NO document composed in the twen-
tieth century has generated greater
or more enduring controversy than the
Treaty of Versailles. The reasons are
clear enough. Never did the peoples of
the earth hope for so much from so few
as they did from Woodrow Wilson and
his colleagues at the Paris Peace Con-
ference in 1919. Never before or since
have statesmen managed to embody in
a single agreement so many specific pro-
visions affecting all quarters of the globe.
Never has so broad a peace settlement
been followed so rapidly by revolution-
ary changes within nations, by severe
economic depression, and by a still more
devastating world war. Questions have
been inevitable. Did the diplomats at
Paris unnecessarily frustrate the hopes
of the world? To what extent was the
Versailles settlement responsible for the
tragic events of later years? Inevitably,
too, the increasing urgency of diplomatic
problems in our time has provoked fresh
evaluations of this effort to construct a
new international order. It is not surpris-
ing that the judgments have been di-
verse, that the controversy has been
heated, and that the issues remain vitally
relevant to our present concerns.

Dispute over the treaty began as soon
as its terms became public. Germans and
many liberals in the Allied Countries
protested that the provisions were too
harsh, a "Carthaginian peace," not only
unjust in light of the Armistice terms
but impossible of fulfillment and produc-
tive only of future discord and war.
Numerous Frenchmen and aroused citi-
zens elsewhere countered that the treaty
was in actuality too soft upon the Ger-
mans since it did not give France all
those guaranties of security which her
leaders had requested. A third verdict
asserted that there were only two practi-
cal alternatives for treating a defeated
enemy, either extreme indulgence which
would leave no grievances or extreme
ruthlessness which would permit no pos-
sibility of retaliation. But the Treaty of
Versailles achieved neither. This peace,
ran one classic comment, was too weak
for the harshness it contained.

Beyond the "hard-soft" category of dis-
pute another cycle of criticism has been
devoted to the question of whether the
settlement embodied too utopian a "new
order" or maintained too reactionary an
"old order." The treaty's greatest weak-
ness, some have charged, lay in its lack
of political realism. By pursuing the
principle of self-determination it created
too many weak nations in central Eu-
rope. It substituted for older considera-
tions of the balance of power a mis-
taken faith in the new League of Na-
tions. It abandoned the tested principles
of diplomacy which had limited war-
fare in Europe during the nineteenth
century for untried, idealistic arrange-
ments which led to world war within
a generation. Other critics, however,
have protested that far from establishing
a New Order the treaty simply restored

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