For, owing to the intercession of her powerful friends, she was treated with a degree of indulgence which, although expected by all who were initiated into the secrets of “open diplomacy,” scandalized those who were anxious that at least some simulacrum of justice should be maintained.  Germany was forced to sign a blank check which her enemies will one day fill in.  Austria was reduced to the status of a parasite living on the bounty of the Great Powers and denied the right of self-determination.  Even France, exhausted by five years’ superhuman efforts, beholds with alarm her financial future entirely dependent upon the ability or inability of Germany to pay the damages to which she was condemned.

But the Prussia of the Balkans, owing to the intercession of influential anonymous friends, had no such consequences to deplore.  Although she contracted heavy debts toward Germany, she was relieved of the effort to pay them.  Her financial obligations were first transferred[333] to the Allies and then magnanimously wiped out by these, who then limited all her liabilities for reparations to two and a quarter milliard francs.  An Inter-Allied commission in Sofia is to find and return the loot to its lawful owners, but it is to charge no indemnity for the damage done.  Nor will it contain representatives of the states whose property the Bulgars abstracted.  Serbia is allowed neither indemnity nor reparation.  She is to receive a share which the Treaty neglected to fix of the two and a quarter milliard francs on a date which has also been left undetermined.  She is not even to get back the herds of cattle of which the Bulgars robbed her.  The lawgivers in Paris considered that justice would be met by obliging the Bulgars to restore 28,000 head of cattle in lieu of the 3,200,000 driven off, so that even if the ill-starred Serbs should identify, say, one million more, they would have no right to enforce their claim.[334]

Nor is that the only disconcerting detail in the Treaty.  The Supreme Council, which sanctioned the military occupation of a part of Germany as a guaranty for the fulfilment of the peace conditions, dispenses Bulgaria from any such irksome conditions.  Bulgaria’s good faith appeared sufficient to the politicians who drafted the instrument.  “For reasons which one hardly dares touch upon,” writes an eminent French publicist,[335] “several of the Powers that constitute the famous world areopagus count on the future co-operation of Bulgaria.  We shrink in dismay from the perspective thus opened to our gaze."[336]

The territorial changes which the Prussia of the Balkans was condemned to undergo are neither very considerable nor unjust.  Rumania receives no Bulgarian territory, the frontiers of 1913 remaining unaltered.  Serbia nets some on grounds which cannot be called in question, and a large part of Thrace which is inhabited, not by Bulgars, but mainly by Greeks and Turks, was taken from Bulgaria, but allotted to no state in particular.