“It is comprehensible that M. Bratiano should have refused to accept in advance the conditions which the Four or the Five may dictate in favor of ethnic and religious minorities.  Rumania before the war was a free country governed congruously with the most modern principles.  The restrictions which she had enacted respecting foreigners in general, and which were on the point of being repealed, did not exceed those which the United States and the Dominion of Australia still apply with remarkable tenacity.  Why should the Cabinets of London and Washington take so much to heart the lot of ethnic and religious minorities in certain European countries while they themselves refuse to admit in the Covenant of the Society of Nations the principle of the equality of races?  Their conduct is awakening among the states ’whose interests are limited’ the belief that they are the victims of an arbitrary policy.  And that is not without danger."[369]

Another eminent Frenchman, M. Denis Cochin, who until quite recently was a Cabinet Minister, wrote:  “The Conference, by imposing laws in favor of minorities, has uselessly and unjustly offended our allies.  These laws oblige them to respect the usages of the Jews, to maintain schools for them....  I have spent a large part of my career in demanding for French Catholics exactly that which the Conference imposes elsewhere.  The Catholics pay taxes in money and taxes in blood.  And yet there is no budget for those schools in which their religion is taught; no liberty for those schoolmasters who wear the ecclesiastical habit.  I have seen a doctor in letters, fellow of the university, driven from his class because he was a Marist brother and did not choose to repudiate the vocation of his youth.  He died of grief.  I have seen young priests, after the long, laborious preparation necessary before they could take part in the competition for a university fellowship, thrust aside at the last moment and debarred from the competition because they wore the garb of priests.  Yet a year later they were soldiers.  I have seen Father Schell presented unanimously by the Institute and the Professional Corps as worthy to receive a chair at the College de France, and refused by the Minister.  Yet I hereby affirm that if foreigners, even though they were allies, even friends, were to meddle with imposing on us the abrogation of these iniquitous laws, my protest would be uplifted against them, together with that of M. Combes.[370] I would exclaim, like Sganarelle’s wife, ‘And what if I wish to be beaten?’ I hold tyranny in horror, but I hold foreign intervention in greater horror still.  Let us combat bad laws with all our strength, but among ourselves."[371]

The minority treaties tend to transform each of the states on which it is imposed into a miniature Balkans, to keep Europe in continuous turmoil and hinder the growth of the new and creative ideas from which alone one could expect that union of collective energy with individual freedom which is essential to peace and progress.  Modern history affords no more striking example of the force of abstract bias over the teachings of experience than this amateur legislation which is scattering seeds of mischief and conflict throughout Europe.