States Senate against the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles without reservations, Senator Knox contended from the beginning that the real issue before the American people was not the surrender of sovereignty implied by Article X of the covenant; that it was primarily a question of our willingness to join forces with other nations to impose upon the world and to maintain the terms of peace contained in the Treaty of Versailles and the other treaties. He contended that since these treaties did not establish a new-world order upon the principles for which the United States had fought, the Senate was not justified in committing the United States to the unqualified support of a new status quo in Europe and throughout the world that would make permanent the political and economic supremacy of certain nations.

The questions raised by Senator Knox were kept in the background during the campaign, but when Mr. Harding became President, he did not hesitate to make this thesis his own. In his first message to Congress President Harding gave the real reason for our unwillingness to ratify the decisions of the Paris peace conference. The American people are ready to coöperate with other nations in a world-wide reconstruction, but we cannot be partners in an alliance devised to keep the control of world affairs in the hands of a few nations. In other words, the interests of the United States do not call for a revival of the balance of power theory.

§ 2

The balance of power is the dominant consideration in the foreign policy of every continental European nation.

Several races in turn, when their country has become too prosperous or powerful, have found that their success led inevitably to a coalition of their neighbors. The present plight of Germany is an old story. The hour of humiliation crowds fast upon the hour of glory. The presence of Great Britain on the side of the victorious coalition, and the unwillingness of the British Government to help enforce a peace too disastrous for the vanquished, is also an old story. The aim of British intervention was the maintenance of the balance of power, and not its destruction. The allpowerful Continental ally might soon become the next enemy.

After European wars the victors have aimed to weaken permanently their enemies by depriving them of frontier provinces, and by seeking to underwrite the results of their successful war through an alliance with others whose interests are similar.

During the last two years the peace conference and the supreme council have followed traditional European precedents except in one particular. The intervention of the United States, which had no interest in the European equilibrium as it was conceived by European statesmen, led the victors to hope that they could associate the United States with themselves in the enforcement of a peace whose main object was a new status quo decidedly to their advantage and not at all to the advantage of the United States.

We Americans have been so sentimental about the war, its causes, its conduct, and its aims that what has gone on in Europe since the armistices is not pleasant reading. Some stop their ears and shut their eyes. Some

relieve themselves by calling the chronicler of post-bellum events a "proGerman" or "Sinn Feiner." Many are cynical, declaring that there is no remedy. Some affect to think the muddle in Europe does not affect

us.

But the Harding administration realizes that we must lend a hand to Europe. How? And in what measure? American public opinion will not be able to help intelligently and constructively in the solution of world problems unless there is a study of specific international situations, how they have arisen, and how the European powers have attempted to deal with them. None of these problems is more enlightening than that of the Ukraine. It illustrates how the balance of power theory makes Prussians of us all.

& 3

When the European war raised the question of subject nationalities, the Entente propagandists ignored the oppression and the aspirations of all other peoples save those under the yoke of enemy countries. The censorship, rigorously enforced in France, forbade even the discussion of the hopes of the Poles. There was wisdom in this. Self-determination was a war weapon, and not a profession of faith in an ideal. When every nerve was strained to beat Germany to her knees, it would have been folly to discuss matters tending to undermine the solidarity of the Entente coalition. But as the war dragged on, the principles proclaimed by Premier Asquith and Premier Viviani proved pervasive. Much to the alarm of Entente statesmen, it was discovered that these principles could not be limited. They

The Ukrainians are by far the most numerous of the races aspiring to independence through the disappearance of the Romanoffs and Hapsburgs. There are thirty-five million Ukrainians, most of them in the six southern and southwestern former Russian "governments," or provinces, and in eastern Galicia. The Ukraine is larger than Germany and twice as large as France. It stretches from the Carpathian Mountains to the Black Sea and the Caucasus. It contains the oilfields of Galicia and the famous Donetz coal- and iron-region. Almost all the cereals, cattle, sugar, and salt exported from the former Russian Empire came from the Ukraine. If the Ukraine manages to survive and keep within its boundaries the territories in which its race predominates, it will be the most populous and the richest of the new states created by the war and, next to Russia, the largest country in Europe.

An independent Ukraine, however, does not seem to fit in with the interests of the victors in the World War, as these interests are conceived by their statesmen. Hence every possible ef

fort is being made to deny the existence of a Ukrainian race. During the last few years the most absurd and unfounded statements about the Ukrianians have been circulated and have gained credence. To get at the truth we must consult authorities who wrote before 1914. In those days, uninfluenced by political considerations and the prejudices born of the war, historians, geographers, ethnologists, and philologists of France, Germany, and Great Britain did not question the fact of the Ukrainian, or Ruthenian, race. They wrote voluminously of its origin from a distinct Slavic immigration, of its racial characteristics, of its language, more nearly allied to Serbian than to Russian, and of its independent history before it was swallowed up by the Polish and Muscovite empires. Students of the history and peoples and languages of eastern Europe have never dreamed of confusing Great Russians (Muscovites) and Little Russians (Ukrainians). Simply because the Ukrainians are Slavs and have been subject to Poland and Russia for nearly three centuries, must they be considered as a branch of the Russian race and their language a Russian dialect, or must the right of Poland to seize the territories they inhabit be admitted? If such theses were consistently supported by the Entente governments, what would become of Poland's claims against Russia and Germany?

The reader demurs. Since the days when Jane Porter's Thaddeus of Warsaw held a place in his heart beside Robert Bruce, he has heard of Poland, her sufferings, her wrongs, her aspirations. But he is unfamiliar with the Ukraine. How many Occidentals know more of Mazeppa than the ad

venture of the wild horse? And if Cossacks are perchance identified with the Ukraine, this confirms the Russian connection, and adds an impression of unruliness and anarchy. We are creatures of habit, blissful in our ignorance, and so we have readily believed the propagandists when they told us that the Ukrainian nationalist movement is an artificial creation of German propaganda during the war, launched to destroy Russian unity, and continued after the Revolution to thwart the reconstruction of Poland. Because one never happened to hear of the Ukraine, the Ukraine does not exist. Or because one does not want the Ukraine to exist, the Ukraine does not exist. The French peasant dismisses the unfamiliar with a positive "Je ne le connais pas." That settles it. I fear we have his mentality without his frankness. The possession of the one, or the absence of the other, is disastrous. The peasant does not have to bother with the unknown, for the unknown does not affect his life. Intelligent public opinion, however, which is the salvation of democracies, has to know about Ukraines, willynilly, in order to deal with Ukraines. Annoying factors in world-politics do not disappear by ignoring them.

$4

Speaking in the Russian Duma on February 24, 1914, before the outbreak of the war, Paul Miliukoff said:

All sides of Ukrainian life are penetrated by the nationalist element. At the same time, the Ukrainian movement is thoroughly democratic; it is carried on by the people. For this reason it is impossible to crush it. But it is very easy to set it on fire and in this way turn it against ourselves, and our authorities

This was the confession of a failure unparalleled in the history of Russification. The Great Russians began their attempt to assimilate the Ukrainians in 1690. They started with the Poles in 1830, and with the Finns only in 1900. Ukase after ukase was aimed by successive czars against the Ukrainians to compel them to abandon their nationality. The crowning edict, in 1876, suppressed the Ukrainian language altogether. Deprived of schools, of newspapers, of books, of the right of assembly, of the use of their mother tongue in the administration, in law courts, and in business, the Ukrainians contrived not only to keep intact their language in the home, but also to develop and enrich their literature. Patriots were exiled to Siberia or fled to Galicia. Just as Posen in Germany became the center of Polish propaganda, Lemberg in Austria was the foyer of the Ukrainian nationalist movement. So successful was the preservation of the mother tongue, to the exclusion of Russian, that the agents of the British and Foreign Bible Society with the Russian Army at the time of the Russo-Japanese War reported to London the necessity of using the Ukrainian Bible in their work among the troops. But the Russian Government refused the request of the British and Foreign Bible Society for permission to distribute the New Testament in Ukrainian. The refusal, which denied the existence of a Ukrainian-reading element in the Russian Army, was in itself an admission of the fact.

After the revolution of 1905, Lithuanian and Polish schools were allowed,

which nationalist movement the Russians regarded as the most formidable of all.

The sixty-three Ukrainians elected to the first Duma asked for autonomy, and, pending that, a complete restitution of language and other rights. But the ukase of 1876 was only partly rescinded. When it was a question of a minority within the borders of the empire, liberal and constitutional Russians proved themselves even more zealous oppressors than reactionaries. But, as M. Miliukoff admitted in 1914, the Ukrainian nationalist movement, having permeated to the peasant masses, could not be stamped out. From 1907 to 1914 the national revival in the Ukraine foreshadowed the destruction of czarist Russia, and close students of eastern Europe realized the impossibility of the collapse of the Russian Empire leading to a reconstitution of medieval Poland. Hence Poles united with Russians in a desperate attempt to prevent the inevitable. Petrograd kept a firm hand on the press, watched the Galician frontier for contraband literature, and acted rigorously in the matter of clandestine schools. But the Ukrainians found a means of propaganda that baffled the functionaries. The Government could not suppress the drama, folk-songs, and national dances. When the war of 1914 broke out, more than three hundred theatrical troupes were agencies of the national spirit in the Ukraine.

It was no surprise to the initiated that after the revolution of 1917 the Ukrainians were the first and the most numerous non-Russian element to make demonstrations in the streets of Petrograd.

$ 5

All the various nationalist movements throughout Europe during the last century possess features in common. They are fostered everywhere by the same internal and external influences, express themselves everywhere in the same aspirations, and lead everywhere to the same perplexing conflict between ideals and expediency. At the peace conference and in the supreme council the striking difference of attitude toward the claims of races aspiring to freedom was not in a single instance the result of any degree of merit of the claims. After two years of study of the treaties and the decisions of the supreme council, I cannot find a single instance where the delimitation of frontiers or the recognition of a new state was not made on the ground of the political and economic interests, fancied or real, of the great powers. This is a sweeping indictment, but it is none the less a difficult one to disprove. The treatment of the Ukrainians is one of the most telling counts in the indictment. Why Why were the Ukrainians the Ukrainians treated in a different way from the other subject races of the Romanoff, Hapsburg, and Hohenzollern empires? On the ground of a square deal for all, and in the interest of a durable peace, the question is pertinent.

The real answer is that an independent Ukraine stood in the way of every combination to create a new balance of power favorable to France in Europe and favorable to Great Britain outside of Europe. This statement will be strenuously denied by propagandists, but I believe that the facts in the case support the statement.

From the beginning the revolution

of 1917 was nationalist and separatist in the Ukraine. A national congress, composed of representatives of the economic, professional, and coöperative associations, municipalities, zemstvos, and peasants, was held at Kieff on April 8, 1917. It joined with three other congresses-of soldiers, farmers, and working-men-to choose a provisional parliament and set up a provisional government. The first Ukrainian Rada (parliament) had eight hundred members, seventy-five per cent. of whom were Ukrainian nationalists and the minority Russians, Jews, and Poles.

In the meantime elections by universal suffrage were taking place for the all-Russian Constituent Assembly. Out of one hundred and fifty members, the Ukraine sent one hundred and fifteen nationalists, with the mandate to insist upon the independence of the Ukraine unless the defunct imperial Government was replaced by a federation in which the Ukraine would be a member equal in every way with Great Russia. This experiment was not tried out, for the Bolsheviki dissolved the all-Russian Assembly on October 6, 1917. Lenine's program was the world-wide application of selfdetermination. The Ukrainians took him at his word. The Ukrainian Rada decided to hold elections for a Constituent Assembly. Out of ten million votes cast, eight million were in favor of constituting an independent state. But before the elections were completed, the Bolsheviki invaded the Ukraine. Like British, French, Germans, Poles, Italians, and reactionaries of their own country, the Bolshevists intended to limit the application of the principle of self-determination only to others. The Ukraine, rich