It was not their reparation clauses that did the damage. The reparation clauses were just. The least you can ask of a boy who flings a stone is that he shall replace the pane which he smashed. The damage was done by clauses conceived in the finest spirit of altruism, but with no practical knowledge of what was possible. You may pitch your ideals so high that you render them useless. The weakness of the Peace Treaty lay in the fact that its framers had to rely on books and hearsay for information which, to be accurate, ought to have been obtained by first-hand investigation. And they were not business men. They were journalists, professors and oratorical inspirers; whereas their task from first to last was a reorganizing of the world's big business. When the doors were flung wide on their deliberations, they presented humanity with exactly what we might have expected--a paper peace. It was a noble performance for the time it had taken. It read beautifully, but in practice large portions of it have proved wholly unworkable and have produced an economic stagnation which is neither peace nor war. It is fair to state, however, that whether because of or in spite of it, Europe has shown a marked improvement in the last two years.
Recriminations are cowardly. The mistakes of the Peace Treaty were the direct result of our culpable indifference. We displayed little interest in what our pacifiers were doing. World-happenings no longer concerned us. Few of us troubled to read the terms when they were published. We had become provincial and were concentrating all our energies on our personal futures. Things being as they were, it is probable that no group of men, differently selected, could have done better. In the spring of 1919 we were not ripe for peace. Most decidedly we were not ripe for altruism. We were spendthrift philanthropists in dread of our creditors. We were too panic-stricken to be considerate, too needy to be magnanimous, too unfortunate to have pity on the unhappiness of the peoples who had caused our embarrassment. If the elderly statesmen made too much haste in Paris, it was we who urged them to hurry. The paper peace was the common people's doing quite as much as it was theirs. By the same token the starvation of five million children in Central Europe is our doing. And the righting of the disaster which our indifference made possible, should be ours.