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timental shrewdness with which they are advised to approach the question of investing in a gold mine somewhere in Kamchatka. For this might appropriately be one of those times when you can not fool all the people.

THE A B C OF ALLIANCES-THE FRENCH ALLIANCE.

On its face the proposed alliance with France looks to many excellent people like a perfectly innocent thing. It is to become operative only after approval by the league. It is to be purely "defensive." It is directed against only one nation, and that a disarmed nation. What could be simpler? It is almost like being asked to insure a steel box against a firebrand who is already in jail and has no matches. This is the general basis of the approval given to the idea by Mr. Oscar Straus in an interview from Paris. The alliance, he says, involves nothing that the league does not involve, and is merely a “deference to the idiosyncracy of the French people."

If this represents the state of mind at the Hotel de Crillon, it would be well to cut short this first unchaperoned visit of the maiden to the city before she gets any deeper into trouble. For anyone who at this late date in the history of the world knows so little of the working of European politics as to be seduced by the phrases in a treaty of alliance is really not competent to represent the affairs of a great people. There is a point where the melting mood of deference and ignorance of history become a positive danger to the State, and this is such a point. When the President returns it will therefore be necessary for the Senate to remind him sharply of a few elementary principles about the character of special alliances.

They are, that every entangling alliance, almost without exception, is fervently described in the text as defensive, that there is absolutely no practical distinction between a defensive and an offensive alliance, that from the forging of the Ems dispatch to the murder of the Austrian archduke intriguing diplomats have never found the slightest difficulty in manufacturing a defensive pretext for an offensive purpose. It is incredible that any American statesman should have forgotten this so completely that after denouncing special alliances time without number he should be so flabbergasted by the word unprovoked" as to miss the whole significance of the project.

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Examine the plan in this European setting and what does it mean? As a result of the war France is left as the one great military power on the Continent of Europe. Her army has a glorious tradition, the staff is the finest in Europe, her greatest rival is completely and permanently disarmed. Against this rival she is to be reinsured by a covenant which is supposed to apply the force of all its members against any kind of sudden aggression. Then a military frontier is given her which means that at the first hint of aggression by the disarmed Germans the whole left bank of the Rhine can be occupied without resistance by a completely armed France, and on top of this she is to be still further reinsured by a special military alliance with the two powers who control the seas and the greatest military re

sources.

To the French people, terrorized for 40 years and invaded for 4, this may at the moment seem merely defensive caution. But not to

the very astute politicians who manage French foreign policy. They know better. They know that the real meaning of this alliance is to give France a free hand in the mastery of the Continent. By making France absolutely immune to the consequences of any policy she may pursue, she is free to pursue any policy. In exactly this way Bismarck reasoned when he reinsured himself several times over on his eastern and southern front in order to be entirely safe in all his other purposes. Let no one deceive himself about this. The beauty of the French landscape, the charm of Frenchmen, the delicacy of French culture, the hardihood of the French peasant, the democracy of French society have no more to do with the question than did German folk songs and Beethoven's music with the policy of Bismarck or of his more degenerate successors under William II. On the Continent of Europe a nation which is in a privileged position of security is fatally tempted to pursue a policy of intrigue and aggression. That privileged position may be the military power of France absolutely reinsured by special alliance with sea power. Where that privileged position exists the temptation to assert mastery is so intoxicating as to be beyond the power of control.

We can be perfectly certain that no matter how much we may deceive ourselves about the defensive character of this agreement, no European, allied, neutral, or enemy, will take it for anything but what it is, a regular old-fashioned military alliance. The result will be what it has always been. The other nations, far more insecure than France, will infer that if the authors of the covenant do not trust the league, why in Heaven's name should they? Italy is already saying it. Spain, looking at her dispute with France in Morocco, is bound to say it, and as for central Europe, what other conclusion can she possibly draw? If France needs special protection, the weaker States certainly do, and the next step is to find allies. Now, in the choice of allies as a means of protection, no nation has the slightest scruple. Republican France and Tsarist Russia, England and Japan, Germany and Turkey; it is not principles but battalions that count.

The French alliance is bound to call up other alliances within what Mr. Wilson once called "the common family of the league of nations" and, we may add, outside the family. With Germany and Russia outside, and China ready to go; with Italy rather dazzled somewhere in no man's land, the number of possible combinations is considerable. All of them, of course, will be purely" defensive." The only thing to remember is that these defensive groups will be extraordinarily interested in being loyal to one another. And being loyal to a defensive alliance means-as Mr. Wilson has recently discovered at the cost of his reputation--doing just about what the most determined member of the group insists upon. The result is a set of rival diplomatic groups, each arming for its own defensive purposes and each intriguing for a good start in the next war.

This alliance is Mr. Wilson's farewell kiss to the league already shattered into a mere holy alliance by the exclusion of over half the world and by the writing of a peace that condemns Europe to a generation of violence and intrigue. It is a public and formal confession that a Europe has been organized so profoundly insecure, so fatally destructive, so lastingly divided that only by a new balancing of

power can the thing be even temporarily maintained. Generous and trusting the American people usually are in their foreign relations, but fools they are not, and fools they would be if they permitted themselves now to be embroiled in a system of European alliances.

THE COVENANT NOW.

What then of the league itself, stripped of the alliances? It will come before the Senate a part of the treaty of peace, and the theory of Mr. Wilson's political strategy is that since the league and the treaty are indissolubly joined they must be accepted or rejected together. But what in all honesty was the assumption upon which this plan-always high handed in its conception-was predicated? It was that the world order established by the treaty would have a clear moral title in the conscience of mankind.

If it be indeed and in truth the common object of the governments associated against Germany, and of the nations whom they govern, as I believe it to be, to achieve by the coming settlements a secure and lasting peace, it will be necessary that all who sit down at the peace table shall come ready and willing to pay the price, the only price that will procure it. That price is impartial justice in every item of the settlement, no matter whose interest is crossed; and not only impartial justice but also the satisfaction of the several peoples whose fortunes are dealt with.

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Now, if this meant anything at all, it meant from the point of view of the American people, that they would be asked to guarantee only such a world situation as had within it the probability of peace and continuity. The plain promise, implied in all the President's utterances, was that a peace could be written, not 100 per cent perfect, of course, but good enough to involve no extraordinarily great risks. The assumption was that the lesson of the congress of Vienna and the congress of Berlin had been learned, and that the resulting peace would exhibit the victors in a new rôle, the rôle of men who use their power to dictate a settlement that promises to endure because it is so clearly just. With such a settlement it was legitimate, and in our opinion highly desirable to associate America completely.

But what has actually happened at Paris is that a treaty has been written which even the authors know can last only by the most extreme and continued use of force. It was assumed that America would have to guarantee a settlement in which the probability was peace. America is confronted with a settlement in which every probability points to class struggles, hostile alliances, and many wars. We were promised a peace that was intrinsically stable, we are getting a peace that is intrinsically unstable. We were asked to guarantee a peace that would probably last. We are confronted with a peace that almost certainly can not last. Because the premise is new, the old conclusion no longer holds.

It was, perhaps, fair to say that having accepted the President's speeches as American official policy, the Senate was bound in honor to ratify. But since the President himself has plainly, unmistakably failed to carry his program, since all the assumptions on which he acted and spoke are shattered, the Senate and the American people are released from the obligation to ratify without amendment. It is a new situation requiring new judgments and new decisions. That new situation briefly stated is this: America through its President

promised to underwrite a stable peace. The peace is unstable. Shall it underwrite this unstable peace?

Newspapers like the World, the New York Evening Post, and journals like the Review realizing the dangers of the settlement put their trust in the power of the league of nations to right wrongs and readjust matters. Their position, and it seems also to be the President's, is this: Concentrate your attention on the league not on the settlement, for the league is a permanent instrument of justice and accommodation. This is plausible. But is it sound?

For those who look not at the words of the covenant but at the grouping of forces behind it certain conclusions are unavoidable. The treaty of Versailles makes the British Empire supreme in Africa, the Near East, the Mediterranean, and in all the waters of Europe and Asia. This supremacy rests on unlimited sea power, on the control of key industries and key materials, on gigantic blocks of territory, and finally on the special economic arrangements of the treaty. These arrangements provide two things which must be noticed: First, they destroy the basis of German commercial power now, and they give to England the unquestionable power to determine how and whether German industry shall recuperate. The treaty, in other words, establishes a situation in which the unconditional surrender of German militarism is accompanied by the unconditional surrender of German commerce. But German commerce surrenders not to the league but to English industry. Germany loses her economic independence to her greatest competitor. The second thing the treaty does is to give France an elastic claim on the surplus of whatever industrial life England allows Germany to have. Admittedly this is not a great deal. In addition the treaty gives to France the possibility of an industrial life of her own by giving her the chief continental mineral supply. Whether France will use the minerals to build up industry and take Germany's place as the competitor of British trade, or whether, acting on ingrained habits, she will prefer to live on the royalties is a question of the future. But one thing is clear the treaty gives France this economic power, and it gives her also the political supremacy of the Continent. Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, German Austria, and in large measure Jugoslavia are satellites in the orbit of French diplomatic influence. And France avowedly intends to use every bit of prestige, financial and military force she possesses to build up this "barrier" of new States and to act as the leader of them. It is a new Middle Europe, now under French rather than under German influence.

But this new French Middle Europe is not an end in itself. It faces both Germany and Russia, and it faces them in a hostile spirit. Its object in regard to Germany is to keep the German nation permanently divided and prostrate. Its object in regard to Russia is to validate French finance, and if possible either to restore something closely resembling the old régime or to dismember Russia by splitting off fragments like Siberia, the Ukraine, and the Don regions. This is not the whole of France's diplomatic policy. She possesses, in certain very influential circles, men who believe in the destiny of Latin civilization in the Mediterranean. Behind them stand powerful syndicates and commercial influences with far-reaching plans in northern Africa, Armenia, Constantinople, Syria defined in the largest sense,

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and in the new Arabian Kingdom of the Hediaz. And overseas lie the French possessions and the French stake in China.

Of these matters it has not been expedient to talk during the course of the war, but they have played a mighty rôle in the conduct of the war and the history of the peace conference. No end of bargains, secret engagements, and what not have been involved in the business of establishing this immense empire. But this empire, unlike the British and like the German, rests not on sea power but on land power and finance. Every really informed observer in Paris knows how the plans for it have grown in scope since the armistice. In part, it represents, no doubt, the exaltation of victory; in part an attempt to recoup the losses of the war, but fundamentally it is a culmination of what already existed before the war. That was the habit of using French savings in adventurous investments for the purpose of extending the area of investments, so that more savings could be engaged abroad. Every American soldier returning from France has seen the results in the condition of the ports, the railroads, and public works. France's domestic life was impoverished and weakened because capital was sucked out of France by the Parisian bankers and invested not in productive enterprise at home but in semidiplomatic schemes in all parts of the earth. And their entanglements meant that France was instantly threatened by trouble anywhere.

Germany was, of course, the great threat, but the hairbreadth escape of war with Great Britain in 1898 indicates the variety of perils amidst which France lived. Now, the plain truth of the matter is that France is not strong enough, has not the population, the resources, or the technical organizations to play the role of the second empire in the world. No matter how much Germany is weakened, France will never be secure as long as she insists on playing the part of a first-class empire with the intrinsic power of a second-class State. But this is just what France proposes to do. With the help of the league and the special alliance, with the exercise of her influence in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere she is about to engage in a policy of diplomatic hostility to the two most numerous and dangerous populations in Europe, the Russian and the German. Not only that; she has estranged Italy, and Italy is virtually isolated. She has a conflict with Spain in Africa, and no small difficulty with Great Britain in Asia Minor. To manage this top-heavy policy she is compelled to keep Germany so hopelessly down that no new combination against her can be formed with Germany as a partner. She is compelled to support the Poles in all of M. Dmowski's wildest plans and to give Japan anything she asks in the Far East. But in keeping Germany prostrate France destroys the source of her much-needed reparation and consequently undermines her own internal stability. If history teaches anything it is that a nation in that state is driven further and further along the path of foreign adventure. It was a somewhat similar misreading of the possibilities and her destiny which after 40 years led Germany to disaster.

Upon this seething insecurity the league is constructed, and the league is the big five. It is designed to regulate the affairs of Europe and Asia. Let us begin with Asia. There a condition has been created, as a result of the surrender at Shantung, the danger and

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