way, so that a
premium is offered for French immigration into the Saar Valley.

Those are a few of the consequences of the mixture of the two
irreconcilable principles.

That Germany richly deserved her punishment cannot be gainsaid. Her
crime was without precedent. Some of its most sinister consequences are
irremediable. Whole sections of her people are still unconscious not
only of the magnitude, but of the criminal character, of their misdeeds.
None the less there is a future to be provided for, and one of the
safest provisions is to influence the potential enemy's will for evil if
his power cannot be paralyzed. And this the Treaty failed to do.

The Germans, when they learned the conditions, discussed them angrily,
and the keynote was refusal to sign the document. The financial clauses
were stigmatized as masked slavery. The press urged that during the war
less than one-tenth of France's territory had been occupied by their
countrymen and that even of this only a fragment was in the zone of
combat. The entire wealth of France, they alleged, had been estimated
before the war at from three hundred and fifty milliard to four hundred
milliard francs, consequently for the devastated provinces hardly more
than one-twentieth of that sum could fairly be demanded as reparation,
whereas the claim set forth was incomparably more. They objected to the
loss of their colonies because the justification alleged--that they were
disqualified to administer them because of their former cruelties toward
the natives--was groundless, as the Allies themselves had admitted
implicitly by offering them the right of pre-emption in the case of the
Portuguese and other overseas possessions on the very eve of the war.

But the most telling objections turned upon the clauses that dealt with
the Saar Valley. Its population is entirely German, yet the
treaty-makers provided for its occupation by the French for a term of
fifteen years and its transference to them if, after that term, the
German government was unable to pay a certain sum in gold for the coal
mines it contained. If that sum were not forthcoming the population and
the district were to be handed over to France for all time, even though
the former should vote unanimously for reunion with Germany. Count
Brockdorff-Rantzau remarked in his note on the Treaty "that in the
history of modern times there is no other example of a civilized Power
obliging a state to abandon its people to foreig