The Truth About the Peace Treaties. Vol. II. By David
Lloyd George. (Gollancz. 18s.)
THE PEACE TREATIES AND AFTER
The Truth About the Peace Treaties. Vol. II. By David Lloyd George. (Gollancz. 18s.)
MR. LLOYD GEORGE, having dealt in his first volume on the Peace Treaties with the settlement with Germany, might be thought to have left himself only subsidiary matter to fill his second. That is far from the fact. Concerned as it is with the Italian demand for Fiume, the rival claims of the Czechoslovaks on one hand and the Austrian-Germans and Hungarians on the other, and the whole Palestine question, the second volume is of considerably greater contemporary interest than the first.
The Fiume controversy, with which the Peace Conference rang through half April of 1919, seems an old story now, but Mr. Lloyd George has proved that it is abundantly worth retelling. He makes no bones about Italy's motives in entering the war. The Allied Powers were able, at some sacrifice of ethnological and other principles dear to themselves and President Wilson, to outbid Austria, and Italy accordingly came into the war on their side for what she could get. That being so, and the Conference minutes having mentioned (in 1917) that " the Prime Minister pointed out that Italy's effort was practically confined to a defence of her frontier against greatly inferior enemy forces," it is a little surprising to find the ex- Prime Minister turned author recording with some rotundity that " war was declared, and before it was over Italy had sent millions of her best young men into the battlefield, where they acquitted themselves with a valour and skill which added distinction to the annals of a people whose courage and capacity once upon a time acquired and directed a World Empire." But no doubt the two sentiments can be reconciled on the " lions led by asses " theory.
Anyhow, the whole story of Italy's claims to territory under the London Treaty in defiance of ethnology and to Fiume on grounds (quite unsound) of ethnology ; of President Wilson's adamantine opposition and his unfortunate appeal to the Italian people over the heads of their leaders ; of the with- drawal of Orlando and Sonnino from the Peace Conference, followed by their hasty return—the whole story is entertainingly retold with the assistance of copious quotations from the Peace Conference minutes, including (happily) the passage in which Sonnino exclaimed bitterly that " because America had given in in the case of France and Great Britain, because she had been immoral here, she tried to re-establish her virginity at the expense of Italy." All Mr. Lloyd George seems to have omitted are Signor Orlando's tears, indisputably historic though they were
Most of the Italian controversy belongs to the past now. The same, unhappily, is not to be said of the Palestine con- troversy. In the Peace Conference days there was real hope of the United States accepting the mandate, and such con- sultation of the inhabitants as there was indicated a clear preference for America, and failing that for Great Britain. Mr. Lloyd George quotes some pertinent passages from the report of what he describes as " an American Commission," presumably the King-Crane Commission, which visited Syria and Palestine while the Conference was sitting, and which after full investigation " felt bound to recommend that only a greatly reduced Zionist programme be attempted by the Peace Conference, and even that only very gradually initiated." The wisdom of such counsel is patent in view of the observations Dr. Weizmann had just made to the Supreme Council, to the effect that the Zionist Organisation wanted " merely " to establish in Palestine under a Mandatory Power an adminis- tration "which would render it possible to send into Palestine yo,000 to 8o,000 Jews annually " ; and to " make Palestine as Jewish as America is American or England English ; S3 that "later on, when the Jews formed the large majority, they would be ripe to establish such a government as would answer to the state of the development of the country and to their ideals." Zionist views on the absorptive capacity of the COIL try were fortified by the interesting remark that the populatfcn in the days Of Christ amounted to four millions.
But the most important part of Mr. Lloyd George's book is the closing chapter, in which he ends his second volume as he began his first, by claiming with considerable justice that the Peace Treaties as a whole did in the main accord with the war-aims of the Allied Powers as proclaimed repeatedly during the War. (It is pertinent, in that con- nexion, to recall that the German Treaty alone was negotiated on the basis of the Fourteen Points.) Being convinced that the era of great men closed with Clemenceau, President Wilson, himself and one or two others, he ascribes the break- down of the Treaties, in spite of their authorship, to " the miscellaneous and unimpressive array of second-rate statesmen who have handled them for the past fifteen years." There is no doubt something in that. There is more in the claim that no Peace ever signed emancipated as many, subject races ; and it is equally true that the foundations for real disarmament were laid at Paris and that the responsibility for the disastrous failure to achieve that indispensable reform lies at the door of the successors of the men who made the peace.
At one point Mr. Lloyd George is both inaccurate and un-
fair. Among the beneficial provisions of the Treaties he includes " the conferring upon the League of Nations of full powers to revise any part of the Treaties where experience revealed that it was unjust or unworkable."
No such power, full or restricted, was conferred on the League of Nations, and Mr. Lloyd George must have read the Covenant with strange spectacles if he thinks it was. All the well-known Article XIX provides is that the Assembly may from time to time " advise the reconsideration " of treaties by the parties concerned. It can by the nature of things have no power to impose revision till the States of the world are ready to form a federation. And that prospect seems considerably more distant today than in 1919.
Altogether, this volume makes a peculiarly timely appear- ance, for there is hardly a controversy agitating Europe east of the Rhine today on which it does not shed indispensable
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