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peace. Others maintained that all the active belligerents who had shown responsibility by making sacrifices proportionate to those of the Great Powers should share the responsibility for making the peace. Within this second group one section argued that only the countries which had been actively at war with a particular enemy should make the peace treaty with that enemy, while others held that, since the war was one war and since it was largely geographical accidents which ■determined whether an ally fought in one theatre rather than another, all the peace treaties should be considered by all the countries who had been actively at war with any one of the enemies. A third and small group believed that all 50-odd members of the United Nations should be associated with the peace settlements because the treaties would set the framework of peace which all the United Nations would have to uphold. In fact, the bodies which drafted the treaties were not organized according to any logical pattern, though the arguments of the first group, tempered by those of the first section of the second group, generally prevailed. The procedure agreed upon by the Council of Foreign Ministers at Moscow (December, 1945), and quoted in the invitations sent to the other States, envisaged three stages in the preparation of the peace treaties —first, preparation of the drafts by the Council of Foreign Ministers ; second, consideration of the drafts by a conference of 21 ; third, final drafting by the Council of Foreign Ministers. The draft treaties presented to the Conference seem to have been prepared in this way : (i) The Italian treaty was drafted by the U.K., U.S.S.R., U.S.A., and France, who in London in September, 1945, heard oral statements from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Yugoslavia on two topics (the Italo-Yugoslav frontier and the question of Trieste) and invited countries who had been at war with Italy to submit their views in writing on aspects of the peace settlement that were of interest to them : (ii) In the case of the Roumanian, Bulgarian, and Hungarian treaties the drafts of the political and territorial clauses were prepared by the U.K., U.S.A., and U.S.S.R. (in the presence of France), and the economic, naval, military and air clauses by U.K., U.S.A., U.S.S.R., and France. (iii) In the case of the Finnish treaty the political and territorial clauses were drafted by U.K. and U.S.S.R. (in the presence of U.S.A. and France), and the economic, naval, military, and air clauses by U.K., U.S.S.R., U.S.A., and France.