“France remains the strongest Power on the Continent.  With her military establishment intact she faces a Germany without a general staff, without conscription, without universal military training, with a strictly limited amount of light artillery, with no air service, no fleet, with no domestic basis in raw materials for armament manufacture, with her whole western border fifty kilometers east of the Rhine demilitarized.  On top of this France has a system of military alliances with the new states that touch Germany.  On top of this she secured permanent representation in the Council of the League, from which Germany is excluded.  On top of that economic terms which, while they cannot be fulfilled, do cripple the industrial life of her neighbor.  With such a balance of forces France demands for herself a form of protection which neither Belgium, nor Poland, nor Czechoslovakia, nor Italy is granted.”

FOOTNOTES: 

[326] One of the three districts of Schleswig.  A curious phenomenon was this zeal of the Supreme Council for Denmark’s interests, as compared with Denmark’s refusal to profit by it, the champions of self-determination urging the Danes to demand a district, as Danish, which the Danes knew to be German!

[327] Das Berliner Tageblatt, June 4, 1919.

[328] Le Journal de Geneve, June 24, 1919.

[329] Cf. L’Echo de Paris, May 12, 1919.

[330] Ibidem.

[331] In a monograph entitled Plus Jamais.

[332] Cf. The New Republic, August 13, 1919, p. 43.

XV

THE TREATY WITH BULGARIA

Among all the strange products of the many-sided outbursts of the leading delegates’ reconstructive activity, the Treaty with Bulgaria stands out in bold relief.  It reveals the high-water mark reached by those secret, elusive, and decisive influences which swayed so many of the mysterious decisions adopted by the Conference.  As Bulgaria disposed of an abundant source of those influences, her chastisement partakes of some of the characteristics of a reward.  Not only did she not fare as the treacherous enemy that she showed herself, but she emerged from the ordeal much better off than several of the victorious states.  Unlike Serbia, Rumania, France, and Belgium, she escaped the horrors of a foreign invasion and she possessed and fructified all her resources down to the day when the armistice was concluded.  Her peasant population made huge profits during the campaign and her armies despoiled Serbia, Rumania, and Greek Macedonia and sent home enormous booty.  In a word, she is richer and more prosperous than before she entered the arena against her protectors and former allies.