The undeveloped territories--the economic opportunities upon which the Big Five were relying for the disposal of their surplus products and surplus capital, were carved and handed about as a butcher carves a carcass. Shantung, which Germany had taken from China, was turned over to Japan under circumstances which made it impossible for China to sign the Treaty--thus leaving her territory open for further aggression. The Near East was divided between Great Britain, France and Italy. Mexico was not invited to sign the treaty and her name was omitted from the list of those eligible to join the League. The German possessions in Africa and in the Pacific were distributed in the form of "mandates" to the Great Powers. The principle underlying this distribution was that all of the unexploited territory should go to the capitalist victors for exploitation. The proportions of the division had been established, previously, in a series of secret treaties that had been entered into during the earlier years of the war. With the Big Five in control, with the lesser capitalist states silenced; with the border states made or in the making; with the enemy reduced to economic impotence, and the unexploited portions of the world assigned for exploitation, the conference was compelled to face still another problem--the Socialist Republic of Russia. Russia, Czar ridden and oppressed, had entered the war as an ally of France and Great Britain. Russia, unshackled and attempting self-government on an economic basis, was an "enemy of civilization." The Allies therefore supported counter-revolution, organized and encouraged warfare by the border states, established and maintained a blockade, the purpose of which was the starvation of the Russian people into submission, and did all that money, munitions, supplies, battleships and army divisions could do to destroy the results of the Russian Revolution. The Big Five--assuming to speak for all of the twenty-three nations that had declared war on Germany--manipulated the geography of Europe, reduced their enemies to penury, disposed of millions of square miles of territory and tens of millions of human beings as a gardener disposes of his produce, and then turned their united strength to the task of crushing the only thing approaching self-government that Russia has had for centuries. A more shameless exhibition of imperial lust is not recorded in history. Never before were five nations in a position to sit down at one table and decide the political fate of the world. The opportunity was unique, and yet the statesmen of the world played the old, savage game of imperial aggression and domination.