enough to steel her against the temptation to profit by the opportunity of joining together again what France had dissevered.  The League of Nations was to be based upon mutual confidence and good fellowship, yet one of its most powerful future members was so distrusted as to be declared permanently unworthy to possess any overseas colonies.  Germany’s territory in the Saar Valley is admittedly inhabited by Germans, yet for fifteen years there is to be a foreign administration there, and at the end of it the people are to be asked whether they would like to cut the bonds that link them with their own state and place themselves under French sway, so that a premium is offered for French immigration into the Saar Valley.

Those are a few of the consequences of the mixture of the two irreconcilable principles.

That Germany richly deserved her punishment cannot be gainsaid.  Her crime was without precedent.  Some of its most sinister consequences are irremediable.  Whole sections of her people are still unconscious not only of the magnitude, but of the criminal character, of their misdeeds.  None the less there is a future to be provided for, and one of the safest provisions is to influence the potential enemy’s will for evil if his power cannot be paralyzed.  And this the Treaty failed to do.

The Germans, when they learned the conditions, discussed them angrily, and the keynote was refusal to sign the document.  The financial clauses were stigmatized as masked slavery.  The press urged that during the war less than one-tenth of France’s territory had been occupied by their countrymen and that even of this only a fragment was in the zone of combat.  The entire wealth of France, they alleged, had been estimated before the war at from three hundred and fifty milliard to four hundred milliard francs, consequently for the devastated provinces hardly more than one-twentieth of that sum could fairly be demanded as reparation, whereas the claim set forth was incomparably more.  They objected to the loss of their colonies because the justification alleged—­that they were disqualified to administer them because of their former cruelties toward the natives—­was groundless, as the Allies themselves had admitted implicitly by offering them the right of pre-emption in the case of the Portuguese and other overseas possessions on the very eve of the war.

But the most telling objections turned upon the clauses that dealt with the Saar Valley.  Its population is entirely German, yet the treaty-makers provided for its occupation by the French for a term of fifteen years and its transference to them if, after that term, the German government was unable to pay a certain sum in gold for the coal mines it contained.  If that sum were not forthcoming the population and the district were to be handed over to France for all time, even though the former should vote unanimously for reunion with Germany.  Count Brockdorff-Rantzau remarked in his note on the Treaty “that in the