You would have a better idea of the difference between German-Austria and the old Austrian Empire if you had visited Dr. Hartmann, the representative of German-Austria in the old Austrian Embassy in Berlin. There, in a palladian palace that was once a centre of the peculiar blend of courtly brilliance and corrupt brutality with which the Austrian Empire kept itself going, you found a modest rather melancholy don and a young secretary; looking like lost souls of a national democracy buried in the sarcophagus of imperialist diplomacy. But after a few minutes' talk you also found that these mild-mannered men represented that force that broke to fragments the Iron Crown of the House of Habsburg, and that will break its way to Union over the paper barricade of the Hall of Mirrors.
There is, indeed, nothing to be said for the insistence of the Supreme Council at Paris on delaying the union of Austro-Germany with Germany. The forcible splitting off of East Prussia and the subjection of millions of Germans to Polish, Tchecho-Slovak and Yugo-Slav governments, though indefensible in principle, may be defended by practical arguments--for instance that these German ports and lands are geographically essential to the new States, while their German population will be a valuable element in them. The assignment of the Tyrol to Italy may have a diplomatic defence as a design to falsify future relations between Germans and Italians, to the advantage of France and England. The acquisition of German Lorraine and the Saar valley by France may be explained by the policy of making France industrially independent of Germany and of preventing any future economic hegemony of Germany in Europe. An insistence on Austro-Germany entering the German Republic might have been explained as an attempt to save Germany from Bolshevism and Prussianism, and to keep it quiet. But an insistence on Austro-Germany remaining independent, with its corollary in the intrigues for a separate Rhine Republic, seem to me as diplomatically ill-considered as they are democratically ill-conceived. We intended a material injury to German nationalists, but we have only inflicted a mortal insult on the German nation.
The Treaty of Versailles has then no elements either of permanence or of peace; because it runs counter both to facts and to forces both in the region of national and in that of international relationships.