The stipulation for which the first British delegate toiled thus laboriously was that within a fortnight after the ratification of the Treaty the German and Polish forces should evacuate the districts in which the plebiscite was to be held, that the Workmen’s Councils there should be dissolved, and that the League of Nations should take over the government of the district so as to allow the population to give full expression to its will.  But the League of Nations did not exist and could not be constituted for a considerable time.  It was therefore decided[131] that some temporary substitute for the League should be formed at once, and the Supreme Council decided that Inter-Allied troops should occupy the districts.  That was the first instalment of the price to be paid for the British Premier’s tenderness for plebiscites, which the expert commissions deprecated as unnecessary, and which, as events proved in this case, were harmful.

In the meanwhile Bolshevist—­some said German—­agents were stirring up the population by suasion and by terrorism until it finally began to ferment.  Thousands of working-men responded to the goad, “turned down” their tools and ceased work.  Thereupon the coal-fields of Upper Silesia, the production of which had already dropped by 50 per cent, since the preceding November, ceased to produce anything.  This consummation grieved the Supreme Council, which turned for help to the Inter-Allied armies.  For the Silesian coal-fields represented about one-third of Germany’s production, and both France and Italy were looking to Germany for part of their fuel-supply.  The French press pertinently asked whether it would not have been cheaper, safer, and more efficacious to have forgone the plebiscite and relied on the Polish troops from the outset.[132] For, however ideal the intentions of Mr. Lloyd George may have been, the net result of his insistence on a plebiscite was to enable an ex-newspaper vender named Hoersing, who had undertaken to prevent the detachment of Upper Silesia from Germany, to set his machinery for agitation in motion and cause general unrest in the Silesian and Dombrova coal-mining districts.  When the strike was declared the workmen, who are Poles to a man, rejected all suggestions that they should refer their grievances to arbitration courts.  For these tribunals were conducted by Germans.  The consequence of Mr. Lloyd George’s spirited intervention was, in the words of an unbiased observer, to “raise the specters of starvation, freezing and Bolshevism in eastern Europe” during the ensuing winter—­a heavy price to pay for pedantic adherence to the letter of an irrelevant ordinance, at a moment when the spirit of basic principles was being allowed to evaporate.