Paris Peace Conf. 184.01102/415
Professor A. C. Coolidge to the Commission to Negotiate Peace
[Received April 30.]
Sirs: I have the honor to report that since the declaration of the President in regard to the frontiers of Italy30 there has been deep depression among all the people here who are interested in the fate of the German-speaking region of South Tyrol. It is feared that the President’s declaration can only be interpreted to mean that this district is to be given to Italy. In the Tyrol itself I am told the anxiety, or rather the despair, is great. I have just been visited by a Tyrolese representative who has handed in to me the enclosed document,31 of which I believe copies have already been forwarded to Paris. In the course of conversation he emphasized the fact that if the southern part of the Tyrol should thus be taken away from the northern, the northern portion would have no choice except union with Bavaria. Further existence in connection with Austria would be impossible, as it would be nothing but a thin strip of mountainous territory with foreign boundaries on three sides of it.
I have [etc.]
- The text of President Wilson’s manifesto of April 23, 1919, is given in Ray Stannard Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement (Garden City, N. Y., 1922), vol. iii, p. 287.↩
- Not attached to file copy of this document.↩