One of the statesmen of eastern Europe made a forcible appeal to have the minority clauses withdrawn.  He took the ground that the principal aim pursued in conferring full rights on the Jews who dwell among us is to remove the obstacles that prevent them from becoming true and loyal citizens of the state, as their kindred are in France, Italy, Britain, and elsewhere.  “If it is reasonable,” he said, “that they should demand all the rights possessed by their Rumanian and Polish fellow-subjects, it is equally fair that they should take over and fulfil the correlate duties, as does the remainder of the population.  For the gradual assimilation of all the ethnic elements of the community is our ideal, as it is the ideal of the French, English, Italian, and other states.

“Isolation and particularism are the negative of that ideal, and operate like a piece of iron or wood in the human body which produces ulceration and gangrene.  All our institutions should therefore be calculated to encourage assimilation.  If we adopt the opposite policy, we inevitably alienate the privileged from the unprivileged sections of the community, generate enmity between them, cause endless worries to the administration and paralyze in advance our best-intentioned endeavors to fuse the various ethnic ingredients of the nation into a homogeneous whole.

“This argument applies as fully to the other national fragments in our midst as to the Jews.  It is manifest, therefore, that the one certain result of the minority clause will be to impose domestic enemies on each of the states that submits to it, and that it can commend itself only to those who approve the maxim, Divide et impera.

“It also entails the noteworthy diminution of the sovereignty of the state.  We are to be liable to be haled before a foreign tribunal whenever one of our minorities formulates a complaint against us.[366] How easily, nay, how wickedly such complaints were filed of late may be inferred from the heartrending accounts of pogroms in Poland, which have since been shown by the Allies’ own confidential envoys to be utterly fictitious.  Again, with whom are we to make the obnoxious stipulations?  With the League of Nations?  No.  We are to bind ourselves toward the Great Powers, who themselves have their minorities which complain in vain of being continually coerced.  Ireland, Egypt, and the negroes are three striking examples.  None of their delegates were admitted to the Conference.  If the principle which those Great Powers seek to enforce be worth anything, it should be applied indiscriminately to all minorities, not restricted to those of the smaller states, who already have difficulties enough to contend against.”