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Washington and the Riddle of Peace
BY
H. G. WELLS
=New York=
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1922
_All rights reserved_
Copyright, 1921,
BY THE PRESS PUBLISHING COMPANY
AND
THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE.
Copyright, 1922,
BY H. G. WELLS.
Set up and electrotyped. Published January, 1922.
Printed in the United States of America
------------------------------------------------------------------------
INTRODUCTION
These twenty-nine papers do not profess to be a record or description of
the Washington Conference. They give merely the impressions and
fluctuating ideas of one visitor to that conference. They show the
reaction of that gathering upon a mind keenly set upon the idea of an
organized world peace; they record phases of enthusiasm, hope, doubt,
depression and irritation. They have scarcely been touched, except to
correct a word or a phrase here or there; they are dated; in all
essentials they are the articles just as they appeared in the _New York
World_, the _Chicago Tribune_, and the other American and European
papers which first gave them publicity. It is due to the enterprise and
driving energy of the _New York World_, be it noted, that they were ever
written at all. But in spite of the daily change and renewal of mood and
attitude, inevitable under the circumstances, they do tell a consecutive
story; they tell of the growth and elaboration of a conviction of how
things can be done, and of how they need to be done, if our civilization
is indeed to be rescued from the dangers that encompass it and set again
upon the path of progress. They record—and in a very friendly and
appreciative spirit—the birth and unfolding of the “Association of
Nations” idea, the Harding idea, of world pacification, they note some
of the peculiar circumstances of that birth, and they study the chief
difficulties on its way to realization. It is, the writer believes, the
most practical and hopeful method of attacking this riddle of the Sphinx
that has hitherto been proposed.
H. G. WELLS.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
I THE IMMENSITY OF THE ISSUE AND THE TRIVIALITY OF MEN
II ARMAMENTS THE FUTILITY OF MERE LIMITATION
III THE TRAIL OF VERSAILLES TWO GREAT POWERS ARE SILENT AND ABSENT
IV THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER OF THE GREAT WAR
V THE PRESIDENT AT ARLINGTON
VI THE FIRST MEETING
VII WHAT IS JAPAN?
VIII CHINA IN THE BACKGROUND
IX THE FUTURE OF JAPAN
X “SECURITY”—THE NEW AND BEAUTIFUL CATCHWORD
XI FRANCE IN THE LIMELIGHT
XII THUS FAR
XIII THE LARGER QUESTION BEHIND THE CONFERENCE
XIV THE REAL THREAT TO CIVILIZATION
XV THE POSSIBLE BREAKDOWN OF CIVILIZATION
XVI WHAT OF AMERICA?
XVII EBB TIDE AT WASHINGTON
XVIII AMERICA AND ENTANGLING ALLIANCES
XIX AN ASSOCIATION OF NATIONS
XX FRANCE AND ENGLAND—THE PLAIN FACTS OF THE CASE
XXI A REMINDER ABOUT WAR
XXII SOME STIFLED VOICES
XXIII INDIA, THE BRITISH EMPIRE AND THE ASSOCIATION OF NATIONS
XXIV THE OTHER END OF PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE—THE SIEVE FOR GOOD
INTENTIONS
XXV AFRICA AND THE ASSOCIATION OF NATIONS
XXVI THE FOURTH PLENARY SESSION
XXVII ABOUT THE WAR DEBTS
XXVIII THE FOUNDATION STONE AND THE BUILDING
XXIX WHAT A STABLY ORGANIZED WORLD PEACE MEANS FOR MANKIND
I
THE IMMENSITY OF THE ISSUE AND THE TRIVIALITY OF MEN
Washington, Nov. 7.
The conference nominally for the limitation of armaments that now
gathers at Washington may become a cardinal event in the history of
mankind. It may mark a turning point in human affairs or it may go on
record as one of the last failures to stave off the disasters and
destruction that gather about our race.
In August, 1914, an age of insecure progress and accumulation came to an
end. When at last, on the most momentous summer night in history, the
long preparations of militarism burst their bounds and the little
Belgian village Vise went up in flames, men said: “This is a
catastrophe.” But they found it hard to anticipate the nature of the
catastrophe. They thought for the most part of the wounds and killing
and burning of war and imagined that when at last the war was over we
should count our losses and go on again much as we did before 1914.
As well might a little shopkeeper murder his wife in the night and
expect to carry on “business as usual” in the morning. “Business as
usual”—that was the catchword in Britain in 1914; of all the catchwords
of the world it carries now the heaviest charge of irony.
The catastrophe of 1914 is still going on. It does not end; it increases
and spreads. This winter more people will suffer dreadful things and
more people will die untimely through the clash of 1914 than suffered
and died in the first year of the war. It is true that the social
collapse of Russia in 1917 and the exhaustion of food and munitions in
Central Europe in 1918 produced a sort of degradation and enfeeblement
of the combatant efforts of our race and that a futile conference at
Versailles settled nothing, with an air of settling everything, but that
was no more an end to disaster than it would be if a man who was
standing up and receiving horrible wounds were to fall down and writhe
and bleed in the dust. It would be merely a new phase of disaster. Since
1919 this world has not so much healed its wounds as realized its
injuries.
Chief among these injuries is the progressive economic breakdown, the
magnitude of which we are only beginning to apprehend. The breakdown is
a real decay that spreads and spreads. In a time of universal shortage
there is an increasing paralysis in production; and there is a paralysis
of production because the monetary system of the world, which was
sustained by the honest co-operation of Governments, is breaking down.
The fluctuations in the real value of money become greater and greater
and they shake and shatter the entire fabric of social co-operation.
Our civilization is, materially, a cash and credit system, dependent on
men’s confidence in the value of money. But now money fails us and
cheats us; we work for wages and they give us uncertain paper. No one
now dare make contracts ahead; no one can fix up a stable wages
agreement; no one knows what one hundred dollars or francs or pounds
will mean in two years’ time.
What is the good of saving? What is the good of foresight? Business and
employment become impossible. Unless money can be steadied and restored,
our economic and social life will go on disintegrating, and it can be
restored only by a world effort.
But such a world effort to restore business and prosperity is _only
possible between governments sincerely at peace_, and because of the
failure of Versailles there is no such sincere peace. Everywhere the
Governments, and notably Japan and France, arm. Amidst the steady
disintegration of the present system of things, they prepare for fresh
wars, wars that can have only one end—an extension of the famine and
social collapse that have already engulfed Russia to the rest of the
world.
In Russia, in Austria, in many parts of Germany, this social decay is
visible in actual ruins, in broken down railways and suchlike machinery
falling out of use. But even in Western Europe, in France and England,
there is a shabbiness, there is a decline visible to any one with a keen
memory.
The other day my friend Mr. Charlie Chaplin brought his keen observant
eyes back to London, after an absence of ten years.
“People are not laughing and careless here as they used to be,” he told
me. “It isn’t the London I remember. They are anxious. Something hangs
over them.”
Coming as I do from Europe to America, I am amazed at the apparent
buoyancy and abundance of New York. The place seems to possess an
inexhaustible vitality. But this towering, thundering, congested city,
with such a torrent of traffic and such a concourse of people as I have
never seen before, is, after all, the European door of America; it draws
this superabundant and astounding life from trade, from a trade whose
roots are dying.
When one looks at New York its assurance is amazing; when one reflects
we realize its tremendous peril. It is going on—as London is going on—by
accumulated inertia. With the possible exception of London, the position
of New York seems to me the most perilous of that of any city in the
world. What is to happen to this immense crowd of people if the trade
that feeds it ebbs? As assuredly it will ebb unless the decline of
European money and business can be arrested, unless, that is, the world
problem of trade and credit can be grappled with as a world affair.
The world’s economic life, its civilization, embodied in its great
towns, is disintegrating and collapsing through the strains of the
modern war threat and of the disunited control of modern affairs.
This in general terms is the situation of mankind today; this is the
situation, the tremendous and crucial situation, that President Harding,
the head and spokesman of what is now the most powerful and influential
state in the world, has called representatives from most of the states
in the world to Washington to discuss.
Whatever little modifications and limitations the small cunning of
diplomatists may impose upon the terms of reference of the conference,
the plain common sense of mankind will insist that its essential inquiry
is, “What are we to do, if anything can possibly be done, to arrest and
reverse the slide toward continuing war preparation and war and final
social collapse?” And you would imagine that this momentous conference
would gather in a mood of exalted responsibility, with every conceivable
help and every conceivable preparation to grasp the enormous issues
involved.
Let us dismiss any such delusion from our minds.
Let us face a reality too often ignored in the dignified discussion of
such business as this Washington Conference, and that is this: that the
human mind takes hold of such very big questions as the common peace of
the earth and the general security of mankind with very great reluctance
and that it leaves go with extreme alacrity.
We are all naturally trivial creatures. We do not live from year to
year; we live from day to day. Our minds naturally take short views and
are distracted by little, immediate issues. We forget with astonishing
facility. And this is as true of the high political persons who will
gather at Washington as it is of any overworked clerk who will read
about the conference in a street car or on the way home to supper and
bed. These big questions affect everybody, and also they are too big for
anybody. A great intellectual and moral effect is required if they are
to be dealt with in any effectual manner.
I find the best illustration of this incurable drift toward triviality
in myself. In the world of science the microscope helps the telescope
and the infinitely little illuminates the infinitely great.
Let me put myself under the lens: Exhibit 1—If any one has reason to
focus the whole of his mental being upon this Washington Conference it
is I. It is my job to attend to it and to think of it and of nothing
else. Whatever I write about it, wise or foolish, will be conspicuously
published in a great number of newspapers and will do much to make or
mar my reputation. Intellectually, I am convinced of the supreme
possibilities of the occasion. It may make or mar mankind. The smallest
and the greatest of motives march together; therefore my self-love and
my care for mankind. And the occasion touches all my future happiness.
If this downward drift toward disorder and war is not arrested, in a few
years’ time it will certainly catch my sons and probably mutilate or
kill them; and my wife and I, instead of spending our declining years in
comfort, will be involved in the general wretchedness and possibly
perish in some quite miserable fashion, as thousands of just our sort of
family have already perished in Austria and Russia. This is indeed the
outlook for most of us if these efforts to secure permanent peace which
are now being concentrated at Washington fail.
Here surely are reasons enough, from the most generous to the most
selfish, for putting my whole being, with the utmost concentration, into
this business. You might imagine I think nothing but conference, do
nothing but work upon the conference.
Well, I find I don’t.
Before such evils as now advance upon humanity, man’s imagination seems
scarcely more adequate than that of the park deer I have seen feeding
contentedly beside the body of a shot companion.
I am, when I recall my behavior in the last few weeks, astonished at my
own levity. I have been immensely interested by the voyage across the
Atlantic; I have been tremendously amused by the dissertations of a
number of fellow-travellers upon the little affair of Prohibition; I
have been looking up old friends and comparing the New York City of
today with the New York City of fifteen years ago. I spent an afternoon
loitering along Fifth Avenue, childishly pleased by the shops and the
crowd, I find myself tempted to evade luncheon where I shall hear a
serious discussion of the Pacific question, because I want to explore
the mysteries of a chop suey without outside assistance.
Yet no one knows better than I do that this very attractive,
glitteringly attractive, thundering, towering city is in the utmost
danger. Within a very few years the same chill wind of economic disaster
that has wrecked Petersburg and brought death to Vienna and Warsaw may
be rusting and tarnishing all this glistening, bristling vitality. In a
little while, within my lifetime, New York City may stand even more
gaunt, ruinous, empty and haunted than that stricken and terrible ruin,
Petersburg.
My mind was inadequate against the confident reality of a warm October
afternoon, against bright clothes and endless automobiles, against the
universal suggestion that everything would shine on forever. And my mind
is something worse than thus inadequate; I find it is deliberately
evasive. It tries to run away from the task I have set it. I find my
mind, at the slightest pretext, slipping off from this difficult tangle
of problems through which the Washington Conference has to make its way.
For instance, I have got it into my head that I shall owe it to myself
to take a holiday after the conference, and two beautiful words have
taken possession of my mind—Florida and the Everglades. A vision of
exploration amidst these wonderful sun-soaked swamps haunts me. I
consult a guide book for information about Washington and the procedure
of Congress, and I discover myself reading about Miami or Indian River.
So it is we are made. A good half of those who read this and who have
been pulling themselves together to think about the hard tasks and heavy
dangers of international affairs will brighten up at this mention of a
holiday in the Everglades—either because they have been there or because
they would like to go. They will want to offer experiences and
suggestions and recommend hotels and guides.
And apart from this triviality of the attention, this pathetic
disposition to get as directly as possible to the nearest agreeable
thoughts which I am certain every statesman and politician at the
conference shares in some measure with the reader and myself, we are
also encumbered, every one of us, with prejudices and prepossessions.
There is patriotism—the passion that makes us see human affairs as a
competitive game instead of a common interest; a game in which “our
side,” by fair means or foul, has to get the better—inordinately—of the
rest of mankind. For my own part, though I care very little for the
British Empire, which I think a temporary, patched-up thing, I have a
passionate pride in being of the breed that produced such men as
Shakespeare, Milton, Bacon, Cromwell, Newton, Washington, Darwin, Nelson
and Lincoln. And I love the peculiar humor and kindly temper of an
English crowd and the soft beauty of an English countryside with a
strong, possessive passion.
I find it hard to think that other peoples matter quite as much as the
English. I want to serve the English and to justify the English.
Intellectually I know better, but no man’s intelligence is continually
dominant; fatigue him or surprise him, and habits and emotions take
control. And not only that I have this bias which will always tend to
make me run crooked in favor of my own people, but also I come to
Washington with deep, irrational hostilities.
For example: Political events have exasperated me with the present
Polish Government. It is an unhappy thing that Poland should rise from
being the unwilling slave of German and Russian reaction to become the
willing tool of French reaction. But that is no reason why one should
drift into a dislike of Poland and all things Polish, and because Poland
is so ill-advised as to grab more than she is entitled to, that one
should be disposed to give her less than she is entitled to. Yet I do
find a drift in that direction.
And prejudice soon breaks away into downright quarrelsomeness. It is
amusing or distressing, as you will, to find how easily I, as a
professional peacemaker, can be tempted into a belligerent attitude. “Of
course,” I say, ruffled by some argument, “if Japan chooses to be
unreasonable”—
I make no apologies for this autobiographical tone. It is easier and
less contentious to dissect one’s self than to set to work on any one
else for anatomical ends. This is Exhibit No. 1. We are all like this.
There are no demigods or supermen in our world superior to such
trivialities, limitations, prejudices and patriotisms. We have all got
them, as we have all got livers.
Every soul that gathers in Washington will have something of that
disposition to get away to the immediately pleasant, will be disposed to
take a personal advantage, will have a bias for race and country, will
have imperfectly suppressed racial and national animosities, will be
mentally hurried and crowded. That mental hurrying and crowding has to
be insisted upon.
This will be a great time for Washington, no doubt, to have a very gay
and exciting time. It becomes the focus of the world’s affairs. All
sorts of interesting people are heading for Washington, bright-eyed and
expectant. There will be lunches, dinners, receptions and such like
social occasions in great abundance, dramatic, and encounters,
flirtations, scandals, jealousies and quarrels. Quiet thought,
reconsideration—will Washington afford any hole or cover for such
things? A most distracting time it will be and it will be
extraordinarily difficult to keep its real significance in mind.
So let us repeat here its real significance.
The great war has struck a blow at the very foundations of our
civilization; it has shattered the monetary system which is the medium
of all our economic life. A rotting down of civilization is spreading
now very rapidly and nothing is being done to arrest it. Production
stagnates and dwindles. This can only be restored by the frank
collective action of the chief powers of the world.
At present the chief powers of the world show no signs of the collective
action demanded. They are still obsessed by old-fashioned ideas of
national sovereignty and national competition, and though all verge on
bankruptcy, they maintain and develop fresh armies and fleets. That is
to say, they are in the preparatory stage of another war. So long as
this divided and threatening state of affairs continues there can be no
stability, no real general recovery; shortages will increase, famine
will spread; towns, cities, communications will decay; increasing masses
of starving unemployed will resort to more and more desperate and
violent protests, until they assume a quasi-revolutionary character.
Education will ebb, and social security dwindle and fade into anarchy.
Civilization as we know it will go under and a new Dark Age begin.
And this fate is not threatening civilization; it is happening to
civilization before our eyes. The ship of civilization is not going to
sink in five years’ time or in fifty years’ time. It is sinking now.
Russia is under the water line; she has ceased to produce, she starves;
large areas of Eastern Europe and Asia sink toward the same level; the
industrial areas of Germany face a parallel grim decline; the winter
will be the worst on record for British labor. The pulse of American
business weakens.
To face which situation in the world’s affairs, this crowd of hastily
compiled representatives, and their associates, dependents and
satellites, now gathers at Washington. They are all, from President
Harding down to the rawest stenographer girl, human beings. That is to
say, they are all inattentive, moody, trivial, selfish, evasive,
patriotic, prejudiced creatures, unable to be intelligently selfish
even, for more than a year or so ahead, after the nature of our Exhibit
No. 1.
Every one has some sort of blinding personal interest to distort the
realities that he has to face. Politicians have to think of their
personal prestige and their party associations; naval and military
experts have to think of their careers.
One may argue it is as good a gathering as our present circumstances
permit. Probably there is some good will for all mankind in every one
who comes. Probably not one is altogether blind to the tremendous
disaster that towers over us, but all are forgetful.
And yet this Washington Conference may prove to be the nearest approach
the human will and intelligence has yet made to a resolute grapple
against fate upon this planet. We cannot make ourselves wiser than we
are, but in this phase of universal danger we can at least school
ourselves to the resolve to be charitable and frank with one another to
the best of our ability, to be forgiving debtors, willing to retreat
from hasty and impossible assumptions, seeking patience in hearing and
generosity in action. High aims and personal humility may yet save
mankind.
II
ARMAMENTS
THE FUTILITY OF MERE LIMITATION
Washington, Nov. 8.
It would seem that the peculiar circumstances of its meeting demand that
the Washington Conference should begin with a foregone futility, the
discussion of the limitation of armaments and of the restrictions of
warfare in certain directions, while nations are still to remain
sovereign and free to make war and while there exists no final and
conclusive court of decision for international disputes except warfare.
A number of people do really seem to believe that we can go on with all
the various states of the earth still as sovereign and independent of
each other as wild beasts in a jungle, with no common rule and no common
law, and yet that we can contrive it that they will agree to make war
only in a mild and mitigated fashion, after due notice and according to
an approved set of regulations. Such ideas are quite seriously
entertained and they are futile and dangerous ideas. A committee of the
London League of Nations Union, for example, has been debating with the
utmost gravity whether the use of poison gas and the sinking of neutral
ships to enforce a blockade should be permitted and whether “all modern
developments” in warfare should not be abolished. “The feasibility of
preventing secret preparations and the advantages of surprise were also
considered.” It is as if warfare was a game.
It is a little difficult to reason respectfully against that sort of
project. One is moved rather to add helpful suggestions in the same
vein. As for example, that no hostilities shall be allowed to begin or
continue except in the presence of a League of Nations referee, who
shall be marked plainly on the chest and pants with the red cross of
Geneva and who—for the convenience of aircraft—shall carry an open
sunshade similarly adorned. He shall be furnished with a powerful
whistle or hand trumpet audible above the noise of modern artillery, and
military operations shall be at once arrested when this whistle is
blown. Contravention of the rules laid down by the League of Nations
shall be penalized according to the gravity of the offense, with
penalties ranging from, let us say, an hour’s free bombardment of the
offender’s position to the entire forces of the enemy being addressed
very severely by the referee and ordered off the field.
In the event of either combatant winning the war, outright by
illegitimate means, it might further be provided that such combatant
should submit to a humiliating peace, just as if the war had been lost.
Unhappily war is not a game but the grimmest of realities, and no power
on earth exists to prevent a nation which is fighting for existence
against another nation from resorting to any expedient however unfair,
cruel and barbarous to enforce victory or avert disaster. Success
justifies every expedient in warfare, and you cannot prevent that being
so. A nation, hoping to win and afterward make friends with its enemy or
solicitous for the approval of some powerful neutral, may conceivably
refrain from effective but objectionable expedients, but that is a
voluntary and strategic restraint. The fact remains that war is an
ultimate and illimitable thing; a war that can be controlled is a war
that could have been stopped or prevented. If our race can really bar
the use of poison gas it can bar the use of any kind of weapon. It is
indeed easier to enforce peace altogether than any lesser limitation of
war.
But it is argued that this much may be true nevertheless, that if the
nations of the world will agree beforehand not to prepare for particular
sorts of war or if they will agree to reduce their military and naval
equipment to a minimum, that this will operate powerfully in preventing
contraventions and in a phase of popular excitement arresting the rush
toward war. The only objection to this admirable proposal is that no
power which has desires or rights that can only be satisfied or
defended, so far as it knows, by war, will ever enter into such a
disarmament agreement in good faith.
Of course countries contemplating war and having no serious intention of
disarming effectually will enter quite readily into conferences upon
disarmament, but they will do so partly because of the excellent
propaganda value of such a participation and mainly because of the
chance it gives them of some restriction which will hamper a possible
antagonist much more than it will hamper themselves. For instance, Japan
would probably be very pleased to reduce her military expenditure to
quite small figures if the United States reduced theirs to the same
amount, because the cost per head of maintaining soldiers under arms is
much less in Japan than in America; and she would be still more ready to
restrict naval armament to ships with a radius of action of 2,000 miles
or less because that would give her a free hand with China and the
Philippines. That sort of haggling was going on between Britain and
Germany at The Hague at intervals before the great war. Neither party
believed in the peaceful intentions of the other nor regarded these
negotiations as anything but strategic moves. And as things were in
Europe it was difficult to regard them in any other way.
No, the limitation of armaments quite as much as the mitigation of
warfare is impossible until war has been made impossible, and then the
complete extinction of armaments follows without discussion; and war can
only be made impossible when the powers of the world have done what the
thirteen original States of American Union found they had to do after
their independence was won, and that is set up a common law and rule
over themselves. Such a project is a monstrously difficult one no doubt,
and it flies in the face of great masses of patriotic cant and of
natural prejudices and natural suspicion, but it is a thing that can be
done. It is the only thing that can be done to avert the destruction of
civilization through war and war preparation. Disarmament and the
limitation of warfare without such a merging of sovereignty look, at the
first glance, easier and more modest proposals, but they suffer from the
fatal defect of absolute impracticability. They are things that cannot
be made working realities. A world that could effectually disarm would
be a world already at one, and disarmament would be of no importance
whatever. Given stable international relations, the world would put
aside its armaments as naturally as a man takes off his coat in winter
on entering a warm house.
And as a previous article has pointed out, wars, preparations for war
and the threat of war are only the more striking aspect of human
disunion at the present time. The smashing up of the world’s currency
system and the progressive paralysis of industry that follows on that is
a much more immediate disaster. That is rushing upon us. This war talk
between Japan and America may end as abruptly as the snarling of two
dogs overtaken by a flood. There may not be another great war after all,
because both in Japan and America social disruption may come first. Upon
financial and economic questions the powers of the earth must get
together very quickly now or perish; the signs get more imperative every
day; and if they get together upon these common issues, then they will
have little reason or excuse for not taking up the merely international
issues at the same time.
There is a curious exaggeration of respect for patriotism and patriotic
excesses in all these projects for disarmament and the mitigation of
warfare. We have to “consider patriotic susceptibilities”; that is the
stereotyped formula of objection to the plain necessity of overriding
the present barbaric sovereignty of separate states by a world rule and
a world law protecting the common interests of the common people of the
world. In practice these “patriotic susceptibilities”; will often be
found to resolve themselves into nothing more formidable than the
conceit and self-importance of some foreign office official. In general
they are little more than a snarling suspiciousness of foreign people.
Most people are patriotically excitable, it is in our human nature, but
that no more excuses this excessive deference to patriotism than it
would excuse a complete tolerance of boozing and of filthy vices and
drunken and lustful outrages because we are all more or less susceptible
to thirst and desire. And while there is all this deference for the most
ramshackle and impromptu of nationalisms there is a complete disregard
of the influence and of the respect due to one of the greatest and most
concentrated interests of our modern world, the finance, the science,
the experts, the labor, often very specialized and highly skilled, of
the armament and munitions and associated trades and industries.
So far as I can ascertain, the advocates of what I may call mere
disarmament propose to scrap this mass of interests more or less
completely, to put its tremendous array of factories, arsenals,
dockyards and so forth out of action, to obliterate its wide-reaching
net of financial relationships, to break up its carefully gathered
staffs, and to pour all its labor, its trained engineers and sailors and
gunners and so forth into the great flood of unemployment into which our
civilization is already sinking. And they do not seem to grasp how
subtle, various and effective the resistance of this great complex of
capable human beings to any such treatment is likely to be. In my supply
of League of Nations literature I find only two intimations of this real
obstacle to the world common weal. One is a suggestion that there should
be no private enterprise in the production of war material at all, and
the other that armament concerns shall not own newspapers. As a
Socialist I am charmed by the former proposal, which would in effect
nationalize, among others, the iron and steel and chemical industries,
but as a practical man I have to confess that the organization of no
existing state is yet at the level of efficiency necessary if the
transfer is to be a hopeful one, and so far as the newspaper restriction
goes, it would surely pass the wit of man to devise rules that would
prevent a great banking combination from controlling armament firms on
the one hand while it financed newspapers on the other.
Yet the fact remains that this great complex of interests, round and
about the armaments interest, is the most real of all the oppositions to
a world federation. It supplies substance, direction and immediate
rewards to the frothy emotions of patriotism; it rules by dividing us
and it realizes that its existence in its present form is conditional
upon the continuance of our suspicions and divisions. It does not
positively want or seek war, but it wants a continuing expectation of
and preparation for war. On the other hand its ruling intelligences must
be coming to understand that in the end it cannot escape sharing in the
economic and social smash down to which we are all now sliding so
rapidly. It is too high a type of organization to be altogether blind
and obdurate. It will not, of course, be represented officially at
Washington for what it is, but in the form of pseudo-patriotic, naval,
military and financial experts it will be better represented than any
other side of human nature. One of the most interesting things to do at
the conference will be to watch its activities.
How much can we common men ask for and hope for from this great power?
Self extinction is too much—even if it were desirable. But it is
reasonable to demand a deflection of its activities to meet the urgent
needs of our present dangers. We do not want the extinction of this
great body of business, metallurgical, chemical, engineering and
disciplined activities, but we do want its rapid diversion from all too
easily attained destructive ends to creative purposes now. A world peace
scheme that does not open out an immediate prospect for the release of
financial and engineering energy upon world-wide undertakings is a
hopeless peace scheme. Enterprise must out. Were this world one
federated state concerned about our common welfare there would be no
overwhelming difficulty in canalizing all this force now spent upon
armament in the direction of improved transport and communications
generally into the making of great bridges, tunnels and the like, into
the rebuilding of our cities upon better lines, into the irrigation and
fertilization of the earth’s deserts and so forth. The way to world
peace lies not in fighting and destroying the armament interests but in
turning them to world service.
But to do such a thing requires a united financial and economic effort;
it cannot be done nationally by little groups of patriots all scheming
against one another. It must be big business for world interests,
unencumbered by national frontiers, or it is impossible.
All these considerations you see converge on the conclusion that there
is no solution of the problem of war, no possibility of a world
recovery, no possibility of arresting the rapid disintegration of our
civilization, except a Pax Mundi, a federated world control,
sufficiently authoritative to keep any single nation in order and
sufficiently coherent to express a world idea. We need an effective
world “Association of Nations,” to use President Harding’s phrase, or we
shall perish. And even in this fantastic dream of Mere Disarmament, of a
world of little independent states, all sovereign, all competing against
each other and all carrying on a mean financial and commercial warfare
against each other to the common impoverishment, all standing in the way
of any large modern-spirited handling of modern needs, yet all remaining
magically disarmed and never making actual war on each other—even if
this dream were possible, it is still utterly detestable—more detestable
even than our present dangers and miseries. For if there are any things
in life worse than pain, fear and destruction, they are boredom,
pettiness and inanity, and such would be the quality of such a world.
However much the diplomatists at Washington may seek to ignore the fact,
may fence their discussion within narrowly phrased agenda, and rule
this, that and the other vital aspect outside the scope of the
conference, the fact remains that there is no way out, no way of escape
for mankind from the monstrous miseries and far more monstrous dangers
of the present time except an organized international co-operation,
based upon a frank and bold resolve to turn men’s minds from ancient
jealousies and animosities to the common aims and the common future of
our race.
If the Washington Conference cannot rise to the level of that idea, then
it were better that the Conference never gathered together.
III
THE TRAIL OF VERSAILLES
TWO GREAT POWERS ARE SILENT AND ABSENT
Washington, the guide books say, was planned by Major Pierre Charles
L’Enfant in imitation of Versailles. If so, it has broken away from his
intentions. I know Versailles pretty well, and I have gone about
Washington looking vainly for anything more than the remotest
resemblance. There is something European about Washington, I admit, an
Italianate largeness, as though a Roman design has been given oxygen and
limitless space. It is a capital in the expanded Latin style. It has
none of the vertical uplift of a real American city. But Versailles!
Versailles was the home and embodiment of the old French Grand Monarchy
and of a Foreign Policy that sought to dominate, Frenchify and
“Versaillize” the world. A visit to Versailles is part of one’s world
education, a visit to the rather faded, rather pretentious magnificence
of its terraces, to that Hall of Mirrors, all plastered over with little
oblongs of looking-glass, which was once considered so wonderful, to the
stuffy, secretive royal apartments with their convenient back stairs, to
the poor foolishness of the Queen’s toy village, the Little Trianon. A
century and a half ago the people of France, wasted and worn by
incessant wars of aggression, weary of a Government that was an
intolerable burden to them and a nuisance to all Europe, went to
Versailles in a passion and dragged French Policy out of Versailles for
a time.
Unhappily it went back there.
In 1871, when Germany struck down the tawdry imperialism of Napoleon III
(who was also for setting up Emperors in the New World) the Germans had
the excessive bad taste to proclaim a New German Empire in the Hall of
Mirrors. So that Versailles became more than ever the symbol of the
age-long, dreary, pitiful quarrel of the French and Germans for the
inheritance of “the Empire” that has gone on ever since the death of
Charlemagne. There the glory of France had shone; there the glory of
France had been eclipsed. I visited Versailles one autumnal day in 1912,
and it was then a rather mouldy, disheartened, empty, picturesque show
place, pervaded by memories of flounces, furbelows, wigs and red heels
and also by the stronger, less pleasant flavor of that later Prussian
triumph.
It was surely the least propitious place in the whole world for the
making of a world peace in 1919. It was inevitable that there the Rhine
frontier should loom larger than all Asia and that the German people
should be kept waiting outside to learn what vindictive punishment
victorious France designed for them.
The Peace of Versailles was not a settlement of the world, it was the
crowning of the French revanche. And since Russia had always been below
the horizon of Versailles it was as inevitable that the Russian people,
who had saved France from utter defeat in 1914, who had given far more
dead to the war than France and America put together, and who had
collapsed at last, utterly exhausted by their stupendous war efforts,
should be considered merely as the defaulting debtors of France. Their
Government had incurred vast liabilities chiefly in preparation for this
very war which had restored France to her former glorious ascendancy
over Germany. And now a new, ungracious Government in Russia not only
declared it could not pay up but refused to pretend that it had ever
meant to perform this impossible feat. There could be no dealing with
such a Government. The German people and the Russian people alike had no
voice at Versailles, and the affairs of the world were settled with a
majestic disregard of these outcast and fallen powers.
They were settled so magnificently and badly that now the Washington
Conference, whatever limitations it may propose to set upon itself, has
in effect to review and, if it can, mend or replace that appalling
settlement. The Washington conference has practically to revise the
verdicts of Versailles, in a fresher air and with a wider outlook.
I do not know how near future historians may come to saying that the
Washington conference was planned in imitation of that Versailles
conference, but it certainly does start out with one most unfortunate
resemblance. There seems to be the same tacit assumption that it is
possible to come to some permanent settlement of the world’s affairs
with no representation of either the German or the Russian people at the
conference. The Japanese, the Italians, the French, the Americans and
the British, assisted by modest suggestions from such small sections of
humanity as China and Spanish America, are sitting down to arrangements
that will amount practically to a settlement of the world’s affairs, and
they are doing so without consulting these two great peoples, and quite
without their consent and assistance. This surely runs counter to the
fundamental principle of both American and British political life—that
is to say, the principle of government with the consent of the
governed—and it is indeed an altogether deplorable intention. In some
form these two great peoples will have to be associated with any
permanent settlement, and it will be much more difficult to secure their
assent to any arrangement arrived at without even their formal
co-operation.
It is necessary to remind ourselves of certain elementary facts about
Germany and Russia and their position in the world today. They are facts
within the knowledge of all, and yet they seem to be astonishingly
forgotten in very much of the discussion of the Washington conference.
First, let us recall certain points about Germany. The German people
occupy the most central position in Europe; they exceed in numbers any
other European people except the Russians; their educational level has
been as high or higher than any other people in the world; they are, as
a people, honest, industrious, and intelligent; upon their social and
political well-being and economic prosperity the prosperity of Britain,
Scandinavia, Russia, Italy—and in a lesser degree France—depends. It is
impossible to destroy such a people, it is impossible to wipe them off
the map, but it is possible to ruin them economically and socially. And
if Germany is ruined most of Europe is ruined.
Germany has been overthrown in a great war and it will be well to recall
here certain elementary facts about that war. Under a particularly
aggressive and offensive imperialism system the Germans were plunged
into conflict with most of the rest of the civilized world. But it was
repeatedly declared by the British and by the Americans, if not by
others of the combatants, that they fought not against the German people
but against this German imperialism. The British war propaganda in
particular did its utmost to saturate Germany with that assurance and to
hold out the promise of generous treatment and a complete restoration of
friendship _provided there was a German renunciation of imperialism and
militarism_.
Germany, exhausted and beaten, surrendered in 1918 upon the strength of
these promises and upon the similar promises implied in President
Wilson’s Fourteen Points. The declared ends of the war had been
achieved. The Kaiser bolted, and Germany repented of him publicly and
unequivocally.
But the conference at Versailles treated these promises that had been
made to Germany as mere “scraps of paper.” The peace imposed upon the
young German republic was a punitive peace, exactly as punitive as
though there were still a Kaiser in Berlin; it was a vindictive reversal
of the Franco-German treaty of 1871 without a shred of recognition or
tolerance for the chastened Germany that faced her conquerors. The
Germans were dealt with as a race of moral monsters, though no one in
his senses really believes they are very different, man for man, from
English, French or American people; every German was held to be
individually responsible for the war, though every Frenchman, Englishman
and American knows that when one’s country fights one has to fight, and
it is quite natural to fight for it whether it is in the right or not;
and a sustained attack of oppressive occupations, dismemberment, and
impossible demands was begun and still goes on upon the shattered German
civilization—which is at least as vitally necessary to the world as the
French. The British and French nationalist press openly confess that
they do not intend to give Germany a chance of recovery. The European
Allies have now been kicking the prostrate body of Germany for three
years; in a little while they will be kicking a dead body; and since
they are linked geographically to their victim almost as closely as the
Siamese twins were linked together, they will share that victim’s decay.
It is high time that this barbaric insanity, this prolongation of the
combat after surrender, should cease and that the best minds and wills
of Germany and the very reasonable republican government she has set up
for herself should be called into consultation. I could wish that
Washington could so far rise above Versailles as presently to make that
invitation. Sooner or later it will have to be made if the peace of the
world is to be secured.
The absence of Russia from the Washington conference is an even graver
weakness. People seem to have forgotten altogether how the Russians bore
the brunt of the opening years of the great war. Their rapid offensive
in 1914 saved Paris and saved the little British Army from a disastrous
retreat to the sea. The debt of gratitude Britain and France owe to
Russia’s “Unknown Warrior,” that poor unhonored hero and martyr, is
incalculable. But for Russia Germany would probably have won the war
outright before the end of 1916. It was the blood and suffering of the
Russian people saved victory for the Allies; those incredible soldiers
fought often without artillery support, without rifle ammunition,
without boots or food, under conditions almost inconceivable to the
well-supplied French and British and Americans of the western front. And
their tale of killed and wounded exceeds enormously that of any other
combatant. In 1917 Russia collapsed; she was bled white, and she
remained collapsed in spite of the sedulous kicking of her allies to
rouse her to further efforts. The intolerable Rasputin-Czarism went down
in the disaster. After a phase of extreme disorder, and very largely
because of the British hesitation to support the Kerensky Government by
bold naval action in the Baltic, the hard, tyrannous, doctrinaire
government of the Bolsheviki took control.