The upshot of the Treaty, as it appeared to most of the leading publicists on the Continent of Europe, was to leave Bulgaria, whose cruelty and destructiveness are described by official and unofficial reports as unparalleled, in a position of economic superiority to Serbia, Greece, and Rumania.  And in the Inter-Allied commission Bulgaria is to have a representative, while Serbia, Greece, and Rumania, a part of whose stolen property the commission has to recover, will have none.

A comparison between the indulgence lavished upon Bulgaria and the severity displayed toward Rumania is calculated to disconcert the stanchest friends of the Supreme Council.  The Rumanian government, in a dignified note to the Conference, explained its refusal to sign the Treaty with Austria by enumerating a series of facts which amount to a scathing condemnation of the work of the Supreme Council.  On the one hand the Council pleaded the engagements entered into between Japan and her European allies as a cogent motive for handing over Shantung to Japan.  For treaties must be respected.  And the argument is sound.  On the other hand, they were bound by a similar treaty[337] to give Rumania the whole Banat, the Rumanian districts of Hungary and the Bukovina as far as the river Pruth.  But at the Conference they repudiated this engagement.  In 1916 they stipulated that if Rumania entered the war they would co-operate with ample military forces.  They failed to redeem their promise.  And they further undertook that “Rumania shall have the same rights as the Allies in the peace preliminaries and negotiations and also in discussing the issues which shall be laid before the Peace Conference for its decisions.”  Yet, as we saw, she was denied these rights, and her delegates were not informed of the subjects under discussion nor allowed to see the terms of peace, which were in the hands of the enemies, and were only twice admitted to the presence of the Supreme Council.

It has been observed in various countries and by the Allied and the neutral press that between the German view about the sacredness of treaties and that of the Supreme Council there is no substantial difference.[338] Comments of this nature are all the more distressing that they cannot be thrust aside as calumnious.  Again it will not be denied that Rumania rendered inestimable services to the Allies.  She sacrificed three hundred thousand of her sons to their cause.  Her soil was invaded and her property stolen or ruined.  Yet she has been deprived of part of her sovereignty by the Allies to whom she gave this help.  The Supreme Council, not content with her law conferring equal rights on all her citizens, to whatever race or religion they may belong, ordered her to submit to the direction of a foreign board in everything concerning her minorities and demanded from her a promise of obedience in advance to their future decrees respecting her policy in matters of international trade and transit.  These stipulations constitute a noteworthy curtailment of her sovereignty.