Some Problems of the Peace Conference
by . Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1920. 8vo, xii+370 pp. $3.00.
PROFESSOR HASKINS was a member of the committee of three which drafted the treaty clauses on Alsace-Lorraine and the Saar Valley; and Professor Lord served at Paris as American adviser on Poland, and as head of the American Section of the Allied mission to that country. Both authors were therefore associated with the Peace Conference in capacities which qualify them to write with an intimate knowledge of its procedure and of the arguments and objects which determined its decisions. Naturally, they view the work of that body from the standpoint of insiders, and their book is in a way an apologia for its labors. But they write in an explanatory rather than a controversial spirit, and they have produced one of the most illuminating accounts yet published of the way the Treaty was drafted and of the whys and wherefores of many of its provisions.
The book is substantially a reprint of the Lowell Lectures delivered by the authors last winter, and is both scholarly and popular. A reader of average intelligence will not find a dry page in it, and yet it will satisfy within its scope the more exacting student. Each of the eight chapters, dealing with ‘The Tasks and Methods of the Conference’ and with the seven principal problem areas of Europe over which the Conference assumed jurisdiction, is followed by a bibliographical note, and the geographical chapters are accompanied by outline reference maps. The volume is well indexed.
The subject matter, as we have just suggested, is limited to Europe. Since Russia was not before the Conference for settlement, that country is omitted. The Near East and the Far East, Armenia and Shantung, are not discussed. There is nothing about colonial mandates. The League of Nations Covenant is not described or debated, although, in speaking of the time required to complete the Treaty, Professor Haskins says, ‘ At every turn the problem of the League of Nations obtruded itself, and the elaboration of the plan for a League facilitated, instead of hindering, the work of the Conference.’
The two points at which the book is strongest are its lucid summarizing of territoria questions under their historical aspects, and its matter-offact but nevertheless much needed picture of the working methods of the Conference itself. It tends to correct a common misapprehension that the American advisers served mainly to adorn the entourage of their chief. It cites the existence of records which will enable a future fairly complete history of even the confidential proceedings at Paris to be written, and seem to qualify considerably the alleged secrecy of the diplomacy which prevailed there.
Students accustomed to read history through economic spectacles may feel that the book, like the Treaty itself, has undervalued the most important single factor in the peace problem. Our modern society of nations is essentially a product of economic forces, which brush aside indifferently obstacles that traverse their path. If the Treaty has broken down at many points, — as the present verdict of Europe affirms, — it is due to other causes besides America’s withdrawal.
V. S. C.