§ Take another condition—the trial of those who have been responsible for the War. I think it is essential, if wars of this kind are to be prevented in future, that those who are personally responsible for them, and have taken part in plotting and planning them, should be held personally responsible. After all, millions of gallant young men have lost their lives, and there has been terrible suffering, in the War; and one or two men have in the main been responsible for engineering it. They ought to be held responsible. Therefore we have decided upon an exceptional course, and a pity it is that it is exceptional. Had it been done before there would have been fewer wars. We have decided that the man who undoubtedly had the prime responsibility for the War, in the judgment, at any rate, of the allied" countries, should be tried for the offence he committed in breaking treaties which he was bound in honour to respect, to which he was a party, and by that means bringing such horrors upon the world. The allied countries have decided quite 1217 unanimously that the tribunal shall be an Inter-Allied one, and that it shall sit in London for the trial of the person supremely responsible for this War.
§ Mr. HAYDAYThen the Kaiser looks like getting to London after all. (Laughter.)
§ The PRIME MINISTERI hope the House will grant me some indulgence, as I am not quite up to the mark. The same thing applies to punishment for offences against the laws of war. There is a longer category than the House may imagine. Some of them are incredible— I could not have believed it had it not been that the evidence was overwhelming. I should not have thought any nation with a pretence to civilisation could have committed such atrocities. I am not going into the categories, and I should not care to enumerate them, but they ought to be punished. Officers who are guilty of these things in a moment of arrogance, feeling that their power to do what they please is irresistible, ought to know in future that they will be held personally responsible. War is horrible enough without committing these unlicensed infamies upon rules which are quite cruel enough as they are. Therefore the persons responsible must be tried. They will get a fair trial, all of them—an absolutely fair trial. It is due to the honour of the allied countries that the trial should be fair. Our credit stands behind a fair trial. We have to show that we are a civilised people, and we will try them according to the methods and rules of civilisation. They will get fair play, and they have no right to more. What injustice is there in that? What undue harshness is there in it? It is the averting of it, and making it impossible for the future.
What are the other acts of injustice which are provided for in this Treaty? It is getting rid of the Bucharest and Brest-Litovsk Treaties—treaties that made the populations of Rumania and of large tracts of Russia the mere slaves of German greed and rapine. Is that unjust? Is it unjust that we should, in our economic terms, make it clear that Germany is not to take advantage of wanton destruction of the trade machinery of her rivals in Belgium and in France, in order to get ahead in the competitive race for business? Money does not put that right. You cannot get machinery in a year or, perhaps, two years, and meanwhile Germany, which has never been devastated, 1218 would be going a head. We had to put in clauses for protection against that. What injustice is there in that?
I have heard that our conditions with regard to the great international rivers of the Continent are unjust, because we have put them under international control. Why not? They are rivers which pass not merely through Germany, but through Poland and through Czecho-Slovakia, and they pass through Belgium. Is it right that, purely because part of these rivers go through Prussia, they should have the power to strangle the economic life of these young countries higher up the river? These rivers are not for Prussia. They are navigable right up Poland and Czechoslovakia, and they must remain navigable. Yet I have heard it said that it was an injustice because we say: "You will not be allowed to suffocate the lives of these young countries by giving complete power to one riparian owner to make it impossible for the others to carry on their business." Those are some of the conditions I have heard described as unjust, and I ask anyone to point out in respect of any of these main conditions a single act of injustice, or anything which in a perfectly impartial court would not have been adjudicated upon in exactly the same sense as that in which the Council, which sat for six months in Paris scrupulously examining all these conditions, decided them.