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INTERNATIONAL CONCILIATION

Published monthly by the

American Association for International Conciliation.
Entered as second-class matter at Greenwich, Conn.
Post-office, July 3, 1920, under Act of August 24, 1912.

THE TREATY OF PEACE WITH GERMANY IN THE UNITED STATES SENATE:

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AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR INTERNATIONAL CONCILIATION EDITORIAL OFFICE: 407 WEST 117TH STREET, NEW YORK CITY PUBLICATION OFFICE: GREENWICH, CONN.

THE TREATY OF PEACE WITH GERMANY IN THE UNITED STATES SENATE: AN

EXPOSITION AND A REVIEW1

By GEORGE A. FINCH

Secretary of the Board of Editors of the AMERICAN JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW; Member of the Bar of the

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For the second time the United States Senate, on March 19, 1920, refused its advice and consent to the ratification of the Treaty of Peace with Germany, signed at Versailles on June 28, 1919. The first rejection took place exactly four months before, namely, on November 19, 1919. The vote on the treaty in November was 39 for and 55 against, and in March 49 for and 35 against. Both votes were upon resolutions of ratification containing reservations and understandings the acceptance of which by the Allied and Associated Powers was made a condition precedent to the going into effect of the ratification of the United States. A resolution of ratification without reservations or conditions of any kind was presented to the Senate on November 19, 1919, and defeated by a vote of 38 for to 53 against. No resolution of this kind was offered or voted upon in March. The treaty has thus failed to receive in either form the concurrence of two-thirds of the Senators present as required by the Constitution for the making of treaties by the President.

These votes do not in themselves, however, give an accurate index to the real attitude of the Senate toward the treaty if full weight be given to the positions assumed by Senators in

1 Reprinted from the American Journal of International Law, Vol. XIV, Numbers 1 and 2, January and April, 1920.

debate and by their votes in the preliminary stages of the contest for ratification. To understand the parliamentary dilemma into which the treaty has been forced, it is necessary to refer briefly to certain facts in its short but turbulent career affecting ratification and to summarize the efforts of its advocates to obtain the constitutional advice and consent of the Senate.

THE SITUATION PRIOR TO THE SUBMISSION OF THE

TREATY TO THE SENATE

The first part of the treaty text to be made public was the Covenant of the League of Nations approved by the Peace Conference on February 14, 1919, which, under the resolution adopted by the Conference on January 25, 1919, “should be treated as an integral part of the general treaty of peace." Opposition to the Covenant was expressed in the Senate soon after the text became known in the United States and, when the President returned from Paris to Washington in February, 1919, he invited the members of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs to the White House for the purpose of discussing the terms of the Covenant. This took place at a dinner on February 26, 1919.

According to one of the Senators present on that occasion, attention was directed to "what were considered to be vital defects and infringements of our Constitution and form of government. Great changes of our traditional policies were pointed out and discussed, and the President was informed that those changes would be absolutely necessary, and that the Covenant in the form in which it then stood was absolutely unsatisfactory to the Committee on Foreign Relations of the Senate." The objections thus pointed out informally to the President were given more definite form on March 4, 1919, the last day of the Sixty-Fifth Congress, when the following

2 Statement of Senator Brandegee, Congressional Record, Nov. 19, 1919, p. 8774.

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