All but one of these plebiscites have now been held, as well as three others not planned by the treaties. It is time to ask how well plebiscites have protected the rights of nationalities. Are they "a nonsense," as both Poles and Germans say in upper Silesia, or have they brought justice and a hope of tranquillity? Is the plebiscite a tool sufficiently useful for political science to keep in its scantily supplied workshop, or should it be discarded?

Although the question comes fresh to us, it is not the first time that the world has asked it. The expression "self-determination" is no older than the war, but the principle dates, as it logically should, from the end of the eighteenth century; for self-determination is in reality merely the extension to questions of sovereignty of the new principle of democracy which Europe owes to the French Revolution. Alas! self-determination in its purity was as short lived as was that early effort at democracy.

It can be argued that the first three plebiscites ever held on a change of sovereignty were meant in good faith. They were held in Avignon in 1791, when the French Republic took over the city and surrounding country from the pope, and in Savoy and Nice in the following year. These were seemingly administered in a fair spirit, although under the French forces of occupation and in the crude form of a time which had no conception of a secret ballot. By another year, however, the value of the plebiscite as a means of justice had been overshadowed by its greater value as a political subterfuge, and as such it was used, with accompaniments of terror and deportations, in the French annexations of the Belgian and Saar communes. Napoleon felt no

need of it even as a subterfuge, and the Congress of Vienna left it, as it left democracy, in oblivion. Oblivion did not mean death, however, for either principle. With the great revival of democracy in 1848 another Latin race was quick to see in the plebiscite a means of salvation, and from that year, when the Italian patriots expelled their Bourbon princes and held plebiscites for union throughout the northern duchies, both the principle and the method flourished greatly until 1870. It shows the growing force of democracy that in those brief twenty years every one of the great powers of Europe, even Prussia and Russia, and even Bismarck himself, had advocated a plebiscite at one time or another as a solution for some territorial question, and that it had gained the almost undeviating support of the other three chief statesmen of Europe, Cavour, Louis Napoleon, and Lord John Russell. But another philosophy was rising. The Prussian annexation of Schleswig in 1867, without holding the promised plebiscite, and the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871, without any popular consultation, marked the end of self-determination as a governing principle in European diplomacy.

There followed a period of bitter controversy between the French, Italian, and Belgian writers on the one side and the Prussians on the other. The dispute grew warm, then died away, for at last, so great was the prestige of German historians, even French writers on international law were won over to the German side on the abstract principle. For the moment democracy and self-determination had parted company. The economic rivalries of the Europe of the

late nineteenth century held little use for self-determination; but, abandoned again by historians and diplomats and forgotten by the world at large, the principle was once more treasured in the hearts of many a racial group. With the World War it came to the fore in the platform of every liberal and radical movement for permanent peace, and became the symbol of regeneration for every subject nationality.

To us as Americans, by nature more confident than other peoples that permanent peace could be achieved, the principle of selfdetermination appealed with

peculiar signifi

cance; for it

was, in a new form, our own declaration that government rests on the just "consent of the governed." In 1918 the world was still a simple place to us, needing only a simple formula to dissolve its chaos into order. So, we thought, would the classic aspirations of Alsace-Lorraine, Poland, and Bohemia be at last fulfilled. Few of us realized that there

marriages, together with the traditional policies of religious and racial persecutions, had made the map of the nationalities of central and southeastern Europe a minute patchwork of dark, glowing colors, far different from those large areas of delicate tones which looked homogeneously content in our pre-war geographies. As the war came to its end, this complexity became more and more appalling. As it became evident that even by the purest devotion to the principle of self-determination not everybody could be satis

were other aspirations in Europe as feverish and as ancient as those of Poland and Bohemia; that centuries of conquest, of colonization, and of royal

fied, economic interests, historic claims, strategic arguments, all grew in their appeal. So, finally, the clash of opposing philosophies and of national interests dislodged the principle of selfdetermination from its preëminence, and in the end it was honored at Paris quite as much in the breach as in the observance. One need speak of only a few of the instances in which

the popular wish was not consulted. There are

Posen, Dantzic, Memel, Alsace-Lorraine, cut, perhaps wisely cut, from Germany, but cut, nevertheless, on other principles than that of popular

consultation. So, too, were the Austrian Tyrol and other regions cut from Austria and Hungary. Yet, in comparison with other peace treaties, those made at Paris gave the principle of self-determination far more attention than it had ever before enlisted, provided for far the most important plebiscites ever held concerning changes of sovereignty, and laid down much more detailed rules to govern the franchise and the freedom of the vote than had any previous treaty.

This is much to say for the Paris treaties; but there is much which must be said on the other side as well. For, advanced as they were, the plebiscite provisions were in the main far less perfect than the political wisdom of the twentieth century could have planned. They were not even of a uniform standard of imperfection. The method of taking the vote varies from the primitive procedure in Eupen and Malmedy to the fairly scientific scheme for the Schleswig voting. One should, perhaps, not class the vote of Eupen and Malmedy as a plebiscite at all, for only one side was called on to vote; yet even in a mere "public expression of opinion" the freedom of the vote should be safeguarded. In Eupen and Malmedy there was, however, absolutely no supervision from without. The two small counties were put under the Belgian Government, and those wishing to have them given back to Germany were invited to sign their names openly under the eyes of the Belgian officials. Yet the same treatymakers were sufficiently sophisticated, politically, to provide in the other cases for a secret ballot under an Interallied policing and an Interallied commission, acting under the supervision of the council of ambassadors. Even

this arrangement was far from perfect, for it meant in fact a commission of partizans. In all the Polish-German plebiscites the Poles will tell you frankly that the French openly favored the Poles, and the Germans will with equal frankness tell you that the British, and to some extent the Italian, commissions favored the Germans. The Schleswig plebiscite is in a class by itself, for here the treaty added two neutrals, Norway and Sweden, to the commission, and also itself provided that the chief German officials should be removed; whereas in the other plebiscites this was, unhappily, left to the discretion of the commissions, where it became a partizan issue. It is not surprising that the Schleswig plebiscite was the only one where the members of the commission were not accused of partizanship, but were respected by both sides, and where there was no violence. violence. It is of course pertinent that there is no such deep antagonism between German and Dane as between German and Pole, nor was there coal to be disposed of in Schleswig as there was in Silesia; yet these two features of the treaty itself were of enormous importance. That they were both essential in any warmly contested plebiscite was shown as far back as 1859, when the powers forced Turkey to allow plebiscites in Moldavia and Wallachia, the two provinces which now form Rumania.

So complex are the difficulties connected with the plebiscite that many prefer to judge of the wishes of a people from the statistics as to their race or language or religion. Yet if there is one thing proved by the recent plebiscites, it is that such statistics may be absolutely misleading. The truth is that those who would ignore national

ism and use economic determinism are to a certain extent justified by the fact, brought out clearly in the plebiscites, that even among people of the same race each may not have the same desire. This was shown in Carinthia, where the majority went for Austria, although the statistics had given eighty-two per cent. as Slovene, or "Windisch," as they are called there; and in upper Silesia, where the majority went for Germany by sixty per cent. in the face of German figures giving fifty-five per cent. as speaking Polish, or, rather, "Wasser Polnisch," as their mother tongue. The fact is that not every man or woman is a strong nationalist. In every country there are always some with whom nationalism is the most ardent passion of their souls; with others it is not so strong as the wish to keep their employment or to see themselves or, perhaps, their children saved from threatening famine.

Generally speaking, in European countries nationalism must depend for its most ardent support on the lesser nobility, the intellectuals, especially the priests, teachers, writers, and officials, and on the working-men. The merchants as a class seem much more indifferent to the claims of nationalism; so, too, the peasants, granted that their religion and their markets are not interfered with and that their children are not kept from rising in the world by the alien government.

Everywhere it is the intellectuals who are both the leaders and the force behind nationalism. Partly theirs is a magnificent spirit of idealism and selfsacrifice, for such has been the condition of subject races in Europe that often a revival of nationalism has been essential to lift them to self-respect in both an economic and a spiritual sense.

But in places where the races seem, but for them, to be prospering together, one could wish that the intellectuals would study their own springs of action enough to realize that more compelling than generosity is their desire to work out their creative instincts in the field of politics, and that they are enjoying themselves hugely thereby. To some extent, of course, the nationalism of the intellectual can be analyzed into a question of markets, also. A wider world than the peasant's is needed for his intellectual food, and if he is a writer or producer of intellectual wares, he needs a far wider market. He must have sympathetic understanding; for this he craves the highest possible level of presupposition, and a common nationality appears to him the best way to supply that need. It is only the comparatively few-"super-intellectuals," one might call them—who find as great a spiritual kinship with minds of other nations as with even the less naturally congenial ones of their own race. Even the intellectual fears variety and craves identity, and considering the record of most European governments in trying to achieve identity by persecuting subject nationalities, there is little to wonder at in this. As for the working-man, it is no denial of his belief in internationalism that he should be an ardent nationalist also. The strength of trade-unions lies in their national scope. They, too, depend on a high, wide level of presupposition for concerted action in protection of their rights. But the peasant is not organized in unions. His world is bounded by his fields, his family, his market, and his religion. The priest and the neighbors of his village are his only intellectual contact. He feels no need of a wider circle. It is this fact

which explains why the vote in southern Carinthia went for Austria. The eighty-two per cent. of Slovenes were virtually all peasants, and though the priests, appointed always by the Slovene bishop at Laibach (now Lublijana), had made every effort to keep alive their national feeling, the peasants had their own lively appreciation that should they be annexed to Jugoslavia, their market of Klagenfurt would be reft from them, and a new market substituted many more miles away and across the Karawanken Mountains, which would mean either a long journey over a mountain pass or a costly railroad fare.

In Carinthia the peasants had been allowed their language and their religion and had felt few, if any, disabilities. In upper Silesia, however, the peasants had been forbidden their language and had had a bitter sense of persecution in other ways under the Prussian rule. So, though they had been separated from their fellow-Poles for six hundred years, they responded eagerly to the leadership of the Polish intellectuals from Posen who had been fanning the spark of Polish patriotism in upper Silesia during the last decades

of the nineteenth century. There is yeast in the Polish peasant. Among the professional men in Kattowitz, and in other parts of Silesia given to Poland after the plebiscite, are many who are the self-made sons of peasants and miners. That their path had been made hard for them by the policy of discrimination started by Bismarck was a fact which played an enormous part in the loss by Prussia of the rich mines and factories of Silesia. Yet in these same cities of Silesia many Poles must have voted for Germany, for only so can one account for the discrepancy between the statistics of language and the vote.

There was a saying, I believe, in Czechoslovakia, "The roof may leak, but it will be ours," and it is a saying with which many of us ardently sympathize; but it is evident that there are many in the world to whom their own leaky roof is not so appealing as the comfort of a roof which, though it is another's, does not leak. It is this floating vote which causes one of the chief difficulties of the plebiscite, for it is, of course, swayed by the economic and political conditions in the two rival countries, and so raises to first importance the question of the exact moment