The noble writer frankly admits that the conferences revolved around the secret treaties among the Allies instead of the Fourteen Points. He reports:
“We already know there were three secret treaties made during the war and to all of which Great Britain was a party; (1) conceding to Italy the Dalmatian coast in return for her help, (2) the concession of the former German islands in the North Pacific to Japan, (3) the promise of Damascus to the King of Hedjaz.”
Again he says: “Japan is in possession of the Marshall and Caroline groups of islands in the Pacific, and has a document signed by both France and Britain that she shall retain them.”
So much for “open covenants openly arrived at,” though they do not cover all the secret pacts which determined the conditions of peace.
Only once Mr. Wilson rose to the importance of his mission, when he declared that Fiume must go to the Jugo-Slav Republic. His announcement was soon followed by an invasion of Fiume under d’Annunzio, the Italian poet-patriot, with the apparent secret connivance of our associates in the war.
At the peace conference, when it was Germany’s turn to be heard, it was decided that the interests of all concerned were best served by precluding any discussion, and the German delegates, with revolution and starvation in their back, and with arms wrested from their hands by a promise, were left no alternative but to affix their signatures to the most violent peace treaty ever consummated. The commission, headed by Brockdorf-Rantzau and Scheidemann, resigned rather than sign, and a new delegation was named, which signed the treaty without being given an opportunity to discuss it. In the streets the German delegates were stoned.
Thus was realized the golden promise held out in the speech Mr. Wilson made on the very day that Congress met to declare war:
“=We have no quarrel with the German people. We have no feeling toward them but one of sympathy and friendship.= It was not upon their impulse that their government acted in entering the war. It was not with their previous knowledge or approval. It was a war determined upon as wars used to be determined upon in the old unhappy days when people were nowhere consulted by their rulers and wars were provoked and waged in the interests of dynasties or of little groups of ambitious men who were accustomed to use their fellow men as pawns and tools.”