DEAN HASKINS TREATS OF SAAR COMMISSION

"The government of the Saar basin by a commission of the League of Nations is a very interesting experiment in international administration," said Professor Charles H. Haskins in a recent lecture on the Rhine and the Saar questions as they appeared at the Peace Conference. "Granted the prompt organization of a league such as the treaty contemplates, this experiment in commission government has a fair chance of success, and by its success or failure the league will be in large measure judged in western Europe."

At the outset, Professor Haskins briefly reviewed the position of France with her lost provinces restored. By the recovery of Alsace she found herself once more on the Rhine and she demanded a corresponding voice in Rhenish affairs. French imperialism, French reparation, French self-defense were all in some degree involved in these problems of the Rhine and the intervening lands.

Some time was devoted by the lecturer to historical background. To German geographers and historians, the Rhine is a German river, he declared, while since the 17th century there have not been lacking in France certain historians and geographers who have maintained that the Rhine was the natural frontier of France, as it had been of Roman Gaul. But to one approaching the matter without nationalistic prepossessions the fate of the Rhine valley seems to have been determined, Professor Haskins said, not by any geographical necessity, but by the vicissitudes of history.

Questions of the Rhine.

With considerable elaboration Professor Haskins traced the history of the Saar Valley and the necessary readjustments with France once more a Rhine power. "In the French projects respecting the left bank there was of course something more than sentiment, and there was also something more than mere imperialism, whether economic or political," the speaker said. "It was in this region that France must needs seek something of that reparation for the devastation of war which Germany seemed unable to furnish elsewhere. And it was here that France would also seek means of defense and guarantees against a new German invasion. For any particular plan more than one of these reasons might be urged, and it was not adways possible to distinguish what was imperialistic by nature from what was necessary to the restoration and protection of France. It was not the least of the services performed for France by that wise old man, George Clemenceau, that he refused to be swept on by the extremists and limited his ultimate demands to the substantial results which the treaty secured. Comparatively few Frenchmen demanded the outright annexation of the left bank, the speaker admitted, nor was the number large who wished to prepare for it by an indefinitely prolonged military occupation. It was maintained that this was the real frontier of all the Allies, the front line that must be held at all cost against Germany. As to the intervening territory, a favorite French solution was that of an independent buffer state under French protection. At one time there were signs of a movement toward separation, for the Catholic Rhineland was inclined to resist the program of the majority Socialists, and there were French Catholics who would have welcomed its affiliation to France. Separatist tendencies were not, however, encouraged by England and the United States, and they never reached serious proportions.

"However little sympathy might be felt with the various projects for the military or economic aggrandizement of France on the left bank, there was one French argument that was unanswerable: the left bank of the Rhine must not be made the basis of a new attack against France, and thus against the world's peace," Professor Haskins said. "The demilitarization of the left bank was an elementary demand of national and international security."

As to the Valley of the Saar, Professor Haskins showed how it became an interrelated problem of the Rhine and a phase of the question of Alsace-Lorraine. He also clearly described the French boundary lines through history, saying that the loss of the frontier of 1814 to Prussia remained a sore point with France until it was swallowed up in the greater loss of 1871. When the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine in 1918 revived the question of their former boundaries, it was natural to inquire what the intervening century had brought forth.

In the region of Landau there had been little change and the surrounding region had altered little. The Saar valley, on the other hand, had shared the industrial development of the most prosperous parts of the Rheinprovinz its coal mines and those of the neighboring villages of the Palatinate had come to pro- duce 17,500,000 tons of coal a year. Numerous industrial establishments had grown up. To the north and west the lines of industrial towns were almost unbroken. More than 355,000 people now lived between the Saar frontiers of 1814 and 1815 and as many more in the adjoining regions which depended on its coal and manufactures.

"The Saar mines lay on the outer edge of Germany; they were already linked with the industries of Lorraine.

"Curiously enough, those who were most eager for the program of an ambitious League were the first to criticise the creation of such commissions and their tasks. But if one of the chief objects of such a League is to promote world peace, surely the Franco-German frontier is an important point for it to watch. And if the League can ease the tension here by acting as a sort of shock-absorber, protecting at the same time the property rights of France and the personal rights of the inhabitants, it will serve another interest no less important than peace, namely, the cause of justice. If the League is not ready for this test, it is certainly not ready to become a super-state. The super-state can wait, but justice is a matter of today. The League of Nations in the Valley of the Saar is the symbol of a new order.