occurred long ago in some Eastern equivalent of Versailles. The great
Abbassid family had suffered many things from the Ommayyad Caliphs, and
at last it rose against them and overcame them and secured the
leadership of Islam. The remnants of the Ommayyad clan were summoned to
witness and celebrate the new peace. But some of the Abbassids, inspired
by quite modern ideas of “security,” had all the Ommayyads massacred
before the banquet began. A beautiful carpet was spread over the dead
and dying and the Abbassids feasted thereon. Here was “security” to
satisfy the most exacting modern European ideals. Yet the Abbassids made
little of their security. They never rose to the glory of the Ommayyads;
the drive and strength seemed to have gone out of Arab Islam; their
history for all this “security” is one of division, decline, decay. It
takes all men to make a world.
Let us get through with this futile haggling for national advantages and
securities and let us get on to the organization of that brotherhood
which can alone save the world.
XI
FRANCE IN THE LIMELIGHT
Washington, November 21.
The first session of the Washington Conference featured, as the
cinematograph people say, President Harding and Mr. Secretary Hughes;
the second day was Mr. Balfour’s day; this third, from which I have just
come, was the session of M. Briand.
The four personalities contrast very strikingly. President Harding was a
stately figure making a very noble oration in the best American fashion;
Mr. Hughes was hard, exact, clear-cut, very earnest and explicit; Mr.
Balfour slender and stooping, silvery-haired and urbane, made his
carefully worded impromptu speech with a care that left no ragged end to
a sentence and no gap for applause. All three are taller and neater men
than M. Briand, whose mane of hair flows back from his face in leonine
style, whose mobile face and fluent gestures reinforce the stirring
notes of his wonderful voice. His eloquence was so great that many
Congressmen in the gallery above, quite innocent of French, were moved
to applause by the sheer grace and music of the performance.
Eloquence could not save the day or the occasion. M. Briand spoke to a
gathering that was saturated with scepticism for the cause he had to
plead. I watched the quiet, scrutinizing countenances of the six men he
turned about to face as he spoke—Root, Lodge and Hughes, as immobile as
judges; Balfour trying to look like a sympathetic ally in the face of a
discourse that insultingly ignored Great Britain as a factor of the
European situation; Lord Lee, obliquely prostrate and judicial; Geddes,
with that faintly smiling face of his, the mask of an unbeliever.
The voice of the orator rose and fell, boomed at them, pleaded, sought
to stir them—like seas breaking over rocks. Their still implacable
faces, hardly or politely, retained the effect of listening to a special
pleader—a special pleader doing his best, his foamy best, with an
intolerably bad case.
M. Briand put before the conference no definite proposals at all. After
Mr. Hughes, with that magnificent discourse of his, punctuated by “we
propose to scrap,” M. Briand was an anticlimax. France proposed to scrap
nothing. France does not know how to scrap. She learns nothing and
forgets nothing. It is her supreme misfortune. He explained the position
of France in a melodious discourse of apologetics and excuses. The
French contribution to the Disarmament Conference is that France has not
the slightest intention of disarming. She is reducing her term of
service with the colors from three years to two. In a Europe of
untrained men this is not disarmament, but economy.
The great feature of M. Briand’s discourse was his pretense of the
absolute unimportance of England in European affairs. France, for whom,
as Mr. Balfour in a few words of infinite gentleness reminded M. Briand,
France, for whom the British Empire lost a million dead—very nearly as
many men as France herself lost; France, to whose rescue from German
attack came Britain, Russia and presently Italy and America; France, M.
Briand declared, was alone in the world, friendless and terribly
threatened by Germany and Russia. And on the nonsensical assumption of
French isolation, M. Briand unfolded a case that was either—I hesitate
to consider which—and how shall I put that old alternative?—deficient in
its estimate of reality, or else—just special pleading.
The plain fact of the case is that France is maintaining a vast army in
the face of a disarmed world and she is preparing energetically for
fresh warlike operations in Europe and for war under sea against Great
Britain. To excuse this line of action M. Briand unfolded a fabulous
account of the German preparation for a renewal of hostilities; every
soldier in the small force of troops allowed to Germany is an officer or
non-commissioned officer, so that practically the German Army can expand
at any moment to millions, and Germany is not morally disarmed because
Ludendorff—M. Briand quoted him at some length—is still writing and
talking militant nonsense.
Even M. Briand has to admit that the present German Government is honest
and well meaning, but it is a weak Government. It is not the real thing.
The real Germany is the Germany necessary for M. Briand’s argument. And
behind Germany is Russia. He conjured up a great phantom of Soviet
Russia which would have conquered all Europe but for the French Armies
and Poland. That iniquitous attack of Poland upon Russia last May was,
he assured his six quiet-eyed auditors and the rest of us, a violent
invasion of Western civilization by Russia.
“There were those in Germany,” he said in a voice to make our flesh
creep, “who beckoned them on.” The French had saved us from that. The
French Army, with its gallant Senegalese, was the peacemaker and
guardian of all Europe.
One listened incredulous. One waited still incredulous to hear it
over again from the interpreter. Yes, we were confirmed; he really
had said that. Poor, exhausted Russia, who saved Paris, desiring
nothing but to be left alone; bled white, starving, invaded by a
score of subsidized adventurers; invaded from Esthonia, from Poland,
from Japan, in Murmansk, in the Crimea, in the Ukraine, on the
Volga, incessantly invaded, it is this Russia which has put France
on the offensive-defensive!
One is reminded of the navvy who kicked his wife to death to protect
himself from her violence.
(It is interesting to recall here that one of the Kaiser’s favorite
excuses for German armament, when it was Germany and not France which
aspired to dominate Europe, was his acute dread of the Yellow Peril.)
When he talked to the journalists in preparation for this display, M.
Briand excused France for wanting submarines in quantity because, he
said, she was liable to attack upon three coasts, but maturer reflection
omitted this aspect of the French case from M. Briand’s attention. It
was too thick even for an American audience. And even Mr. Balfour, with
all his charming tenderness for a fellow-statesman, could not well have
avoided the plain question, “From whom does France anticipate a sea
attack?”
France is in about as much danger of an attack upon her three coasts as
the United States of America is upon her Canadian frontier. Her ships
are as safe upon the sea as a wayfarer on Fifth Avenue. If she builds
submarines now, she builds them to attack British commerce and for no
other reason whatever. All the Ludendorffs and Soviets in the world do
not justify a single submarine. Every submarine she launches is almost
as direct a breach of the peace with Britain as though she were to start
target practice at Dover Harbor across the straits, and every one in
England will understand the aim of her action as clearly. As M. Briand,
in his discourse to the journalists, argued that the empire of France
was as far-flung as that of Britain, her need to protect her
communication was as great. This was in the face of Mr. Balfour’s
reminder that Britain can feed its people only for seven weeks if its
overseas supplies are cut off. France can feed from her own soil all the
year round. The argument was not good enough for a boys’ debating
society, and M. Briand, who is prepared to scrap nothing else, was at
least well advised to scrap that.
I will confess that I am altogether perplexed by the behavior of France
at the present time. I do not understand what she believes she is doing
in Europe and I do not understand her position in this conference. Why
could she not have co-operated in this conference instead of making it a
scene of special pleading? I have already said that the French here seem
to be more foreign than any other people and least in touch with the
general feeling of the assembly. They seem to have come here as national
advocates, as special pleaders, without any of that passionate desire to
lay the foundations of a world settlement that certainly animates nearly
every other delegation. They do not seem to understand how people here
regard either the conference or France.
There is indeed a great and enduring enthusiasm for France in America.
Marshal Foch has gone about in America as the greatest of heroes and the
most popular figure. He has been overwhelmed by hospitality and
smothered by every honor America could heap upon him. The French flag is
far more in evidence than the British in both New York and Washington.
This may easily give French visitors the idea that they are exceptional
favorites here and that France can count upon American backing in any
quarrels she chooses to pick with the British or the Germans or
Russians.
There could be no greater error. The enthusiasm for Foch is largely
personal; he was the General of all the Allies. The enthusiasm for
France is largely traditional and it does not extend to the French
nationals or the present day. America loves, as all liberal and
intelligent men throughout the world must love, France the great
liberator of men’s minds; France of the great Revolution; the France of
art and light, France, the beautiful and the gallant. It is hard to
write bitterly of a country that can give the world an Anatole France,
sane and smiling, or so brave and balanced a gentleman as the late
Robert d’Humiers. But where is that France today? None of that France
has come to the Washington Conference, but only an impenitent apologist
for three years of sins against the peace of the world, an apologist for
national aggression posturing as fear, and reckless greed disguised as
discretion.
Here in New York and Washington I find just the same steady change of
opinion about France that is going on in London. I want to write it down
as plainly as I can. I want to get it over to my friends in France,
because I have loved France greatly, and I do not think the French
people realize what is going on among the English-speaking peoples.
People here want to see Europe recuperating, and they are beginning to
realize that the chief obstacle to a recuperating Europe is the
obstinate French resolve to dominate the Continent, to revive and carry
out the antiquated and impossible policy of Louis XIV., maintaining an
ancient and intolerable quarrel, setting Pole against German and brewing
mischief everywhere in order to divide and rule, instead of entering
frankly into a European brotherhood.
Feeling about Germany and Austria is changing here, even more rapidly
than in England, to pity and indignation; feeling about Russia is
drifting the same way. One detects these undercurrents in the minds of
the most unlikely people. People are recalling the France of Napoleon
III., that restless and mischievous France, which came so near to a
conflict with America in Mexico and which kept Europe in a fever for a
quarter of a century. It is an enormous loss to the Washington
Conference, it is a misfortune to all the world, that the great
qualities of the French people, their clear-headedness, their powerful
and yet practical imaginations seem at present to be entirely
subordinated to the merely rhetorical and emotional side of the French
character.
XII
THUS FAR
Washington, Nov. 22.
How are we getting on in Washington?
The general mood is hopefulness tempered by congestion, mental and
physical, and by sheer fatigue. There is no rest in Washington, no
cessation. Last winter I was a happy invalid at Amalfi, I sat in the
Italian sunshine, the hours were vast globes of golden time, my mind and
my soul were my own. Now I live to the tune of a telephone bell and the
little feverish American hours slip through my hot, dry hands before I
can turn my thoughts around. I wish I could attend to everything.
The conference has evolved two committees, one on disarmament and one on
Pacific affairs, which meet behind closed doors, so that one has three
or four divergent reports of what has happened to choose from; delegates
at all hours and in devious ways call together the press men to make
more or less epoch-making statements; there are particular conferences
with representative business men of this country and educationists of
that, and so forth; one is called upon by a multitude of well informed
people insistent upon this fact or that point of view, eloquent
sidelights from South China, Albania, Czecho-Slovakia clamor for
attention. And there is a terrible multitude of mere pesterers who want
to do something—they know not what. The weather here is unusually warm
and inclined to be cloudy, a brewhouse atmosphere, due entirely, one
humorist declares, to the tremendous fermentation that is going on.
The fermenting vat overflows with the press of all the world. All the
world, we feel, is present in spirit at Washington.
Three questions stand out as of importance and significance. The naval
disarmament discussion, as one could have foretold, becomes a haggle for
advantages. Each power seeks to disarm the other fellow. Great Britain
detests the big raider submarine and wants none of it; it is America’s
only effective long range weapon. A clamor comes to us from across the
ocean from the French Senate for unlimited submarines. These will be to
attack Great Britain; there can be no other possible use for them.
Perhaps the French Senate does not really want war with Britain, but
this is the way to get it.
Japan is asking for a seven to ten instead of a six to ten basis for
herself. And so on. So long as unsettled differences remain, disarmament
discussions are bound to degenerate in this fashion. Settlements and
sincere disarmament are inseparably interwoven. The French, however,
have led in an important pronouncement, promising evacuations and
renunciations in the Chinese area on the part of France, provided
Britain and Japan follow suit. Lord Riddle, on behalf of Britain, has
followed suit; Britain is ready to relinquish everything, with the
justifiable exception of Hongkong, a purely British creation. And M.
Briand has explained why France must have an awful army to overawe
Europe, but that still leaves certain possibilities of military
restraint open for consideration. We are still discussing whether we may
not hope to see conscription banished from the earth.
When such things swim up through the boiling activities of the
Washington vat, not merely as passing suggestions and happy ideas but
embodied in more or less concrete proposals, we cannot fail, however
jaded we may feel, from also feeling hopeful. The conference has got
only to its third session and we already seem further from war in the
Pacific and nearer security there than at any time in the last two
years.
And these intimations of success in this world discussion, of which
Washington is the controlling nucleus, turn our minds naturally enough
to the continuation and final outcome of this great initiative of
President Harding’s. The more fruitful the conference seems likely to be
in agreements and understandings the more evident is the necessity for
something permanent arising out of it, to hold and maintain, in spirit
and in fact, this accumulation of agreements and understandings.
The Washington Conference before it breaks up and disperses must in some
way lay an egg to reproduce itself. In some fashion it must presently
return. Because we have had to bear in mind that in the final and
conclusive sense of the word the conference can decide nothing. It has
produced a fine and generous atmosphere about it; it will probably
arrive at an effectual temporary solution of a large group of problems,
but the power of final decision rests with Governments and Legislatures
far away.
The American proposals are only suggestive and they have no value as a
treaty, unless they are accepted by the powers and until the American
Senate has confirmed them by a two-thirds majority. M. Briand may have
wished to be generous and broadminded here, but in Paris is this French
Senate, inspired by a mad patriotism that would even now begin to arm
France for an “inevitable” war with Britain. The French Senate has made
a warlike gesture directly at England, has set its feet in a path that
can end only in a supreme disaster for both France and England, and it
did so, one guesses, in order to remind M. Briand that if he dared to be
reasonable, if he dared to be pacific, if he acted for Great France and
mankind, instead of at the dictates of Nationalist France, he did so at
his peril. He would have been accused of betraying his country.
“Conspuez Briand!” they would have cried in their pretty way. So M.
Briand has played the patriot’s role.
In Tokio and in London it is an open secret that the same conflict goes
on; the cables are busy with the struggle between reason and fierce
patriotism. * * * Every concession made by every country at Washington
will go back to the home land to be challenged as “weakness,” as “want
of patriotism,” as “treason.”
In America and Britain the ugly side of this business has still to come,
the outbreak of the patriotic fanatics, of the disappointed politicians
who wanted to come here, of the wrecker journalists, the dealers in
suspicion, the evil minds of a thousand types. And the lassitude that
follows great expectations has also to be reckoned with. What Washington
decides will not be the ultimate outcome; what the world will get at
last in treaties ratified and things accomplished will be the mangled
and tangled remains of the Washington decisions.
For that reason it is imperative that the Washington Conference should
meet again. Its work is not done until its decisions are realized. After
it has sent over its reports to the Goverments and Parliaments it will
adjourn, but it must not cease. With perhaps rather fuller powers, with
perhaps a wider or a different representation of the world, it must come
again to a renewed invitation, to restore once more that atmosphere of
international good will that has been created here, and to go over the
attempts to realize, or the failures to realize, the settlement it has
already worked out. And there will be many questions ripening then for
solution that it cannot deal with now.
Much remains to be done by the Washington Conference, most of its work,
indeed, is still to be done, but enough has been demonstrated already
here to convince any reasonable man that a new thing, a new instrument,
a new organ, has come into human affairs and that it is a thing that the
world needs and cannot do without again. This thing has to recur, has to
grow. It has to become a recurrent world conference. And this being
clear, it is time that public discussion, public opinion, direct itself
to the problem of the renewal of the conference in order that before it
disperses we may be assured that it will meet again.
As a temporary, transitory thing, it will presently fade out of men’s
memories and imaginations; but as a thing going on and living, which has
gone, but which, like the King in circuit, will come again to try the
new issues that have arisen and to try again the experiments that have
fallen short of expectation, it may become the symbol and rallying point
of all that vast amount of sane, humanitarian feeling and all that
devotion to mankind as a whole, and to peace and justice, that has
hitherto been formless and ineffectual in the world, for the need of
such a banner.
XIII
THE LARGER QUESTION BEHIND THE CONFERENCE
Washington, November 23.
The Washington Conference, after its tremendous opening, seems now to be
running into slack water. It has had its three great days, in which
Secretary Hughes and Mr. Balfour and M. Briand have respectively played
the leading parts. The broad lines of a possible naval reduction and of
a possible Chinese and Pacific settlement are shaping themselves in
men’s minds.
M. Briand has spoken and now departs. France will not disarm until she
has a binding treaty which her former allies are not yet prepared to
give her. She ignores the assurances of her proved allies and the
experiences of the Great War. She goes in fear of desolate Russia and
bankrupt Germany and she is “assailable on three coasts.” So she retains
her great armies, and especially her “colonial” army. M. Briand’s
departure has something of the effect of France shaking the dust from
her feet and departing from the conference.
But France cannot step out of her share in the leadership of peace in
this fashion. France has not finished with the conference yet. She will
speak now at Washington with a voice perhaps less romantically
impressive but more practically helpful. She has explained the terrors
of her position and the assembled delegates have said “There! There!” to
her as politely and soothingly as possible. But nobody really believes
in the terrors of her position. Mr. Hughes is a man of great tenacity of
purpose, and his chief reply to M. Briand’s speech is to keep military
disarmament upon the agenda. A third committee of five powers has been
added to the two already in existence to deal with land disarmament. It
is doubtful if it can get very far unless it can bring in German and
Russian representatives to reply to the alarmist charges of M. Briand.
With the formation of this third committee the Washington Conference
would seem to have got as much before it as it is likely to handle. The
Hughes impetus has done its work and done its work well. The conference
has followed his rigorous lead almost too rigorously. It has cut off a
manageable part of the vast problem of world peace and seems well on the
way to manage it. That is exemplary—if limited. To manage a sample is to
go some way toward demonstrating that the whole is manageable. A war on
the Pacific has been averted, I think, at least for some years. But the
more general problem of world peace as one whole, the problem of ending
war for good, still remains untouched, and it is well to bear in mind
that that is so.
It is impossible not to contrast this phase in the life of the
Washington Conference with the great propositions of the opening days,
when President Harding was speaking at Arlington and in the Continental
Building of making an end to offensive—and with that of defensive—war
forever in the world. It is impossible to ignore this shrinkage of aim
and to refrain from measuring the vast omissions. That prelude, one
perceives, was the prelude to something greater than this present
conference, and more than this conference must ensue from it. The
haggling and adjustment that is now going on in the committee of five
powers on naval limitation and in the committee of nine powers on the
Pacific settlement I will not attempt to follow. It is a matter for the
experts and diplomatists; the public is concerned not with the methods
of the wrangle but with the general purport and practical outcome.
We of the general public are incapable of judging upon the merits of
battle cruisers and the possible limits to the size of submarines. Our
concern is to see such things grow rarer and rarer until they disappear.
I will not apologize, therefore, for going outside the conference
chamber for the matter of my next few papers. I will go back from Mr.
Secretary Hughes and his proposals and their consequences to President
Harding and to the great expectations with which the conference
assembled.