Seeking a mitigation of the peace terms, the Germans at Versailles reminded their victors of the repeated assurance given the German people that the Allied and Associated Powers were making war against the Imperial German Government. The distinction had been clearly drawn by President Wilson on several occasions. The pre-armistice correspondence reiterated the difference between a government of the people and a government of the Kaiser. Had not the Germans, by a revolution, rid themselves of their discredited rulers, down to the most insignificant princeling? M. Clemenceau answered, in the name of the victors, that the German people had willed the war and had sustained it; therefore, they could not escape the responsibility for it. And, if the terms of peace were severe, it was not only because justice must be satisfied, but also because reasonable precautions must be taken against an outlaw people, still over sixty million strong. There was much force in M. Clemenceau’s contention, applied to powerful Germany, with her industrial machinery intact, and enjoying a peculiarly advantageous strategic position in central Europe. But this same explanation cannot be given to excuse similar terms imposed upon six million Austrians and seven million Hungarians. As peoples, their responsibility certainly was much less. As new nations, shorn of much of their territory, heavy indemnities were absurd; and refusing the right to ethnographic frontiers on the plea of guarantees for the future was without justification. The Treaty of Versailles, had it only been practicable, was a punishment fitting a crime. The Treaties of St.-Germain and Trianon are indefensible from every point of view.

“We have Balkanized all that part of Europe,” said Mr. Lloyd George ruefully. He was right. But ineptitude is none the less blameworthy because it is admitted!

“If the Hapsburg Empire did not exist, it would have to be invented,” a Russian diplomat once said. He was a political realist. His statement was a wise one from the political point of view. The developments of the last half-century have proved that it is wiser still from the economic point of view. But there was no broad statesmanship at the Paris Conference, looking to the future, and no sound economic generalship, setting limits to the greed and fantasies of those who divided the spoils. Fools rushed in where angels would have feared to tread. The economic evolution of the nineteenth century was disregarded. The Hapsburg Empire was partitioned in such a way as to do more violence to the will of its inhabitants than had been done under the old scheme of the Dual Monarchy, with none of the economic compensations of the destroyed political organism. New irredentisms were created, much more dangerous than the old ones. In 1914, Alsace-Lorraine was unique among European problems: it was the only instance of a people forcibly detached against their will from a country in which they had enjoyed the privilege of taking a full and conscious part in the national life. The Treaties of St.-Germain and Trianon did violence on a far greater scale than the Treaty of Frankfort had done to the national sentiments of peoples. Half a dozen new Alsaces were brought to life and half a dozen new danger-zones established in Europe. When the terms of the Treaty of Versailles were made known, students of international affairs had their misgivings. When the terms of the Treaties of St.-Germain and Trianon were published, we realized that “the war to end war” was resulting in the creation of causes for new wars.

Of course the problem before the peacemakers was exceedingly difficult from many angles. The Hapsburg spoils were enormous. There were claims and counter-claims. There were promises already made. There were faits accomplis to take into consideration.

The peril of insisting upon a reasonable decision as to frontiers, a decision in accordance with principles, was demonstrated by the storm Mr. Wilson caused when he tried to defend the South Slavs against Italy. Italy had her secret treaty with the other Entente Powers. The Treaty of London, signed in 1915, had been the price paid for Italian intervention. In their desperate need the Entente Powers secretly sold out Serbia, the nation in whose defense they had begun the war, to Italy; and Italy had taken the precaution of occupying militarily what she had been promised more than three years earlier, when the armistice with Vienna was signed. In addition Italy claimed Fiume, which had been outside of the 1915 agreement. But this seemed reasonable to her, in view of modifications of that agreement elsewhere. President Wilson was given clearly to understand that his principles had nothing whatever to do with the Austrian treaty. Similarly, Rumania had her secret intervention bargain, made with the Entente Powers in 1916. And France sponsored the most extreme claims of Poles, Czechs, and Rumanians, because she intended to form of these peoples a bloc to take the place of Russia in the new alliance against Germany. In making the Treaties of St.-Germain and Trianon, therefore, border districts were bartered with no regard whatever either for the wishes or economic necessities of their inhabitants.

By these treaties Czechoslovakia was created; Poland, Rumania, and Serbia were made as large as possible and given contiguous frontiers and direct railway communications; and Italy did unto the Austrians and South Slavs what she had for half a century been complaining of the Austrians doing unto her. The result is a patchwork of states, none satisfied, and all reduced to political unrest and economic chaos. The two formerly dominant peoples of the Hapsburg Empire, the Austrians and the Hungarians, were given a large dose of the medicine they had long been prescribing to their subject peoples.

Invoking the sacred principle of nationality, Italy triumphantly completed her unification by adding the “unredeemed Italians” of the Hapsburg Empire. But with them she insisted on incorporating in Greater Italy hundreds of thousands of Austrians and South Slavs. The principles invoked here were historical and strategical. The Adriatic must become an Italian lake. To accomplish this and to have a strategic frontier, nearly 300,000 Austrians of the Tyrol were separated from their compatriots, and a like number of Slovenes, Croats, and Dalmatians were prevented from joining the Greater Serbia of their dreams.

To make a strong Czechoslovakia the Paris conference asserted the validity of the historical argument against Germany and Austria, and chose a boundary-line for the new state which left nearly three million Germans subject to less than twice as many Czechs. When a delegation of Germans from Bohemia protested against this decision, Mr. Lloyd George reminded them that their ancestors had followed conquering armies to settle in Bohemia, and that they had the privilege of going back where they came from if they wanted to. The Peace Conference, he said, was righting historical wrongs. They answered that they were three times as numerous as the Scotch who had gone to Ireland, and had been in Bohemia two centuries longer than the inhabitants of the Belfast region. If this solution was a just one, why was not the Ulster problem to be solved in the same way by a return of the North Irelanders to Scotland? But that was different! It all came back to the old principle of vae victis—woe to the conquered. The Czechs were given also a bit of Upper Silesia; the Hungarian town of Poszony or Pressburg (renamed Bratislava), for an outlet on the Danube, with half a million Hungarians along the Danube, so that the frontier of the new states would separate Vienna from Budapest and come within thirty-five miles of Budapest; and half a million Ruthenians, so that Czechoslovakia would dominate Hungary from the Carpathians.

To Poland was allotted Galicia. The eastern part of this province contains more than three million Ruthenians, in territory contiguous to Ukrainia, which is inhabited by a people of the same blood and language. This manifest injustice was covered in the Treaty of St.-Germain by making Eastern Galicia a separate territory, under Polish mandate, with a plebiscite after twenty years. But the Poles have already managed to remove the flaw in their title.

The additions to Rumania freed several million Rumanians from Hungarian rule, but put about an equal number of Hungarians, Germans, Serbs, and people of other races in Greater Rumania. Hungary was deprived of her iron and coal. Greater Serbia was allotted one of the finest towns of Hungary, Szabadka (Maria-theresiopel), an overwhelmingly Hungarian city, now cut off by the Serbian boundary from the farming country it had prospered in serving. The excuse for this glaring injustice was that Serbia needed to control the railway line passing from Croatia to the territories detached from Hungary for the benefit of Rumania. There are several instances of this sort of thing in the treaties.

But while the treaties of St.-Germain and Trianon limited Austria and Hungary to frontiers well within what the application of the principle of self-determination would have given them, even the non-German and non-Magyar elements in border regions felt that they, too, were sacrificed to the exigencies of international politics. Poles and Czechs were dissatisfied with the Silesian frontier and came to blows over it; Ruthenians received no recognition whatever of their right to nationhood; Slovaks suffered on economic grounds through separation from Hungary; Rumania and Serbia both claimed the Banat of TemesvÁr; and Jugoslavs had to be content with partial liberation, because in many regions the Jugoslavs simply changed masters, being turned over by the peace conference to Italy.

Plebiscites were provided for in two border regions only; and in these instances the motive was not that of vindicating the principle of self-determination. The district of Klagenfurt remained with Austria after its inhabitants had voted against Serbia. This was done because its possession by the Jugoslavs would have embarrassed Italy. A slice of West Hungary was awarded to Austria for the obvious purpose of making bad blood between the two enemy peoples.

Hungary, because of the richness of her soil, was able to live in the limits imposed by the Treaty of Trianon. But the Treaty of St.-Germain reduced Austria to a little state of six million souls, more than a third of whom lived in the city of Vienna. Upon the Austrians was saddled a huge indemnity. Not only was the indemnity impossible to maintain, but the existence even of such a country as was provided for the Austrians to live in was questioned by economists. The Austrians were reduced to dire poverty in the city of Vienna, and condemned to a hopeless future by the provision of the treaty forbidding them to unite with Germany. The Treaty of St.-Germain is the most striking example in history of vengeance wreaked upon defenseless people. Never had the tables been so suddenly and completely turned.

And yet the Austrians were only one of several peoples in the Hapsburg Empire who had made common cause with Germany. Statesmen and generals in highest places throughout the war had been Czechs, Poles, and Jugoslavs. With the exception of the Czechs, all the peoples of the Dual Monarchy had fought well throughout the war. It is patent that Austria-Hungary could never have gone through four years of war had not the landed aristocracy, the bankers, and the manufacturers of all the peoples of the empire supported and coÖperated with the Vienna Government until the game was clearly up. But, as soon as the armistice was signed, the liberated peoples received immunity, doffed their uniforms and decorations, and asserted that they had been forced to fight against their liberators. This was not true of the great majority of them. The Jugoslavs were always bitter against the Italians. Until the latter part of 1917 the Poles had no kindly feeling for the allies of Russia, while the Austrians were their best friends. The Rumanians, like the Italians, had hesitated about abandoning their neutrality until the bribe had been made sufficiently attractive. At Vienna and Budapest throughout the war the upper classes of subject peoples were heart and soul (or at least acted as if they were!) with the cause of the Central Empires. Only the Czechs—and not the majority of them—had shown themselves disloyal.

This was natural. The Dual Monarchy was a system, a complicated system; and the picture painted for us of Germans and Magyars, less than twenty millions; lording it brutally over more than thirty millions of other races is hardly half true. The national antagonism between German and Czech was largely local, and was not remedied by the Treaty of St.-Germain. The Poles were very well off under Austrian rule. Jugoslavs preferred the Germans to the Italians. The great mass of Rumanians in Hungary were better educated, further advanced in self-government, and much more independent economically than the Rumanians in Rumania. The truth is that, with the exception of the Czechs, the various peoples of the Hapsburg Empire were aware of their common economic interests, and saw the advantages of belonging to a great country. Worked upon by irredentist propaganda from the outside, there had been the struggle between culture and pocketbook, with a victory for the latter up to the time of the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire.

If the Paris Conference had had at heart the best interests of the peoples of Austria-Hungary, they would have maintained the organism that united these peoples with common interests under some new program of federation. The Treaties of St.-Germain and Trianon are inspired by British, French, and Italian interests, and not by a desire to make a better world to live in along the Danube. Under the nose of President Wilson, these interests were amicably adjusted by compromises and bargains. The question was never debated as to whether it would not be best for the peoples concerned to keep some form of a union, in which Austrian and Hungarian domination would no longer prevail.

The Entente Powers had their reasons for wanting to break up the Hapsburg dominions. Italy entered the war for this purpose. If the old political organism had been readjusted, Slavic predominance would have appeared to the Italians as a greater menace to their security than the old arrangement of Austrian and Hungarian joint hegemony. Great Britain and France were determined that Germany should never again have the Danubian countries as a reservoir from which to draw for armies to support her schemes. The dissolution of the empire blocked forever Germany’s Drang nach Osten. The Treaties of St.-Germain and Trianon cut Germany off from the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire. France had in mind a cordon of allies, separating Russia from Germany, and opening up the path to France from the North Sea to the Black Sea. Most important of all, the disappearance of Austria-Hungary removed the formidable commercial rivalry possible when fifty million people lived under a united government in a common customs area.

The only danger foreseen was the possibility of Austria joining Germany. This the Entente Powers thought they had taken care of by denying to the Germans the political unity achieved by all the other peoples of Europe.

The logical alternatives confronting the peacemakers were either establishing a new Danubian federation or allowing free rein to the national instinct as opposed to economic expediency. Blinded by the extent of their victory, and betrayed into the fallacy of believing that some national movements could be encouraged and approved and others discouraged and stamped out, the Entente Powers forgot economic and political laws. They chose neither alternative. They believed that they could use the power the victory gave them for the furtherance of their own selfish interests. But they forgot that this power was theirs because they were united, and that treaties inspired by their own interests and imposed by force would remain in vigor only so long as they remained united.

In the Treaties of St.-Germain and Trianon the Entente Powers departed farther than in the Treaty of Versailles from the ideals so nobly proclaimed during the war. In his speech of January 5, 1917, Mr. Lloyd George had anticipated Mr. Wilson when he told the House of Commons:

Equality of right among nations, small as well as great, is one of the fundamental issues that this country and her allies are fighting to establish in this war.... We feel that government by consent of the governed must be the basis of any territorial settlement.... A territorial settlement must be secured, based on the right of self-determination or the consent of the governed.