CHAPTER XLVIII THE TREATY FINISHED ATTITUDE OF ALLIES TOWARD GERMANY IN MAKING IT-GREAT CEREMONY OF THE PRESENTATION AT VERSAILLES-BROCKDORFFRANTZAU'S SPEECH T of HE Treaty was finished at last. Six months had elapsed since the close of the World War. For four of these months the representatives of the allied powers, there at Paris, had been toiling desperately to get it ready. It had been truly a race of peace with anarchy; for while Paris talked, European civilization was literally dissolving in chaos. Most of the difficulties, and every one of the serious crises, had arisen not so much out any differences of view of the sternness of the terms to be imposed upon conquered Germany, but out of deepseated and bitter disagreements among the Allies themselves. The centre and focus of this conflict had been between President Wilson demanding a settlement upon broad principles-which everyone had indeed accepted!— and the other allied powers demanding various immediate material reparations and territorial and other advantages. But here, at length, through many vicissitudes, much darkened counsel, had emerged a bulky white book, of more than two hundred pages, bearing upon its cover, in two languages, the concise information that these were the "Conditions of Peace." This momentous book, packed and crammed with meaning for the whole of humanity, the provisions of which were still for the most part secret, was now to be laid down, with ceremony, before the vanquished enemy. Here were the names of representatives of twenty-seven Allied nations and at the head of them all was: "The President of the United States of America, by: "The Honourable Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States, acting in his own name and by his own proper authority." And following the names of the American delegation: "His Majesty the King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British Dominions beyond the Seas, Emperor of India, by: "The Right Honourable David Lloyd George, M. P., First Lord of His Treasury and Prime Minister." And after the Anglo-Saxon world, so represented, came France and the other allied nations, great and small, and at last, not the Empire, nor yet the Republic, nor yet the Commonwealth, but: Germany, by: "Count Brockdorff-Rantzau, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Empire." After the names of this distinguished array came the bulky body of the Treaty itself, 440 articles, and then the pages for the signatures of seventy allied leaders, to which later were to be attached the great seals and the coloured ribbons to symbolize, somewhat ironically, the new harmonies this vast document was aimed to bring about. And finally, near the end of it all, was the place at which the world was soon to point with a determined and yet somehow curiously uncertain finger and say to conquered Germany: "Sign there." "Done at Versailles, in a single copy which will remain deposited in the archives of the French Republic, and of |