I know it will be said that although the boundaries of Germany were to end at the Rhine, the province on the left bank was not to be annexed, but to be reconstituted into an "independent" republic. What manner of independence and what kind of republic? All German officers were to be expelled; it was to be detached by special provision from the economic life of Germany upon which it is almost entirely dependent for its existence. It was not to be allowed to associate with the fatherland.
The Rhine which divided the new territory from Germany was to be occupied in the main by French troops: the territories of the independent republic were to be occupied by foreign soldiers. Its young men were to be conscripted and trained with a view to absorbing them into French and Belgian armies to fight against their own countrymen on the other side of the Rhine. The whole conditions of life in the "free and independent republic" were to be dictated by an "accord" between France, Luxemburg and Belgium, and, in the words of Marshal Foch, "Britain would be ultimately brought in."
But I am told that these proposals did not mean annexation. Then what else did they mean? You do not swallow the oyster. You only first give it an independent existence by detaching it from its hard surroundings. You then surround it on all sides and absorb it into your own system to equip you with added strength to prey on other oysters! What independence! And what a republic! It would have been and was intended to be a sham republic. Had the plan been adopted it would have been a blunder and a crime, for which not France alone but the world would later on have paid the penalty.
In the face of these quotations and of these undoubted facts, can any one say that I calumniated France when I said there was a powerful party in that country which claimed that the Rhine should be treated as the natural barrier of Germany, and that the Peace treaty should be based upon that assumption?
Let it be observed that I never stated that this claim had the support of the French democracy. The fact that the treaty, which did not realise that objective, secured ratification by an overwhelming majority in the French parliament and subsequently by an emphatic verdict in the country, demonstrates clearly that the French people as a whole shrank with their invincible good sense from following even a lead they admired on to this path of future disaster. But the mere fact that there are potent influences in France that still press this demand, and take advantage of every disappointment to urge it forward, calls for unremitting vigilance amongst all peoples who have the welfare of humanity at heart.
