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CHAPTER VIII.

Peace Proposals and Comment.

No preacher or orator ever had so large an audience as has our Professor-Orator-President, Woodrow Wilson; no university president ever lectured to so large and attentive a class as our Primarius-University-President, President Woodrow Wilson; for lie has the whole world for his audience and all the nations of the entire world at his feet for instruction and guidance in matters politic.

Uncle Sam Has the Key to the World's Peace.

(From the Literary Digest.)

"THE KEY to the Temple of the World Peace is in the hand of President Wilson," said Maxmilian Harden recently to an American correspondent in Germany; and many think that the key was fitted in the lock when the President restated our waraims to Congress on January 8.

"The moral climax of this, the culminating and final war for human liberty, has come," he declared, “and the American people are ready to put their own strength, their own highest purpose, their own integrity and devotion to the test."

"In instant response, his definition of our war-aims is acclaimed as theirs by the press and leaders of the Entente Allies, and his explicit frankness is hailed by our own press as the acme of grand strategy."

"The wavering labor, Socialists and pacifists elements have been brought into the line by his call.

"We may say that peace negotiations have now begun, and that the world now waits for proofs that the Central Powers are sincere in their desire to carry them to a conclusion that will be acceptable to the peace of the world," says an official manifesto of the British Labor Party, which declares "the spirit of the President's message to be the spirit to which democracy all over the world can respond."

"The President's peace terms," as Frank H. Simonds points out in the New York Tribune, "shatters Germany's dream of MITTELEUROPA, an empire by conquest which was to extend from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean, with a footing in Asia Minor." Analyzing these conditions on the basis of what they would force the Central Powers to relinquish, Mr. Simonds translates them into terms of square miles and population. He says:

Mitteleuropa Slashed.

"The President's peace terms require three stupendous concessions on the part of Germany. They demand that she shall consent to the destruction of her great scheme of MITTELEUROPA; that she and her allies shall surrender 210,000 square miles of conquered territory, inhabited by 40,000,000 people, an area greater than that of Germany before the war and a popu

lation in excess of that of France in 1911, and, finally, that Germany, Austria and Turkey shall cede territory in their possession when the war broke out.

"Looked at from the point of view of the Mitteleuropa scheme, the President's terms cut this grandiose creation by restoring Roumania and Servia and bestowing upon the latter a seacoast, obviously in Albania. It was to break down such a barrier that Austria, at Germany's direction, assailed Servia in July, 1914, and produced the world-war. When Servia and Roumania have been restored, Bulgaria and Turkey will be cut off from Austria and Germany.

"But the amputation at the waist, if one may use this figure, is accompanied by similar operations on all four limbs. Of the two arms of Mitteleuropa, that extending westward through Belgium to the coast is eliminated by the restoration of Belgium, that which extends eastward to Riga is cut off by the creation of a free Poland, having Danzig as a seaport, and by the restoration to Russia of the remainder of Russian lands conquered by the Germans and the Austrians. In the same way, by depriving the Turk of his Mesopotamian and Syrian lands, as well as his Armenian provinces, President Wilson takes off both legs.

"But the President does not stop there. He not only insists upon the restitution by Germany and Austria of all the lands taken in the present war; he demands that Germany shall cede AlsaceLorraine to France and the Polish districts of Prussia to the new Poland. By these two cessions Germany would lose more than 12,000 square miles and between 5,000,000 and 6,000,000 of people which were hers before the present war. Austria would, in the same fashion, have to give up Trieste and the Trentino with nearly a million people and four or five thousand square miles of territory, as well as the Polish half of Silesia, containing 6,000,000 people.

"Finally, Turkey, under the President's proposal, would lose Arabia, Armenia, Syria, Palestine, and Mesopotamia, That is about one-half of the Turkish Empire and no less than 7,000,000 people-a full third of the population of the Empire. The Turk would be restricted to the Anatolian district, in which the Osmanli element predominates, and he would lose his hold upon the holy cities of Mekka, Medina, and Jerusalem.

"President Wilson has gone far beyond Lloyd George in the matter of Poland, Russia, and Austria-Hungary. He has reechoed the British Prime Minister's terms in the Balkans, in Asiatic Turkey, in Belgium, and in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine and the Italian Irredenta."

The President's new and more concrete statement of war aims. a London correspondent tells us, is regarded in England as "a heavy and perhaps decisive reenforcement in 'the diplomatic offensive a form of warfare which many publicists have been asking for as only secondary in importance to the warfare of

arms." New York's Socialist Congressman, Meyer London, declares that "this counter peace offensive of the Allies will shorten the war more than all military offensives combined"; and Representative Baer, who was recently sent to Congress from North Dakota by the Farmers' Non-Partizan League, thinks that "had Russia known these war-aims a few weeks ago she might still have been in the fray." It will prove harder for Germany to fight against the President's words "than against an army of fifty millions," declares W. Bourke Cockran. In making his statement, says the Pittsburg Dispatch, "the President apparently had two special purposes: to drive home the wedge between the German militarists and the German people, and to reassure Russia of the support and sympathy of the democratic peoples." The President's conditions must be accepted ultimately, if not now, says the Washington Herald, for "they are the irreducible minimum of terms which civilization will make with the mad nations which outraged and ravished it." A London paper describes them as "the Magna Carta of future peace.”

CHAPTER IX.

Peace Proposals.

Our Terms.

1. "Open covenants of peace”—“no private international understandings"-diplomacy "in the public view."

2. Freedom of the seas "outside territorial waters" in peace and in war, except as the seas may be closed "by international action for the enforcement of international covenants."

3. Equality of trade conditions "among all the nations consenting to the peace and associating themselves for its maintenance."

4. Guaranteed reduction of armaments "to the lowest points consistent with domestic safety."

5. Adjustment of colonial claims on the principle that "the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the Government whose title is to be determined."

6. Evacuation of all Russian territory and settlement of questions affecting Russia to secure the "best and freest cooperation of the other nations of the world" in obtaining for her opportunity for the "independent determination of her own political development and national policy and assure her of a sincere welcome into the society of free nations under institutions of her own choosing."

7. Belgium "must be evacuated and restored without any attempt to limit the sovereignty which she enjoys in common with all other free nations."

8. All French territory should be freed and the invaded portions restored and the "wrong done to France by Prussia in 1871, in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine-should be righted."

9. Frontiers of Italy should be readjusted “along clearly recognizable lines of nationality."

10. The peoples of Austria-Hungary "should be accorded the freest opportunity of autonomous development.”

11. Roumania, Servia, and Montenegro should be evacuated; Servia have "access to the sea" and "international guaranties of the political and economic independence and territorial integrity of the several Balkan States should be entered into."

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12. Turkish portions of the Ottoman Empire should have 'secure sovereignty, but other nationalities now under Turkish rule should have "undoubted security of life" and "unmolested opportunity of autonomous development," and the Dardanelles should be open to all nations "under international guaranties."

13. A Polish state should be created to include territories "inhabited by indisputably Polish populations." It should have "access to the sea," and its independence and territorial integrity should be "guaranted by international covenant."

14. An association of nations must be formed for the purpose

of "affording mutual guaranties of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike."

Bolshevik Terms.

1. Evacuation of occupied Russian territory. Autonomy for Poland and the Lithuanian and Lettish provinces.

2. Autonomy for Turkish Armenia.

3. Plebiscite for Alsace-Lorraine with guaranteed freedom of vote.

4. Restoration of Belgium and indemnity for damages to be provided by an international fund.

5. Restoration of Servia and Montenegro, with indemnity from international fund. Servia to have access to the Adriatic. Bosnia and Herzegovina to have "complete autonomy."

6. Other contested territory in the Balkans to have "temporary autonomy until a plebiscite is taken."

7. All Roumanian territory "within her previous frontiers" to be restored "after promising to grant autonomy to the Dobrudja and to give effect to Article III of the Berlin Convention concerning the equality of the rights of Jews."

8. Autonomy for Trent and Trieste regions inhabited by Italian populations, until a plebiscite is taken.

9.

10.

German colonies to be restored.

Restoration of Persia and Greece.

11. Neutralization of maritime straits "leading to inland seas, including the canals of Suez and Panama." "Freedom of commercial navigation"-Cancelation of all charters of enemy ships during war-time. "Torpedoing of commercial ships on high seas to be forbidden by international agreement."

12. Renunciation by all belligerents of "war-indemnities under any form or disguise." All contributions exacted since the beginning of the war to be refunded.

13. No commercial boycott after the war and no "institution of special customs agreements."

14. Peace congress to be composed of "delegates chosen by national representative bodies." No secret treaties, "which are to be declared by their very nature, null and void.”

15. Gradual disarmament "on land and sea" with militia "to replace standing armies.”

British Terms.

1. Restoration of "political, territorial, and economic indepen dence of Belgium and such reparation as can be made for the devastation of its towns and provinces."

2. Restoration of Servia, Montenegro, and the occupied parts of France, Italy, and Roumania. Withdrawal of the allied (Teutonic) armies and "reparation for injustice done."

3. "Reconsideration" of the "great wrong of 1871" when "two French provinces were torn from the side of France and incorporated in the German Empire." Until this "sore" is cured "healthy conditions will not have been restored."

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