THE DESERT OF PEACE.

Kaipara and Waitemata Echo, 29 April 1920, Page 3

THE DESERT OF PEACE.

VERSAILLES TREATY

There is no book on the stall or shelf to-day states The Challenge (a Church of England Weekly, published at Home), that has so urgent a claim on our attention as Mr J. M. Keyne's Economic Consequences of the War. The author gives dispassionately and judically his account of what occurred at Paris last year. He had every opportunity in his official position to learn the truth, and now he speaks it with the boldness of the private citizen. It is a story infinitely sad for the Englishman to read. Those who shared with Mr Keynes the knowledge of the eddies and currents in the Peace Conference are for the most part fain to admit the accuracy of his statement. He sets forth briefly the Fourteen Points enumerated by President Wilson and reminds us that the Germans laid down their arms on the distinct understanding from the Allies that these should form the basis of Peace. He then shows with pitiless detail that we were party to a Peace enforced upon the enemy which bore no sort of re- \ lation to the conditions they had accepted in the field. We have taken advantage of a disarmed and defenceless enemy to exact terms which they could not gainsay. We forsook justice for revenge. Posterity may find an apologist for Mr Lloyd George. There is always a recurrent fashion in the drama to idealise j the weak tyrant, and history itself is susceptible to such tendencies. But no pleading can bind the historian who chooses to set the Fourteen Points, which were the tale of our proposals, against the Treaty of Versailles, which is the record of our performance. By this contract we stand condemned. We in turn have been faithless to a scrap of paper. The British Premier is depicted in Paris as an astute politician, profiting rather than endangering his interests by the clash between the well-inten-tioned Wilson and the polemic Clemenceau, with his ear to the ground to catch the party rumbles in England ; using his genius of intuition and compromise to find solutions which appeared to promise justice to Wilaon and revenge to Clemenceau, and at the same time to provide him with a specious party cry for his Government at home. What a sad representative of English statesmen, what a soratchy pen with which to write history ! The Treaty which emerged from the Conference should have been far more than the settlement of differences occasioned by the war. It was not an occasion for adding up losses and gains and assessing the completeness of the victory in terms of cash. The whole economic structure of Europe had been torn from its basis by the violence of war. The delicate balance of currency was distorted, the immense machinery of

transport out of gear. Europe i was facing starvation, ruin, bar- j barism. It was the real function of the Peace Conference to act as the high International Court of Civilisation, summoned by the needs of humanity to plan the way out of the morass on the; firm ground of increased produc- j tion and organised distribution, j But " the future life of Europe was not their concern ; its means of livelihood was not their anxiety. Their preoccupation, good and bad alike, related to j frontiers and nationalities, to the balance of power-, tq imperial aggrandisement, to the future ; enfeeblement of a strong and | dangerous enemy, to revenge, and to the shifting b> the victors ; of their unbearable Unancial bur- J den on to the shoulders of the I defeated," j Hevenge is usually so blind as j to lead men into the worst \ stupidity, and the Treaty of I Versailles, conceived in the spirit, is as foolish as it is false. An indemnity is usually imposed on the conquered State, whose | ministers then devolve the burden | on their citizens, sharing the incidence as fairly as they can. The claim of the conqueror is against the State, an.d not against any one citizen or class. Th^s obviously jjust and. proper rqethcfd is laid aside by the Treaty, which, empowers the Reparation Commission, set up by the victorious Allies, to indicate the exact property they propose to confiscate and to take it from any one German citizen or company as part of the national i indemnity. The economic provisions of the Treaty, so far from rebuilding the e,oo,nar.riic ' fabric of Europe aim hastening i the p^ociess'ea of production, have ; disturbed still further the foundations of industry. For purposes [Continued on page 4.'l