to give up cheerfully in the middle of life a familiar method of dealing
with things in favor of a new and untried one as it is to change one's
language or emigrate to an entirely different land. I realize what this
proposal means to diplomatists when I try to suppose myself united to
assist in the abolition of written books and journalism in favor of the
gramophone and the cinematograph. Or united to adopt German as my means
of expression. It is only by an enormous pressure of opinion in the
world behind these monarchs, ministers, and representatives that they
will be induced even to consider the possibility of adapting themselves
to this novel style of international dealing through a permanent
congress. It is only the consideration of its enormous hopefulness for
the rest of the world that gives one the courage to advocate it.
In the question of the possible abolition of the present diplomatic
system, just as in the case of the possible abolition of war, while on
the side for abolition there must be a hugely preponderating interest
and a hugely preponderating majority, it is, nevertheless, a dispersed
interest and an unorganized, miscellaneous majority. The minority is, on
the other hand, compact, more intensively and more immediately
interested and able to resist such great changes with a maximum of
efficiency. There is a tremendous need, therefore, for a world congress
organization propaganda if this advantageously posted minority is to be
overcome.
And from such countries as the American States in particular, and from
the small liberal neutrals in Europe, whose diplomacy is least developed
and least influential, liberal-minded people through the world are most
disposed to expect, and do expect, a lead in this particular matter. The
liberal forces in Britain, France, and Russia are extraordinarily
embarrassed and enslaved by the vast belligerent necessities into which
their lives have been caught. But they would take up such a lead with
the utmost vigor and enthusiasm.
No one who has followed the diplomatic history of the negotiations that
led to this war can doubt that if there had been no secret treaties, but
instead open proclamations of intentions and an open discussion of
international ambitions, the world might have been saved this
catastrophe. It is no condemnation of any person or country to say this.
The reserves and hesitations and misconceptions that led Germany to
suppose that England would wait patiently while France and Belgium were
destroyed before she herself received attention were unavoidable under
the existing diplomatic conditions. What reasonable people have to do
now is not to recriminate over the details in the working of a system
that we can now all of us perceive to be hopelessly bad, but to do our
utmost in this season of opportunity to destroy the obscurities in which
fresh mischief may fester for our children.
Let me restate this section in slightly different words. At the end of
this war there must be a congress of adjustment. The suggestion in this
section is to make this congress permanent, to use it as a clearing
house of international relationships and to abolish embassies.
Instead of there being a British Ambassador, for example, at every
sufficiently important capital, and an ambassador from every important
State in London, and a complex tangle of relationships, misstatements,
and misconceptions arising from the ill-co-ordinated activities of this
double system of agents, it is proposed to send one or several
ambassadors to some central point, such as The Hague, to meet there all
the ambassadors of all the significant States in the world and to deal
with international questions with a novel frankness in a collective
meeting.
This has now become a possible way of doing the world's business because
of the development of the means of communication and information. The
embassy in a foreign country, as a watching, remonstrating, proposing
extension of its country of origin, a sort of eye and finger at the
heart of the host country, is now clumsy, unnecessary, inefficient, and
dangerous. For most routine work, for reports of all sorts, for legal
action, and so forth, on behalf of traveling nationals, the consular
service is adequate, or can easily be made adequate. What remains of the
ambassadorial apparatus might very well merge with the consular system
and the embassy become an international court civility, a ceremonial
vestige without any diplomatic value at all.
IV.
Given a permanent world congress developed out of the congress of
settlement between the belligerents, a world alliance, with as a last
resort a call upon the forces of the associated powers, for dealing with
recalcitrants, then a great number of possibilities open out to humanity
that must otherwise remain inaccessible. But before we go on to consider
these it may be wise to point out how much more likely a world congress
is to effect a satisfactory settlement at the end of this war than a
congress confined to the belligerents.
The war has progressed sufficiently to convince every one that there is
now no possibility of an overwhelming victory for Germany. It must end
in a more or less complete defeat of the German and Turkish alliance,
and in a considerable readjustment of Austrian and Turkish boundaries.
Assisted by the generosity of the doomed Austrians and Turks, the
Germans are fighting now to secure a voice as large as possible in the
final settlement, and it is conceivable that in the end that settlement
may be made quite an attractive one for Germany proper by the crowning
sacrifice of suicide on the part of her two subordinated allies.
There can be little doubt that Russia will gain the enormous advantage
of a free opening into the Mediterranean and that the battle of the
Marne turned the fortunes of France from disaster to expansion. But the
rest of the settlement is still vague and uncertain, and German
imperialism, at least, is already working hard and intelligently for a
favorable situation at the climax, a situation that will enable this
militarist empire to emerge still strong, still capable of recuperation
and of a renewal at no very remote date of the struggle for European
predominance. This is a thing as little for the good of the saner German
people as it is for the rest of the world, but it is the only way in
which militant imperialism can survive at all.
The alternative of an imperialism shorn of the glamour of aggression,
becoming constitutional and democratic--the alternative, that is to say,
of a great liberal Germany--is one that will be as distasteful almost to
the people who control the destinies of Germany today, and who will
speak and act for Germany in the final settlement, as a complete
submission to a Serbian conqueror would be.
At the final conference of settlement Germany will not be really
represented at all. The Prussian militarist empire will still be in
existence, and it will sit at the council, working primarily for its own
survival. Unless the Allies insist upon the presence of representatives
of Saxony, Bavaria, and so forth, and demand the evidence of popular
sanctions--a thing they are very unlikely to demand--that is what
"Germany" will signify at the conference. And what is true of Germany
will be true, more or less, of several other of the allied powers.
A conference confined purely to the belligerents will be, in fact, a
conference not even representative of the belligerents. And it will be
tainted with all the traditional policies, aggressions, suspicions, and
subterfuges that led up to the war. It will not be the end of the old
game, but the readjustment of the old game, the old game which is such
an abominable nuisance to the development of modern civilization. The
idealism of the great alliance will certainly be subjected to enormous
strains, and the whole energy of the Central European diplomatists will
be directed to developing and utilizing these stresses.
This, I think, must be manifest even to the foreign offices most
concerned. They must see already ahead of them a terrible puzzle of
arrangement, a puzzle their own bad traditions will certainly never
permit them to solve. "God save us," they may very well pray, "from our
own cleverness and sharp dealing," and they may even welcome the promise
of an enlarged outlook that the entry of the neutral powers would bring
with it.
Every foreign office has its ugly, evil elements, and probably every
foreign office dreads those elements. There are certainly Russian fools
who dream about India, German fools who dream about Canada and South
America, British fools who dream about Africa and the East;
aggressionists in the blood, people who can no more let nations live in
peace than kleptomaniacs can keep their hands in their own pockets. But
quite conceivably there are honest monarchs and sane foreign ministers
very ready to snatch at the chance of swamping the evil in their own
Chancelleries.
It is just here that the value of neutral participation will come in.
Whatever ambitions the neutral powers may have of their own, it may be
said generally that they are keenly interested in preventing the
settlement from degenerating into a deal in points of vantage for any
further aggressions in any direction. Both the United States of America
and China are traditionally and incurably pacific powers, professing and
practicing an unaggressive policy, and the chief outstanding minor
States are equally concerned in securing a settlement that shall settle.
And moreover, so wide reaching now are all international agreements that
they have not only a claim to intervene juridically, but they have the
much more pressing claim to participate on the ground that no sort of
readjustment of Europe, Western Asia, and Africa can leave their own
futures unaffected. They are wanted not only in the interests of the
belligerent peoples, but for their own sakes and the welfare of the
world all together.
V.
Now a world conference, once it is assembled, can take up certain
questions that no partial treatment can ever hope to meet. The first of
the questions is disarmament. No one who has watched the politics of the
last forty years can doubt the very great share the business and finance
of armament manufacture has played in bringing about the present
horrible killing, and no one who has read accounts of the fighting can
doubt how much this industry has enhanced the torment, cruelty, and
monstrosity of war.
In the old warfare a man was either stabbed, shot, or thrust through
after an hour or so of excitement, and all the wounded on the field were
either comfortably murdered or attended to before the dawn of the next
day. One was killed by human hands, with understandable and tolerable
injuries. But in this war the bulk of the dead--of the western Allies,
at any rate--have been killed by machinery, the wounds have been often
of an inconceivable horribleness, and the fate of the wounded has been
more frightful than was ever the plight of wounded in the hands of
victorious savages. For days multitudes of men have been left mangled,
half buried in mud and filth, or soaked with water, or frozen, crying,
raving between the contending trenches. The number of men that the war,
without actual physical wounds, has shattered mentally and driven insane
because of its noise, its stresses, its strange unnaturalness, is
enormous. Horror in this war has overcome more men than did all the
arrows of Cressy.
Almost all this enhanced terribleness of war is due to the novel
machinery of destruction that science has rendered possible. The
wholesale mangling and destroying of men by implements they have never
seen, without any chance of retaliation, has been its most constant
feature. You cannot open a paper of any date since the war began without
reading of men burned, scalded, and drowned by the bursting of torpedoes
from submarines, of men falling out of the sky from shattered
aeroplanes, of women and children in Antwerp or Paris mutilated
frightfully or torn to ribbons by aerial bombs, of men smashed and
buried alive by shells. An indiscriminate, diabolical violence of
explosives resulting in cruelties for the most part ineffective from the
military point of view is the incessant refrain of this history.
The increased dreadfulness of war due to modern weapons is, however,
only one consequence of their development. The practicability of
aggressive war in settled countries now is entirely dependent on the use
of elaborate artillery on land and warships at sea. Were there only
rifles in the world, were an ordinary rifle the largest kind of gun
permitted, and were ships specifically made for war not so made, then it
would be impossible to invade any country defended by a patriotic and
spirited population with any hopes of success because of the enormous
defensive capacity of entrenched riflemen not subjected to an unhampered
artillery attack.
Modern war is entirely dependent upon equipment of the most costly and
elaborate sort. A general agreement to reduce that equipment would not
only greatly minimize the evil of any war that did break out, but it
would go a long way toward the abolition of war. A community of men
might be unwilling to renounce their right of fighting one another if
occasion arose, but they might still be willing to agree not to carry
arms or to carry arms of a not too lethal sort, to carry pistols instead
of rifles or sticks instead of swords. That, indeed, has been the
history of social amelioration in a number of communities; it has led
straight to a reduction in the number of encounters. So in the same way
the powers of the world might be willing to adopt such a limitation of
armaments, while still retaining the sovereign right of declaring war
in certain eventualities. Under the assurances of a world council
threatening a general intervention, such a partial disarmament would be
greatly facilitated.
And another aspect of disarmament which needs to be taken up and which
only a world congress can take up must be the arming of barbaric or
industrially backward powers by the industrially and artillery forces in
such countries as efficient powers, the creation of navies Turkey,
Servia, Peru, and the like. In Belgium countless Germans were blown to
pieces by German-made guns, Europe arms Mexico against the United
States; China, Africa, Arabia are full of European and American weapons.
It is only the mutual jealousies of the highly organized States that
permit this leakage of power. The tremendous warnings of our war should
serve to temper their foolish hostilities, and now, if ever, is the time
to restrain this insane arming of the less advanced communities.
But before that can be done it is necessary that the manufacture of war
material should cease to be a private industry and a source of profit to
private individuals, that all the invention and enterprise that blossoms
about business should be directed no longer to the steady improvement of
man-killing. It is a preposterous and unanticipated thing that
respectable British gentlemen should be directing magnificently
organized masses of artisans upon the Tyneside in the business of making
weapons that may ultimately smash some of those very artisans to
smithereens.
At the risk of being called "Utopian" I would submit that the world is
not so foolish as to allow that sort of thing to go on indefinitely. It
is, indeed, quite a recent human development. All this great business of
armament upon commercial lines is the growth of half a century. But it
has grown with the vigor of an evil weed, it has thrown out a dark
jungle of indirect advertisement, and it has compromised and corrupted
great numbers of investors and financial people. It is perhaps the most
powerful single interest of all those that will fight against the
systematic minimization and abolition of war, and rather than lose his
end it may be necessary for the pacifist to buy out all these concerns,
to insist upon the various States that have sheltered them taking them
over, lock, stock, and barrel, as going businesses.
From what we know of officialism everywhere, the mere transfer will
involve almost at once a decline in their vigor and innovating energy.
It is perhaps fortunate that the very crown of the private armaments
business is the Krupp organization and that its capture and suppression
is a matter of supreme importance to all the allied powers. Russia, with
her huge population, has not as yet developed armament works upon a very
large scale and would probably welcome proposals that minimized the
value of machinery and so enhanced that of men. Beyond this and certain
American plants for the making of rifles and machine guns only British
and French capital is very deeply involved in the armaments trade. The
problem is surely not too difficult for human art and honesty.
It is not being suggested that the making of arms should cease in the
world, but only that in every country it should become a State monopoly
and so completely under Government control. If the State can monopolize
the manufacture and sale of spirits, as Russia has done, if it can,
after the manner of Great Britain, control the making and sale of such a
small, elusive substance as saccharin, it is ridiculous to suppose that
it cannot keep itself fully informed of the existence of such elaborated
machinery as is needed to make a modern rifle barrel. And it demands a
very minimum of alertness, good faith, and good intentions for the
various manufacturing countries to keep each other and the world
generally informed upon the question of the respective military
equipments. From this state of affairs to a definition of a permissible
maximum of strength on land and sea for all the high contracting powers
is an altogether practicable step. Disarmament is not a dream; it is a
thing more practicable than a general hygienic convention and more
easily enforced than custom and excise.
Now none of this really involves the abandonment of armies or uniforms
or national service. Indeed, to a certain extent it restores the
importance of the soldier at the expense of machinery. A world
conference for the suppressing of the peace and the preservation of
armaments would neither interfere with such dear incorrigible squabbles
as that of the orange and green factions in Ireland, (though it might
deprive them of their more deadly weapons,) nor absolutely prohibit war
between adjacent States. It would, however, be a very powerful delaying
force against the outbreak of war, and it would be able to insist with a
quite novel strength upon the observation of the rules of war.
It is no good pretending that mere pacifism will end war; what will end
war, what, indeed, may be ending war at the present time, is
war--against militarism. Force respects itself and no other power. The
hope for a world of peace in the future lies in that, in the possibility
of a great alliance, so powerful that it will compel adhesions, an
alliance prepared to make war upon and destroy and replace the
Government of any State that became aggressive in its militarism. This
alliance will be in effect a world congress perpetually restraining
aggressive secession, and obviously it must regard all the No-Man's
Lands--and particularly that wild waste, the ocean--as its highway. The
fleets and marines of the allied world powers must become the police of
the wastes and waters of the earth.
VI.
Now, such a collective control of belligerence and international
relations is the obvious common sense settlement of the present world
conflict, it is so manifest, so straight-forward that were it put
plainly to them it would probably receive the assent of nineteen sane
men out of twenty in the world. This, or some such thing as this, they
would agree, is far better than isolations and the perpetual threat of
fresh warfare.
But against it there work forces, within these people and without, that
render the attainment of this generally acceptable solution far less
probable than a kind of no-solution that will only be a reopening of all
our hostilities and conflicts upon a fresh footing. Some of these forces
are vague and general, and can only be combated by a various and
abundant liberal literature, in a widely dispersed battle in which each
right-thinking man must do as his conscience directs him. There are the
vague national antagonisms, the reservations in favor of one's own
country's righteousness, harsh religious and social and moral cant of
the Carlyle type, greed, resentment, and suspicion. The greatest of
these vague oppositions is that want of faith which makes man say war
has always been and must always be, which makes them prophesy that
whatever we do will become corrupted and evil, even in the face of
intolerable present evils and corruptions.
When at the outbreak of the war I published an article headed "The War
That Will End War," at once Mr. W.L. George hastened to reprove my
dreaming impracticability. "War there has always been." Great is the
magic of a word! He was quite oblivious to the fact that war has changed
completely in its character half a dozen times in half a dozen
centuries; that the war we fought in South Africa and the present war
and the wars of mediaeval Italy and the wars of the Red Indians have
about as much in common as a cat and a man and a pair of scissors and a
motor car--namely, that they may all be the means of death.
If war can change its character as much as it has done it can change it
altogether; if peace can be kept indefinitely in India or North America,
it can be kept throughout the world. It is not I who dream, but Mr.
George and his like who are not yet fully awake, and it is their
somnolence that I dread more than anything else when I think of the
great task of settlement before the world.
It is this rather hopeless, inert, pseudo-sage mass of unbelievers who
render possible the continuation of war dangers. They give scope for
the activities of the evil minority which hates, which lives by pride
and grim satisfactions, and which is therefore anxious to have more war
and more. And it is these inert half-willed people who will obstruct the
disentanglement of the settlement from diplomatic hands. "What do we
know about the nuance of such things?" they will ask, with that laziness
that apes modesty. It is they who will complain when we seek to buy out
the armaments people. Probably all the private armament firms in the
world could be bought up for seventy million pounds, but the unbelievers
will shake their heads and say: "Then there will only be something else
instead."
Yet there are many ungauged forces on the side of the greater
settlement. Cynicism is never more than a half-truth, and because man is
imperfect it does not follow that he must be futile. Russia is a land of
strange silences, but it is manifest that whatever the innermost quality
of the Czar may be, he is no clap-trap vulgar conqueror of the
Wilhelm-Napoleon pattern. He began his reign, and he may yet crown his
reign, with an attempt to establish peace on a newer, broader
foundation. His religion, it would seem, is his master and not his
servant. There has been no Russian Bernhardi.
And there has been much in America, much said and much done, since the
war broke out that has surprised the world. I may confess for myself,
and I believe that I shall speak for many other Europeans in this
matter, that what we feared most in the United States was levity. We
expected mere excitement, violent fluctuations of opinion, a confused
irresponsibility, and possibly mischievous and disastrous interventions.
It is no good hiding an open secret. We judged America by the peace
headline. It is time we began to offer our apologies to America and
democracy. The result of reading endless various American newspapers and
articles, of following the actions of the American Government, of
talking to representative Americans, is to realize the existence of a
very clear, strong national mentality, a firm, self-controlled,
collective will, far more considerable in its totality than the world
has ever seen before.