The events of the past four years in Europe and Asia, coupled with the final decision of the American people not to enter the League of Nations, give us the right to call the six months of blasted hopes in 1919 the tragedy of Paris. For an astonishingly long time the Peace Conference and the treaties framed by it had their defenders, especially in the United States, where a group of what the French would call intellectuels declared that critics of the treaties and the League Covenant were unreasonable and uninformed. Colonel Edward M. House organized in Philadelphia a series of lectures on the Treaty of Versailles by experts and Presidential advisers attached to the American Commission to Negotiate Peace. The lectures were valuable contributions to Peace Conference literature. They told much, and told it well. They were accurate and comprehensive. But some of these gentlemen directly, and others by inference, said that the American public had been misled by correspondents whose judgments were based on gossip and rumor rather than on knowledge of what actually happened.

It is difficult for the professional writer to answer this sort of charge. Although he has as much pride in his accuracy as the college professor, and is fully as careful to base statements on source material personally investigated and tested, the newspaper correspondent is unable to cite his sources and quote his authorities. He deals with history in the making. He must be discreet. He must avoid using names. When he is accused of not knowing what he is talking about and of making sweeping assertions, he has to bide his time.

I was proud of the men of my craft at Paris. The work of the American correspondents was as trustworthy as it was brilliant. Tested by wide knowledge and experience of the field, as well as by training, some of the correspondents were better qualified to acquaint their fellow-Americans with what was going on at Paris than any expert or adviser of the American Commission. For even when they participated in the work of the various committees the American experts had neither the knowledge nor training to appreciate the forces at work that determined the decisions upon the very questions they were deliberating. Events have fully justified the severe criticism that was made by correspondents upon the Treaty of Versailles while it was being drafted. Actual participants in the inner workings of the Peace Conference have now given us, in narratives and documents, full corroboration of what was cabled day by day from Paris during those fateful months. Of no great conference has there ever been given so complete and faithful a daily picture.

Except in rare instances of anecdote, such as Mr. Lamont’s graphic story of how President Wilson came to agree to include (against the advice of the lawyers on the American Commission) pensions in the reparations, Colonel House’s compilation does not give “What Really Happened at Paris” in a satisfying manner. Now, if the colonel had only written for us the frank and unreserved story of a primary witness instead of editing a volume of testimony of others, the volume would have contained invaluable pages of contemporary history. For Colonel House is the American best qualified, aside from the ex-President himself, to make a contribution to the diplomatic history of America’s participation in the war and Peace Conference.

Mr. Lansing’s book, “The Peace Negotiations,” makes it clear that only Colonel House is qualified to write the inside story of Woodrow Wilson and the world peace. But we do have Mr. Lansing’s contribution, Mr. Baruch’s “The Economic Sections of the Peace Treaty,” and Mr. Ray Stannard Baker’s three volumes, “Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement,” which are indictments of the treaty.

Mr. Lansing was the first of the signers of the Treaty of Versailles to realize that the consequences of the blunders at Paris were too disastrous in human suffering to permit the covering up of mistakes and the glossing over of weaknesses. He told a story that was, in every important particular, what press correspondents saw themselves or were told at the time by creditable witnesses. Mr. Lansing agreed with his predecessors in the State Department, Mr. Root and Mr. Knox, concerning the weaknesses and dangers of the Covenant and its incompatibility with American interests and ideals. He gave the text of the letter sent by General Bliss to President Wilson on April 29, appealing that the great moral principles for which the United States fought be not abandoned. Wrote General Bliss:

If it be right for Japan to annex the territory of an ally, then it cannot be wrong for Italy to retain Fiume taken from the enemy. It can’t be right to do wrong even to make peace. Peace is desirable, but there are things greater than peace—justice and freedom.

Mr. Lansing quotes from a memorandum he wrote on May 8, 1919, when the draft of the treaty was handed to the Germans:

The terms of peace appear immeasurably harsh and humiliating, while many of them seem to me impossible of performance.... Examine the treaty and you will find peoples delivered against their wills into the hands of those whom they hate, while their economic resources are torn from them and given to others.... It may be years before these suppressed peoples are able to throw off the yoke, but as sure as day follows night, the time will come when they will make the effort. This war was fought by the United States to destroy forever the conditions which produced it. Those conditions have not been destroyed. They have been supplanted by other conditions equally productive of hatred, jealousy, and suspicion.... The League of Nations is an alliance of the five great military powers.... Justice is secondary. Might is primary.... We have a treaty of peace, but it will not bring permanent peace because it is founded on the shifting sands of self-interest.

To Mr. Baker were entrusted the private papers, letters, and even minutes of the Council of Ten and the Council of Four, collected by President Wilson. These have been published at President Wilson’s suggestion, with the intention of showing that the Peace Conference was a struggle between the new and the old, the idealism of Mr. Wilson and the sinister forces of Old World diplomacy. In attempting to explain and justify Mr. Wilson’s rÔle at Paris, the Baker volumes reveal much—but by no means all—of the sad story of how greed and particular interests triumphed at the Conference from beginning to end. Mr. Baker throws more light upon the inner workings of the conference, thanks to the unrivaled worth of his sources, than any other writer. But his revelations only tend to confirm the fairness of the judgments of General Smuts and Mr. Lansing.

The only other writer who has had access to unpublished and inaccessible material is M. AndrÉ Tardieu, Clemenceau’s right-hand man and one of the signers of the treaty. M. Tardieu reveals that France’s policy had been from the beginning to make the Rhine the western frontier of Germany, and have all the Rhine bridges permanently occupied by interallied military forces. The chief advocate of the extreme French forward policy was Marshal Foch, who urged that the military occupation of the left bank of the Rhine was essential to the safety of France and Belgium, but he was not supported in this stand by the King of the Belgians. The compromise was arranged in April, Wilson being won over on the twentieth and Lloyd George on the twenty-second. The evacuation after fifteen years was to be dependent upon two conditions, the complete fulfilment of the treaty by Germany, and also the agreement among the Allies that “the guarantees against unprovoked aggression by Germany are considered sufficient by the Allied and Associated Governments.” These two jokers nullify the fifteen-year provision, and make the occupation dependent upon the will of France.

The Lansing, Baker and Tardieu books confirm the impression one had at the time, that Mr. Wilson gradually abandoned position after position, that disastrous expedients and compromises were adopted in a spirit of panic, and that the American president refused to stand with the British premier at the last minute in an effort to rid the final draft of the treaty of some of its injustices and absurdities.

The economic clauses of the treaty are ably discussed by Mr. Keynes, British expert; Mr. Baruch, American expert; and former Premier Nitti of Italy, one of the greatest European economists. These three men write from first hand, and are agreed that the economic terms imposed upon Germany were not only impossible of fulfilment but also ruinous to the European economic structure. Premier Lloyd George and Sir George Foster, who signed the treaty for Canada, have openly indorsed this position, declaring that the reparations terms were impossible from the beginning and imposed upon Germany a burden that no nation could possibly carry. New light on the tragedy of Paris has also come from debates in the American Senate, the British House of Commons and House of Lords, and the South African Parliament. The testimony is concordant. The more light we get the more we realize that the Treaty of Versailles was not a treaty of peace, and that even those who made it were convinced that it would not and could not bring peace to the world.