1 want, in the first place, to say a word about the Treaty of Versailles. It has become the fashion—Dr. Goebbels has made it the fashion to attribute every evil to that unfortunate treaty, said the Marquess of Lothian, British Ambassador to United States, to the New York Pilgrims' Society. There were certain defects enough in it. But it is absurd to attribute all our troubles to it. A very distinguished German democrat some time ago said that the rise of National Socialism was due 30 per cent. to the Treaty of Versailles, 30 per cent. to the inexperience of Germany in democracy and 30 Der cent. to the great depression, which began in 1929. I would put it somewhat differently. Hitlerism is the child of Bolshevism out of universal economic nationalism.
But do not let us lose sight of the ideals Which moved us in those remarkable days from 1914 to 1920. We then entered an epoch in Which an old world began to die and a new world: began to be born. Before 1914 international relations were governed by the old diplomacy. It was regarded as natural and right that every nation should think only of its own. interests, and should feel no responsibility for any one else. But in 1914 the democracies, Which had previously concerned themselves almost entirely with their internal affairs, began to take charge of international relations. Democracy, by the law of its being, inevitably gives its allegiance not to dreams of power but to moral ideals. It may not always live up to these ideals. It certainly does not, But they are the stars by which it guides its life, And so, immediately after the democracies became actively concerned with international affairs they proclaimed their own ideals about them.
Mankind is a community. War is fratricide. Nations as well as individuals have the right to life, liberty and happiness. Backward people have the right to security against exploitation and to be guided towards self-government. The status of all nations, great and small, should be equal before the law. And the establishment of a true reign of law between the nations is the only remedy for war. Those were the ideals which underlay the war and the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. They are, I believe, eternally true. And they were expressed with immortal eloquence by President Wilson, But the democracies had not thought out what the establishment of this new world implied. They did not realize that the new world was incompatible with universal national sover-eighty or with many other features of the old order.
Not Only Reason Why War Has Returned That is not the only reason, but it is one reason why the war has returned; and why it is still in doubt whether the break-up of the old order is going to end in a new advance to freedom or another plunge back towards barbarism.
But the victorious democracies in 1919 in the Versailles Treaty, did apply their principles to the territorial settlement of Europe. They did give every nation the right to separate autonomous existence, and they did try to give protection to minorities, and they did set up the mandate system to give protection to backward peoples. The number of free nations in Europe rose from seventeen to 26, including the terribly-delayed freedom of Ireland. People criticize the frontiers drawn at Paris, Admittedly some of them were not very good. But at the worst they were only a few miles wrong. What Herr Hitler is challenging at bottom is not the frontiers made at Versailles but the whole democratic conception of international life. His remedy for frontier mistakes is not to correct them but to annihilate Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland by violence, in order to establish a Nazi empire controlled by a secret police, which destroys not only national but individual freedom within it, and gives minorities no rights at all.
So I beg you not to be misled by this ceaseless attack upon the Treaty of Versailles. The greatest mistakes made at the peace conference were not political but economic. Few people seemed to realize the inevitable consequence of d ing Europe, or, for that matter, the world, into water tight economic compartments and then of imposing on these states fantastic reparations and other forms of intergovernmental indebtedness which it was quite impossible to pay across these economic frontiers, without disaster for all,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.