TREATY OF PEACE (HUNGARY) BILL

HC Deb 20 April 1921 vol 140 cc1907-71

Order for Second Reading read.

The UNDER-SECRETARY of STATE for FOREIGN AFFAIRS (Mr. Cecil Harmsworth)

I beg to move, "That the Bill be now read a Second time."

In moving the Second Beading of this Bill, I shall endeavour to be as brief as I possibly can, and, what is even more important, to exercise the best discretion I can in the choice of the words I use. We are to-day dealing with the affairs of other people, and I always feel for myself in the capacity I occupy in relation to their affairs, that I cannot be too careful in the language I use in dealing with those matters.

Lieut.-Commander KENWORTHY

This affects us, too, very closely.

4.0. P.M.

Mr. HARMSWORTH

It affects us very closely; it affects a number of other nations much more closely. I have observed, in connection with my present office, that what we say in this House about other people excites their interest in an almost pathetic degree, for however lightly we are sometimes disposed to assume our responsibility, and to regard our membership of this House, it is still regarded abroad as the greatest of all Parliaments, and there are scholiasts and commentators in foreign countries who examine what we. say here with all the care that a scholar bestows on a. classical text. The House will observe that the Hungary Treaty follows in its main features other Treaties that have been presented to Parliament. We have in the forefront of it the Covenant of the League of Nations. We have military, naval and air Clauses very similar to those which are found in the other Treaties. There is the usual Chapter on reparations and the Chapter on labour, and so forth. But I think it will be generally recognised that the work of the Peace Conference in Paris in regard to this Treaty was easier than in the case of any of the other Treaties that were there framed, because, in point of fact, the Kingdom of Hungary had fallen, to a large extent, into its component parts before the Peace Conference took in hand the work of constructing a Treaty. The Slav, Czech, Slovakian, and Rumanian populations had already separated themselves from Hungary. The Czecho-Slo-vaks, indeed, were out of the War before the War generally terminated, and they came to Paris, not as enemies, but as. a friendly and an allied people. I think it is universally known that many of the peoples composing the late Austro-Hun-garian Empire had for many years—in some cases, for many generations—do-sired to separate themselves from that Empire, and to achieve their independence. As a result of the labours of this Conference in Paris, a new Hungary, if I may so term it, was created, a compact entity with a population of some 6,500,000 or 7,000,000 Magyars. I should like to observe, when there is discussion and controversy as to the establishment of frontiers here and there and the allocation of a population, that the Peace Conference used throughout its deliberations Hungarian statistics, the results of the Census of 1910. They were the only figures, as I understand it, that were available, and there was this advantage from the point of view of a defence of the Peace Treaty, that at all events those figures did not err in unfairness of any kind to the Magyar people. It will be most convenient if I describe very briefly what in point of fact has taken place on the several frontiers of the present Hungary. I will take first what I may call roughly the Western or Austrian side. Here, as the House is probably aware, is a population of some 200,000 Germans, and the frontier has been so drawn as to include that population within the State of Austria. The House will be aware that this arrangement has given rise to some considerable controversy, and the parties concerned have been informed by the Conference of Ambassadors in Paris that if they can come to an agreement as between themselves that is more in conformity with their wishes the Conference of Ambassadors will not press for the exact alignment of the boundary as laid down in the Treaty. On the Northern or Czechoslovak frontier we have a position in which there is a large admixture of Magyar and Slovak population, but, according to the statistics, the Magyar element is in a minority of something like two to one, and the populations are so largely interwoven that it was found impossible by the Peace Conference to make any other arrangement than the assignment of that part of the old Kingdom of Hungary to the new Czecho-Slovak State.

Lieut.-Commander KENWORTHY

What area is that?

Mr. HARMSWORTH

What I call the northern or Czecho-Slovak side. Of course, I use the terms "north, south, east and west" in a very rough and approximate way. On the eastern or Rumanian side of the new State the areas taken from Hungary comprise an estimated population of 2,800,000 Rumanians, 1,600,000 Magyars, and 500,000 Germans, the Germans having shown them selves very willing to be incorporated in the Rumanian State. I do not think it will be suggested that this large body of 3,000,000 Rumanians and Germans should have been retained definitely in the Hungarian State against their own wishes, and in favour of a Magyar population not quite half the combined populations of Rumanians and Germans. In one notable respect—I daresay this is one of the considerations in the minds of the two hon. and gallant Gentlemen who have an Amendment down for the rejection of the Bill—considerations not strictly those of race weighed with the Supreme Council and decided them to fix the Rumanian border so as to include the three towns of Szatmar, Grozswardein, and Arad. The contention was that, although the urban population of the district leaves the Magyars in a majority, the rural population is Rumanian, and that in any case it was necessary to advance the Rumanian frontier so as to include these three towns, because the line of railway which connects North and South Transylvania runs through them, and geographically and from an engineering point of view it would not be possible to reconstruct the railway through an area exclusively inhabited by Rumanians. There are two other groups of populations on this side of Hungary to which I must briefly refer. There is the case of the Ruthenes. I do not understand it to be argued that the Peace Conference should have included the Ruthene population in the Kingdom of Hungary. As far as I am aware, this population has no special sympathy with Hungary, and is well content with the arrangement which has been made on their behalf, to be attached to the Czecho-Slovak: State in the possession of local autonomy.

Then we had a very difficult problem, one that the House may be quite sure engaged the very anxious consideration of the Peace Conference. That was the group of Hungarians occupying what are called the Szekler counties. If the House had an opportunity of examining and dealing with this part of Central Europe, they would find within and far within the confines of Transylvania compact groups of Hungarians, islands as it were, in the midst of a foreign population. The number of Szeklers concerned, I am informed, is about 500,000. I do not myself see what the Peace Conference could have done other than include those islands within Transylvania and so within the new Roumania frontier. On the Southern or Jugo-Slav frontier, the Conference decided that where the population was predominantly Slav those areas should come within the Slav Kingdom. They did not give the Jugo-Slavs everything for which the Jugo-Slavs asked, but made what they considered the fairest arrangement in the circumstances. The House will observe that of course the very important district of Pecs will revert to Hungary on the ratification of this Treaty.

I may be permitted to make one or two general observations on this part of my subject. First, I would venture to claim that whatever may be advanced in criticism of this Treaty the great Powers who framed it are under no suspicion of having had ulterior objects in view. None of them, so far as I am aware, wanted for themselves any part of the Hungarian territory. They had no purpose to serve other than the best interests of the emancipated peoples and of European peace. I can well imagine that when the delegates, gathered in Paris, came to the consideration of this problem among the many great problems that they had to consider they would have been only too pleased if they had found that they had to deal with a perfectly compact Magyar population and with other populations, that could with the greatest ease, and without any suspicion of partiality or unfairness, be assigned to the States which they desired to join. What else could the; Peace Conference do but so arrange boundaries as to include as far as possible the majorities that desired to be included in the new States? I have referred to the one case in which strictly ethnic considerations were departed from, but even there I do not see myself what other arrangements could have been made. I confess that for myself I am all for self-determination, but if that principle be interpreted too narrowly on all occasions it may result in far greater injustice than by the adoption of a plan that has been well and anxiously considered. My hon. and gallant Friends suggest a plebiscite. This matter was most carefully considered by the Peace Conference, and in the letter of M. Millerand, written on 6th May, 1920, to the Hungarian Delegation, it was specially referred to. M. Millerand, speaking for the Powers assembled in Paris, said that they had given this question very careful consideration and had come to the conclusion that if plebiscites were held, in all probability the results arirved at would not be substantially different from those that had been arrived at by the Peace Conference itself. In the same letter—this is an important consideration—the Hungarian Delegation were informed that if, when the Boundary Commissioners began their work they reported cases which in their estimation were cases of positive injustice, they should be entitled to make a. report to the Council of the League of Nations, and the Council of the League, if desired to do so by one of the parties, would be in a position to offer its services in making a new arrangement to the satisfaction of both parties.

Colonel WEDGWOOD

Does that mean that if the Hungarians think that they are ill-treated in Transylvania, Hungary will be able to appeal to the Council of the League of Nations to have the complaint investigated and remedied?

Mr. HARMSWORTH

No, I do not think it is a question of being ill-treated, because those cases are covered by the Minority Treaties which protect foreign populations in the different territories. I understand that this point is met by the proviso that where there is a dispute between the Magyars or other groups, or populations, it will be competent for the Boundary Commissioners to call the attention of the Council of the League of Nations to the dispute, and if the Boundary Commissioners think there is injustice on one side or the other it will be open to the Council of the League of Nations to offer their services in making an adjustment of the difficulty.

Lord R. CECIL

Will the right hon. Gentleman tell the House whether the Boundary Commissioners in such a case will act by a majority, or how?

Mr. HARMSWORTH

I would ask my Noble Friend to allow me to reserve my answer on that subject till either later in the day or till a later stage of the Bill. I cannot answer it at the moment. M. Millerand concluded this part of his message to the Hungarian deputation by saying: The Allied and Associated Powers are confident that this procedure provides a method suitable for the correction, in tracing the frontiers, of every injustice against which reasonable objection could be urged. I pass to the question of Reparations. The reparations under the Treaty of the Trianon do not differ materially in character from the reparations proposed to be exacted by the Treaty of Versailles. As the House knows, this matter has been the subject of consideration at several recent Conferences of the highest importance. Another is shortly to be held. Perhaps I may be permitted to say this: It was surely a right principle that the aggressor States should be required to pay for the damage done up to the limit of their capacity to pay. If we fail to establish this principle we fail to remove one of the principle incentives to War. In the case of Hungary, the amount of compensation is to be fixed by the Reparation Commission, which is to draw up the schedule of payments, prescribing the time and manner of securing and discharging by Hungary, within 30 years, dating from 1st May, 1921, of the debt assessed by the Commission. It will be observed the Commission is to give the Hungarian Government the opportunity to be heard when the claims are assessed. Certainly, in the discharge of her obligations, Hungary will enjoy advantages not possessed, let me say, by Austria. Hungary, in the matter of foodstuffs, is a self-supporting country, and it may well be hoped, when her agriculture has been restored, that she may again become an exporter of cereals. In any case, there is no reason to apprehend that Hungary will receive in the matter of reparation anything but justice at the hand of the Allies.

The Amendment for the rejection of this Bill refers to the Treaty of Peace as destroying the economic unity of a once prosperous community. I shall be much interested to hear how my hon. and gallant Friend (Colonel Wedgwood) develops that part of his argument. As we have seen, Hungary was nothing but an artificial and enforced aggregation of dissimilar and, in some cases, hostile races, and they have broken to pieces, not by reason of the Peace Conference, but by the shock of war. It is not the Allies who have separated the Slavs, the Czechs, the Slovaks, and the Rumanians from the Hungarian State at all. They had done this for themselves before the Supreme Council took in hand the task of drawing up the boundaries of new Hungary. I should be surprised if my hon. and gallant Friend (Colonel Wedgwood) suggests that by an attempt at fiscal unity, or any other such interest, the Supreme Council should have denied liberty to the seceding peoples. Of course, he would advance no such argument, nor will the hon. Gentleman contend, I think, that the Supreme Council should have imposed on Hungary and the seceded States a policy of fiscal unity. I can imagine no more grave interference with the independence of sovereign States than the prescription by the Supreme Council of what particular form of fiscal policy they shall adopt. On the other hand, it cannot, of course, be denied that serious economic evil has resulted in the disruption of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Such result was certain to occur, and was clearly foreseen by the Supreme Council. If the House will refer to the economic clauses of the Treaty they will find that the Supreme Council did in fact go, in my judgment as far as they could, in interfering with discretion and independence, and that they did in fact lay down certain conditions to govern the economic relations of Hungary and the emancipated peoples. Under Article 205 it is provided: That for a period of five years Hungary may establish a special Customs regime with Austria and Czecho-Slovakia, and, by a self-denying ordinance the Allies and the Associated Powers agree that they themselves are not to share in the advantages accruing, from these specially favourable conditions. Again, in Article 207 it is ordained that During a period of five years a special agreement shall be made between Poland and the Czecho-Slovak State and Hungary as, to the supply of coal, lignite, foodstuffs, and jaw materials reciprocally. I would ask the very careful consideration of the House to that particular part of the Treaty. However, it is admitted that grave economic evils have followed from the disruption of the Austro1 Hungarian Empire, and, moreover, the resentment, suspicion, and enmity unhappily entertained by some of these people for Hungary have led to the setting up of economic barriers and export and import prohibitions and restrictions on communities as between one and the other. Everybody knows that this has happened, how grave have been the results on all these peoples of Central Europe, and how greatly this policy of dissension has tended to delay their economic recovery. In the matter of these difficulties a conference of the States in question is shortly to be held at Porto Rosa to explore the whole of these problems. Our own Government and the Governments of France and Italy will be represented. The intention, as I say, is to review all questions regarding Central Europe. I understand that this Conference will meet towards the end of this month, or perhaps the beginning of next.

Mr. ASQUITH

Who are the other parties represented?

Mr. HARMSWORTH

I think I can answer that. They are Hungary, Austria, Czecho-Slovakia, Rumania, the Jugoslav State, and Italy.

Mr. ASQUITH

What about Poland?

Mr. HARMSWORTH

I am not quite sure. As I say, France and Belgium will also be represented. In conclusion, in moving the Second Reading of this Bill it is no part of my duty to contend that the text of the Peace Treaty which it embodies is in every Article and every line verbally inspired, I am sure that none of the eminent statesmen who framed the Treaty would make any such claim for it. But it represents the best results of much labour and anxious care. I assert without fear of challenge that it was conceived in no spirit of anger, vengeance, or caprice. I hope, and Relieve, that new Hungary has every prospect before her of a splendid and a prosperous future. Only recently the Hungarian Government and the Hungarian people have given proof of an admirable steadiness in circumstances of exceptional strain. We need not doubt that the admiration excited in this country by the wisdom and staunchness exhibited on this occasion by Hungary is shared by her neighbours in Central Europe. We may look forward with great confidence to the negotiations at Porto Rosa for a solution of the problems that for the moment delay the revival, not only of Hungary herself, but of the border States in whose fortunes her own are so intimately involved.

Colonel WEDGWOOD

I beg to move, to leave out the word "now," and at the end of the Question to add the words "upon this day six months."

The hon. Gentleman in so ably moving the Second Reading of this Bill, if I understood him aright, said that there was no special sympathy with Hungary in this House. I think there he was wrong. I think of all the nations against whom we were fighting in the late War. we had less bitterness—

Mr. HARMSWORTH

My hon. and gallant Friend says that we had no special sympathy.

Colonel WEDGWOOD

I am quoting you.

Mr. HARMSWORTH

No, no! I must not be represented as having said that. I did not say that.

Colonel WEDGWOOD

I am sorry if I have made a mistake, but I have stated the words as I took them down. There was no special sympathy with Hungary in this House I understood the hon. Gentleman to say. I think that is wrong. But I am very glad of my hon. Friend's correction.

Mr. HARMSWORTH

No, no! I did not say anything of the kind. I did not express any opinion. What I did say was that there was resentment and enmity and suspicion of Hungary among some of her neighbours.

Colonel WEDGWOOD

I am very glad to have brought this thing up. I must have misunderstood the hon. Gentleman. I think there is a very real sympathy in this House for Hungary. Of all those Powers warring against us we had less enmity against Hungary than anybody else. Even at the worst part of the War, English people in Hungary were extremely well treated by the Hungarians, and since the War those of us who have been in Hungary find there is a general admiration for the Englishman there, and I think there is admiration in this country for Hungarian history and for the Hungarian people. We know perfectly well, we who have been acquainted with that part of Europe in past years, that the Hungarians have misruled the subject races in Hungary. We know from the works of Mr. Seton Watson what happened in Slovakia in the old days. The rights of these old subject people to their own Government has been realised in this Treaty, and we do not wish those other matters to be written down against the people of England in the minds of the Hungarians. They have not forfeited our good opinion because at the conclusion of the Great War the races whom they used to control are set free. The Czecho-Slovaks, or rather the Slovaks, because the Czechs were never under the Magyars, are now independent of Hungary, and whatever the future of the Austrian Empire may be at any rate the old days of one race controlling another have come to an end. The settlement with the Jugo-Slavs, although they have in some parts got more than they should take, is a settlement based on racial lines which every party in this House can properly support. So far as the Austrian boundary is concerned the official settlement by the Supreme Council, which is laid down in this Treaty, is on strictly racial lines, and the Hungarians have not much to complain of, viewed solely from the ethnological point of view.

On the eastern frontier I think the Hungarians have a reasonable ground of complaint, and the Hungarian population in Transylvania are not now obtaining elementary justice from the ruling race in that country. We have complaints from the Bishops of three faiths in Transylvania protesting against the treatment of the population of that country under Roumanian rule. We have heard how the miners have been treated in Transylvania, how they have been made to work in the mines and tortured by the Roumanian officials. If only a tithe of the complaints of the treatment they have had to undergo in Transylvania is true, we have in this Treaty injured many thousands who were living happily under the old Austrian Empire in Transylvania, but if steps were taken even now to enforce the Treaty signed by Roumania, against which Roumania protested at the time, demanding protection for the minorities in Transylvania, if the Government will enforce those provisions, remembering that Roumania, after all, is dependent to a large extent upon British good will, they would do more to restore the good name of England in the East, and good relations between England and the Magyar Kingdom, than any other possible way.

You have at the present time a state of terror over the whole of the eastern part of the old Austrian Empire. It is not so bad on the Czecho-Slovak border, but in Transylvania and over a large part of Hungary itself justice has ceased to operate, and brute power and brute force is the rule in that country. We on these Benches have to look at this Treaty not only from the ethnological point of view, but also from the point of view of our duty to international labour. The right hon. Gentleman did not refer in his speech to the Clauses protecting minorities or to the Clauses protecting labour. I will refer first of all to the Clause affecting minorities in Hungary. There are Clauses affecting particularly the Jews who are being persecuted as probably no other country in the world persecutes them, except it be the Bolsheviks in the Ukraine. I would call the attention of the House to the Clauses of the Treaty. Article 55 of the Treaty provides that: Hungary undertakes to assure full and complete protection of life and liberty to all inhabitants of Hungary without distinction of birth, nationality, language, race or religion. All inhabitants of Hungary shall be entitled to the free exercise, whether public or private, of any creed, religion or belief. Article 58.—All Hungarian nationals shall be equal before the law and enjoy the same civil and political rights without distinction as to race, language or religion.…Hungarian nationals who belong to racial, religious or linguistic minorities shall enjoy the same security in law and in fact as other Hungarian nationals. Are those Clauses meant to be real Clauses or shams? About ten months ago some members of the party to which I have the honour to belong were invited to go to Hungary to see that the workers in that country were well treated and had nothing to complain of. Our visit to Hungary was prefaced by a Report from the British High Commissioner in Hungary to the effect that the statements and rumours in this country as to the white terror in Hungary were false. When we arrived there we found that so far from their being false the actual terror was worse than it had ever been depicted in this country. Shortly after our return the High Commissioner had to admit that he was wrong and that there was indeed a white terror in Hungary. What was going on in Hungary ten months ago is still continuing there. The Jewish minority are being persecuted now as they were then. The officers' detachments are still ruling the country. The missions may be better politically, especially since the last adventure, but so far as justice for the Jews and the working classes is concerned the conditions to-day are as bad as ever they were. Do these Clauses mean any hope for the Jews and for the working classes of Budapest or in the mine areas in Hungary?

Is our High Commissioner there to use his influence, or such influence as he possesses, to see that this protection of minorities and of labour is indeed carried out? One of the most tragic memories I have of that visit to Hungary was a deputation that came to see me at Vienna. They represented the miners from Pecs, in Baranya. This district is now to be handed back to Hungary by the Jugo-slavs. These miners gave us their names and the names of the president and secretary of their union. They said: We beg you to tell the English people and our comrades in England that we must not be handed back to Hungary. We are all Hungarians, and we love our country, but as long as Hungary is ruled by the White Guards we beg that we shall not be handed over to their tender mercies. Already many of their comrades have been decoyed across the frontier and murdered. They told us that the mines belong to an English company, and that if the Jugo-Slav troops left and the Magyar troops came in they would either fight or else they would blow up the mines and retire with the Jugo-Slavs. To see these people who were previously Hungarians begging that they might not be handed back to their country was the most terrible evidence of the terror that has been inspired in the working classes of Hungary. The miners there are not allowed to strike or change their occupation. Their pay is almost ridiculous to mention in comparison with any sort or class of labour in this country. These people are desperate, but under this Treaty they are being handed back to the Magyar Government, which is the same Government they dreaded ten months ago. I do think in making our protest against this Treaty we might get some sort of assurance that the terror which was evidenced in the story of these men to us should be prevented from extending to this district in Baranya. It was never under the Bolsheviks and there is no excuse for saying that they were Bolsheviks. They are outside the Bolshevik area and they are people who are only anxious to get on quietly with their own business, and if when these White troops come in those men are butchered we feel that their blood will, to some extent, be on our heads.

It could all be avoided if only steps were taken to send an English Commissioner to Baranya who should remain until all danger of terror was over. In this way a great deal of the danger would be overcome. To my mind the whole value of this Treaty depends upon whether or not we do see to the protection of the minorities in Hungary. A more active and energetic supervision by the Hungarian Government is quite possible, because that Government, like so many of the small States in the East, is extremely anxious to stand well with the English people. If you had there a representative of Great Britain who takes the decent English point of view that anti-semitism is bad form, if you had a representative of Great Britain there who would keep in touch with the Minister of Labour here, and be open to hear the complaints and the views of labour in Hungary, things might be different. If you had a High Commissioner who, at some risk of local popularity with the ruling classes, would stand up for the honour of England as we stand up for it in this House, then indeed there would be hope both for the Jewish minority and the down-trodden workers of Budapest. That is what I hope will come out of this Bill, and some steps should be taken to represent to our representative in Budapest that his duties are not merely diplomatic, but that he should also be the watchdog for the Jews, and the working classes in Hungary.

The other matter to which I want to refer is the Reparation Clauses. We all hope that the Reparation Clauses may bring some money out of Germany possibly. They appear in one treaty after another. They have a common form, but absolutely they have no bearing whatever on the Hungarian Peace Treaty, or the Austrian Peace Treaty, or the Bulgarian Peace Treaty or the Turkish Peace Treaty. We know we shall not get anything out of those countries, yet the Reparation Clauses in those four Treaties. are making it impossible for finance in any of those countries to be restored to a sound footing. The Austrian crown is. now about 2,000 to the pound. I do not know what the Hungarian crown is—I think it was worse than the Austrian—but it is now about 1,000 to the pound, and it is better to that extent because, within the last six months they have had in Hungary a Finance Minister who has really tried to straighten out Hungarian finance. They have levied enormous taxes in Hungary in order to try and stop the perpetual printing of paper money, which is sending down the value of their crown. They are making desperate efforts to right themselves, and as they do effect some improvement, one sees the hungry eyes of the Allied Powers cast upon them, and hears the statement, "Here are the Reparation Clauses: let us squeeze them of all we can." It is a positive incentive to every Finance Minister to leave everything to the printing press and to remit all taxation, and it is one of the most definite obstacles to the reconstruction of civilisation in the West of Europe. I think we are right in protesting against these Clauses which are causing unemployment in this country to-day, and it would be futile for us to let this Bill pass without registering our protest against the suicidal policy of clamouring for what we cannot get, with the result that we get less than we otherwise might manage to secure.

Personally I have the greatest regard for the Hungarians. I believe that even under this Peace Treaty, if we help them in Budapesth, if we send a Minister to represent this country who will look after these matters, Hungary may again come to the front. They are largely a peasant people. It is almost entirely an agricultural country. They are a freedom-loving people. There is in Parliament an elected majority of the Small Land Holders party, and that is a party which would be opposed to any form of autocracy in the country. If that party is encouraged we shall gradually get rid, I believe, of the "white" robber barons, and Hungary may have an opportunity of returning to a prosperous era and recover some of the glories of the old Imperial Hungary.

Lieut.-Commander KENWORTHY

I beg to second the Amendment. I welcome particularly the words of the Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs in which he suggested we should all exercise care in the choice of our words in referring to these foreign countries. I wish other Members of the Government would remember that when they are making speeches. It is the insults to foreign countries after the War is over which are remembered. People in this Chamber may be tempted to forget it, but what we remember about the Germans more than anything else are really the insults they threw at us at the beginning of the War in reference to our "contemptible little Army." We also remember years previously the Kruger telegram of the Kaiser. Therefore I welcome this spirit as represented by the head of the Foreign Office in this House in pleading for temperate language in regard to foreign countries. If the framers of this Peace Treaty are so satisfied with its boundaries, it seems to me to be a very great mistake that they did not agree to adopt the plebiscite for its determination. If it is right to hold a plebiscite for Schleswig-Holstein or for the determination of the frontiers of Upper Silesia, it is equally right to hold one for the frontiers of Hungary? I would accept, as my hon. Friend does, the ethnographical map drawn up in Paris, and the data given by the Hungarian censors in 1910. But I wish to point out to the House that this Peace Treaty which we are asked to pass this afternoon creates some half-dozen Alsace-Lorraines on the frontiers of Hungary, if the information we get is correct. If it is incorrect it could have been proved by a plebiscite, and I say one should have been held.

5.0. P.M.

I wish particularly to draw the attention of hon. Members to one or two of the areas where real injustice has been done, and may I in doing so say that I share my hon. and gallant Friend's indignation at the action of the present Hungarian Government. All my sympathies are with the subject races emancipated from the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. But in drawing the frontiers we must not allow our prejudices and our sentiments, our likes for this people, our sympathy for that people or our dislike of other people to in any way mould our actions in laying down these new frontiers. I will first draw the attention of hon. Members to the case of the district of Pressburg on the Danube and of Ersekhovar. This, as hon. Members may be aware, is territory predominantly inhabited by Magyars. It has been handed over to the new Czechoslovak State in order that it should have a riparian frontier on the Danube. There is a very rich plain south of the Danube also which has been included so that this State may have a footing on both sides of the river. If it was necessary that the Czechs should be assured of freedom of transit to the Danube, why was not some-arrangement made whereby freedom of transit was given them along the railways and roads leading to it? Statesmen attempted to do it with regard to Bulgarian trade going out to Salonika and I hope that the economic corridor will work there. I trust, too, that this historic town of Pressburg, with its normal Magyar population and old associations with Hungary, will not be handed over to alien rule. Unless it is rectified that will be so, and it will be the cause of future warfare. Those of us who have watched events during the last few years realise that war in Europe affects this country even if we are Hot drawn into it. It affects the whole financial situation in Europe, it affects our trade and commerce, and brings distress to our people. There is another very bad irredenta in the Kassa—part of the northern frontier, partly composed of Magyars and partially of Slovaks. There is a solid block of 300,000 or 400,000 Magyars, with a little interspersion of other races, who are mostly German. I think the Slovak frontier has been drawn too much in favour of the Czecho-Slov-akian States, and I contend that a plebiscite should have been taken there. With regard to Ruthenia, we do not know yet to which country that will go. There is going to be a plebiscite in Eastern Galicia in 15 years' time, and in the meantime the Poles are to have con- trol of that territory. Whichever country eventually gains control over that will have a good deal to say as to the future destinies of Ruthenia. It seems quite wrong to hand these people over without any direct popular attempt to ascertain their wishes. I am informed that the real reason is that in order that Czecho-Slovakia should have a boundary marching with that of Rumania. That is the sort of thing that has led to trouble in the past, and will certainly do so in the future. The hon. Gentleman did admit that there seemed to be hardship to the Szeklers in this matter. There you have a racial island with a Magyar population which has been incorporated in Rumania. I admit that the difficulties there are very great. There seem to me, however, to have been two alternatives which might have been followed. One was to run a corridor through the Kolzs-var area and the other was to allow the Szeklers to remain in the Hungarian Kingdom. I admit there would have been great economic difficulties in doing that, but I think it would have been better if these unfortunate Szeklers could have been given autonomy. As my hon. and gallant Friend said, these unfortunate people have been most harshly treated by the Rumanians. The University at Kolozsvar has been closed up, the professors driven away, and the students dispersed, and although the Hungarians admit no Jewish students to enter the University at Budapest, there is no excuse for Rumania doing that sort of thing in Kolozsvar. I agree that both are wrong in that case, but that is no reason why we, in drawing up this Treaty, should pay attention to misdeeds of that sort, and I think that a much larger measure of autonomy might have been given to the Magyar-inhabited regions in Transylvania. The district of Szatmar has been handed over, although I believe it is predominantly Hungarian.

I do not want to spend any more time on these irredentas, except that I think a real case has been made out for a plébiscite. If a plébiscite is not taken, the Magyar people will always be discontented, and many thousands of people—I have seen the figure put at 3,000,000 Magyars—will be groaning under the sense of injustice of being bartered away like so many cattle to alien rulers. I fear that the real reason has been that, when the Bela Kun-Maximalist Government was formed at Budapest, the statesmen who made this Treaty were so panic-stricken that they offered any sort of bribe to the neighbours of Hungary if only they would advance and upset this terrible Government. Now I suppose they are being, I will not say blackmailed, but importuned to keep their promises. The Under-Secretary of State referred to the letter of M. Millerand in which he stated that these frontiers would be carefully examined on the spot by the Boundary Commission, and that the good offices of the League of Nations would, it was hoped, be sought to rectify any hard cases. I should like to ask if it is a fact that this Boundary Commission is carrying out that programme. From the Continental papers one sees that it is reported freely in various quarters that this programme has been abandoned, in view of the obstruction of the emancipated peoples, the expense, and so on. Could we be informed that it is the intention of the Allies really to carry out that programme honestly and thoroughly? A good deal of apprehension has been caused by these reports of its abandonment. With regard to the whole matter, I think that the fate of these people in Slovakia and Transylvania who are now suffering in their turn from the peoples whom they at one time oppressed is a real warning to all Imperialists of what in time will be their fate if they suppress the nationality of other peoples. The trouble in the whole of this area which is now under discussion is the disease of nationality. Nationality suppressed is seen exhibiting its best and its worst features. There is the heroism and self-sacrifice of the patriot when he is oppressed, and there is his reaction when he in his turn oppresses his former rulers when he gets the opportunity. I beg hon. Members to look at the fate of Hungary and of the unfortunate Hungarians who find themselves as little Ulsters throughout Slovakia and Transylvania, with their churches and schools closed, their professional men driven out, their property taken away, and their people most harshly treated.

There is one further objection which I must take to the Treaty in justifying my vote against it. To realise these facts fully it is necessary to take a map of Hungary showing the railways, and to put on it a tracing showing the new boundaries; and also to take other maps showing the waterways and the roads and other communications, and put similar tracings on them, and, if possible, on other maps showing the physical features of the country—the mountains and so on. It will then be seen that the neiw frontiers completely cut across the whole economic life of the former Hungary. Whereas you have a superfluity of corn in the great Hungarian plain, you have a shortage of timber; while in Slovakia you have an abundance of timber and a shortage of grain of all sorts. The factories and centres of production are cut off from their raw materials and from their usual, historic and natural markets. At these new frontiers there, is all the paraphernalia of customs, prohibitions, anti-dumping regulations, and fiscal measures of all sorts, and trade is absolutely stopped. I would suggest with great diffidence that the Articles in the Treaty which deal with freedom of transit for Rumanian, Slovakian and Serbian goods over the Hungarian railways, should have been made applicable to the railways of those countries as regards Hungarian produce. Throughout the scales have been weighted, it seems to me, altogether on the side of the seceding States, and the result is that commerce is held up. As in the case of Austria, which is very similar, the Powers responsible for this Treaty should have insisted on freedom of transit on the rivers and railways serving this great commercial and producing country. It was not sufficient to allow these people in their new territories complete fiscal freedom and to give them carte blanche to cut off the trade of their neighbours. They are injuring themselves and each other, but the worst is that they are injuring our commerce. We used to do a great trade up the Danube. We had a great export and import trade with the former Hungary, and it does affect us when these new frontiers cut right across this trade, as they do at present. I feel that those who drew up this Treaty paid too much attention to the political aspect and too little attention to the economic aspect; and this is not the only Treaty in which that difficulty is visible.

There is, however, a ray of light in the matter. Not only is there going to be the meeting at Porto Rosa, but for some weeks a very important Conference has been sitting at Barcelona. At that Conference the whole of the States affected in this case have delegates, and they are considering some scheme whereby through traffic can be relieved of all these vexatious searchings and delays. The importance of the Conference is that the former enemy States are admitted on equal terms, and I believe that so far the results promise to be good. I should like to ask whether the results and recommendations of this Conference will be considered by the Council of the League of Nations, and whether the Council will lend them its full authority. I am now reminded that it is in direct connection with the League of Nations, and that the League of Nations will then take up the work. The League of Nations should take up the work of the Barcelona Conference, and the very important results which may come from that Conference should be supported and carried forward by the Council of the League. I need not mention the case of reparations, which has been dealt with by my hon. and gallant Friend who moved the Amendment, but I should like to support his plea for the pressure of his Majesty's Government on the Hungarian Government. We have very great influence with them at present—they are practically at our mercy—and I beg the Government to bring every pressure to bear upon them to treat their subject peoples properly. The Jews, for instance, have been very hardly treated in Hungary, and recent information which I have received points to a continuance of that harsh treatment. We have a responsibility with respect to these unfortunate people in Hungary, and in the past we have always been quick as a people to take the part of the oppressed throughout the world. We have more power with the Hungarian Government even than we had with the Sublime Porte when we were attempting to ease the lot of the Armenians. We can, almost by a word, have the persecution of the Jews stopped in Hungary. We have done a great deal to stop the more outrageous treatment of the Jews in Poland, and we are in a much stronger position vis-è-vis Hungary than vis-è-vis Poland, which claims to be an Ally and which is a new State flushed with the feeling of emancipation and regeneration. Hungary is cowed and beaten to-day, and will listen to us as Poland will not. The same applies to the treatment of the working classes in Hungary. We have a chance now to do a little good in that part of Europe by bringing to bear such pressure as I recommend. Bad as this Treaty is for the reasons which I have attempted to sketch, it does contain Clauses for the protection of minorities, which, if faithfully carried out, will produce good results. I beg the Government to use their utmost endeavours, apart from trying to seek illusory reparations from a ruined country, to force the rulers of that country to treat the unfortunate people in their power with humanity and justice.

Mr. ASQUITH

I shall not follow my hon. and gallant Friend (Lieut.-Commander Kenworthy) in his criticisms, although they seem to me to be very pertinent and to require some notice, as to the demarcation of the new frontiers of Hungary. In the whole history of political map-making I suppose that no territory has presented greater difficulty, to those who were trying to adjust the claims of the various populations within it on the basis of liberty and self-government, than Hungary. It is true that the Magyars were in a substantial majority of the whole population, but not a very large one—I think something like 54 per cent. There were 16 per cent, of Rumanians, 10 per cent, of Slovaks, 10 per cent, of Germans, and a number of other smaller races, none of them inconsiderable in population or in industrial and economic interests. I am not going to commit myself to anything in the nature of a whole-hearted approval—for I have not the information which would enable me to do so—of the actual boundary which has been drawn, yet I can imagine few more difficult and complicated problems. On the whole we may rejoice, and I think my hon. and gallant Friend rejoices, that large populations which have suffered in the past from an artificial, and in many ways unsympathetic, union, are now in a position to work out their own future on the lines of autonomy.

It is not, however, for the purpose of dealing with the frontier that I have risen, but to direct attention, mainly for the purpose of eliciting information from the Government, to two or three other matters which seem to me to be of high importance, and some of which affect, not only this particular Treaty, but other Treaties which we have made in relation to this part of Central and Eastern Europe. In the first place I agree with both my hon. Friends who have spoken in the view that to talk in any real of substantial sense of exacting material reparation from these countries is to play with words. Germany is another matter. I will not say anything about Germany at present. But to talk about getting reparation in any solid sense from communities such as Hungary, or Austria, or Bulgaria, or Turkey—I do not care which of them you take—seems to me to be paying mere lip service to a political phrase, and the sooner we wipe off these purely hypothetical and imaginary claims, not only from our own national estimates of possible revenue in the future, but from the whole international slate, the sooner we shall recognise the absolutely clear teachings of common sense.

I pass from that to two other points. The first is the economic and fiscal relations not only of Hungary but of the adjacent and newly-emancipated communities. I very much regret—I think it has been one of the greatest blots upon the whole of this series of treaties—that the Great Powers did not insist, as a condition of the emancipation and of the grant of autonomous rule to these countries, that they, should remain as they have been—and that was the one virtue of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—members of one economic unit. The Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs, in his very admirable and lucid speech, seemed to think that that would be infringing some abstract principle of sovereignty which it would be sacrilege for diplomacy to attempt. It is no such thing. You claim the right, and you have exercised the right, in a hundred previous articles of these various treaties, very properly, to impose upon them, as a condition of the new freedom which they would enjoy, conditions which make them exercise their powers in conformity with what Western Europe, and indeed the civilised world, agrees to be the maxims of sound statesmanship. You have in fact, as my hon. Friend pointed out, by a number of the articles in this Treaty in regard to Hungary imposed economic limitations upon its full fiscal and financial freedom in the future. I do not say those limitations were not very good. Probably they are all in the right direction, but you ought to have gone a great deal further, and the terrible chaos to which my hon. Friend himself bore testimony, and which he obviously deplored, which has arisen from these new States erecting against one another all kinds of artificial barriers is one of the great causes which has retarded the re-establishment of free and full industrial life in that part of Europe from which, as we now know—and we realise perhaps more than we ever have done the economic inter-dependence of the whole area—we, France and America, and all the victorious nations are suffering only in a less degree than they are. I think it was a great mistake that that was not foreseen and given effect to in the counsels of the diplomatists. I am very glad to hear from what the Under-Secretary told us that a conference between these States is going to take place—a conference to which I hope all these States will be parties—the States, I mean, of Central and Eastern Europe—a conference which is to be held, I understand, very shortly—in Italy?

Mr. HARMSWORTH

Near Trieste.

Mr. ASQUITH

I hope all the proper people are represented, and I earnestly hope the Government and the Allied Governments of France and Italy will exercise an authority which, if they choose to exercise it, cannot fail to have effect, and will insist on the discontinuance of this internecine and suicidal economic warfare which is retarding the development of these communities and inflicting loss on the whole civilised world.

The only other point to which I will call attention is, I will not say of greater, but certainly of equal importance. I mean what machinery 'is contemplated to give effect to the provisions which occur, not only in this Treaty, but in all the Treaties which relate particularly to the creation and development of these new States for the protection of minorities. We have heard from my hon. and gallant Friend (Colonel Wedgwood) a most moving story, no doubt absolutely accurate in its main features—I have heard the same thing myself—of the open and flagrant manner in which both in the curtailed Hungary provided by this Treaty, and in Rumania, which received such large accessions, such enormous advantages from a Treaty which was made in her favour—of the gross and flagrant violation going on day by day and week by week of the provisions put into these Treaties for the protection of minorities. The Jews, of course—that is an old story—were always maltreated in Rumania, My own recollection of history is that on the whole they were fairly well protected in Hungary. I am very sorry to hear that an anti-Semitic movement of a more or less savage kind is going on now in Hungary against them. It is not a question of the Jews only. Still more these minority provisions should be enforced when you have transferred, as you have had to transfer—it was inevitable—when dealing for instance with a country like Transylvania, large blocks of Hungarians and also of Germans to Rumanian rule, and it is of vital importance that the provisions for the protection of civil and political rights should not be a dead letter, but should be capable, by some really effective machinery, of being brought into operation within the areas of the different Governments concerned. We always believed and hoped that that would be one of the functions and one of the most important functions of the League of Nations and it is provided for in the Covenant and in the Treaty. When we hear, on evidence which unfortunately we cannot controvert, that these minority provisions in the various treaties are-being daily disregarded, I think we may ask from the Government what steps they are taking to make the nominal authority of the League of Nations in this matter a really effective force. These are the points which, it seems to me, arise on the consideration of the Treaty and in regard to which the House before it gives the Bill a Second Reading may well ask for further information on the part of the Government.

The LORD PRESIDENT of the COUNCIL (Mr. Balfour)

The speeches which have been made by the two hon. and gallant Gentlemen who moved and seconded the rejection of the Treaty, as well as that of my right hon. Friend (Mr. Asquith), I think require some little commentary, although I have nothing very important to tell the House on the subject. It is quite easy and it may be a useful employment of time to ask the House, with regard to frontiers traced after immense labour, after impartial discussion, after the most careful investigation of all the available information, to say, as the hon. and gallant Gentlemen (Colonel Wedgwood and Lieut.-Commander Kenworthy) I think said, that these boundaries have been ill-drawn, that they might have been so drawn as to safeguard the nationality of the populations concerned or the economic welfare of the populations dwelling in the neighbourhood. They deal with matters of intricate complexity. They require maps; they require special information; and they require re-investigation by the House if this House is really usefully to criticise the labour that has been spent on the consideration of these treaties. I cannot honestly advise the House to undertake that. I cannot believe they think that the work that was done in Paris in 1919 could be better done in a Committee Room in this House, or in this House itself, in the year 1921. It clearly is not so. I do not pretend that mistakes may never have been made The gentlemen who worked at the frontiers of these States are fallible like other human beings. They had to deal with questions on which the conclusions arrived at were doubtful conclusions, on which the arguments on either side were balanced arguments, and it is perfectly easy, and I think perfectly futile, to say in these difficult cases, "A wrong decision has been taken. Do not ratify the Treaty. Reconsider it. Go again over all the work that has already been done and see if you cannot improve upon it." That is not, I think, practical politics. That is not really the way to bring peace in Eastern Europe. It is not a course which I hope the House will on this occasion pursue.

A good deal has been said by all the speakers upon the damage to the economic position of the world and to the interests of the British working-man of the condition of things that prevails in Eastern Europe, and it is perfectly true that the economic condition of the world causes anxiety to every thinking man, and that among the contributory causes to the present economic condition of the world the position of affairs in Eastern Europe is one. But putting off the ratification of this Treaty and going again over all the work of the Peace Con- ference is the very last method which any sane man would adopt if he wanted to bring to an end the state of unsettlement which so unfortunately prevails in this district at present. I think, as I am on this question of frontiers, the hon. Gentleman did imperfect justice to the letter of M. Millerand which my right hon. Friend quoted in the admirable speech in which he intiated our Debate to-day. Minor rectifications, minor adjustments to deal with economic conditions unforeseen or imperfectly apprehended at the time are possible under the Treaty. More than that I do not believe it is possible to do. To attempt to do more than that would do far more harm than good, and I hope the House will support the Government with a view to as rapid as possible a ratification of the Treaty and the resettlement of Eastern Europe.

I think the hon. Member who moved the Amendment said there ought to be a plebiscite, and that no such decision ought to be taken without direct consultation with the populations concerned. The question of a plebiscite, or any plebiscite, is one that constantly came up and inevitably came up before the Paris Conference, and has come up on other occasions since. It is always a doubtful point. There are some places where a plebiscite is clearly desirable, there are others where it is clearly undesirable, and there is a margin where it is very difficult to say with any assurance whether the machinery of a plebiscite, cumbersome, expensive, and throwing a great burden upon Powers other than those immediately concerned, is the proper machinery to use. A plebiscite is not an easy thing to carry out. It is a very necessary and very useful instrument in certain cases, but it involves the use of a policing force, and it involves, as everybody who has followed the events in Silesia and other places knows, great local difficulties. Very often it is far better, far wiser, and far more statesmanlike to do your best with the facts which are adequate for a decision than to go through the elaborate, doubtful, and difficult process of a plebiscite, which, when it is done, when it is carried out, when it is brought to its termination, unless every precaution has been taken, may show not so much the willing wishes of a free population as the unhappy results of pressure, intimidation, and other illegitimate methods of arriving at a decision.

The hon. and gallant Gentleman who seconded the rejection of the Treaty was very insistent that a great deal more could have been done to secure freedom of transit between the various States. That is part of the larger question of the relations among each other of these fragments of the late Austrian Empire. I do not see why I should in the least) conceal from the House the disappointment which I personally feel at the methods which these new States have sometimes adopted in their relations one to another, and sometimes in their relations to the fragments of alien populations left, and necessarily left, within their borders. It is undoubtedly true that if any cynic wishes to survey the history of the last few years, he could easily prove—it is a lamentable thing to think of—that those who have suffered most from intolerance and oppression have hot always shown toleration when they have been given their freedom, and that their new privileges have not prevented them using towards others the unhappy policy under which they themselves have so long suffered. That lesson, which one would have thought the) simplest of all lessons, apparently is not one quickly or easily learned, but that) it is being learned, and that there will be a steady amelioration of the international relations of these people, and of their internal government, I feel on the whole convinced.

Colonel WEDGWOOD

How are you going to help it?

Mr. BALFOUR

We help it in every possible way. We always do help it in, every possible way.

Colonel WEDGWOOD

In Rumania?

Mr. BALFOUR

We always help it in every possible way. My hon. and gallant Friend appears to suppose that by a perpetual system of lecturing you get the system you want at once and easily. That is not so. The relations between States are often more difficult than the relations between individuals, and require tact, judgment, and choosing the right moment for intervention. If the hon. and gallant Member really supposes that we are indifferent to the ways in which these new States are carrying out the duties which we have enabled them to perform, if they only will perform them, he profoundly mistakes both the temper of the Government and the views of the country, which I believe the Government represents in this respect. One of the ways in which this international jealousy shows itself unquestionably is by transit. A great deal has been done with regard to transit. I think it was the hon. and gallant Member who seconded the Amendment who ended his attack upon the transit policy of the Government by referring to what has been recently done in Barcelona. What has been done there was the calling together under the auspices, and through the efforts and organisation of the League of Nations, of an International Transit Conference, at which all nations were represented. The results of that Conference, which has only just terminated, I am not in a position to explain to the House, because I am not as yet acquainted with them, but I do not think that anything could better illustrate the kind of good work which in these economic spheres the League of Nations can perform than the fact that it did call this Conference, that the Conference did assemble, that it did deal with a large number of these most difficult problems, and the result undoubtedly will be, it cannot be questioned that it will be, a great improvement in all these international transit arrangements which both hon. Gentlemen earnestly and properly desire.

Another question on which both hon. Gentlemen and my right hon. Friend who has just sat down dilated, was the question of reparation. My right hon. Friend said it was perfect folly to expect any reparation from countries like Hungary, Austria, Turkey and Bulgaria, that they were not in a position to pay, that everybody knew they were not in a position to pay, and that the sooner we wiped out the question of payment from our minds, the better. Do my hon. and right hon. Friends who speak like that really think it would have been desirable, and if desirable, practicable, at the time the Powers met at the Paris Conference to arrange the Peace Treaty, with any measure of assent from any part of the civilised world, to say that the crimes committed in the late War by our late enemies should go wholly unpunished, and that they should make no effort to do something towards repairing the prodigious wrongs in the committal of which they have been parties? That would have been an impracticable policy. It may be that my right hon. Friends are right; it may be that the amount of money, the amount of reparation to be got out of countries like Austria and Hungary is insignificant, that it is an utterly impracticable policy to try to extract money where money does not exist—it may turn out so—but the facts ought to be examined, and the machinery for examining them is in existence and will be set to work when this Treaty is ratified. The hon. Gentleman who wishes to put off the Treaty is the same hon. Gentleman who thinks that the sooner this thing is dismissed the better. It cannot be dismissed as he wishes to dismiss it. You cannot say that these people are unable to pay, and that therefore, we should not ask them to pay, unless you examine; their economic position. You cannot examine their economic position until the machinery for examining—the Reparations Commission—sets to work, the Reparations Commission cannot set to work until the Treaty is ratified, and the Treaty cannot be ratified until the hon. Gentleman withdraws his Amendment or until he is outvoted. Under these circumstances, I really think the criticism is an unfounded one. It is perfectly true that all these questions of reparation are most difficult. It is perfectly true that the problem of deciding how much or how little a given community can pay is not a problem easy of solution, but it is impossible to carry out the policy which my hon. Friends recommend, and that we should say, "These people cannot pay; we will not ask them to pay anything, and we will dismiss the idea of payment," without examination. The policy that has been adopted is the only one that can be adopted, namely, that you should leave a competent body to decide what they can pay, and what by universal consent they ought to pay, so far as in their power lies, to repair the unutterable wrongs for which they and their leaders were responsible.

I am not sure that there is any other question to deal with except that of minorities. As regards minorities my right hon. Friend seemed to think that there was some slight slackness on the part either of the Government or of the Supreme Council or of the League of Nations or some other body with regard to setting in force the machinery by which these minorities will be protected. I can assure him that this question is causing great anxiety to all concerned. It was a great step, a bold step to provide in these Treaties that unpopular minorities should be under some protection, or that the States which have been created by the War should be put under some protection from a body which was brought into being by the War. The League of Nations has been required by the Pact to undertake that duty, and I am confident that the League of Nations will do its best to perform it. Let nobody suppose that the duty is an easy one. It is not an easy one it is one which will demand all the anxious attention of the Council of the League, all the support which the Council can derive from the Assembly of the League, and, what is all important, the support of all the members of the League, the various nations which compose the League. The duty thrown upon it by the Treaty of Versailles and other treaties will be discharged by the League of Nations to the best of its ability and that it will be successful I have every hope.

Do not let us for a moment suppose that merely by uttering a formula or quoting an article of a Treaty this very difficult task can be carried out. I believe that the pressure of the public opinion of the world brought to bear upon any community which violates its duty with regard to minorities will be enough. On that I rest my main hope and faith. If that fails, either through the want of skill or dramatic attack or from any other cause, other steps no doubt might have to be taken. But it is on the organised public opinion of the world you must rest the matter. If the League of Nations is to carry out any part of the great work which many of us hope it may be able to accomplish, it would be largely by focussing and concentrating the public opinion of nations upon the duties of the various members in the work which they have to carry out in common. But observe when you talk of the League of Nations organising the best public opinion of the world, and using that for the amelioration of social conditions in this or that country, you imply that that public opinion really exists, and can be concentrated upon some particular object.

That public opinion the League of Nations cannot after all produce. The countries themselves must have these views. It must be not merely in this House or in this country, where my hon. Friends truly say the lot of oppressed minorities has always found sympathy. It must be in the general community of nations also that those sentiments exist. If you cannot induce the world at large to feel that the oppression of a minority on account of its opinions or its race, or indeed for any reason is a matter which outrages the general conscience of mankind, if there is not that feeling diffused over the world, how can the League of Nations or any other machinery apply to a particular object that which does not truly exist. We must—I say we as a member of the Council for the moment—have behind us in such tasks the combined and harmonious effort of all the world if we are to do anything, and I hope earnestly that we shall be able to command that assistance. Such appeals as that which my right hon. Friend has made will help. I am sure that what he said in this matter found a sympathetic echo in every heart. So far as I am concerned, while I do not underrate the prodigious difficulties of dealing with these questions. I do think the more you can bring nations together, the more you can make each sensitive to the best form of public opinion of the other, by so much the more you will facilitate the tremendous task which the Covenant of the League of Nations has thrown on that body. I do not know that I can add anything on that point. I think that I have dealt with the main contentions.

Colonel WEDGWOOD

I am afraid that the right hon. Gentleman was not here when I asked that some sort of assurance should be given that the miners of the Baranya should be protected.

Mr. BALFOUR

I did hear my hon. and gallant Friend give a story of a deputation which waited upon him in Vienna, and if I understand him aright a certain number of Hungarian miners said that they would rather cease to be Hungarians than to continue under the existing system of Hungarian government.

Colonel WEDGWOOD

The Baranya was in Jugo-Slavian territory at the time. It has now been handed back to Hungary. They said that rather than do that they would blow up the mines and retire with the Jugo-Slavian troops to Serbian territory, and they asked that we should not decide to hand them over to the white terror.

Mr. BALFOUR

These workmen say they do not want to go back to Hungary. That is what I thought my hon. and gallant Friend said.

Colonel WEDGWOOD

You said that they were under them.

Mr. BALFOUR

I am not prepared to deal with that point. I am informed that my hon. Friend gets his information from the deputation which waited upon him in Vienna. I am told that there is a very different side to the story.

Colonel WEDGWOOD

The side of the white guards.

Mr. BALFOUR

As I understand my hon. and gallant Friend, he wishes that the ethnological principle shall not be carried out in this district because there is bad government in Hungary.

Colonel WEDGWOOD

I asked that if the district is taken over British officers should be sent to see that these people are not slaughtered by the White Guard.

Mr. BALFOUR

I think that for my hon. and gallant Friend to ask me to deal with that sort of question—

Colonel WEDGWOOD

I gave notice to the Under-Secretary.

Mr. BALFOUR

—on this occasion, is really absurd. He wants us to control the Hungarian Government. In another part of his speech he explained that the Hungarian Government was going to be one of the glories of Hungary, and he referred to the small landowners' party and all that it was doing for Hungary. I hope that the small landowners' party will so far control the White Guard that, these Hungarian workers will be able to go back to Hungary again without any of the evil results of which my hon. and gallant Friend has spoken. I do not think that his facts are correct.

Colonel WEDGWOOD

They are more correct than your emissaries.

Mr. BALFOUR

I think that on reflection my hon. and gallant Friend will come to the conclusion that whatever other remedies there may be there is nothing to justify the drastic course of deferring the signature to this Treaty. In truth the signature of this Treaty and all other treaties is one of the most pressing necessities. I do not think that any calamity has been greater in Europe since the Armistice than the fact that these treaties have been so long held over, and that for one cause or another for which probably circumstances are alone to blame, we have been nominally at peace for so long without the Peace Treaties themselves being brought to a conclusion and all frontiers finally settled. This is a contribution to that great object, and it ought not to be delayed for a moment. I hope therefore that the House will not listen to the view of those who urge the rejection of this Treaty, but that this Treaty with Hungary will be added to those which have been already signed, and that, one more step may be taken towards the long deferred and anxiously desired time when peace may reign not merely nominally, but really, in these disturbed and unhappy districts in Eastern Europe.

Lieut.-Colonel Sir S. HOARE

The right hon. Gentleman made a very true observation at the end of his speech when he said that one of the evils from which Europe is suffering has been the delay in ratifying this and other peace treaties. The Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs spoke to-day of this Treaty as the simplest of the various peace treaties. Two-and-a-half years have elapsed since the Armistice and it is only to-day that the House of Commons is asked to ratify this Treaty. The other day I and several other hon. Members heard a panegyric by the Secretary of the War Cabinet upon the subject of diplomacy by conference. If it takes two-and-a-half years to ratify the simplest of these treaties by diplomacy by conferences there is something to be said for the less expansive and less expensive methods of the old diplomacy. The result has been that in one part of the world, where the only thing that counts is the accomplished fact, questions have been left open, racial bitterness has been constantly encouraged, propaganda has sprung up in every one of these new States and there has been no chance whatever of reestablishing peace.

6.0. P.M.

The incident of the Emperor Karl seems to illustrate what I mean. I feel confident that if this Treaty had been ratified without delay the Emperor Karl would not have attempted to make his ridiculous incursion into Hungary. I believe that that was the direct result of the delay in the ratification of this Treaty. More serious than that, I believe that these delays have been the direct occasion of a great deal of the bitterness that has unfortunately been produced between the various Succession States. If frontiers could have been delimitated immediately after the Armistice, even though those frontiers might not have been in every respect perfect, half the trouble that has sprung up during the last two years between the new small States of Central Europe would not have happened. Frontier questions have been left open, all kinds of opportunities for racial bitterness have remained, and the result has been that dispute after dispute has taken place in Central Europe between Poland and Czecho-Slovakia, Jugo-Slavia, Hungary, and Austria. That being the case, I am indeed glad that at last we have an opportunity of putting an end to the delay. But let me remind the House that in Hungary, particularly, delay has meant all kinds of racial bitterness and difficulty. There is the case, for instance, in the Banat, where you have had four separate races all left at each other's throats during the last two years. There has been the case in Transylvania, with the Roumans. That has been the case in the German districts of Western Hungary. That has also been the case—a case to which the right hon. Gentleman did not give sufficient attention—in the Pecs coalfields. There you have had, as the result of these delays, the principal coalfield of Central Europe left in the hands of Jugo-Slavia, which is now called upon to surrender it.

Think of all the difficulties that that delay has meant. The hon. and gallant Gentleman opposite (Colonel Wedgwood) told the House that he had seen these miners in Hungary a short time ago, and that they had implored him not to be handed over to the Magyars. I have received information, which I think is more modern than his. I understand that their case is not so much against being handed over to the Magyars as against being handed over to the Magyars as long as their Government is in the hands of the White terror. That seems to be exactly the kind of case that is contemplated or should be contemplated under the minority Clauses of this Treaty, and I do not think his suggestion is at all fantastic when he says that we have upon our shoulders the direct responsibility of seeing that these miners are not maltreated when they are handed back to the Magyar regime. I should have thought that the least we could have done, whether it be we ourselves separately or the great Allies as a whole, is to have a representative on the spot when the cession of this territory is made to the Magyar Government to ensure that the minority Clauses were properly carried out.

Mr. HARMSWORTH

As a matter of fact, the Conference of Ambassadors decided in September last that although on the ratification of the Treaty the Allied Commission of Generals now in Budapest would be dissolved, a sub-committee of that Allied Commission should remain after the evacuation of the country by the Jugo-Slavs.

Colonel WEDGWOOD

How long?

Mr. HARMSWORTH

I do not think any definite term has been fixed.

Sir S. HOARE

That removes to a great extent my fear. If only a delegation remains there sufficiently long, I think we may feel that the Minority Clauses will be carried out effectively. I am obliged to the hon. Gentleman for giving me that answer. I pass from that to another subject to which no attention has yet been paid, and that is the question of disarmament. There, again, I think the delay in the ratification of the Treaty has been extremely harmful. Central Europe is suffering to-day from an excess of armaments. Even after the extensive demobilisation which has been taking place in certain of the countries during the last six months, I calculate, from a return given by the Secretary of State for War yesterday, that there are still no fewer than 1,200,000 men mobilised in those States. That is a most regrettable state of affairs. I cannot help thinking that if the Treaty had been ratified two years ago demobilisation and demilitarisation would have gone far further than they have in Central Europe. What has happened? The Succession States have seen in their midst the Magyars, a very vigorous and warlike race, with a highly efficient army extending under the Treaty 'to 35,000 men, but extending in practice to a considerably-larger number, backed by all kinds of semi-military organisations. What wonder in view of this military threat from, their own enemy, Hungary, that these border States have not been able to cut. their armies down to the point at which we should like to see them? I hope, therefore, that if the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs intends to make any further statement in the Debate he will be able to say a word about disarmament. Is he quite satisfied, for instance that the information he has received from Hungary that the military forces have been reduced to 35,000 men is really correct? I have seen many people: who-have some right to speak of Hungarian affairs, and they tell me that there are-still under arms a much larger number than 35,000. I hope the' hon. Gentleman will assure the House that both in the matter of disarmament and in the matter of the territorial adjustments that are to take place under the Treaty there will be no delay in carrying out the Treaty Clauses.

It seems to me to be necessary to say that in view of the innumerable delays that have taken place in the matter of the German Treaty. Are those Clauses, Clauses which most of us believe to be on the whole sound Clauses, not only to be ratified by the House of Commons to-day, but really to be carried out by the Allies in the course of the next few weeks? Let me make a single observation with reference to another phase of the Treaty. During the last two years there has been in progress a very active Magyar propaganda. The British and the Magyar races in the past have been good friends. The British have recognised in the Magyars their qualities of vigour and energy. At the same time, I think that under the fire of this Magyar propaganda we have been apt to forget two facts, first that the Magyars in the past for many centuries have tyrannised over the small races that were put under their regime, and, secondly, that the Magyars really lit the first spark in the conflagration of the War. Those two facts have a very direct bearing upon the Treaty. Two hon. Gentlemen opposite pointed with great effect to some of the territorial anomolies that will be left when the Treaty is ratified. Central Europe, unfortunately, is a pell-mell of nationalities, small racial units scattered about, often at some distance from their mother stock, with the result that no treaties that could possibly be made could draw up perfectly ethnographical frontiers for the mixture of races and nationalities.

Remembering those two facts, first that the Magyars tyrannised over the other small races, and, second, that the Magyars were not a little responsible for the War, I say that it is just that these necessary anomalies should be in favour of our Allies rather than in favour of our enemies. I do not wish to go into details upon that question. It is sufficient to point to the case of Transylvania. There you have the dilemna that you have either to leave a large number of Roumans under Magyar domination or you must have certain Magyar units of population under Rumanian régime. On the whole I think the makers of the Treaty have drawn as good a frontier as they could in the circumstances, with this one proviso—that granting that these minorities must be left under foreign domination it is all-important that the minority Clauses should be carried out effectively. I have some right to say that, because I remember that two years ago I raised the question of the treatment of the Magyars by the Roumans in Transylvania and I drew the attention of the House to what I believed were gross acts of maltreatment inflicted on the Magyars by the Roumans. The two hon. Members opposite raised the question again this afternoon. I have made some inquiries and I believe that upon the whole the Rouman administration has very much improved during the last year, and I hope, therefore, that the atrocities to which I drew attention then have ceased to be perpetrated. None the less I am quite convinced that the great Allies must keep a very close supervision of these mixed territories. Nationality has always been very bitter in those parts of the country and it would be a matter for the most sincere regret to all of us who are prepared to vote for the Treaty to feel that any régime such as the Rouman régime in Transylvania of two years ago would be allowed to continue.

Upon the whole, I think the Rouman regime has improved, and in that connection I should like to say that, on the whole, the conduct of the various Succession States seems to have taken a marked turn for the better during the last year. Some of the criticisms made against them this afternoon seem to be out of date. It is only necessary to quote such expressions of their feeling as the Little Entente—the alliance between certain of the Succession States. And from what information one receives, one also gathers that they are remedying a great many of the foolish acts in connection with transport and trade that were being committed so constantly by them two years ago. I think that that is very true of a country like Czecho-Slovakia which is genuinely anxious to remove all obstacles and impediments in the way of peace. We should not assume that no improvement in this respect has been made during the last twelve months. As to the Magyars, I personally believe we may look forward to living at peace with them. But I am quite confident that no peace will be possible in Central Europe unless the Magyars realise that the new Hungary is totally different from the old. They cannot hope in the future to dominate the subject races and they cannot hope to exploit the industrial and agricultural resources of Central Europe for the benefit of Budapest and a certain number of great landowners in Hungary. If they realise this, there is no reason why we should not be once more what we were before the War, good friends with the Magyars, and why we shouldnotforgetand forgive their responsibility for the War.

Captain ELLIOT

Nothing terrifies me more than the mood of the House of Commons this afternoon. We are doing a great injustice, and we are coolly going to shoulder our responsibilities on to the Paris Conference which committed sins in the heat of the War that we now propose to ratify in the cold light of reason. We have no right to set ourselves up and thank God that we are not as these others—these Magyars and other people who have been tyrannising over subject races. When we hear the case for doing nothing but ratifying this Treaty put with the urbanity and ease and in the polished style, which the Lord President of the Council, particularly amongst the statesmen in this House, is able to employ, one still feels in spite of everything that the case for doing nothing cannot possibly be as good as he has made it out to be. The facts in relation to this Treaty are not facts that we can get rid of with a wave of the hand. We cannot dismiss them as the foolish mouthings of sentimentalists.

The great facts of geography and justice stand out like mountains against the settlement which is proposed by this Treaty. During the heat of the War certain experts sought to sweep away mountains by Act of Parliament and to change the courses of rivers by conferences between neighbouring Powers, but it is not possible to do so. We should realise this time that the arguments against putting these northern provinces under the domination of Prague for instance are not arguments which will disappear in the course of time, but arguments which will get stronger. A province of extremely mountainous country is to be stuck on to the end of a narrow strip also extremely mountainous, which in its turn is supposed to be governed by a country that has never governed it before, namely Bohemia. That is one of the things which this Treaty is supposed to do and we apparently are going to ratify it this afternoon because nothing better can be done. It fills me with fear and trembling to think that some day our destiny may be adjudicated on by such a tribunal as this which is to-day adjudicating on the destinies of Hungary. There is not time now to make any great protest. There is no doubt that a Treaty of some sort has to be ratified and then we shall have to start at the bottom again, but it did not come well from the Government to say that Members of this House were delaying the ratification, when we know they have delayed bringing forward the Treaty month after month and that it has been ratified by every other country and by Hungary which stands to suffer and lose so much by it.

The short discussion we are having this afternoon will probably end in the ratification of this instrument which is supposed to settle the destinies of Eastern Europe. It was said long ago, and it is as true to-day as ever it was, that nothing is ever settled unless it is settled right. This is one more nail in the coffin of that wicked policy of self-determination which has done so much harm throughout Europe in the past few years. It swept Europe like a blast of pestilence, and the end has not come yet. This idea of self-determination always seems to me to be urging a race which is getting on very well under one set of people to come out and subject itself to the rule of another set of people. Why speak of self-determination to the Serbs, the Rumanians, and the other peoples in Hungary. These people came into-Hungary to avoid the Turkish storm that was sweeping up from the South, breaking every State and enslaving every State. The Serbs came into Hungary after the Serbian power had been broken at the great battle of Kosovo in 1389, and they came in as suppliants, crying, "Let us in or we perish." They were let in-and given their religious freedom and allowed to live in this country, and now we say that because they have been allowed to live in peace they are to be allowed to set up Customs barriers against and seize the land of their benefactors. Could any injustice be more horrible? Could anything be more calculated to disturb the future of Eastern Europe than that we should sanction such a grave injustice as this? A plebiscite leads directly to massacre, because a massacre is the only way of countering a plebiscite.

In Smyrna we see the result of theories-put forward in conference halls in Paris by some mild-mannered gentleman with pince-nez and an American accent. It leads to murder and death, because-people say: "If this man is going to take-my fatherland by ballot, then as dead men not only tell no tales, but cast no-votes, we shall see that he does not cast any votes, and consequently we shall put him under the ground and we shall continue to live in our fatherland as before." The policy of self-determination is a direct incentive to massacre. It has led to massacre in the past, and will lead to. massacre in the future. Take the case-of the Armenians who lived within the boundaries of Turkey. Suddenly the-Turks realised that some day a plebiscite could be cast against them, and they adopted the very simple method of cutting the throat of every Armenian. It is as old as the hills. When the Israelites came into the fair land of Egypt they settled down and were given autonomy, and their religious customs were protected. The next thing they said was that it was their land, and Pharaoh then adopted the simple process of massacring all the male children. No doubt the same idea will be followed when the subject races which have been living in any country seek by a plebiscite to take the country away from its original owners. Here you have the results of Liberal principles. I leave it to my Liberal friends, and I hope they will like it.

Sir F. BANBURY

Hear, hear!

Captain ELLIOT

You have here a country to which the Serbians came to shelter from their enemies, and it is sugrgested that this country should be voted away from those to whom it originally belonged and given to the Serbians. This is not because the Serbians are in any great majority, as one would expect. In this country that is to to be taken away from the men who have ruled it for one thousand years the figures are: Magyars, 751,000; Germans, 634,000; Serbs, 420,000; Rumanians, 256,000. I admit that these are figures from Magyar sources, and consequently are not to be relied upon, because one of the worst things about modern political discussion is that it has debased not only figures of speech but figures of arithmetic, and nobody can trust to the simple old processes of addition and subtraction. In any case there is not such a clear and over whelming majority as would justify this shocking act of ingratitude. If the Belgians were to insist some day on annexing Bournemouth it would be no greater act of ingratitude than the taking away of these districts from the people who gave the Serbians shelter from their enemy.

Then it is said that an undue fuss is being made in Hungary about Ruthenia. Does the House realise what is being taken away in this case from an economic whole? Let the Labour party realise that what is being taken away is an economic unity of a thousand years' standing. This is not from suspect-sources, but from the League of Nations Union. A memorandum which only came from that body this morning states: The real reason for the Hungarian desire to include Ruthenia in its boundaries is that in losing that district she has lost nearly all her mining industry, her steel industry, iron ore mines, mineral fuel, a great part of her textile and her cotton industry, a great part of her wool industry, and numbers of cement works, quarries, starch factories and distilleries and also extensive areas of forestry. Then the hon. Baronet the Member for "Chelsea (Sir S. Hoare) complains that propaganda has been going on against the taking away of this province. If there were any proposal, to remove such areas of our own land from our own Government I think such an extensive propaganda would be set up as the Magyars could not possibly hope to compete with. It is all very well to say that the Ruthenians are not a Magyar tribe, but it is now proposed that a Ruthenian delegate going to the Czecho-Slovak Parliament should leap from precipice to precipice over the crags of the Carpathians until eventually after 300 or 400 miles of mountaineering he arrives at his capital—Prague—a place where they can scarcely understand the language in which he wishes to address them. It may be possible for politicians to undertake these athletic feats, because, no doubt, they will constitute a necessary part of the political propaganda in those parts of the country, but what of the people whose mining industry and other industries are thus being taken from them. It is, also, all very well to say that what Hungary has lost Czecho-Slovakia has gained. You do not gain anything by cutting off the head waters of a river and saying that the people of a particular valley should climb over the hills into the next valley, instead of following immemorial custom and going down the waterway until they come to the capital situated at the foot of it. You cannot make the rivers run sideways across the face of the hills, because that is not the way rivers run, and all the decisions of the Conference at Versailles make no difference. The obstinate rivers are still running down the same as they used to, and the immemorial hills are standing just as they were before, and they will stand when the Versailles Conference has passed into oblivion and the War has been utterly forgotten. Why, then, should we admit these monstrous injustices without a certain amount of protest?

It terrifies me when I see the Labour party supporting this principle They talk—that bellicose pacifist, the hon. and gallant Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Colonel Wedgwood) talks—of enforcing their decrees by a British resident in Hungary, and no doubt battalions of the Guards being towed up the Danube in barges to see that the Hungarian workmen are kept free. We have discussed it before, the hon. and gallant Member and I, and we agreed that it would be an excellent thing to get the hon. Member for Stafford (Mr. Ormsby-Gore) to go out there as British Resident and rule the country with a rod of iron. I mentioned it to the hon. Member for Stafford, but he showed no enthusiasm whatever for the project, and he did not seem to think this House would back him up with the necessary force which would be the inevitable consequence of such a policy. When you controvert the facts of justice and of geography you get trouble; you always will get trouble, and it is always right that you should get trouble. By this Treaty we are flying in the face of the manifest facts of nature, which will come back on us in spite of all the Acts of Parliament that ever were passed. It is only a year and a half ago that I was in Hungary, in Budapest, during their General Election there. I was there the day the Peace Treaty terms came back from Paris, and I hope never to see such a sight again. There was every shop window with the Hungarian Colours in it, and a great bow of crape tied across them, every house flying a black flag, every street filled with processions, church bells ringing all day, knelling out what they regarded as the doom of their native country. Later on, in the course of his campaign, the Prime Minister of the day, Monsieur Huszar, addressed a great meeting on the subject of the Peace Treaty, which I attended, and his claims were so moderate, so straightforward, and so eminently reasonable that I despair of ever hearing anything like them at a General Election addressed by a Prime Minister in this country of ours to-day. He said: "If these people are to be taken away from us, what we want are plebiscites. If they vote against us, we should have free trade, and we should have effective protection of minorities, and without these," he said, "we shall never consent to this Treaty—no, no, never!" And it came roaring back to him from 15,000 men in the audience: "No, no, never!"

This is a fighting race which has been accustomed to rule and to govern. It is one of the greatest achievements of Christendom that we took in this savage race from the Steppes and civilised it, and set it up as a bulwark to defend the countries of Christendom against the Turks and pagans coming in from the great wastes of Asia, but it has been trained and taught and tempered in the ideals of war, and it is all very well to suppose that the subject races, so called, who have looked to the Magyars as their only organisers, officers, and leaders to guard them against the dangers coming out of Barbary, will be able eventually to stand up against a people like that, when it recovers, as it will recover, in a very few years. I see we are committed by the Treaty of Versailles to guarantee the territory of Czecho-Slovakia, etc., and when the day come that the Czechs say, "Send us the Coldstream Guards up the Danube to make sure that Ruthenia is kept under Prague," then we will realise the awful mistake we have made by committing ourselves to a policy of this kind. Article 10 of the Treaty guarantees each of the Powers against aggression. The economic facts of nature, which have been confirmed by a thousand years of occupation, cannot be upset as easily as this, and when next we have a chance of revising this, as we will have a chance of revising it, under the Boundaries Commission, which has been promised us by Monsieur Millerand's letter, I hope it will not be the niggling, petty, temporary revision and minor adjustments which the Lord President of the Council seemed to foreshadow, but an altogether broader and wider adjustment. If it had not been for his statement, that all that could be hoped for under this Boundary Commission was a small minor adjustment of one kind or another, I think I should not have got up to-day.

Unless we make altogether wider and more sweeping adjustments, we shall not have restored the economic possibilities of Eastern Europe, and until we do that we shall have no peace in that part of the world. The Czechs have bullied these people, the Slovaks have bullied them, the Rumanians have bullied them, the Jugo-Slavs have bullied them, but it is not a mere allowance of a protest to be carried to the League of Nations that will do any good. We ought to send it out as a message to these smaller nations that if they insist on upsetting trade in Eastern Europe, we cannot support them in their policy, and either we cannot continue as guarantors of a settlement under the League of Nations, or, if necessary, that we cannot continue in the League of Nations at all. After that great day of national humiliation for the Hungarians, I went into dinner in the Hotel Hungaria, and there was a big string band playing with all the fervour and verve that only Hungarians can put into their music. They were playing, oddly enough, the old British National Anthem, "It's a long, long way to Tipperary." That may be taken as an evidence of a frivolous set of people whose wishes we need not consult. It is not. It is the sporting spirit in adversity which we admire, which we can recognise in our enemies as we should admire it in this island for ourselves. The Hungarians came into their country over the Pass of Munkacs, the Pass of Hard Work, and by hard work they are recovering themselves, and they will recover themselves, and by the Pass of Munkacs they will go back into their native land of Hungary, one and indivisible, as it has been decreed by geology and as it cannot be altered by any decision come to in this House.

Lord ROBERT CECIL

The present discussion has shown the difficulty in which the House of Commons is necessarily placed in discussing any Treaty. The Motion has been made by my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Colonel Wedgwood) that we should reject this Treaty, but the only result of that would be that we should have to have another Peace Conference, which is alone enough to terrify anyone, and an immense delay would be interposed in the settlement of Europe, without the slightest guarantee that the next Treaty would be any better than the one which is now before us. Therefore, I do not myself think it is really practical for this House merely to reject the Treaty, and it is quite impracticable for it to amend it. That is the reason why some of us are so anxious in another connection that we should have an opportunity of considering international documents before they are presented to us in this form, when practically the House has no power to deal with it at all.

On the merits of this case, I confess I was a good deal impressed by what was said by the Lord President of the Council as to the boundaries. I do not pretend to be an expert, like my hon. Friend who has just spoken, as to the geography of Transylvania and Ruthenia, but I feel rather that these questions of boundaries are exceedingly difficult, that they can be determined only by experts, that they were the sub- ject of prolonged consideration, and although personally I have very little doubt that some mistakes were made, yet I do not feel that there is any possibility of asking for an extensive revision, at this stage, of the boundaries which were then fixed. I confess that I hope, if any Minister says anything further in this Debate, that something will be said to elucidate exactly what was meant by-Monsieur Millerand's letter, because it is, I must say, a very vague document as it stands. All that Monsieur Millerand, or rather the Supreme Council, offers, as I understand it, is this, that if it turns out that there are any objections in the future, and if the objectors can satisfy the Boundary Commissioners that an injustice has been committed, then the-Boundary Commissioners may go to the-Council of the League, who may decide on that to make a recommendation—not more than that—for a rectification of the boundary. We do not know who the Boundary Commissioners are. I do not know whom they are to represent. I do not know even whether they are to be judicial personages or political personages, but I presume they will have to decide everything, as all other international bodies have to decide everything, by unanimity. Unless there is something in Monsieur Millerand's letter to correct that, I cannot find anything in the Treaty itself which throws any light on it. Therefore, there will have to be, first, a unanimous decision of the Boundary Commissioners that an injustice has been committed, and, secondly, a decision of the Council of the League to recommend an alteration. If that is all the letter means, it does not amount to very much. I hope I have misinterpreted it and that a greater measure of freedom is intended to be given to the Council of the League and the Boundary Commissioners than at first sight appears to be the case.

My hon. and gallant Friend (Captain Elliot), who has made such a brilliant and entertaining speech, is very angry indeed with the principle of self-determination. He says that we are throwing the whole, of Europe into confusion by acting on that principle. I am not sure whether he thinks that the condition of the Austrian Empire before the War was altogether satisfactory. His knowledge, I confess, is much greater than mine, but such information as I have leads me to suppose that there was a very great deal of discontent in a number of parts of the Austrian Empire, and what they complained of, unreasonable people as they were, was that various races were being tyrannised over by aliens, and not only did they object to being governed, but they still more objected to being misgoverned, and I think it is perfectly true to say that, though I am not a very great admirer of the proceedings of the Conference of Paris, they did not break up the Austrian Empire. Whatever other crimes they committed, they certainly did not commit that crime, for it had broken up itself into hopeless fragments long before they began to sit, and all that they had to do, as far as the Austrian Empire was concerned, was to try and make the fragments more or less satisfied and coherent. My hon. Friend was also very angry with the idea of plebiscites. He said they led to massacres, and he said the Armenian massacres of 1915 were entirely due to Turkish fears of a plebiscite at the end of the War. That shows a very remarkable amount of prevision in the Turkish statesmen. He even went so far as to suggest that the massacres carried out by the Israelites had something to do with plebiscites.

Captain ELLIOT

Carried out on the Israelites.

Lord R. CECIL

Yes, on the Israelites, but that they had something to do with plebiscites, yet at the end of his speech I was amazed to hear him quote, with warm approval, a statement by Monsieur Huszar which demanded plebiscites in all these districts. I do not think that my hon. Friend is really right about plebiscites. I agree with my right hon. Friend that they are not really a panacea for every possible thing, but they are sometimes very useful in ascertaining what are the wishes of the population, and I am not prepared to admit that there is any provable case that they have led to massacres, or anything of the kind. Of course the principle of self-determination may be pressed far beyond what is right and just. It is not the only thing to be considered, but I do myself believe profoundly that, unless you try to settle the may of Europe broadly on the lines of giving to the various populations the governments which they ' themselves desire, you will not get any permanent settlement at all. After all, we tried the other plan with the Treaty of Vienna. They drew a line with very little regard to the wishes of the population, and I do not think the experiment there tried would encourage anyone to repeat it. It is for that reason that I personally do not desire to say very much about the boundaries laid down in this Treaty. I confess—I say it merely in passing—that there is a piece of boundary—what is called the northern inclusion of a large mass of Magyars—which I personally regret. There may be very good reasons of which I am not aware, but it does look on the map as a great blot on the boundary line. Beyond that, I do not desire to press the question of boundaries.

Something has been said about reparations. I do not think my right hon. Friend the President of the Council quite appreciated what was the real criticism that was made. He said nobody would have been satisfied that these people should go wholly unpunished; they must be made to pay what they could towards the cost of the War. I do not think anyone would quarrel with that proposition. But that is not what the reparation Clauses do at all. They lay down, in the first place, that Hungary is liable in principle to pay the whole cost of the War, and, in the second place, out of the great grace and favour of the Allies and Associated Powers, that liability is cut down to a schedule of losses which are exactly the same as we require from Germany. And then there is instituted this elaborate, expensive, and wholly unworkable system of a Reparations Commission, which is imposed on the top of all that. I am satisfied the whole of that policy is a profound mistake. It is no use putting into a Treaty a provision that a country like Hungary is to pay an indefinite sum, which will probably be valued, if ever valued, at eight or ten thousand millions. It is a silly and an utterly futile thing to do. You do not get more by making extravagant demands of that kind, and you do make it much more difficult to the country on whom you make such demands to recover from the great economic exhaustion with which it is faced by the War. My right hon. Friend said you could not tell how much Hungary was bound to pay until you had had an economic examination into her resources by the Reparations Commission. That is exactly of what I complain. Why was not that economic examination carried out before you signed the Treaty? This Treaty was not signed in the hot blood of the War, as my hon. Friend seems to think. It was not signed until the 4th June last year, and there would have been ample time to have had an inquiry into the capa bilities of Hungary before you put this fantastic farrago of Clauses upon her by this Section of the Treaty. I believe very considerable modifications were made in the case of Bulgaria, and I have never been able to understand why that course was pursued in that case.

I do not think anything seriously can be said in defence of the Reparations policy in any of the Treaties, and in the case of the Treaties of Austria and Hungary the demands are perfectly fantastic and absurd. Nor am I satisfied an answer has been given about the economic provisions of the Treaty. The criticism is made that you did not put into the Treaty sufficient Clauses to compel the Secession States to behave in a reasonable manner as a result of their independence. That criticism is not answered at all by saying that we are doing our best to persuade them to be reasonable now. I think anyone who listened to the able speech of the Undersecretary must have been struck by the fact that the provisions which he pointed to in the economic Clauses were ludicrously insufficient to secure anything like freedom of trade between the Secession States, and freedom of trade is really essential if you are considering the prosperity of that part of the world. I agree very much with what my right hon. Friend the President of the Council said, that a perpetual system of lecturing is no good. The question really is whether the provisions of your Treaty are sufficient. My hon. Friend said he hoped a great deal from the Transit Conference at Barcelona, but it certainly was new to me that the Transit Conference was going to deal with matters like the difficulties of transit in the Austro-Hungarian States. I thought all that the Conference in Barcelona was going to do was to lay down general principles of transit, regulations, management of rivers, and so on, and not deal with local difficulties.

Mr. BALFOUR

I think the question was raised by the hon. Gentleman opposite, but I rather agree with what my Noble Friend has said.

Lord R. CECIL

In that case, I am afraid the Conference at Barcelona will not really furnish a remedy for this particular difficulty. There are, I see, some provisions with regard to railways in the Treaty itself, and if they are vigorously carried out, I think they may do a great deal to remedy the difficulties so far as Hungary is concerned, but not, I think, so far as the rest of the Secession States are concerned. Just one word about minorities. I agree most fully as to the enormous importance of protecting minorities, or rather giving security to minorities in all these Central and Eastern European States. It is a very old policy so far as this country is concerned. It was initiated in the Treaty of Berlin, or, I daresay, earlier still, but it was' carried to a very much greater extent in the Treaties of Paris, and it is one of the very best things that can be found in those Treaties. On paper, if those Clauses which my hon. Friend read out are carried into effect, adequate protection is given to minorities, and the question we are anxious about is whether they will be carried out or not. My right hon. Friend said there would be no slackness on the part of the Council of the League of Nations, and I hope not. Some of us are a little regretting that the Council of the League of Nations have not met so often this year as they met last year, although there is more to do. He also said, and said with absolute truth, if I may be permitted to say so, that the great work in this respect, as in everything else, is in instructing public opinion. I agree with him. It is quite plain we can do nothing to protect a minority in any of those countries by force. That is out of the question. The picture of sending the Coldstream Guards is a reductio ad absurdum. Nobody thinks of anything of the kind, and it could not possibly be done. Nor does the scheme contemplate anything of the kind. What it contemplates is bringing before public opinion prominently any cases of failure on the part of the people to carry out their duties under the Treaty for the protection of minorities.

7.0. P.M.

I do not think the machinery is quite sufficient, but, so far as it goes, I understand it is this: Any member of the League may bring before the Council of the League any defect in the execution of these clauses, and my hon. Friend is perfectly justified, if I may say so, in asking the British Government to take advantage of that provision to bring before the Council of the League any defect in the execution of these clauses. More than that, they can require that the matter shall be submitted, if there is any doubt about the fact, to the permanent Court of International Justice. I attach enormous importance to that, just for the purpose of focussing public opinion. If you could have an open trial before a great Court of that kind, in a case where a really serious act of misgovernment is alleged, you would focus the whole public opinion in the world upon the charge. You would have a weapon of enormous power. I want to ask the Government, in connection with this matter, two things. Are they satisfied that the present machinery for getting the matter before the Council of the League is sufficient? I confess I have grave doubt. You have to rely on the casual charge, as it were, of some member of the League. What some of us wish is that the Powers could see their way to give to the minority itself an appeal. What I understand has been done so far in the Council is that if an appeal is received as to ill-treatment, the appeal is circulated to all the members of the Council, and any member can take it up and bring it before the Council. I hope that machinery will be perfected, and that there will be some organism constituted whose duty it will be to bring these matters to the Council as soon as they occur, and to take care that they really are formally considered by the Council in some shape or form. Secondly, I want to take this opportunity of asking my right hon. Friend when they are going to ratify the Convention of the International Court of Justice. I cannot imagine what is delaying the ratification. This was agreed upon last December at Geneva. My right hon. Friend agreed upon it, and was one of the warmest supporters of the scheme, and it was discussed at great length by a very able legal adviser at the Foreign Office. There was no question about it. I would remind my hon. Friend that the Court cannot come into existence until half the members of the League have ratified the Convention. Certainly 'I hope there will be no further delay in that matter, because for this purpose, as well as for others, the creation of the Court is an essential wheel in the machinery of mak- ing the protection of the minority certain. I am quite sure there will be no opposition really, even in the Central European States, to the working of this machinery once it is in operation. I had the honour of discussing this question with a statesman of one of the Central European States. He was a very enlightened man, and he said, "We are always being charged, generally quite untruly, with oppressing the minority. Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to have any charge made definitely to my Government, and then I should myself ask for its investigation by an International Court of Justice." That is an attitude which, I belive, every enlightened statesman in that part of the world will be induced to take. I hope that everything will be done to facilitate the operation of this Clause, and for the early establishment of an International Court of Justice. The hon. Member for Chelsea (Sir S. Hoare) spoke very truly of the anxious military situation in Central Europe. It is perfectly true, he told the. House, that 1,250,000 troops are still mobilised and in being in some of these States. I do not know whether those figures are right, but there are a considerable number of troops mobilised there. There is great anxiety in each of the States lest they may be attacked by another State. That is undoubtedly true, and I hope that everything possible will be done to induce those States to demobilise their army.

We are constantly being asked about, and are at this minute taking part in a Conference to see what can be done; with regard to, the economic condition of these States, either by the application of the Termeulen scheme or in some other way. I hope the recommendation of the Brussels Conference will not be lost sight of, and that it will be a condition of any assistance given to any of these States that they should cease, to waste their money in useless military preparation. There is no greater criticism of the Supreme Council and of its work at Paris than that they did not realise that the great thing was to restore peace; that they did not insist upon peace being established before they considered the claims of any of these States; that they did not insist upon disarmament, and did not make proper provisions for international trade. It is for us to remedy that mistake, as well as we can, now.

I quite sympathise with much that fell from my hon. Friend who spoke last as to the dangers that have been left in Europe. I am sure they are very considerable; I am sure he is right, though I do not myself think it is all the fault of self-determination, that much of the territorial settlement will turn out to be, unworkable or dangerous. I say that without desiring to criticise the negotiators at Paris unduly, because the difficulty of drawing these lines was very great. The only hope is in the League of Nations; that is your only chance. You have, at any rate, created an instrument one of the purposes of which is to correct treaty mistakes of that kind. I am satisfied that those hon. Members in the House who speak slightingly of the League of Nations, and who do not recognise that it is really the only hope left to us for securing and preserving the peace of Europe, are profoundly ill-advised, and are doing the work not of peace but of war; not of friendship but of hostility.

Mr. F. C. THOMSON

The hon. Member for Lanark (Captain Elliot) seemed to think that the Serbs living in what was Southern Hungary had no rights at all, because they had only come in there some six centuries ago after a disastrous defeat: and that, having treked into that country and solicited the aid of the Magyars, they were to be without rights. Let me remind the hon. Member that had it not been for the Serbs keeping up their end against the invading hoard of Turks for a long period prior to their final defeat, probably not only the Magyars but the rest of Europe might have succumbed to the Turks. Therefore, those Serbs who sought refuge in the Magyar territory had a good title behind them. What is more, for a very long time in Croatia there had been certain constitutional rights. The Croats had a Diet of their own, and that constitution was summarily brought to an end, I think, in 1912 by the Hungarian Government. That, again, was an invasion of right which seemed intolerable. I agree most profoundly with what was said by the hon. Baronet the Member for Chelsea (Sir S. Hoare) in regard to Hungary. The Hungarians have been a gallant race. We, in this country, have had much sympathy with them in the past. We had great sympathy with them in 1848. We know them for a virile race, who in their turn played a great part in withstanding the advance of the Turk in those critical centuries when it might easily have happened that all Western civilisation might have gone down before the forces of the Crescent. They have had a glorious past, but we cannot forget that during the last half century they have played a rather sorry part in regard to the non-Magyar races in Hungary. They have not learned by experience, and if today we find in Transylvania certain cases of oppression by Rumanians of Magyars we must not forget that for many a year the Transylvanians suffered under the grossest persecution, both in matters of language and of education. Again the same happened in the Northern parts of Hungary in the Slovak territory, where the Magyar rule was harsh and oppressive in the extreme.

It cannot be forgotten that that is the record of the Hungarian nation in the last half-century. As the hon. Baronet the Member for Chelsea so well pointed out, they are in a very peculiar sense responsible for the War, along with the Germans. Berlin depended very much on the influence of the ruling class at Budapest in keeping alive the spirit of domination in the Austrian Empire, and in preventing the Slav elements in that Empire from getting a fair share of power and government. Therefore, in a peculiar sense, they were responsible, along with the Germans, for the Great War. We must view all these questions which we have to decide to-day remembering these two things; that the Hungarian race and nation, with all its great past, has in the past 50 years grossly misgoverned subject races, and also that the policy of Hungary in recent years led very directly to the breaking out of the War in 1914. As the Noble Lord who spoke last pointed out, all over the non-Magyar parts of the Austrian Empire things were at a breaking point even before the outbreak of the War. The War was probably precipitated very largely on account of these considerations.

I do not wish to deal in great detail with the frontiers. It is easy, of course, to criticise what has been done, but I think the marvel is that it has been carried out so well. It is not the fault of the Allies or negotiators in Paris that the people in South-Eastern Europe live, as it were, in packets, one packet here and another packet there, scattered up and down the different countries. That makes the task of the Treaty-maker an almost impossible one. Criticism has been made this afternoon of the settlement in Transylvania, but it would have been a thing impossible to have put the Szeklers in Eastern Transylvania into Hungary. It would not have been at all a succesful arrangement to make a corridor from Hungary to Eastern Transylvania so as to include the Szeklers in Hungary. Therefore it was absolutely necessary, and it could not be avoided, that they should be put into the Rumanian State. I think the Powers have done what they could by way of Treaty stipulations, and the Treaty which Rumania made with the Great Powers in December, 1919, was designed to afford local autonomy in regard to scholastic and religious matters of the Szeklers and Saxons in Transylvania. Rumania had a very difficult task, in that she is a country comparatively small, and is receiving great additions of territory without any great trained Civil Service. In this House and in this country we may often criticise our Civil Service, but no Government can be carried on at all well or with reasonable fairness without a highly-trained Civil Service. Rumania's borders have been greatly increased, and she has no Civil Service on this kind. Though her borders in the main accord with the linguistic and ethnographical boundaries, she has in Transylvania and in certain other parts alien elements, and the task that has lain before her in the two years since the War has not been an easy one.

Therefore, let us be slow to judge, and in judging let us remember that in those parts of Transylvania where this deplorable condition of reprisals seems to have existed, these people lived for many long years under the ruthless repression of the Magyars. Is it any wonder that there is a tendency to hit back? Matters seem to be improving, and I am very glad to hear from the hon. Baronet the Member for Chelsea that from recent information it appears that in that part of Rumania things are in a better state. I want to put this point with regard to all these succession States. They must be judged with great leniency. They have started, some of them, with greatly-extended territories, and some are entirely new States, and they cannot be expected to have traditions of government which belong to nations which have a long history. The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, with all faults, did come down from the earlier times with a trained personnel of administrators who had had a long experience. That is not the case with these new countries.

One word as to the economic point. The right hon. Member for Paisley (Mr. Asquith) deplored the fact that at the time the Treaty was made insistence had not been made by the Powers that these States which formerly formed part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire should form an economic whole. It seems to me that that would have been a policy almost impossible to carry out. In the first place, these new States were very jealous of their national position. It would have been a very difficult thing to have got them to agree to a proposition of that sort. Furthermore, there is a second point, that large sections of Austro-Hungarian territory became parts of a country, such as Serbia, which had hitherto been independent and outside the Austro-Hungarian tariff system. That applies also as regards the parts of Transylvania which were joined to Rumania. It would have been impossible at that date to have said to all these countries—and you would have had to include Serbia and Eumania—" You must make one economic whole." I think all is now being done that could be done. One was very glad to hear that a conference is shortly to assemble at Porto Rosa to consider these matters, and also to hear that in the succession States there is a much more reasonable disposition in regard to the light in which economic questions are viewed. It is probable that at that conference those States may see the folly of very much of their actions in the recent past, and may, as indeed must have been forced upon them, realise that it is to their interests to make economic agreements one with another.

I think I may say, in concluding, that these safeguards to minorities may be difficult to carry out. In the Treaty we are considering this afternoon, as well as the various treaties concluded between Czecho-Slovakia and the Allied Powers, between the Serb State and the Allied Powers, between Rumania and the Allied Powers, we have seen a great advance. There are safeguards there for minorities such as rarely have been seen in the diplomatic instruments of the past. It may be, as the Noble Lord said, that it may be a little difficult to put the machinery in motion. I do not see how that can be. The machinery is there and it only remains to us to hope that that machinery, being there, it will be used if need be. At any rate, it is a great advance on the old days. Such stipulations would never have appeared in the treaties of a hundred years ago, or even of much more recent date. I think, therefore, while it may be possible here and there to criticise the provisions of this Treaty, and to point out that in certain respects boundaries might have been adjusted on a more equitable basis, I myself think they are drawn up with wonderful skill. I think the Treaty forms the basis upon which the Hungarian nation, possessing as it does, a great central plain, fertile beyond words, a great asset, throwing aside the evil dreams of past domination over other races, may become a prosperous State, no longer being a menace to the peace of the Near East and the world, but, on the contrary, working along with other countries now constituting the Little Entente may bring to that part of Europe, which in the past has known, for many centuries, so little peace, a degree of prosperity hitherto undreamt of.

Mr. A. HERBERT

My hon. Friend who has just sat down (Mr. F: C. Thomson) will forgive me if I do not follow him throughout the course of his speech. There is, however, one doctrine that he applies to which I should like to refer. He went back into history and said that the Hungarian people in the past had had a bad name for tyranny and Imperialism. He hinted, or suggested, that on those grounds they must be prepared to suffer to-day. I entirely repudiate in these days the Old Testament doctrine that the children must suffer for the sins of the fathers. It seems to me that as it would be ridiculous for me to get a pension because my ancestors had been good men, it would be equally hard to be treated badly because they had been iniquitous. We have, I hope, got beyond that. I should like to make one or two observations with regard to the speech of the right hon. Gentleman the Lord President of the Council. In dealing with the question of reparations from Hungary I under- stand him to ask, when he was speaking of the decisions of the Paris Conference, how it would have been possible to have let off the people who had behaved as our enemies had behaved. Could you, he suggested, in the frame of mind in which everybody was in those days have said: "They shall suffer nothing at all for the damage they have done." I quite agree. But, after all, that was 2½ years ago, not to-day. Again, I would remind my right hon. Friend of speeches which, I think, he himself made at a period very little anterior to the Paris Conference in which, disclaiming any desire on our part to attach blame to the people, as apart from their governors, he said we were going to apportion the blame and fix the culpability, but that the innocent ought not to be called upon to pay for the guilty.

Everyone in this House knows that the Hungarian people were always friendly to this country, and we all know that many of them were not very favourable to the War. It has been urged by the Lord President that it is now a long time from the Paris Conference, and that as one of the great evils of these days is that these Treaties have not yet been ratified—we all know the disadvantages—let us ratify this Treaty to-night as speedily as possible. Does not this argument really mean that there is a connection between time and justice? To my mind they are on different planes. Does not that argument really mean that because you have taken the wrong way and you only discover after you have gone two or three miles that you had better continue in the wrong way than got back to the right one? If you make ' a mistake in clay are you to confirm it in marble? It seems to me that the Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs really admitted, or at all events indicated, that he was of the same opinion. He did it when he said, and said very truly, how careful we ought to be of our words in this House, and that he intended to use no hard words to people who were ex-enemy people. Tonight it seems to me it does not very much matter what we say in this House. What really matters is what is done. The Hungarian people will not care much what words are used to-night. What they will care about and what they will remember is whether or not two-thirds of their land is to be taken away from them, and they will remember that in the past the remainder of their land has been very largely looted, their schools and churches suppressed, and their priests beaten. These are the things about which they care.

Many actions of the Supreme Council have been criticised. I think it would be unfair to criticise them on one point and to say that their actions have been inconsistent, because, so far as a humble back-bencher like myself can discover, there is nothing that the Supreme Council has touched that it has not broken and trampled upon. The effect of it all is coming home to us at the present time. Let me take for one moment this question of Austria and Hungary. We have seen the work of the Supreme Council in Austria. Since then many people, including Lord Haig, have tried to undo that work. What did they do in Austria? I do not know whether they had greater talent in breaking down bridges or in building up barriers. They have isolated these countries, and Central Europe is now in a state of starvation. Then the Prime Minister comes here and says, " There they are standing in shabby clothes and unable to buy from us," as if there was no relation between cause and effect. The case of Hungary is different from the case of Austria. You will not be able to break up Hungary in the same way that you have broken up Austria because it is a self-supporting, rich country. On the other hand what you can do there is this. You can cut off the people if you cannot cut off the food, and that is what you are doing in the case of Hungary.

In his coruscating speech my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Lanark (Captain Elliot) said a good deal about the question of self-determination. I will admit-that the question of self-determination is a very uncomfortable doctrine. At the same time I do not see how you can get away from it in these days. In the old days you had your empires, which I am old-fashioned enough to like, because living then was orderly—though there was discontent beneath. They had their emperors, and these had got certain consecrated authority. They could command. But after you have gone and smashed up an empire, like Austria, then there is nothing for it—you have got to have self-determination. There is no one who is more responsible for that than this country, because during the War we can all remember that the Prime Minister made very strong Sinn Fein speeches as to subject-races of Austria. I always thought that was a dangerous policy to advocate. We now find that these eagles are coming home to roost.

My Noble Friend the Member for Hitchin (Lord E. Cecil) has really said all that I could have wished to say to-night. I will only put two or three points. First of all, take the question of a plebiscite, which has been mentioned already. It has been asked: Why should you allow a plebiscite? The Greeks, the Germans, and every kind of nationality have had it—all but the Hungarians. On what ground are you refusing it to them? On what kind of principle are you acting to them? I do not wish to animadvert on the Supreme Council. What I will say is this: That when history comes to be written it will be said—I do not suppose we shall be too much reproached—that we, the Allies, had been through one of the most terrible ordeals that humanity can ever face; they withstood that, and went through the fire, and at the end of it they came out, as anybody who is not divine would come out, seeing red and angry, and they made impossible proposals. We all know that. I do not suppose anybody in this House I would deny that there are impossible things in the Treaties that have been made. What is the way out? I see no other way but the League of Nations. That is my only hope, and that is why I shall not support the Government to-night in the Lobby on this question of Hungary.

There is still one other thing to which I should like to refer. It occurred in the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Chelsea (Sir S. Hoare). He said that during the past two years there has been a great deal of Hungarian propaganda in this country. I must tell him if there has been I know nothing about it. What, I think, has happened is this. We have come to remember certain things. During the War, we know perfectly well that our prisoners were vilely treated in the enemy countries. We were not fighting Hungary, but still some of our prisoners were sent there. I do not think there ever has been one word against their treatment by the Hungarians. My recollection is that there was a Commission, a neutral Commission I think, that went into the question of the treatment of our prisoners. They went to Budapest, and found a whole lot of our prisoners had gone to the races. That and much else is evidence that there was no bad treatment there. I feel that we are very close now to the parting of the ways. In the past, after we had fought a war we have always been able to keep our heads. What has happened in connection with the last war is that we have got tied to the tail of continental hatred. If we continue in that, if we absorb the mentality of others, if we lose that calmness which has always distinguished us in the past, then I see very little hope for the future of Europe. It is upon those grounds that I am not able to support the Government to-night. I am asked to support a Treaty that is silly, unworkable; that is vindictive; that holds in it the seeds of future wars. I am asked to do that because there is no alternative. I say there is an alternative. Refer these questions and the other allied questions of frontiers to the League of Nations, and you may be able to get a just and lasting settlement that is going to be better for us all.

Mr. SPOOR

There is one observation which was made by the hon. Member for Lanark (Captain Elliot) with which I and many others in this House are in entire agreement, and that was when he said that the real tragedy of the present situation is that we are ratifying in cold blood all that was agreed to in the heat and passion of Versailles. It seems impossible to tolerate a situation like that if it is true, because it is symptomatic of something which will lead this and other European countries into ruin. I do not wish to speak about the ethnological question, which has been discussed at very considerable length, beyond saying that it is quite impossible to imagine that a unity like the Hungarian Kingdom can be broken up in the violent and unnatural manner which is suggested, and at the same time hope that economic unity will remain. I have heard nothing here to-night that has attempted even to justify the economic disintegration of those countries. With regard to the suggestion that a plebiscite of those millions who without consultation have been put under various rules and controls should have been taken, I think it is unfortunate that in this case, as in many others since the signing of the Armistice, our Government and the Allied Governments have failed to live up to the declarations repeatedly made during the progress of the present War.

I would like to refer to the question of the safeguarding of minorities. After all, it seems to me that this is one of the vital matters with which the Treaty deals. I have heard nothing here to-night either from the Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs or the Lord President of the Council which would give us a real assurance that the rights of minorities, in the new sense, are going to be adequately safeguarded. When one remembers the record of even recent times one is hardly encouraged to hope for this if we are to have a continuance of this regime. The hon. Member for Newcastle under-Lyme (Colonel Wedgwood) referred to a visit paid to Hungary by a delegation sent over by the Labour movement in this country last year. That delegation issued a report upon their return, and in it it is clearly indicated that tyranny did exist there despite the statement of the British Commissioner to the contrary. Facts are given in that report of the very regular, persistent persecution of the workers and the repression that was going on. Anyone suspected of holding Communist views was placed under arrest. It is stated that over 27,000 Communists were arrested, and over 6,000 were imprisoned. The estimate of the Labour delegation of the total number in prison at the time they were in that country was 12,000. Repressive measures and policies like that which have been persisted in within the last 12 months and followed up since that report was issued do not encourage one to believe that the signing of the Treaty is going to change the character or policy of the Hungarian Government, or that the rights of minorities are going to be adequately safeguarded.

I was interested to hear the hon. and gallant Member for Lanark almost claiming that the Hungarian Government were really ideal people in face of the facts I have quoted from this report, and in face of the reputation they bear as being extremely tyrannical to their own people. In face of these facts, the hon. and gallant Member's contention is a very difficult one to support. The real question is, what is this Treaty going to be in its effect upon the political and economic situation in Eastern and Central Europe? I take it that it is the desire of every sincere Member of this House and of all European Parliaments to get back to normal economic conditions at the earliest possible moment. Is this Treaty in any way going to contribute to that end? Unless we can get away from the abnormal conditions now existing it appears to me that ultimately there will be nothing but ruin before Europe, and perhaps the whole world. Is there anything in this Treaty that suggests that in the minds of those who have drawn it up and are responsible for it it will alter this, and what is there in it that suggests that in their minds there is any clear way out of the appalling difficulty in which we find ourselves?

We all realise that our present unfortunate situation at home is in a very large measure due to the disturbed condition of large tracts of Europe. We are realising that we cannot expect to have an economic balance here when we have economic insecurity and want of balance abroad. More and more men are realising that the principles underlying the whole of the Peace Treaties are fundamentally wrong. I have never heard of a single responsible economist who has approved of the economic or Reparation Clauses in any of these Treaties. On the other hand, I have come across very severe, acute, and unanswered criticisms of both the economic and reparation policy. The question I would like to put is that we are all agreed, or at any rate all thoughtful people agree, that these Reparation Clauses can never in the end of things be of any use. Why not be honest about it? I may be wrong, but I thought I discerned between the lines of the statement made by the Lord President of the Council to-night a desire on his part to repudiate the whole policy of reparations. I may have been wrong, but I hope I was not. I have never yet heard any responsible person argue that there was the slightest chance of getting these particular Clauses in any of the Treaties observed, and if that is so, would it not be wise, even at this late stage, if the Government and the Allies were willing and able, to make some real gesture of magnanimity? As a matter of ordinary commercial sagacity that would lead to the establishment of really normal financial conditions.

Unfortunately our policy since the Armistice has been in harmony with the Treaties. I agree with what an hon. Member said that we have been dragged at £he tail of Continental hatred. That is a criticism more generally heard now than it was months ago. A feeling of dissatisfaction is spreading throughout this country. This dissatisfaction is not confined to a small group. Those who attend public meetings or who have had any experience of public opinion, realise that there is a growing feeling that we have been proceeding upon wrong lines, and the sooner we get back to the right lines the better it will be. If this Treaty is not likely to restore confidence and there have been speeches from all sides, from men representing widely divergent political views, that suggest it is not going to do that, can the Government not take action in the same way with the Allies to make a frank and public declaration as to a change of policy? If that is done, it will, I believe, have the effect of restoring confidence in Europe and all parts of the world, and I believe it will be acting in much more complete Harmony with the traditions of our own country than we have been acting during the last few years.

Major C. LOWTHER

We have heard views expressed in this Debate as to what will be the effect of this Treaty on the economic conditions of Europe. I differ from the view which has been put forward upon that point. The question is, Are we to have a Treaty with Hungary or not? I do not profess to have the knowledge which most hon. Members have at first hand of conditions in Hungary. I have listened with great attention to the Debate, and I hope I have learned something. I want to get to an atmosphere of clear thinking on the matter. What is the position? When the War was over and the time came to settle the Treaty of Peace with our adversaries, what steps did we take? We took the very natural and obvious step of appointing delegates, men in whom we had confidence, to attend a conference at Versailles to settle these matters for us. It was necessary to do so, and it must be obvious that a Treaty of Peace could not be discussed line by line in all its great ramifications and difficulties across the floors of the different Chambers concerned. We therefore entrusted to our delegates the duty of making peace with the different enemy countries.

I imagine that all the considerations which have been put forward this afternoon, and a great many other considerations very naturally from other countries which took part in those conferences, were threshed out. No doubt the same views were put forward at the time the Treaty was drawn up, and we are now called upon to say whether we will have that Treaty or not which was arrived at as the result of those deliberations. What is our position? If we say, on the evidence we have heard so far, that we are satisfied that this Treaty of Peace should not be ratified by this House we should have to change our delegates, we shall have to start all over again, and we should get right in the midst of all the trouble, with this added disadvantage, that all that was done before will have to be scrapped. That is a position of affairs which I believe very few Members of this House have contemplated. I venture to think the issue is, Are we to have this Treaty of Peace or not? A great deal has been said about it. I think it is being rather prejudged. A good many hon. Members have expressed fear of what it may or will do, but we, as a people, are accustomed to give things a fair trial. This document has not been lightly drawn up. Cannot we give it a fair trial and see whether, in fact, it does what its authors contemplate and hope it will do? The League of Nations has been frequently referred to in this Debate. I am not a believer in the League, but if this Treaty proves a failure, if it breaks down and causes distress and unrest throughout Central and Eastern Europe, and if, after that, the League of Nations can put matters right, then I shall become one of its firmest supporters in this House.

Question, "That the word 'now' stand part of the Question," put, and agreed to.

Bill read a Second time.

Bill committed to a Committee of the Whole House for To-morrow.—[Mr. (J. Harmsworth.]