[To the Editor of Tini SPECTATOR] SIR,—It is an honour
to elicit comments from your pen, such as you attach to my letter on the German colonial claims and the Fourteen Points, and I am sorry to persist. But in one particular you are, I believe, inexact. When I said that the " Clemenceau Letter" disregarded the German appeal to the pledge of a "free, open-minded, and impartial settlement," I meant, as people commonly do, both the signed covering note and the details attached. Both are included in the Stationery Office text under the head "Reply of the Allied and Associated Powers." My reference was to the detailed "Part IV. German rights and interests outside Germany." There the Allies make no reference at all to the pledge of impartial settlement ; and in view of the tenor of that whole document, if they could have argued that they were making a "free and open-minded" settlement they would certainly have done so. They confine their justifications to the grounds (i) of German maltreatment of native peoples, and (2) to strategic need for Allied security
lest Germany use the colonies as bases. The latter argument was and is cogent, but it has nothing to do with the Fourteen Points.
The mandatory system may have fulfilled the "no an- nexation" pledges as regards the natives. But it did not fulfil them as regards Germany.
Surely, in judging a contract which one party says has been broken, nobody can adduce as material what the other party may have been thinking in his private breast. (That is Hitler's pretext for half his broken premises.) Judgement can only be given in what the protesting party, on a fair reading, must have supposed to be the meaning of the text. If President Wilson had meant to exclude Germany from colonial redistri- bution, he should have said, "A free, open-minded and impartial settlement of all colonial claims except those of Germany." But he did not so say ; he couldn't have got away with it, in the then relatively undisillusioned state of public feeling. When he said "all," the Germans were bound to believe he meant "all."
This is written against the grain, for I do not believe Germany should have colonies. But one owes a more scrupulous fairness to one's opponents than to one's own side. Or are we to debase our level of justice to the Nazi standard
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