Locarno

T HE treaties negotiated at Locarno in October, 1925, must be judged in the light not merely of their actual content but of the negotiations that led up to them. Those negotiations extended over a period of eight months, and the essential feature of them is that they were initiated not by Great Britain and not by France, but by Germany. It was the German government which proposed in February, 1925, that one of the most disquieting of the standing controversies in European politics should be settled, by the elimination of all future disputes regarding the common frontier between Germany and Belgium and Germany and France. Germany, in other words, not merely offered to accept without further cavil the western frontier assigned her by the Treaty of Versailles, and the permanent demilitarization of a certain frontier zone as prescribed by the same treaty, but actually proposed that the frontier in question should be guaranteed by a pledge given to France by Great Britain, and perhaps by other powers, of military assistance against Germany in case the frontier should be violated by the latter state. It is true, of course, that the guarantee as originally proposed and as ultimately framed was to protect Germany equally against France, but the fact that Germany should have suggested an agreement which bound her absolutely to acceptance of the Versailles frontier for all time was in itself a notable contribution to European stability. So equally was the initia

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