It was surely the least propitious place in the whole world for the making of a world peace in 1919. It was inevitable that there the Rhine frontier should loom larger than all Asia and that the German people should be kept waiting outside to learn what vindictive punishment victorious France designed for them.
The Peace of Versailles was not a settlement of the world, it was the crowning of the French revanche. And since Russia had always been below the horizon of Versailles it was as inevitable that the Russian people, who had saved France from utter defeat in 1914, who had given far more dead to the war than France and America put together, and who had collapsed at last, utterly exhausted by their stupendous war efforts, should be considered merely as the defaulting debtors of France. Their Government had incurred vast liabilities chiefly in preparation for this very war which had restored France to her former glorious ascendancy over Germany. And now a new, ungracious Government in Russia not only declared it could not pay up but refused to pretend that it had ever meant to perform this impossible feat. There could be no dealing with such a Government. The German people and the Russian people alike had no voice at Versailles, and the affairs of the world were settled with a majestic disregard of these outcast and fallen powers.
They were settled so magnificently and badly that now the Washington Conference, whatever limitations it may propose to set upon itself, has in effect to review and, if it can, mend or replace that appalling settlement. The Washington conference has practically to revise the verdicts of Versailles, in a fresher air and with a wider outlook.
I do not know how near future historians may come to saying that the Washington conference was planned in imitation of that Versailles conference, but it certainly does start out with one most unfortunate resemblance. There seems to be the same tacit assumption that it is possible to come to some permanent settlement of the world’s affairs with no representation of either the German or the Russian people at the conference. The Japanese, the Italians, the French, the Americans and the British, assisted by modest suggestions from such small sections of humanity as China and Spanish America, are sitting down to arrangements that will amount practically to a settlement of the world’s affairs, and they are doing so without consulting these two great peoples, and quite without their consent and assistance. This surely runs counter to the fundamental principle of both American and British political life—that is to say, the principle of government with the consent of the governed—and it is indeed an altogether deplorable intention. In some form these two great peoples will have to be associated with any permanent settlement, and it will be much more difficult to secure their assent to any arrangement arrived at without even their formal co-operation.