, and the gendarme are no longer used to stir up anti-Italian feeling, many Italians seem to believe that the Dalmatian Slavs could be won back to the old friendly relations and to peaceful acceptance of Italian rule. In any case, can Italy abandon those communities which remained faithful to her even during the period of Austrian persecution—that is, the capital, Zara, and some of the islands?

To understand Italian feelings on this subject, one must recall the long, agonizing, and—in the main—losing fight of the last forty years to save the Italian character of the Dalmatian cities. The struggle turned about control of the municipal councils, for it was they that decided what was to be the official language of the schools and the public services and which nationality was to set the tone and get all the favors in the community. The Austrians seem to have employed every form of corruption, fraud, and violence to sweep the Italians out of the municipalities. It is said that at the elections in Spalato in 1883 all the officials were ordered to vote Croat; the clergy also; a cruiser was sent to overawe the city; the election officials and the soldiery completed the intimidation of the voters; and it was thus that Spalato was lost to the Italians. One after another the other cities succumbed. Cattaro and Ragusa holding out bravely until 1900; and then only one Italian stronghold was left. That is why people in Rome speak of it as ‘Zara Italianissima’—any city that could defend itself so long must have a superlative character about its patriotism; and this is why the Italians have been so anxious to save at least that last bulwark of Latin Dalmatia.

Fourthly, the Italian argument dwells upon the geographic character of the province—shut off from Yugo-Slavia by rough and savage mountains, united to Italy by the sea over which practically all its external communications are carried on. Ratzel declared that Dalmatia lived like an island, and Freeman compared it to a branch cast forth from Italy across the Adriatic.

Finally, the Italians invoke strategic reasons for demanding at least a part of Dalmatia. The Adriatic Sea forms a narrow couloir, about 400 miles in length but in places scarcely 100 miles across. The western coast of that sea, the Italian side, is almost destitute of harbors that could serve as defensive naval bases; while on the eastern side the Dalmatian coast, with its many fine ports, its protecting chains of islands, its labyrinth of back channels and concealed inner basins, offers the most marvellous basis for naval operations. Obviously, the Italian fleet, with its bases at Venice and Pola at one end of the Adriatic and Brindisi at the other, would be at a grave disadvantage as against a naval power planted midway in the couloir in the impregnable strongholds of Dalmatia. And if it is said that Yugo-Slavia is never likely to have such a fleet as would be a serious menace, the Italians reply that even a small fleet of cruisers, lurking in the recesses of the Dalmatian coast, could be a scourge to Italian commerce and to the unprotected coast of Italy only three hours distant; and for submarine bases Dalmatia offers unrivalled advantages, as the World War has shown. Hence, it is argued, Dalmatia is necessary to Italy’s security. Without it, her long and vulnerable flank will remain undefended and indefensible.

I have tried to set forth the Italian side of the Dalmatian question at some length, because it is far less simple and obvious than the Yugo-Slav standpoint. Nevertheless, I am inclined to think that the latter case is the stronger. In view of the overwhelming Yugo-Slav majority and the attitude which, from whatever cause, the Dalmatian Slavs have come to adopt towards the Italians, the assignment of any considerable part of the province to Italy would, I believe, be a grave violation of the principles of the Allies, and a source of endless embarrassments for Italy.

After a year of discussions the Italian government has come to the point where, if it can obtain a satisfactory settlement as to Fiume, it seems willing to drop its claims to Dalmatia, except for a couple of points. For strategical purposes it still demands the island of Lissa, which Mazzini called “the Malta of the Adriatic”—a claim that seems not unreasonable; and it is also apparently asking that Zara should be constituted a free city—which might be of questionable advantage for Zara.

The main contest, then, is over Fiume.

Fiume is a rather small place in proportion to the commotion it has excited in the world—a city of about 50,000 people. Who founded it or when, we do not exactly know. It appears in the later Middle Ages as a small self-governing commune of the Italian type, which in 1465 passed under the suzerainty of the Hapsburgs, and was by them treated as a part of their hereditary Austrian lands until in 1776-79 Maria Theresia, wishing to endow the Magyars with a port of their own, transferred the city to the kingdom of Hungary. Amid all these changes, the ‘Magnificent Community’ of Fiume kept up its self-government and a very strong spirit of local independence. Indeed, down to a few years ago, at least, the only patriotism that the Fiumani knew was an intense love for their own little city. This spirit helped to preserve them from ever falling under the rule of Venice or any other Italian state; and, equally, it led them to fight strenuously at various times against the incorporation of their city in the kingdom of Croatia, which the Diet of Agram was always trying to put through. On the other hand, they long accepted with enthusiasm the union with Hungary, which did not seem to threaten their independence and which brought great economic advantages to their city as the single port of the Magyar kingdom.

As far back as we can trace it, the population of Fiume seems always to have been a mixed one—in part Croatian, in part Italian. It could hardly be otherwise with a city whose hinterland was solidly Croatian, but whose commercial relations were mainly with Italy. Hence it appears that the lower classes of the population were always chiefly Croats, constantly replenished from the country districts, while the upper classes were partly of the one race, partly of the other. But Italian was the language of society, of business, and of government, and to it the citizens were much attached. During the struggles of the period between 1848 and 1867, when annexation to Croatia was always staring them in the face, the municipal authorities again and again petitioned the Emperor not to permit the violation of “the sacred rights of the Italian language,” “the tongue that has been spoken here ever since Fiume existed.” “It would be superfluous,” they declare, “to demonstrate what is universally known, that in Fiume the Italian idiom has for centuries been the language of the school, of the forum, of commerce, of every public and private meeting; in short, it is the language of the community, and one of the chief sources to which it owes its grade of culture and of commercial and industrial progress.”

Two races living together in harmony, untouched by any national feeling, swayed only by love of their city-state, devotion to its time-honored customs, including the use of the Italian language, and zeal for the connection with Hungary, on which their economic prosperity depended—these conditions began to break down after 1867. The great development of the port carried out by the Hungarian government brought in a flood of new citizens—mainly Italians, since the Magyars favored that element. It was at this time that the Italians seem to have gained the numerical preponderance in the city. Then, in the last few decades, the importation of Magyars set in, at such a rate that the Italian ruling class in alarm concluded that the government at Budapest was bent on Magyarizing the city and that their connection with Hungary was not so comfortable after all. Hence there arose a new Italo-Magyar conflict to complicate the struggle that had already broken out between the Italians and the Yugo-Slavs. Now at last the Italian-speaking population began to turn their eyes across the Adriatic for liberators, and the Croat-speaking citizens began to sigh for the Yugo-Slav fatherland.

In the Fiume problem, as it presents itself today, the respective rôles of the Italians and the Yugo-Slavs are just the opposite of what they are in Dalmatia. In the case of Fiume, the Italian argument rests solely on the rights of nationality and the alleged wishes of the population.

The Italians point out, in the first place, that at the last Hungarian census (in 1910) the city contained about 24,000 Italians (not counting 6000 subjects of the kingdom of Italy), as against 16,000 Yugo-Slavs. To this the Yugo-Slavs retort that the Italian majority has been built up in the last few decades through the deliberate policy of the Magyar government; and that if the suburb of Sušak, which is practically part of the city, and the adjacent rural district were reckoned into the account, the Fiume territory would contain as many Yugo-Slavs as Italians.

Secondly, the Italians lay great weight upon the declarations of the National Council of Fiume and upon a plebiscite held in the city soon after the Armistice, as voicing the desire of the Fiumani to be united to Italy. The Yugo-Slavs deny that either of these things can be taken as a free and genuine expression of the wishes of the inhabitants.

At any rate, the Yugo-Slavs rest their argument mainly on other grounds. They maintain that Fiume is as naturally soldered on to their new state as Marseilles is to France; that this is the only satisfactory port on the Adriatic that that state can obtain; that its control by Italy would mean an intolerable subjection of Yugo-Slavia to her neighbor; and that it is inconceivable that their one good port should be taken away from them simply because within the walls of the city itself, not counting in the suburbs on which it vitally depends, Magyar machinations have built up an artificial plurality of barely 8000 Italians.

The Italians, of course, assert that farther south the Adriatic coast is full of good harbors, which could amply provide for the rather scanty trade of Yugo-Slavia. But it must be admitted that the mountain wall, which lines the coast from Fiume southward to the Drin, opposes very great obstacles to the opening up of a satisfactory outlet through the Dalmatian ports. At present there is, south of Fiume, only a single railway through to the coast—the wretched, winding rack-and-pinion road which comes down from Bosnia to Metković and Ragusa. It would be extremely difficult and expensive to develop and operate this line as a first-class railroad, and to link it up with the various parts of the Yugo-Slav state. Undoubtedly Fiume is the natural gate of Yugo-Slavia to the West; it is the only port that is well equipped today and that could easily adapt itself to the existing lines of communication. Even granted that another outlet could be developed farther south, it would require many years’ time and the expenditure of millions of dollars to bring this about.

It was, I think, because of the undeniable weight of such considerations, and in order that the new, poor, struggling state of the Yugo-Slavs should not be terribly handicapped at the outset by being denied that secure access to the sea for which Serbia had fought so long, that the American delegation at Paris took the stand it did on the Fiume question.

After going through many phases and fluctuations, this question appears to be at least appreciably nearer to a solution. The margin of difference between the two sides has now been reduced to a few points. If Italy gives way altogether on Dalmatia, it would seem only fair that the Yugo-Slavs should make some concessions as to Fiume, providing their economic interests can be reasonably insured. And it cannot be too strongly desired that if a compromise can be effected, the Yugo-Slavs recognizing their great debt to Italy, and the Italians recognizing the right to unity and independence of Yugo-Slavia, the two nations should go back to that attitude of mutual respect, coöperation, and fraternity which was the ideal of the noblest and most far-sighted Italian statesman of the nineteenth century, the great Mazzini.

Bibliographical Note

Probably the best history of Hungary available in any Western language is that by E. Sayous: Histoire générale des Hongrois, Budapest, 1900.

Conditions in Hungary before the War are described from the Magyar point of view in: Percy Alden (ed.), Hungary of Today. By members of the Hungarian Government. (Apponyi, Kossuth, Wekerle, etc.) London, 1909. C. M. Knatchbull-Hugessen, The Political Evolution of the Hungarian Nation. 2 vols. London, 1908.

The author who has done more than any other one man, perhaps, to expose the tyranny of the old Magyar regime to the Western public, is R. W. Seton-Watson, who at first wrote under the pseudonym of ‘Scotus Viator.’ His chief books on this subject are: Racial Problems in Hungary, London, 1908; Corruption and Reform in Hungary: a study of electoral practice, ibid., 1911; The Southern Slav Question and the Habsburg Monarchy, ibid., 1911.

The Roumanian problem in Hungary naturally forms a chief topic in another recent work by Mr. Seton-Watson: Roumania and the Great War, London, 1915. Other noteworthy expositions of Roumania’s claims to what was eastern Hungary are to be found in: M. R. Sirianu, La Question de Transylvanie et l’unité politique roumaine. Paris, 1916. D. Draghicesco, Les problèmes nationaux de l’Autriche-Hongrie. Les Roumains. Paris, 1918. N. P. Comnène, Roumania through the Ages. An historical, political, and ethnographical atlas. Paris, 1919.

A rather copious literature has grown up lately around the Yugo-Slav movement. Among the most useful works on that subject are: A. H. E. Taylor, The Future of the Southern Slavs. New York, 1917. V. R. Savić, South-Eastern Europe. New York, 1918. E. Denis, La grande Serbie. Paris, 1915. R. J. Kerner, The Jugo-Slav Movement. Cambridge, Mass., 1918.

For Italian views on the group of questions relating to the Adriatic provinces, one would turn especially to: V. Gayda, L’Italia d’oltre confini. Turin, 1914. A. Tamaro, Italiani e Slavi nell’Adriatico. Rome, 1915. ***, L’Adriatico. Studio geografico, storico, e politico. Milan, 1915. Adriacus. From Trieste to Valona. The Adriatic Problem and Italy’s Aspirations. Milan, 1919. G. Dainelli, La Dalmazia, sua italianità, suo valore per la libertà d’Italia nell’Adriatico. Genoa, 1915. Dainelli has also published a useful atlas of Dalmatia, entitled La Dalmazia. Cenni geografici e statistici. Novara, 1918. A. Hodnig, Fiume italiana e la sua funzione antigermanica. Rome, 1917. G. Depoli, Fiume e la Liburnia. Bari, 1919.

On the Fiume question it is also useful to consult V. Tomsich, Notizie storiche sulla città di Fiume, Fiume, 1886 (the fullest history of the city. Written in a vein of intense local patriotism, in the spirit of the old Fiumano independence party); Sišić, Abrégé de l’histoire politique de Rieka-Fiume, Paris, 1919 (review of the history from the Croatian point of view); and the brochure Fiume, arguing for Yugo-Slav claims, published at Paris in 1916 by Count Voinovitch and others.

Frontier promised to Italy by the Treaty of London (1915)

FOOTNOTES:

[57] While these pages were going through the press, the peace treaty with Hungary was signed on June 4 at the palace of the Grand Trianon at Versailles.

[58] H. Wickham Steed, Edinburgh Review, vol. 222, p. 234.

VIII
THE BALKANS

It was in the Balkans that the World War started; control of the Balkans was one of the primary objects for which the Central Powers fought; through the intervention of our Balkan opponents, Turkey and Bulgaria, the War was prolonged far beyond what would probably otherwise have been the case; and it was in the Balkans that the victory of the Entente was earliest and, perhaps, most decisively won.

Nevertheless, the War has produced, or is likely to produce, fewer and much less sweeping changes of territory in the Balkans than in the case of Austria-Hungary or Germany. It will probably alter the map of the Peninsula less than did almost any other of the Balkan cataclysms of the last hundred years. That is partly because one of our late enemies, the Sick Man on the Bosporus, had already handed over so much of his estate to his impatient heirs that in Europe at least very little remains to be liquidated; while our other enemy at Sofia possessed very little land that was not Bulgarian in population, and it was not the policy of the Allies to take away territory simply by way of retribution. But the main reason why no very large alterations of frontiers are now in process, is that the most contentious territorial questions of the Peninsula were settled by the two Balkan wars of 1912-13 and the ensuing Peace of Bucharest. Whether they were rightly settled at that time is a topic to which I may revert a little later. At any rate, they were settled in a sense favorable to our allies, Greece, Serbia, and Roumania. And the most salient feature of the Balkan settlement made by the Conference at Paris is that it essentially confirms the settlement made by the Peace of Bucharest.

Bulgaria escapes with far slighter losses than any other member of the defeated alliance. Nevertheless, she is quite as indignant as any of the rest of them over the peace treaty imposed upon her (the treaty signed at Neuilly, November 27, 1919). But she is indignant, not so much over what she has lost, as over what she has failed to gain. There is, of course, not a little irony in the fact that at the close of a war which she entered so perfidiously, conducted so brutally, and ended so disastrously, Bulgaria should still be clamoring that to the vanquished belong the spoils, and should be demanding that the Entente hand over to her, at the expense of its Greek and Serbian allies, the lands which she hoped to gain by fighting throughout the War on the side of the Germans. But there is another way of looking at the matter. Bulgaria and her many friends abroad regard the Peace of Bucharest as a monstrous iniquity—the dismemberment of the Bulgarian nation at the hands of its rapacious neighbors. Therefore, it is argued, at a time when the victorious Allies are remaking the map of Europe on the basis of the principle of nationality and of impartial even-handed justice, it is only right that ‘the crime of 1913’ should be undone, and that Bulgaria should be allowed to attain her national unity, as Greece, Serbia, and Roumania are doing in such rich measure. And unless that is done, it is said, there can be no stable peace in the Balkans.

Since the discussion of the new settlement thus turns largely on the merits of the Peace of Bucharest, it is necessary to revert briefly to the main facts connected with that treaty.

In the First Balkan War (1912-13), the four small allies—Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, and Montenegro—had brought the Turkish giant to earth with an ease and rapidity that astonished the world, and themselves, perhaps, most of all. By the peace treaty signed at London May 30, 1913, all of the Turkish possessions in Europe were ceded to the victors, except for the district along the Straits, bounded by the famous Enos-Midia line, which was to be left to the Sultan, and Albania, which was to be made independent—the one case in history of a people that owes its liberty to Austria-Hungary. As everyone remembers, there then arose a dispute among the victors as to the distribution of the spoils. While negotiations were still going on and the other states were willing to accept the proffered arbitration of Russia, Bulgaria, carried away by a truly Prussian arrogance and recklessness, attempted to seize what she wanted by suddenly and treacherously attacking her late allies. This precipitated the Second Balkan War, in which the despised Greeks and Serbs were completely victorious, while Roumania and Turkey also intervened to complete Bulgaria’s discomfiture. The upshot was the Peace of Bucharest, of August 10, 1913.

By that famous treaty, Macedonia, the chief object of the dispute, was divided up between Serbia and Greece, the former taking the northern and central parts, the latter the southern and southeastern. Bulgaria received only a small fragment of Macedonia—the Strumica salient—together with some territory in Western Thrace, which gave her a narrow frontage on the Aegean and the two mediocre harbors of Porto Lago and Dedeagach. Eastern Thrace, including Adrianople, was restored to Turkey. Finally, Bulgaria had to cede to Roumania the territory called the Southern Dobrudja.

The net result was, in the first place, a great shift in the Balkan balance of power in favor of Greece and Serbia, both of which had formerly been far smaller and weaker than Bulgaria, but both of which, after nearly doubling their territories, had now virtually caught up with their neighbor; and, secondly, that Bulgaria came forth from the crisis mortally exasperated over the loss of her old territory in the Dobrudja and of the new territories she had hoped to gain in Thrace and Macedonia. It is, above all, the Macedonian question that has rankled in her mind ever since. For many decades Macedonia has been the Promised Land to the Bulgars: it has undoubtedly meant for them at least as much as Alsace and Lorraine to the French. Once they had had it in their grasp, in 1878 when Russia won it for them by the treaty of San Stefano—and then the Congress of Berlin restored it to Turkey. Again in 1912 they believed that they had secured it—and it was taken away from them by their allies. A third time they had it, during the present War,—and the Peace Conference has restored it to Greece and Serbia, in accordance with the Peace of Bucharest.

What are the rights and wrongs in the case? Has the Peace Conference simply perpetuated a great injustice, repeated the mistake of the Congress of Berlin, deprived the Bulgarians of a province which is theirs by right of nationality and without which they can never rest?

The Macedonian question has been before the world a sufficiently long time to have thoroughly wearied most people of it, perhaps, but not long enough to produce a clear understanding or any real unanimity of opinion about it. It presents, on the one hand, such a medley of jarring races, long-standing animosities, and ever-recurring atrocities, and, on the other hand, such a jumble of ethnographic riddles, philological controversies, psychological uncertainties, unreliable statistics, assertions and counter-assertions flatly contradictory on every point, that one almost despairs of an idea as to how it ought to be settled, or of the hope of ever seeing it settled at all.

Macedonia contained in 1910—nobody knows what it contains now, after the last three wars—over two million people, including about 1,300,000 Slavs, 300,000 Greeks, and scattered minorities of Turks, Albanians, Vlachs, Jews, and Gypsies. The Greeks predominate in the south and southeast, and can make out a very good claim on ethnographic grounds to most of that part of Macedonia which they acquired in 1913. The dispute turns much more upon central and northern Macedonia, where the Slavs predominate, and upon the question whether these Slavs ought to be considered as mainly Bulgarians or Serbs.

For the elucidation of this question, it is necessary to go very far afield. When the Southern Slavs first settled in the Balkans, they formed a great, undifferentiated mass, stretching from the Alps and the Adriatic to the Aegean and the Black Sea—a mass of ethnographic raw material out of which almost any number of ‘nations’ and ‘languages’ might have been developed in accordance with the accidents of history. As it turned out, two centres of political crystallization arose—a northeastern centre, in the region between the Balkan Mountains and the Danube, where a Turanian people called Bulgars organized the Slavs into a state to which they—the original Bulgars—contributed little except the name and the ruling class; and a northwestern centre of crystallization in Serbia and Montenegro. The modern Serb and the modern Bulgarian nations are closely akin in language and in blood, although the Bulgars have a certain Turanian strain in them, while the Serbs boast of being ‘pure Slavs.’ Sprung from substantially the same stock, the two nations have throughout their history vied with each other in trying to draw to themselves as large as possible a part of their kinsmen; and it is not surprising if the Macedonian Slavs, lying midway between the two centres of gravitation, have been attracted, now to the one and now to the other, without ever apparently taking on completely the imprint of either.

In the Middle Ages, when frontiers in the Balkans were, if possible, even more fluid than they have been in recent times, Macedonia was most frequently under the rule of the Greeks. It was, however, held by Bulgaria from about 860 to 1018 and again for some years in the thirteenth century; and from about 1260 down to the Turkish conquest in 1389 it belonged to the Serbian empire. From these rather brief periods of tenure both nations draw their claims to ‘historic rights’ over Macedonia today, and a fund of proud historic memories which lend warmth and passion to those claims. King Ferdinand of Bulgaria promoted himself to be ‘Tsar’ in imitation of the Bulgarian tsars of the Middle Ages who ruled over Macedonia. The Prince Regent of Serbia today addresses the Macedonians as “sons of Stephen Dushan,” in allusion to the great Serbian emperor of the fourteenth century whose capital was Üsküb in Macedonia. It seems undeniable that the period of Serbian rule made a much deeper impression on the country than did the Bulgarian. Not only is Macedonia strewn with churches, monasteries, and works of art recalling the great days of Serbia, while similar Bulgarian monuments are almost totally lacking; but the wonderfully rich ballad literature, through which alone the Macedonian Slavs express whatever historic memories they have, dwells exclusively upon the heroes of the Serbian past, with never the mention of a Bulgarian.

At any rate, the ensuing five hundred years of stagnation and isolation under Turkish rule afforded the Macedonians ample time to forget which of their kinsmen they preferred to be associated with, and to lose whatever national consciousness they had possessed. When the Serb and Bulgarian national revivals began in the early nineteenth century, Macedonia was more or less no-man’s-land; and either movement might sweep the field, provided it got started early enough. Fortune seemed for a while to be with the Bulgarians. For many years all of Russia’s powerful influence was cast in their favor, since Russia regarded the Serbs as Austria’s protégés. The Turks also thought it very clever to favor the Bulgarians, who seldom or never revolted, against the Serbs who never did anything else but rebel. Hence the Bulgarians got the start, and for some decades they could conduct religious, educational, and nationalist work in Macedonia, while Serb influences were in the main barred out. What particularly helped the process of Bulgarization was the formation in 1870 of the independent Bulgarian (or Exarchist) church, a body which could offer the Macedonian Slavs the things which they seem to have craved above all others at that time: emancipation from the Greek clergy, and the church service in a tongue which they could understand. Hence a general stampede to the Exarchist church, restrained only by the calculation that it was materially more expensive to get christened, married, or buried by that businesslike body than by the old Patriarchist or Greek church. Once inside the Exarchist fold, you were regarded by the authorities as a Bulgarian and taught by your religious superiors that you must feel yourself one.

After the formation of the new Bulgarian state in 1878, the Bulgarian nationalist propaganda in Macedonia went forward with redoubled vigor. It was carried on from Sofia and from the seat of the Exarchate at Constantinople with all the means and by all the devices that the government and the church could bring to bear. Meanwhile the Turks, somewhat disillusioned as to the harmlessness of their Bulgarian protégés and always experts at the art of playing the Christians off against each other, determined to open the door to rival influences. Hence in the late ’80s and the ’90s the Serbs could at last rush in and strive to make up for lost time by organizing a rival propaganda, with all the paraphernalia of Serbian bishops, churches, schools, etc. As the Greeks were also busily engaged in the same kind of work, the Macedonian question then entered that acute phase which so delighted the Turks and wore out the nerves of Europe—that desperate and sanguinary mêlée, in which the three rival races strove to spread their ‘national culture,’ not only by furiously proselytizing the unfortunate Macedonians, but by exterminating each other. It must be admitted that in both forms of activity the Bulgarians came out ahead. Not only did their komitadjis dominate the blood-stained field, but they had a network of schools and churches quite surpassing either of their rivals. Refugees from Macedonia also seem to have fled to Bulgaria in larger numbers than to Serbia or Greece; and indeed they formed a very active and influential element at Sofia, which did not permit the Bulgarian government to forget the Macedonian question for a moment.

On the eve of the Balkan Wars, the situation might be summarized by saying that a section of the Macedonian Slavs had more or less warmly adopted the Bulgarian cause, and another, probably smaller, section, the Serbian cause, and—it seems to me—the great mass of this population was still lying inert and undecided, untouched by any schools, chiefly concerned about peace and its daily bread, prepared to go with either party that should prove the stronger. So much for the sentiments of the population.

Both sides have also appealed to other arguments to prove that all Slavic Macedonia ought to belong to them. Endless controversy has raged over the question whether its people speak Bulgarian or Serbian. It has been triumphantly demonstrated, on the one hand, that the Macedonians are Bulgars because they use a definite article and do not inflect their nouns; but it has also been conclusively shown that they are Serbs by all the laws of morphology and phonetics. In fact, the best philological judgment seems to be that these people speak a series of dialects intermediate between Bulgarian and Serbian, gradually shading off from one into the other; and that they can without much difficulty understand either language.

Equally inconclusive are the arguments based on popular customs. Although it has been attempted, one will never solve the Macedonian question by proving that marriage, burial, and saint’s day customs in this region are strikingly Serbian, or that the female costumes and the embroidery worn by the ladies are unmistakably Bulgarian. In customs as in language, this is simply a transitional area with affinities with both its neighbors.

It is therefore a rather tragic thing that for a generation or two the public in Bulgaria has been trained to think that Macedonia is a fundamentally Bulgarian country pining for liberation. The feeling on that subject has been all the more intense because this was almost the only region that could be considered as unredeemed Bulgaria. Bulgarian patriotism could concentrate and specialize on Macedonia. Serbian feeling about the country was formerly not quite so strong, perhaps, since Serbia had so many other unredeemed kinsmen to ponder over—in Bosnia first and foremost. At any rate, since the events of the last seven years, after they have fought three wars for the possession of Macedonia, the Serbs now entertain feelings about that country that are not a bit less ardent and intransigent than those of the Bulgarians.

Those three wars—or the last two at least—can hardly be left out of the account. If before 1913 the Macedonian problem might be considered an open question, with the balance of rights inclining somewhat in favor of the Bulgarians, it would seem that today Serbia has acquired, by blood and suffering, titles that can scarcely be denied. After Bulgaria’s two perfidious attacks—the first one in 1913 so indefensible that prominent Bulgarians have since called it “an act of insane folly,” “a fratricidal crime,” and the second one in 1915 hardly less dastardly, for it was a blow in the back when Serbia was fighting for her life against the Austro-German onslaught—; after Bulgaria has conducted her wars with a savagery worthy of her allies and joined in what seems little less than a deliberate effort to exterminate the Serbian nation; after Bulgaria, in her moments of apparent triumph, has loudly announced the intention to appropriate not only Macedonia but half of the older Serbia as well; and after Serbia’s so desperate and gallant struggle and final brilliant victory—it may be all very well for the beaten Bulgar to present himself, with Wilsonian phrases to replace his old Prussian ones, and say, “Let’s have peace and make up, and you give me all we’ve been fighting for”; but it would be more than human nature could expect, or than strict justice, I think, can demand, that Serbia or her Allies should grant his request.

It is another question, of course, whether this outcome will make for permanent peace in the Balkans. Much will depend on the degree of generosity and tact that the Serbs may show in dealing with those Macedonians who have come to feel themselves Bulgars, and with the probably larger mass who as yet have no definite national consciousness of any kind. There is reasonable ground for hope, I think, that, if peace continues for a generation or so, the majority of the Macedonians can be won over by quite legitimate means to Serbian nationality.

Rather different, perhaps, is the case of another territory lost by Bulgaria at the treaty of Bucharest, and which she has again failed to recover—the Southern Dobrudja. Apart from the one city of Silistria (with 14,000 people), this small territory would seem to be of little value to anybody. It contains, however, over 100,000 Bulgarians as against only 6000 Roumanians; moreover, it is of strategic importance. Roumania’s motive for demanding it in 1913 was to protect the railway leading to her chief port, Constanza, a line which was at one point only about twenty miles from the old Bulgarian frontier. But through the cession then made, the danger was merely shifted to the other side. It is now Bulgaria’s chief Black Sea port, Varna, and the railway serving it that are menaced, for the Roumanian frontier comes within about ten miles of them. Hence the American delegation at Paris endeavored to have the frontier of 1913 corrected so that neither side would be in danger. But Roumania displayed a certain obstinacy, and the Conference, not wishing to complicate much more serious questions then pending between it and Roumania, shelved the Dobrudja matter, intimating, however, that it might be taken up later in connection with the problem of Bessarabia.

Not only has Bulgaria failed to regain her losses of 1913, but the new Peace Treaty deprives her of some bits of territory that have hitherto belonged to her. Serbia has secured some small rectifications of the frontier established in 1913, all of them for strategic reasons. One of them, in the valley of the River Strumica, was very genuinely needed, for at that point the old frontier came within about six miles of the Belgrade-Salonica railway, and what this means is shown by the fact that in the first year of the Great War, before Bulgaria officially entered the contest, this all-important railroad was almost cut by a raid of Bulgarian komitadjis. The other chief rectification, in the Pirot-Tsaribrod basin, seems more questionable, and has the disadvantage of bringing the frontier even nearer to Sofia than has been the case since 1878.

A more considerable loss to Bulgaria, though not necessarily a definitive one, is that of the territory in Western Thrace which she acquired in 1913. To this question I shall come back in a moment in connection with the whole problem of Thrace. As a preliminary to that, however, it seems necessary to say a word as to the general situation and claims of Greece.

While the Balkan settlement now being effected at Paris is in the main a confirmation of that of 1913, some new departures have been made or are in prospect; and these relate almost wholly to the problem of Greek irredentism. For if Roumanian or Serbian national unity could be attained chiefly by the acquisition of former Austrian and Hungarian territories, the question of Greek national unity involves primarily further changes of territory in the Balkans.

It has been estimated by Mr. Venizelos that the Hellenic nation today comprises over eight million people, of whom only 55% live in the kingdom of Greece. Of the rest about one million are widely dispersed all over the world; nearly two millions reside in Asia Minor and Cyprus—lands outside the scope of this survey; there are 100,000 in the Dodecanesus, those Aegean islands which Italy certainly should, and probably will, transfer to Greece. There remain, as unredeemed Greek populations in the Balkans, about 731,000 people in Thrace and at Constantinople, and about 151,000 in Northern Epirus and Southern Albania. All told, Greece hopes to liberate about two millions of her kinsmen as a result of the War, and to bring it about that at least 75% of the race, that portion which is gathered in the lands about the Aegean, should live united in the Hellenic kingdom.

On the northwest Greece lays claims to that territory which she calls Northern Epirus and which her opponents call Southern Albania: a territory which she fought for in 1912-13, but which the Powers at that time, under Austro-Italian influence, awarded to Albania. This district contains two important towns, Koritza and Argyrocastro, and a total population of about 120,000 Orthodox Christians and 80-100,000 Mohammedans. It seems to be fairly well agreed that the Mohammedans are and feel themselves to be Albanians, and that most of the Christians also speak Albanian in their homes as their mother tongue. The Greeks claim however, that these Christian Epirotes read and write only Greek and are really bilingual; that by their religion, culture, historic traditions, and their ardent Hellenic patriotism today, they are essentially Greeks, and belong to Greece by the same right as Alsace and Lorraine to France. All of this the Albanian spokesmen, of course, strenuously deny. They maintain that this is a thoroughly and devotedly Albanian population, whose separation from the rest of the Shkypetars would be among the most glaring of the many mutilations that this much-tried nation has had to endure.

Nothing is more difficult than to ascertain the sentiments of a population among whom such a thing as a genuinely free election has never been known, propaganda and terrorism are the most common things in the world, and the rifle has hitherto been the principal means of settling questions. Albanian nationalism is so new and Albanian education so much a novelty of yesterday that perhaps the Albanians have never had a fair chance. At any rate, the balance of evidence so far seems to favor the Greeks. Almost all the schools in the contested area are Greek; the predominance of the pro-Greek element in the intellectual and economic life of the country can scarcely be disputed; the manifestations of Greek sentiment, especially at Koritza, have been impressive; and most impressive of all, perhaps, was the uprising of the Northern Epirotes in 1913, when Europe tried to place them under Albanian rule and then found itself unable to make them submit to it. At all events, the Paris Conference did not arrive at an agreement about this question. While the British and French advocated transferring all of Northern Epirus to Greece, the Italians stood out for leaving it to Albania, and the Americans advocated a compromise solution, which would have ceded the southern, Argyrocastro district to Greece, while leaving to Albania the northern district of Koritza, which some people have called the intellectual centre of Albanian nationalism.

Albania is menaced with some other losses. There has been talk of forming her northern territories into a separate autonomous province under the protection of Yugo-Slavia. Something might be said for this project from the economic standpoint, since, through the control of the Drin valley and the ports at its mouth, Serbia would obtain the only relatively easy outlet to the sea south of Fiume. The Drin valley has usually been taken as the western starting-point in plans for an Adriatic-Transbalkan railway. But from every other standpoint, the project in question seems objectionable in the extreme. Whatever may be the case in Epirus, no one can claim that the North Albanians are devotees of Serbian culture or have any feelings towards the Serbs save ancient and bitter hostility. One could hardly think of a more successful device for creating a permanent storm centre in the Balkans.

A more certain territorial loss to Albania is that of the port of Avlona, which Italy occupied in 1914, and which she assuredly will be allowed to keep. After all, her possession of it is no more unnatural than England’s position at Gibraltar or our own at Panama. Furthermore, it is probable that Italy will receive some kind of mandate from the Allies or from the League of Nations to supervise Albania. It is pretty generally admitted, even by the Albanians themselves, that this nascent and terribly backward state needs a protector; and since our government has been unable to assume that rôle, as the Albanians would have preferred to see us do, both we and they can scarcely object to Italy’s undertaking it.

To return to the subject of Greek claims—the main object of Mr. Venizelos’ diplomacy at Paris was the question of Thrace. This was a double-barrelled problem, for it referred both to the territory which fell to Bulgaria in 1913, which we call Western Thrace, and to Eastern Thrace, which means all that is left of Turkey in Europe except Constantinople.

Here again we are in a region of statistical chaos and ethnographic nightmares. The racial problems of Thrace are as bad as those of Macedonia—worse in fact, since they are so new and unfamiliar. We know in a general way that throughout both the Thraces Turks, Greeks, and to a less extent Bulgarians are scattered about with a promiscuity that almost defies analysis or conclusions. The racial statistics available—the Turkish census of 1910, the Greek Patriarch’s statistical estimates of 1912, and the Bulgarian census in Western Thrace for 1914—make it a point never to agree on a single item. Religious factors add to the confusion. In Western Thrace there is a large population called the Pomaks: people who are probably Bulgarian in race and speech, but who are Moslems in religion and in their Weltanschauung. Ought they to be counted as sterling Bulgarian patriots, as people at Sofia maintain; or rather as Turks, as Constantinople and Athens consider them? Finally, after all the wars, migrations, and massacres of the last eight years, one may well doubt whether any of the three censuses mentioned could claim to represent the existing situation, even assuming that they were honestly made in the first place.

At all events, one point in this chaos is tolerably clear. In Eastern Thrace the Greeks have the best claim on the basis of nationality, if one takes as the criterion the situation before the Balkan Wars. Speaking very roughly, they may then have numbered about 400,000, as against some 250,000 Turks and only about 50,000 Bulgarians. Not only did the Greeks hold virtually the entire coast, even on the side of the Black Sea; but in the interior they formed the matrix of this strange agglomeration, in which the Turkish and Bulgarian enclaves were embedded.

In Western Thrace the question is more difficult. The answer to it depends on whose statistics one thinks least unreliable, and largely on whether one counts the Pomaks as Bulgars or Turks. The Pomaks are rather less known to us than the tribes of Central Africa; but if one may judge of their sentiments today by what little is known of their behavior in the past, one would hesitate to put them down as Bulgarians. At any rate, one is faced here by Mr. Venizelos’ estimates: a total population of about 400,000, made up of 285,000 Turks, 70,000 Greeks, and 59,000 Bulgarians; and, on the other side, the Bulgarian census purporting to show 210,000 Turks, 185,000 Bulgarians (including 70,000 Pomaks) and only 32,000 Greeks. In fact the latest Bulgarian estimates do not admit the existence of any Greeks at all here: which leaves one free to make any one of several unpleasant conjectures as to what the Bulgars have done with them. A slight Greek majority over the Bulgarians is claimed by the one side, then; and a large Bulgarian preponderance is claimed by the other.

The question also has an economic and a political aspect. If Bulgaria is deprived of Western Thrace, she will be shut off from the Aegean Sea, which certainly forms her shortest and most natural outlet to the Western world. It is true, as the Greeks point out, that Bulgaria has several ports on the Black Sea, and as the Straits are surely going to be placed under international control and freely opened to all nations, Bulgaria will not be cut off from external communications. Moreover, Greece is willing to offer her special commercial rights, to be defined by the Powers, in certain Greek ports on the Aegean. But this quite naturally does not satisfy the Bulgars. They maintain that if they were to be deprived of their one direct and secure access to the open sea, this would be a disaster and an affront from which their people would never recover.

This raises, of course, the political question. From the standpoint of nationality, it would seem only just to award Eastern Thrace to Greece, and perhaps at least the southern half of Western Thrace as well. The Greeks ardently desire this, both for the sake of liberating their kinsmen, and also, doubtless, in order to build a bridge towards Constantinople, the glittering prize of the future, which is always dangling before Greek eyes. But beyond this narrow isthmus of Hellenism along the north Aegean coast, there would always be the lowering Bulgarian giant, thirsting to recover what he considers to be the key to his house. Whatever be the rights and wrongs in the case, a very severe strain is being put upon Bulgaria’s self-control by the present settlement of the Macedonian question. If, in addition, Bulgaria were to be permanently stripped of the territory she already possesses on the Aegean, the resulting dangers to the peace of the Balkans would be obvious.

For some such reasons, and since the ethnographic situation in Western Thrace was so uncertain, the American representatives at Paris, as is well known, stood out against the attribution of this territory to Greece. Finally, a compromise was arranged by which, in the treaty of Neuilly, Bulgaria was made simply to cede the disputed territory to the Principal Allied and Associated Powers. What they will do with it remains, apparently, still unsettled. It may pass to Greece; it may ultimately be restored to Bulgaria; conceivably it may be joined to Eastern Thrace to form an internationally controlled autonomous state. In any case, this is likely to remain one of the danger-zones of Eastern Europe.

The fate of Eastern Thrace is still awaiting the conclusion of peace with Turkey and the settlement of the far greater problem—Constantinople. That most tantalizing of questions has gone through some astonishing phases since 1913. Seven years ago the Bulgar was thundering at the lines of Chatalja, and Tsar Ferdinand was said to be ordering the diadem with which he was to be crowned in St. Sophia. Five years ago the Russian solution was at last accepted by England and France, though those states for a century had seemed to believe that the establishment of the Muscovites on the Bosporus would mean the end of everything. Then after the collapse of Russia and of Turkey people talked only of sending the Turk “bag and baggage” back to Asia and of establishing a small international state on the straits, with the United States as mandatory. This project seems now to be beyond the range of possibilities. The next best plan would seem to be to install the Greeks, who from the standpoint of history and of population statistics have at least as good a right to be there as the Turks, and from the standpoint of their general utility in the world an infinitely better right. But the news dispatches of the last month foreshadow that the drama will end with an anti-climax. Since England and France are each unwilling to allow the other to control this coveted position, since both are rather sceptical of Greece’s present fitness for so responsible a rôle, and England moreover is disquieted by certain possible repercussions in India and elsewhere, it now seems to be agreed that the Sultan is to remain in Constantinople. Once more, the Turk is to make good his claim to having nine lives, and from the old cause—the rivalries of the Christians. There will doubtless be elaborate arrangements about neutralizing and internationalizing the straits, and the Sultan will issue whole batches of paper reforms; but I fear that many people will be inclined to echo the words of the late President Roosevelt, that (after the close of the War), “it would be a betrayal of civilization to leave the Turks in Europe.”

I do not wish, however, to end upon a note of pessimism. Whatever mistakes may have been made in connection with the territorial problems of Eastern Europe—and some mistakes were inevitable, in view of the tremendous multiplicity and complexity of the problems raised—the general outcome represents an immense gain for the cause of liberty and nationality. The dream which haunted Mazzini and so many other liberals of fifty years ago—the transformation of the four great despotisms of Eastern Europe—Austria, Prussia, Russia, and Turkey—into a world of free, self-determining national states—has now been in large part realized. The unification of Italy, delayed for half a century, is now virtually finished; and from the Baltic to the Aegean there has been built up a tier of national states, which may perhaps set a check upon any recrudescence of Pan-Germanism, and which some people have called ‘the new bulwark of liberty in the East.’ Of course, fears are expressed as to ‘the Balkanization of Eastern Europe.’ But if that charge implies a disintegration of the older units into a large number of small and permanently feeble states, the complaint is scarcely well founded. After all, in the area considered in these lectures, only two really new states have been created. In the main, the effort has been to round out older ones so as to make their political frontiers coincide with their ethnographic ones, to unite rather than to divide. As a result we have Poland, with about thirty million people; Czecho-Slovakia with twelve to thirteen millions; Roumania with fifteen millions; Yugo-Slavia with twelve to thirteen millions; Greece, which may attain six to seven millions;—results which scarcely fit in with the charge of Balkanization.

Whatever mistakes there may have been, whatever selfish interests have occasionally come unpleasantly to light, I think it may be justly affirmed that on no similar occasion in the past has so earnest and systematic an effort been made to settle territorial questions on the basis, not of the interests or the convenience of the Great Powers, but of the rights and aspirations of the peoples directly concerned; that the Peace Conference at Paris has liberated and unified more nations than any previous European congress, or all the congresses of the last century taken together; and that the principle of nationality has never before won so sweeping and signal a victory.

Bibliographical Note

In view of the fact that most of the numerous ethnographic maps of the Balkan Peninsula are works of propaganda or else are copied from earlier works so that they often have no independent value, it is a not inessential precaution to consult the article by Haardt von Hartenturm, “Die Kartographie der Balkanhalbinsel im 19. Jht.,” in the Mitteilungen des k. k. Militär-geographischen Instituts, xxi, Vienna, 1901. The later maps are enumerated by Jovan Cvijić in his article, “Die ethnographische Abgrenzung der Völker auf der Balkanhalbinsel,” in Petermanns Mitteilungen, 1913 (i).

This latter article is accompanied by the author’s own ethnographic map of the Peninsula, which represents the conclusions of the most eminent and one of the most moderate of Serbian scholars. Professor Cvijić has published another map of the same character in the Geographical Review, May, 1918.

A large Bulgarian work obviously designed for propagandist purposes is the atlas of forty maps, accompanied by explanatory text, entitled The Bulgarians in their Historical, Ethnographical, and Political Frontiers, published at Berlin in 1917, in German, French, English, and Russian, by a group of scholars headed by D. Rizoff. (Cf. the critical observations on this work by Professor Beliċ, Les Cartes ethnographiques au service de la propagande bulgare. Paris, 1918.)

A similar historic and ethnographic atlas for Roumania has been referred to in the bibliography for Chapter VII.

The geography of the Peninsula is described by Jovan Cvijić, La Péninsule balkanique, géographie humaine, Paris, 1918; and Marion Newbigin, Geographical Aspects of Balkan Problems in their Relation to the Great European War, 2d impression, London, 1915.

From the mass of excellent historical works dealing with the Balkans, one would commend especially: N. Forbes, A. J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, and D. G. Hogarth: The Balkans, a History of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Rumania, Turkey, Oxford, 1915; J. A. R. Marriott, The Eastern Question, an Historical Study in European Diplomacy, Oxford, 1917; R. W. Seton-Watson, The Rise of Nationality in the Balkans, London, 1917; and (Baron) L. H. C. Courtney (editor), Nationalism and War in the Near East, by a Diplomatist. Oxford, 1916.

The aspirations, claims, and policy of Bulgaria have received their most moderate and candid presentation from “Historicus,” Bulgaria and her Neighbors, New York, 1917; and G. C. Logio, Bulgaria: Problems and Politics, New York, 1919.

There is a fairly detailed map showing the new frontiers of Bulgaria as fixed by the treaty of Neuilly in the Geographical Journal, February, 1920.

On the situation and claims of Greece, see Charles Vellay, L’Irrédentisme hellénique, Paris, 1913; and “Polybius,” Greece before the Conference, London, 1919.

The literature of the Macedonian question is enormous. Among pre-War works on the subject by impartial outsiders, one would name especially: Victor Bérard, La Turquie et l’hellénisme contemporain, Paris, 1896, and La Macédoine, Paris, 1897; H. N. Brailsford, Macedonia, its Races and their Future, London, 1906; and G. Amadori-Virgilj, La Questione rumeliota, vol. i, Bitonto, 1908 (also very useful on Albania and Epirus). The Bulgarian claims to Macedonia are set forth notably by “A. Ofeikov” (pseudonym for Šopov), La Macédoine au point de vue ethnographique, historique et philologique, Philippopolis, 1887; S. Radeff, La Macédoine et la renaissance bulgare au XIXᵉ siècle, Sofia, 1918; and V. Sís, Mazedonien, eine Studie über Geographie, Geschichte, Volkskunde ..., Zurich, 1918. The Serbian point of view is presented by T. R. Georgevitch, Macedonia, London, 1918; Jovan Cvijić, Questions balkaniques, Paris, 1916; and A. Belić, La Macédoine, études ethnographiques et politiques, Paris, 1919. For the Greek side of the case, see M. Paillares, L’Imbroglio macédonien, Paris, 1907; and S. P. Phocas-Cosmetatos, La Macédoine, son passé et son présent, Paris, 1919.

Regarding the Dobrudja question, the Roumanian claims are set forth by N. P. Comnène, La Dobrogea: essai historique, économique, ethnographique, et politique, Paris, 1918; and the Bulgarian standpoint is upheld by A. Ishirkov, Les Bulgares en Dobrudja; aperçu historique et ethnographique, Berne, 1919.

On the question of Northern Epirus (or Southern Albania) one may consult, for the Greek side, N. J. Cassavetes, The Question of Northern Epirus at the Peace Conference, Boston, 1919; and R. Puaux, The Sorrows of Epirus, London, 1918. The Albanian point of view in this and other questions is set forth by C. A. Chekrezi, Albania Past and Present, New York, 1919; C. A. Dako, Albania, the Master Key to the Near East, Boston, 1919; and in the Memorandum submitted by the Albanian Delegation to the Peace Conference (published by the Association for International Conciliation, American Branch, New York, 1919: no. 138 of their series).

Very little has yet been published on the question of Thrace. The most useful compendium of maps, statistics, and historical and ethnographic data about it is The Question of Thrace: Greeks, Bulgars, and Turks, by J. Saxon Mills and M. G. Chrussachi, London, 1919 (primarily based on Bulgarian data, used to refute Bulgarian claims).

On the problem of the Straits, the best treatment—both historical and analytical—is probably to be found in the recent volume by Coleman Philippson and Noel Buxton, The Question of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, London, 1917. A brief but excellent essay is A. C. Coolidge’s Claimants to Constantinople, Cambridge, Mass., 1917.

The London Times of May 12, 1920, contains a rather full account of the terms of the treaty of peace with Turkey, which have just been officially presented to the Ottoman government. These proposed terms have been given out too late to be considered in the text of the present volume.

MAP OF THE BALKANS

INDEX

Aabenraa, 42.

Adrianople, 266.

Adriatic question, the, 225, 244-262.

Adriatic Sea, the, 206, 225, 268.

Adriatic territories, 213, 244-262, 280f.

Adriatic-Transbalkan railway, proposed, 280.

Aegean Sea, the, 266, 268, 278, 283, 284, 287.

Africa, 9.

Agram, 248, 257.

Albania, 265, 278-281, 290.

Albanians, 268, 278-281.

Albert of Hohenzollern, first duke of Prussia (1525-68), 162.

Alexander Karageorgevich, prince regent of Serbia, 269f.

Alexandria, 182.

Alföld, plain of the, 231, 232.

Alpine racial type, the, 16, 86, 87, 119.

Alps, the, 20, 211, 222, 225, 244, 268.

Alsace, 12, 16, 76, 77, 78f., 87, 91, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 101, 117,119, 120, 123, 133.

See Alsace-Lorraine.

Alsace-Lorraine, 17, 29, 75-116, 132, 134, 136, 139, 150, 187, 267, 279.

American Geographical Society, the, 23.

Amsterdam, 63.

Anarchy, 5f., 204.

Antwerp, 54, 62, 63, 65.

Arc de Triomphe, the, 4.

Argyrocastro, 278, 280.

Armenia, 226.

Armenians, 166.

Arndt, E. M., 118.

Arva, 188, 213.

Asia, 9, 210, 285.

Asia Minor, 15, 17, 278.

Athens, 282.

Augustus Caesar, 201.

Aulard, F. A., 138.

‘Ausonian Republic,’ 247.

Austria, 3, 11, 33, 38, 39, 67, 91, 93, 94, 159, 171, 201-229, 244, 246, 250, 256, 270, 277, 287.

Austria-Hungary, 6, 14, 17, 188-191, 203-210, 248, 265.

Austrian Netherlands, the, 52.

Austrian Silesia, 158, 212, 216, 219.

Autonomy, 106, 207, 238, 280, 285.

Avlona, 281.

Baden, 12, 76, 121, 122, 123.

Bagdad, 242.

Baker, R. S., 34.

Balkans, the, 15, 17, 20, 238, 245, 263-290.

Balkan wars, the, of 1912-13, 263f., 265f., 267, 282, 285.

Ballad literature, of the Macedonian Slavs, 270.

Baltic provinces, the, 17.

Baltic Sea, the, 157, 159, 161, 162, 164, 167, 178, 179, 180, 181, 287.

Banat of Temesvár, the, 240.

Barker, J. E., quoted, 202.

Baruch, B. M., 24.

Basel, 122.

Basque region, the, 90.

Bas-Rhin, department of the, 114.

Bavaria, 79, 121, 124, 132, 144.

Belfort, 104, 105.

Belgian Congo, the, 71.

Belgium, 11, 48-73, 90, 93, 121, 122, 131.

Belgrade, 240, 248, 277.

Belleau Wood, 5.

Bellum omnium contra omnes, 205.

Benson, W. S., 25.

Berlin, 140, 145, 191, 192, 207;

congress of (1878), 9, 267.

Bernhoft, H. A., 42.

Bessarabia, 276.

Birkenfeld, principality of, 124.

Bismarck, Prince Otto, 38f., 101, 153, 154;

quoted, 100, 212.

Black Sea, the, 167, 238, 268, 276, 282, 283.

Blockade, problems of, 5.

Böcking, family, 137.

Böcking, H., 136, 151.

Bohemia, 18f., 93, 211, 212, 213-222, 223.

Bolsheviki, the, 169, 195f.

Bolshevism, 6, 237.

Bosnia, 242, 260.

Bosporus, the, 263, 285.

Botzen, 225.

Bowman, I., 23, 34.

Brandenburg, 79, 162.

Bremen, 182.

Brenner Pass, the, 225.

Brest, 7.

Brest-Litovsk, treaty of (1918), 191.

Breusch, the, 88.

Bridges and bridgeheads, Rhine, 128, 129, 130.

Briey, 13, 103, 104, 112.

Brindisi, 255.

British Isles, the, 11, 17.

Brittany, 90.

Britten, 147.

Brixen, 225.

Brockdorff-Rantzau, Count von, 120.

Bryce, Viscount, 6.

Bucharest, peace of (1913), 264, 266, 267, 275.

Budapest, 237, 242, 246, 258.

Bülow, Prince von, 187.

Buffer state, proposed, on the Rhine, 128f.

Bulgaria, 3, 11, 14, 208, 263-277, 281-285, 288ff.

Bulgarian church, the, 271f.

Bulgarians, 264-277, 280-285.

Bundesrat, the German, 81.

‘Burgundian gate,’ the, 105.

Burgundy, 51.

Butler, R., quoted, 197.

Caesar, Julius, 8.

Carbonari, the, 247.

Carinthia, 229, 244.

Carniola, 13, 244.

Carnot, L. N. M., 118.

Carpathians, the, 157, 163, 164, 188, 191, 211.

‘Carpatho-Ruthenian nation,’ the, 238.

Casimir IV, king of Poland (1447-92), 161.

Castlereagh, Viscount, 5.

Catholics, in Alsace-Lorraine, 77, 113;

Croats and Slovenes, 242;

French, 129;

Poles, 185;

in the Rhineland, 129;

among the White Russians, 196;

in Zealand Flanders, 65.

Cattaro, 247, 254.

Cavour, Count di, 247.

Celtic speech and blood, 17;

Celtic character of the Left Bank, 118.

Census-takers, perversions of fact by, 17, 44, 159, 170, 173f., 213, 232f., 249f., 282, 283.

Central Africa, 283.

Central Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine, the, 121ff., 150.

Central Territorial Commission, the, 30.

Ceramic wares, 54, 137.

Cereals, 53.

Champs-Elysées, the, 4.

Charlemagne, 201.

Charles, emperor of Austria, 106, 207, 209.

Charles V, Holy Roman emperor, 51, 78, 201.

Charlotte, grand duchess of Luxemburg, 58, 60.

Chatalja, lines of, 285.

Château-Thierry, 5.

Chemical products, 54.

Chéradame, A., 205, n. 1, 228.

Chiches, the, 250.

Cisleithania, 203-229.

Civil War, the, 15.

Clémenceau, G., 26, 27, 107, 128.

Cleves, 66, 125.

Coal, 13, 53, 58, 61, 77, 80, 101, 112, 113, 117, 131, 134-148, 152, 186, 197, 221.

Code, German civil, of 1900, 113.

Code Napoléon, the, 126.

Colmar, 89.

Cologne, archbishopric of, 124.

Colonial rivalries, 20.

Comité d’Etudes, the, 23, 35, 115, 116, 151, 152.

Comité de la Rive Gauche du Rhin, 118.

Commissions, 28-31.

Committees, special, 29, 30.

Communication, related to boundary problems, 12.

Concordat of 1801, the, 113.

Condominium, in Moresnet, 57;

on the Scheldt, 63ff.;

suggested, in Lorraine, 112.

‘Congress Kingdom’ of Poland, the, 158, 159, 171, 195, 197.

Connecticut, 76.

Consciousness of kind, 13, 16, 90.

Consistency, Bismarck on, 212.

Constance, Lake of, 122.

Constantinople, 242, 271, 278, 282, 284, 285f., 290.

Constanza, 276.

Constitution of the United States, the, 32.

Convention of 1787, the, 32.

Copper, 113.

Cotton manufacture, 54, 76.

Council of Five, the, 27, 30, 33.

Council of Four, the, 27-30, 33, 50.

Council of Ten, the, 25ff., 29, 30, 33, 42, 50, 68.

Cracow, 164.

Croatia, 233, 241f., 257.

Croats, 233, 241f., 246, 250, 253, 257, 258.

Crown of St. Stephen, lands of the, 214, n. 1.

Crown of St. Wenceslaus, lands of the, 219.

‘Culture,’ propagation of, in Hungary, 233;

in Macedonia, 272;

in Schleswig, 39.

Currency, depreciation of, 48.

Curzola, 248.

Cyprus, 278.

Cyrillic characters, 241.

Czecho-Slovakia, 12, 156, 188, 210, 213-222, 237f., 287.

Czecho-Slovaks, 207, 208, 209, 212, 228.

Czechs, 166, 202, 213-222.

Dacia, 239.

Dalmatia, 29, 244, 245f., 247, 248, 251-256, 260, 261, 262.

Danish-Americans, letter of President Wilson to, 42.

Danish language, the, 17, 37, 39f.

Dannevirke, the, 42.

Danton, G. J., 118.

Danube, the, 12, 20, 225, 237, 240, 268.

Danzig, 21, 157, 161, 173, n. 1, 180-185, 223.

Darmstadt, 97.

Davis, N. H., 24.

Dedeagach, 266.

Delaware, 37.

Delbrück, H., quoted, 187f.

Demilitarization of the Left Bank, 130.

Denis, E., quoted, 127.

Denmark, 37-47, 48, 72.

Dillon, E. J., 25, n. 1, 34.

Dinaric Alps, the, 244.

Disraeli, B., 154.

District of Columbia, the, 145.

Divide et impera, 191, 205.

Dixon, W. M., 23.

Dnieper, the, 157, 161, 164, 182, 196.

Dniester, the, 182.

Dobrudja, the, 266, 276, 290.

Dodecanesus, the, 278.

Doge of Venice, the, 252.

Donon, Mount, 88.

Doubs, the, 105.

Drafting Commission, the, 36.

Drang nach Osten, the Germanic, 160.

Drave, the, 223.

Drin, the, 260, 280.

Dualism, in Austria-Hungary, 203f., 234.

Dunkirk, 90.

Dux Dalmatiae, 252.

Dvina, the, 157, 164.

Eastern Galicia, 189-195.

‘Eastern Marches,’ the, of Prussia, 173, 187.

Eastern Thrace, 266, 281, 282, 284, 285f.

East Friesland, 66.

East India Company, Austria likened to, 203.

East Prussia, 12, 158, 161, 162, 179, 180, 185.

Echo de Paris, the, 128.

Economic problems, commissions on, 28.

Egypt, 14, 212.

Eider, the, 37, 42, 43, 44.

Eiffel, mountain range of the, 55.

Elector Palatine, the, 133.

Elsenborn, camp of, 55, 130.

Enclaves, 78, 134, 159, 176, 282.

England, 25, 27, 47, 67, 71, 87, 120, 129, 153, 172, 241, 248, 281, 285, 286.

See Great Britain.

Enos-Midia line, the, 265.

Epinal, 105.

Epirotes, 279.

Epirus, 278ff.

Eteimbes, 88.

‘Ethnographic Poland,’ 158f., 164.

‘Ethnographic rights,’ 212.

Eugene, Prince, 201.

Eugénie, Empress, 100.

Eupen, 55, 56.

Exarchist church, see Bulgarian church.

Farnese, Alexander, 51.

Federal republic, the Polish, 166.

Felix of Bourbon-Parma, Prince, 60.

Ferdinand I, II, III, Holy Roman emperors, 201.

Ferdinand, king, later tsar of Bulgaria, 269, 285.

Finance, commission on, 28.

Finno-Ugrian stock, 232.

Fiume, 9, 28, 223, 248, 251, 256-262, 280.

Flanders, 60, 65f.

Flemish language, in Belgium, 48;

spoken about Dunkirk, 90.

Flensburg, 37, 42, 46.

Flensburg fiord, the, 37, 42.

Florida, 14.

Foch, Marshal, 25.

Fortresses of the French frontier, demanded by Germany, 104f.

Fortwusteln, 203.

Fourteen Points, the, 21f., 42, 170, 171, 177, 207, 209.

France, 11, 16, 25, 27, 50, 51, 52, 67, 71, 131, 153, 154, 170, 248, 259, 280, 285, 286;

problems of her eastern frontier, 75-152.

Francis I, emperor of Austria, 93;

quoted, 204f.

Francis II, Holy Roman emperor, see Francis I, emperor of Austria.

Frankenholz, 142.

Frankfort, treaty of (1871), 75, 80, 103, 108, 109, 110, 120.

Frankish empire, the, 51, 119.

Frederick the Great, king of Prussia, 178.

Freeman, E. A., 120, 254.

French Foreign Office, the, 24.

French Revolution, the, 5, 52, 57, 63, 85, 92, 95f., 99, 120, 124, 125, 133, 134, 138.

Frisian islands, the, 37.

Frisians, 38.

Frontiers, geographical elements of, 11ff.;

human elements in frontier-making, 13-20;

as affected by hopes of the future, 20f.;

bibliography, 35.

Fustel de Coulanges, N. D., 115;

quoted, 96.

Galicia, 158, 159, 160, 188-195, 199, 210, 238.

Gaul, Roman, 118.

Gauls, 86, 88.

Geislautern, 136.

‘Geographic Poland,’ 158.

German Austria, 209f., 213, 217, 218, 222-229.

German Bohemia, proposed republic of, 216.

German colonies, the, 14, 21.

German East Africa, 71.

German Gate, the, at Metz, 83.

Germanic invasions, the, 119.

Germanization, 39, 173, 174f.

German minorities, in Austria, 203-206;

in the Baltic provinces, 17;

in the Banat, 240;

in Belgium, 18;

in Bohemia, 15, 18, 215, 216-222;

in Hungary, 233;

in Moravia, 216;

in North Schleswig, 46;

in Poland, 15, 166, 172, 173-188;

in Transylvania, 239;

in Upper Silesia, 212, 216.

Germany, 3, 6, 7, 8, 11, 14, 16, 21, 33, 48f., 50, 51, 61, 70f., 154, 157, 160, 191, 197, 198, 206, 207, 218, 226-228, 243, 264;

adjustment of Danish frontier, 37-47;

of Belgian frontier, 49, 54-57;

of French frontier, 75-152;

of Polish frontier, 172-188.

Ghent, 64.

Gibraltar, 281.

Gladstone, W. E., 154.

Gorizia, 244, 247, 248, 249, 251.

Governing Commission, the, in the Saar district, 144-150.

Governing Commission, for the Rhenish territories, see Inter-Allied Rhineland High Commission.

Gradisca, 244.

Grand Trianon, treaty of the (1920), 3, 237, n. 1.

Great Britain, 122, 131, 132, 170, 280.

See England.

Greater Greece, 156.

Greater Roumania, 156.

Greece, 28, 156, 264, 265, 266, 267, 277-287, 289f.

Greek church, the, 271.

Greeks, the, 16, 266, 268, 269, 272, 278-287.

Gribble, F., quoted, 209.

Grodno, province of, 196.

Guelders, Prussian, 125.

Guizot, F. P. G., 154f.

Gypsies, 268.

Halicz, principality of, 160.

Hamburg, 54, 182.

Hapsburg, house of, 51, 78, 79, 94, 98, 201ff., 209, 219, 222, 249, 256.

Haskins, C. H., 29.

Haut-Rhin, department of the, 114.

Hawaii, 14.

Headlam-Morley, J. W., 29.

Heligoland, 47.

Hellenic nation, the, 278f.

Henderson, A., 207.

Hesse, 121, 124.

High German, the official language in Germany, 90.

Historical Section of the British Foreign office, the, 23.

‘Historic rights,’ 211f.

Hoboken, 7.

Hofer, Andreas, 225.

Hohenzollern, house of, 94, 98, 162.

Hohe Tauern, the, 225.

Holland, 11, 49, 51, 52, 54, 57, 60-70, 93, 118, 121, 122.

Holstein, 38.

Holy Roman Empire, the, 78, 84, 92ff., 120.

Homburg, in the Palatinate, 146.

Hoover, H., 5, 25.

Hostenbach, 142.

House, E. M., 23.

Hugo, Victor, 154.

Hundred Days, the, 135.

Hundred Years’ War, the, between Poland and the Teutonic Knights, 161.

Hungary, 3, 6, 210, 212, 213, 226, 231-243, 244, 246, 256, 257, 258, 259, 277.

Ill, the, 76.

Immanent justice, idea of an, 153.

Imperial Colonization Commission, the, 174.

Indemnities, 6, 111.

India, 212, 286.

Industrialism, modern, 12.

‘Inquiry,’ the, 23.

Intendant, the, 95.

Inter-Allied Rhineland High Commission, the, 131, 150.

International administration, 21, 285.

International Commission, on the Schleswig plebiscites, 44.

International servitudes, 68.

Ireland, 14, 15, 212, 241.

Iron, 13, 54, 58, 59, 77, 84, 85, 101-104, 106, 112, 113, 116, 137, 197.

Istria, 244, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251.

Italia Irredenta, 156.

Italianità, 245.

Italy, 11, 25, 27, 50, 90, 93, 122, 153, 158, 170, 210, 213, 224f., 244-262, 278, 280, 281, 287.

Japan, 25, 50.

Japanese, at the Peace Conference, 25, 28.

Jefferson, Thomas, quoted, 154.

Jena, battle of, 187.

Jews, 15, 19, 113, 159, 166, 189, 194, 268.

Joseph II, Holy Roman emperor (1765-90), 201.

Julian Alps, the, 244, 249.

Jutland, 37.

Kamieniec, 164.

Kansas, 158.

Karl, see Charles.

Károlyi, Count, 236, 237.

Karst Mountains, the, 244, 249.

Kehl, 122.

Key deposits of minerals, disposal of, 18, 140f.

Keynes, J. M., 27, n. 1, 34, 148f.

Kiel Canal, the, 37, 46f.

Kiev, 163.

Klagenfurt, 213, 223f.

Kléber, J. B., 96.

Königsberg, 180, 182.

Komitadjis, 272, 277.

Koritza, 278, 279, 280.

Kosciuszko, T., 165.

Kossuth, Louis, 243.

Kun, Béla, 237.

Labor organizations, in the Saar district, 140.

Lamont, T. W., 24.

Lancashire, 197.

Land, passion for, 10.

Landau, 80, 120, 133, 134, 135, 136, 138.

Landtag, the, in Alsace-Lorraine, 80f.

Language, as an element in frontier-making, 16ff.;

in Schleswig, 40;

in Alsace-Lorraine, 87-92, 116, 119;

in Macedonia, 273;

in Northern Epirus, 278f.

Language Union, the, in Schleswig, 40.

Latin colonies and language, in Dalmatia, 245.

Latin-Dalmatian communes, the, 252.

Lauenburg, 38.

Lauter, the, 80, 133, 135.

Lavisse, E., 23.

Lead, 186, 197.

League of Nations, the, 3, 4, 20f., 33, 35, 56, 66, 71, 132, 144-150, 183, 202, 227, 281.

Left Bank, the, 54, 55, 76, 111, 117, 118-132, 150, 151.

Leipzig, battle of, 187.

Lemberg, 189, 192.

Lens, 142.

Leopold I (of Saxe-Coburg), king of the Belgians (1831-65), 52.

Liberia, 50.

Liberty, a privilege, 14.

Libre Parole, the, 128.

Liège, 55, 62, 120.

Liepvrette, the, 88.

Ligne, Prince de, 201;

quoted, 4.

Limburg, 13, 55, 60ff., 66.

Limestone, 102.

Lissa, 248, 256.

“Litany of the Polish Pilgrim,” by Mickiewicz, 155.

Lithuania, 161, 162ff., 165, 168, 172, 196, 200.

Lithuanians, 15, 159, 168, 169.

Little Russian race, the, 189.

Livonia, 163.

Lloyd George, D., 27, 188.

Lötzen, 174.

London, 54, 206;

treaty of (1831), 52;

(1913), 265;

(1915), 248f.

Longwy, 103, 104, 112.

Lorraine, 13, 76ff., 79, 87, 88, 89, 91, 93, 94, 95, 96, 101-104, 117, 132, 133, 135, 141, 142.

See Alsace-Lorraine.

Lorraine, duchy of, 78, 133.

Losheim, 147.

Louis XIV, king of France, 78, 79, 92, 96, 98, 99, 118, 120, 133.

Louis XV, king of France, 78.

Low Countries, the, 157.

Lower Alsace, 81, 89.

Lower Austria, 223.

Low German dialects, 90.

Lunatics, proselytizing of, 217.

Luxemburg, 49, 54, 55, 57-60, 61, 69, 72, 76, 102, 129.

Lvov, Prince, 171.

Lyck, circle of, 174.

McCormick, V., 24.

Macedonia, 178, 266-275, 284, 289f.

Maestricht, 61, 62, 120.

‘Magnificent community’ of Fiume, the, 256.

Magyarization, 234ff., 258.

Magyars, 166, 203, 209, 211, 212, 214, n. 1, 215, 216, 231-243, 246, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261f.

Mainz, archbishopric of, 124.

Majority Socialists, the, in Prussia, 129.

Malmedy, 56.

Malta, 247, 256.

Mandates, 281, 285.

Manin, D., 247.

Mannesmann, family, 137.

Mannheim, 121, 122.

Mantoux, P., 27.

Maria Theresia, empress-queen, 201, 256.

Marie Adelheid, grand duchess of Luxemburg, 58.

Marienwerder district, the, 180, n. 1, 184f.

Marne, the, 4.

Máros, the, 240.

Marseillaise, the, 96.

Marseilles, 182, 259.

Mary, heiress of Burgundy, 51.

Maximilian of Austria, 51.

Mazuria, 180, n. 1, 185.

Mazzini, G., 154, 247, 256, 261, 287.

Mediterranean racial type, the, 16.

Meersen, partition of (870), 120.

Meran, 225.

Mercury mines, 13.

Metković, 260.

Metz, 78, 81, 83f., 85, 89, 101, 120.

Meuse, the, 55, 60, 62, 63, 69, 70, 105, 119.

Meyer’s Handlexicon, quoted, 95.

Mickiewicz, A., 155, 165, 203.

Middle kingdom, the, of the Frankish empire, 50f.

Miller, D. H., 24, 34.

Mineral resources, 13, 53, 77, 112f., 186, 197, 221, 231.

Minette iron field, 77, 102ff., 112.

Minnesota, 158.

Minorities, problems of, 15.

Minority Socialists, in Germany, 106.

Minsk, 164;

province of, 196.

Mitteleuropa, 20, 207.

Model dwellings, 137.

Mörs, county of, 125.

Mohammedans, 19, 242, 278, 282.

Mommsen, T., 8.

Mongols, the, 160.

Montalembert, Comte de, 154.

Montenegro, 265, 269.

Montreux, 88.

Moravia, 212, 213, 216, 218, 219, 223.

Moresnet, district of, 57.

Morier, Sir Robert, quoted, 97f.

Morlaks, the, 250.

Morocco, 28.

Moselle, the, 76, 101, 105, 122, 141.

Moselle, department of the, 114.

Moslems, see Mohammedans.

Mountains, as frontiers, 11f.

Münster, 3.

Mulhouse, 76, 78, 79, 89.

Munich, 140, 145.

Muscovites, 165, 285.

Nahe, the, 124.

Namier, L. B., 182, n. 1.

Nancy, 112.

Napoleon I, 3, 79, 84, 135, 202.

Napoleon III, 38, 84.

Nassau, house of, 52;

Luxemburg branch, 57, 58, 60.

National Councils, in the former Austrian territories, 209.

Nationalities, Hungarian law of, 234.

Nationality, principle of, 19f., 243, 265, 288.

Natural resources, importance of, 12f.

Naval Intelligence Division, the British, 23.

Negroes, in America, 15.

Netherlands, the, 51, 122.

Neuilly, treaty of (1919), 3, 264, 285, 289.

Neutrality, Belgian, 66-69.

‘Neutral schools,’ 114.

New York, 7.

Ney, M., 96, 138.

Niemen, the, 182.

Nord, department of the, 139.

North Albanians, 280.

Northern Epirus, 278ff., 290.

North Schleswig, 19, 37-48, 72.

North Schleswig Voters’ Union, the, 40, 42.

North Sea, the, 42, 62.

Norway, 44.

Oder, the, 159.

Oetzthaler Alps, the, 225.

Oil wells, 77, 113.

Oldenburg, duke of, 124.

Orlando, V. E., 27.

Orthodox, in Albania, 278;

Serbs, 242;

among the White Russians, 196.

Osnabrück, 3.

Ottweiler, 139.

Pacific Ocean, the, 9, 191.

Paderewski, I. J., 165.

Palatinate, the Bavarian, 76, 124, 129, 136, 137, 139, 140, 141, 146.

Palestine, 19.

Panama, 50, 281.

Panama Canal, the, 47.

Pan-Germanism, 105, 208, 287.

Pannonian basin, the, 231.

Paris, treaty of (1814), 134f.;

conference of (1815), 3;

peace conference at (1919), 3-35, et passim.

Partitions of Poland, the, 163, 164, 165, 168, 169, 177, 178, 180, 181, 189, 197.

Pas-de-Calais, department of, 139.

Patois, local, 90.

Patriarch, the Greek, 282.

Patriarchist church, see Greek church.

Pechelbronn, 77.

Pennsylvania, 53.

Petlura, S., 194.

Petroleum, 197.

See Oil.

Philip II, king of Spain, 51.

Philippines, the, 14.

Piasts, house of the, 159, 163.

Pichon, G., 26.

Pilsudski, J., 165.

Pirot-Tsaribrod basin, the, 277.

Pius IX, pope (1846-78), 154.

Plebiscites, 18, 35, 42-46, 60, 106-109, 173, 184-187, 188.

Pliny the Elder, 5.

Poincaré, R., 107.

Pola, 255.

Poland, 12, 19, 28, 39, 91, 153-200, 210, 287.

Poles, 209, 212.

Polonization, 163ff.

Pomaks, 282, 283.

Pomerania, 159, 160.

Pont-à-Mousson, 141.

Porto Lago, 266.

Posen (Posnania), 158, 177f., 184, 188.

Potash, 13, 77, 101, 112.

Prague, 218;

treaty of (1866), 38.

Presburg, 237.

Prescription, notion of, 19.

Protestants, in Alsace, 77, 96, 113;

in Mazuria, 185.

Prothero, G. W., 23, 35.

Provence, 90.

Prussia, 17, 19, 38, 39, 40, 54f., 57, 58, 66, 67, 80, 82, 93, 117, 121, 125, 126, 132, 135, 136, 144, 146, 150, 159, 160, 167, 171, 172, 173-188, 205, 287.

Quadruple Alliance, the, 236.

Quai d’Orsay, the, 24, 27.

Quarnero, gulf of, 247, 249.

Queich, the, 80.

Race, 15f., 86f., 119, 159, n. 1.

Radical party, the, in Denmark, 42, 45.

Ragusa, 245, 254, 260.

Railroad lines, as related to frontier problems, 12, 55, 176, 180, 184f., 223, 260, 276, 277.

Ranke, L. von, quoted, 98.

Rationing, problems of, 5.

Ratzel, F., 254.

Reformation, the, 79.

Reichsrat, Austrian, 250, 252.

Reichstag, the German, 40, 46, 80, 81, 83, 108, 145.

Religious toleration, in Poland, 166.

Renan, E., 7f.

Reparation, commission on, 28, 142f.

‘Republic of the Great Ukraine,’ the, 194.

‘Republic of the Western Ukraine,’ the, 192.

Revolutionary covenant of 1790, in France, 138.

Rheinprovinz, the, 124-132, 136, 140, 141.

Rhenish Prussia, see Rheinprovinz.

Rhenus finis Germaniae, 118.

Rhine, the, 12, 16, 20, 50, 55, 66, 76, 82, 92, 96, 101, 114, 117-132, 150, 151.

Rhine frontier, the, 29, 119, 128.

Rhine-Scheldt canal, proposed, 62.

Rhode Island, 76, 146.

Rhone, the, 93, 182.

Right Bank, the, 111, 123, 127, 131.

Rio Grande, the, 10.

Risorgimento, the, 247.

Rivers, unite rather than divide, 12.

Röchling, family, 137.

Romans, the, 166, 239.

Rome, rule of, in Dalmatia, 245, 246, 252.

Roosevelt, T., quoted, 286.

Rotterdam, 63.

Roumania, 3, 28, 156, 210, 238ff., 262, 264, 265, 266, 276, 277, 287.

Roumanians, 209, 233, 238ff., 276.

Rubens, 26.

Ruhr, region of the, 131.

Rumenes, the, 250.

Russia, 11, 67, 156, 157, 158, 159, 169, 171f., 191, 195-198, 206, 207, 248, 265, 267, 270, 285, 287.

Russians, 15, 17, 166, 194.

Russification, 163.

Ruthenians, 189-195, 233, 238.

Ryksvlaanderen, 65.

Saar, the, 120, 133.

Saar basin (valley, district), the, 13, 21, 29, 76, 77, 80, 101, 117, 120, 125, 132-152, 186, 223.

Saarbrücken, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 139; county of, 133.

Saar Commission, see Governing Commission, the, in the Saar district.

Saarhölzbach, 146.

Saarlouis, 78, 80, 120, 133, 134, 135, 138, 139.

Saint-Germain-en-Laye, treaty of (1919), 3, 213.

St. Sophia, 285.

St. Thomas, 14.

St. Vith, territory of, 54.

Salisbury, Lord, 154.

Salonica, 277.

Salt mines, 77.

San Marco, lion of, 246.

San Stefano, treaty of (1878), 267.

Saône, the, 105.

Sarrebourg, 88.

Sarreguemines, 146.

Saxony, 54, 125, 135.

Scandinavia, 11, 87.

Scheldt, the, 60, 62-66, 68, 69.

Schlei, the, 43, 44.

Schleswig, 17, 37-48, 72.

Schleswig-Holstein question, the, 38.

School Union, the, in Schleswig, 40.

Schrader, F., 120.

Schumacher, H., quoted, 103, n. 1.

Schwob, 16.

Scotch mill-worker, anecdote of a, 7.

Scott, J. B., 24.

Scotus Viator, see Seton-Watson.

Sea, access to the, importance of, 12.

Seigniorial rights, 95.

Self-determination, 13ff., 34, 46, 140f., 238.

Sensburg, 174.

Separation Laws, the, in France, 113f.

Separatist tendencies, in Rhenish Prussia, 129.

Serbia, 11, 240ff., 261, 264, 265, 266, 267, 269-275, 277, 280.

Serbs, 233, 240ff., 266, 268-275, 280.

Seton-Watson, R. W., 262.

Shkypetars, 279.

Siam, 50.

Siberia, 207.

Sick Man on the Bosporus, the, 263.

Sierck, 78.

Silesia, 158, 159, 160, 213, 219.

See Austrian Silesia, Upper Silesia.

Silistria, 276.

Slovakia, 222.

Slovaks, 213-222, 233, 237.

Slovenes, 223f., 241 f., 246, 249, 250, 251.

Social insurance, 137, 145.

Sönderjylland, 37, 72.

Sofia, 263, 271, 272, 277, 282.

Somme, the, 104.

Southern Albania, 278ff., 290.

Southern Dobrudja, the, 266, 276.

Southern Slavs, the, 268-278.

See Yugo-Slavs.

Sovereign Council, the, 95.

Spain, 51, 63.

Spalato, 253f.

Spanish Netherlands, the, 52, 63.

Spanish peninsula, the, 11.

Speier, 140;

bishopric of, 124, 133.

Stanislas Leszcynski, king of Poland, duke of Lorraine, 78.

State, Polish conception of the, 167.

Statistical Commission, the, of the Congress of Vienna, 22.

Statthalter, the, in Alsace-Lorraine, 80, 81.

Stavelot-Malmedy, abbey of, 54.

Steed, H. W., 228;

quoted, 202, 243.

Stephen Dushan, Serbian emperor, 270.

Stettin, 182.

Straits, the, 265, 283, 290.

Strasburg, 79, 80, 81, 83, 89, 96, 107, 120.

Strumica, valley of the, 266, 276f.

Stumm, family, 136, 137.

Submarine bases, 65, 255.

Suez Canal, the, 47.

Sugar refineries, 125.

Sultan, the, 265, 286.

Super-state, the, 150.

Supreme Council, the, 225.

Sušak, 259.

Sweden, 44, 45.

Swedes, 165.

Switzerland, 76, 79, 91, 93, 118, 121, 122, 222, 236.

Sylt, island of, 42.

Szepes, see Zips.

Talleyrand, 4.

Tardieu, A., 29, 34, 151.

Tartars, 165, 166, 167.

Taussig, F. W., 24.

Teaching religious orders, 114.

Temesvár, 240.

Terneuzen canal, the, 64.

Teschen, 13, 158, 188, 213.

Teutonic Knights, the, 160, 161, 162, 178, 185.

Teutonic racial type, the, 16, 86, 87, 119.

Texas, 14.

Theiss, the, 240.

Thionville, 88.

This, C., 88, 116.

Thirty Years’ War, the, 79.

Thomas process, the, 102, 103.

Thorn, peace of (1466), 161.

Thrace, 266, 277, 278, 281-285, 290.

Three Bishoprics, province of the, 78, 120.

Tobacco, 76.

Tönder, 46.

Toul, 78, 105.

Trajan, Roman emperor (98-117), 239.

Transleithania, 231-243.

Transportation, problems of, 5.

Transylvania, 239, 240.

Traù, 248.

Trentino, the, 224, 247.

Tribal duchies, 92f., 120.

Trier, 140;

archbishopric of, 124.

Trieste, 244, 245, 247, 248, 249, 251.

Trois Evêchés, 78.

Tsars, Bulgarian, 269.

Turanians, 268, 269.

Turkey, 6, 14, 33, 242, 263, 265, 266, 267, 269, 270, 281-287, 290.

Turko-Tartar stock, 232.

Turks, 165, 167, 201, 268, 270, 271, 272, 281, 282, 283, 285, 286.

Tyrol, the, 224f., 248.

Üsküb, 270.

Ukraine, the, 163, 165, 168, 172, 191, 193, 194, 199f.

‘Ukrainian idea,’ the, 191.

Ukrainians, 159, 160, 168, 169, 189, 191-194, 196, 209, 210.

Ukrainophiles, 193.

Ulster, 15.

United Netherlands, the, 51.

United States, the, at the Peace Conference, 4f., 7, 14, 19, 21, 23f., 25ff., 29, 30ff., 261, 280;

indisposed to accept a mandate for Albania, 281;

or for Constantinople, 285f.

Upper Alsace, 13, 76, 81, 88, 89, 91, 101, 105, 109, 112.

Upper Austria, 223.

Upper Silesia, 13, 45, 91, 185f., 197, 212.

Urals, the, 157.

Utrecht, treaty of (1713), 52.

Valenciennes, 142.

Valona, see Avlona.

Varna, 276.

Vauban, 135, 138.

Velebite Mountains, the, 244.

Venetia, 247, 249.

Venetia Julia, 249.

Venice, 245, 246, 252, 255, 256.

Venizelos, E., 277 f., 281, 283.

Verdun, 78, 105, 120.

Versailles, preliminaries of (1871), 75, 103;

treaty of (1919), 3, 31, 75, 145, 146, 148, 172, 177f., 186, 213, 227.

Vieille Montagne, 57.

Vienna, 192, 209, 222, 226, 233, 246;

congress of (1814-15), 3, 4, 8, 22, 32, 52, 66, 124, 158;

treaty of (1738), 78;

treaty of (1815), 32, 57, 63, 79f., 120, 121, 125;

treaty of (1864), 38.

Viribus unitis, 205.

Vistula, the, 160, 161, 178, 182, 184.

Vlachs, 268.

Volhynia, province of, 196.

Vosges, the, 76, 84, 85, 101, 119.

Wacke, 16.

Wadern, 147.

Wallenstein, A. E. von, 201.

Walloon language, 56;

Walloon portion of Luxemburg, 57.

Walther von der Vogelweide, 225.

Warsaw, 154, 164, 171, 185.

War-weariness, 4ff., 206.

Washington, 206.

Waterloo, battle of, 79, 154, 187.

Waterways, commission on, 28.

Webster, C. K., 35;

cited, 4.

Wedding of the sea, the, by Venice, 252.

Weiss, the, 88.

Weisskirchen, 147.

‘Welsh,’ 16.

Wesel, 66.

Western Galicia, 189.

Western Thrace, 266, 277, 281-285.

Westphalia, 125f., 141, 148.

Westphalia, treaty of (1698), 3, 63, 78, 79, 93.

West Prussia, 12, 158, 161, 178f., 181, 184.

Wharton, Henry, quoted, 154.

White Russia, 163, 168, 200.

White Russians, 159, 196.

William I, German emperor, quoted, 100.

William II, German emperor, 84, 207.

Wilno, 163, 164;

province of, 196.

Wilson, Woodrow, 3, 7, 14, 19, 21, 23, 26, 27, 31, 42, 49, 68, 75, 106, 109, 150, 170, 207, 208, 261, 275.

Wissembourg, 134.

Wittelsheim, 77.

Worms, bishopric of, 124.

Young, A. A., 24.

Yugo-Slavia, 156, 210, 241f., 244-262, 280, 287.

Yugo-Slavs, 208, 209, 213, 223, 224, 244-262.

Zabern affair, the, 82.

Zanzibar, 47.

Zara, 252, 253, 254, 256.

Zbrucz, the, 192.

Zealand Flanders, 65f.

Zillerthaler Alps, the, 225.

Zimmermann note, the, 14.

Zinc, 186, 197.

Zinc mine of Vieille Montagne, 57.

Zinc works, 54.

Zips, 188, 213.

Zollverein, German, 58, 59, 129.

Zweibrücken, 137;

house of, 124, 133.

Transcriber’s Notes

Page 27: A missing footnote anchor was added.

Page 71: “ambitions of Gemany” changed to “ambitions of Germany”

Page 170: “Warsaw in in 1831” changed to “Warsaw in 1831”

Page 201: “sixteenth and seventeeth centuries” changed to “sixteenth and seventeenth centuries”

Page 290: “historique, economique” changed to “historique, économique”

The spelling of proselytizing was fixed in the Index.

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