II. ALSACE-LORRAINE AND THE SAAR VALLEY 152 III. POLAND 200 IV. TERRITORIES OF THE FORMER AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN MONARCHY 242 V. THE ADRIATIC 262 VI. THE BALKANS 290 SOME PROBLEMS OF THE PEACE CONFERENCE I TASKS AND METHODS OF THE CONFERENCE Great peace conferences are proverbially slow bodies. The negotiators of Münster and Osnabrück spent five years in elaborating the treaty of Westphalia; the conferences of Paris and Vienna labored a year and a half at undoing the work of Napoleon. Judged by these standards, the Peace Conference of 1919 was an expeditious body. It began its sessions January 18 and adjourned December 9. It submitted the treaty with Germany, including the covenant of the League of Nations, May 7; the treaty with Austria June 2 and July 20; the treaty with Bulgaria September 19; the treaty with Hungary in November. In the early summer it prepared various treaties with Roumania and the new states of eastern Europe. The heaviest part of its work was done in less than six months, before the departure of President Wilson on June 28. Judged by its output in a given time, the Conference must also be pronounced a businesslike and efficient body. Whereas the treaty of Vienna covers some seventy pages of print, and the related conventions perhaps a hundred and fifty pages more, the published works of the Paris Conference fill several volumes. The treaties which it drew up were long and detailed, each of the major treaties running to a couple of hundred pages and comprising some hundreds of articles and annexes--territorial, political, financial, economic, naval, and military--besides the provisions respecting labor and the League of Nations which are common to all.