H. J. Paton

Herbert James Paton FBA FSA Scot (30 March 1887 – 2 August 1969) was a Scottish philosopher who taught at various university institutions, including Glasgow and Oxford. He worked in British intelligence during the to world wars and played a diplomatic role on behalf of Poland at the 1919 Versailles conference. In 1968, the year before his death, he published The Claim of Scotland, a plea for greater general understanding of the constitutional position of his own native country.

Paton was the son of the Reverend William Macalister Paton, B.D., Abernethy, in Perthshire, Scotland, and Jean Robertson Millar. He was educated at the High School of Glasgow, the University of Glasgow, and Balliol College, Oxford. At Oxford he gained a First in Classical Moderations, 1909, and a First in Literae Humaniores ('Greats', a combination of philosophy and ancient history) in 1911.

During the First World War Paton served in the Admiralty's Intelligence Division, 1914–1919, and became an expert on Polish affairs in which capacity he attended the Versailles conference in 1919. At the Peace Conference he was the brains behind the Curzon Line. Drawn across eastern Poland, the line marked to the west of it what Lord Curzon, the British Foreign Secretary, would guarantee as Poland for the Poles. It was breached by the German-Russian Steel Pact of 28 September 1939, that prevented Russians from assisting Poland.

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