manufacturers are also, to a very marked but not overwhelming extent
exporters and much of their internal trade is to the farmers—whose
purchasing power will be diminishing. Bad times for the industrial
regions also will follow the European disaster, perhaps even very bad
times. New York and the Eastern cities, so far as the overseas traffic
goes, may suffer exceptionally. For them there may be less power of
recovery, for with the fall of Europe into barbarism, the centre of
American interests will shift to the interior. But after a series of
crises, a lot of business failures and so on, I do not see why the
United States—if there is no war with Japan—very little reduced from the
large splendor of its present habits, should not still be getting along
in a fashion. America is not tied up to the European system, to live and
die with it, as France or Britain is tied.
And there is a limit also to the areas of the Old World affected by the
collapse of the cash and credit system in Europe. Outside the European
seacoast towns, Asia Minor is not likely to go much lower than it is at
present, though most of Europe sink to the level of the Balkans and Asia
Minor. The dissolution of Asia Minor resulted from the great wars of the
Eastern Empire and Persia; all that land was ruined country before the
days of Islam. It has never recovered and Europe may never recover.
Given an enfeebled Britain, there will probably be a collapse into
conflict and discord throughout most of India; and China, unhelped, may
continue in a state of confusion which is steadily destroying her
ancient educated class and her ancient traditions without replacing them
by any modernized educational organization. But here again upon the
Western Pacific there may be regions which need not go the whole way
down to citylessness, illiteracy and the peasant life.
Japan is still solvent and energetic, the war has probably strained her
very little more than it has strained America, and her participation in
the world credit system is still so recent that, like America, she may
be able to draw herself together and maintain herself and expand her
rule and culture, unimpeded, over the whole of Eastern Asia. She will be
the more able to do this if a phase of disarmament gives her time to
rest and consolidate before her expansion is resumed. A war between
Japan and America would be a long and costly affair and it would no
doubt topple both powers into the same process of dissolution in which
Europe now welters, but I am assuming that America takes no risk of such
a war for the sake of China or suchlike remote cause and that Japan is
not eager for California. An America indifferent to the fall of Europe
would probably not trouble itself seriously if presently Australia came
under Japanese domination. It would not trouble—until the Monroe
Doctrine was invaded. And it would get along very comfortably and
happily.
So far as material considerations go, therefore, there is not much force
in an appeal to the ordinary plain man in America to interest himself,
much less to exert himself, in the tangled troubles of Europe and Asia
now. He can remain as proudly “isolated” as his fathers; he can refuse
help, he can “avoid entangling alliances,” and rely on his own strength;
he can weather the smash, insist on pressing any sparks of recovery out
of the European debtor, and so far as he and his children, and possibly
even his children’s children, are concerned, America can expect to go on
living an extremely tolerable life. There will still be plenty of Fords,
plenty of food, movies and other amusing inventions; seed time, harvest
and thanksgiving; no armament and very light taxation and as high a
percentage of moral, well-regulated lives as any community has ever
shown upon this planet. Until that long-distant time when the great
Asiatic Empire of Japan turns its attention seriously to expansion in
the New World.
So far as present material considerations go....
But I belong to one of the races that have populated America. I know the
imagination of my own people and something of most of the peoples who
have sent their best to this land, I have watched the people here, and
listened to them and read about them; there has been no degeneration
here but progress and invigoration, and I will not believe that the
American spirit, distilled from all the best of Europe, will tolerate
this surrender of the future, this quite hoggish abandonment of the
leadership of mankind that continuing isolation implies.
The American people has grown great unawares; it still does not realize
its immense predominance now in wealth, in strength, in hope, happiness
and unbroken courage among the children of men. The cream of all the
white races did not come to this continent to reap and sow and eat and
waste, smoke in its shirtsleeves in a rocking-chair, and let the great
world from which its fathers came go hang. It did not come here for
sluggish ease. It came here for liberty and to make the new beginning of
a greater civilization upon our globe. The years of America’s growth and
training are coming to an end, the phase of world action has begun. All
America is too small a world for the American people; the world of their
interest now is the whole round world.
I have no doubt of the heart and enterprise of America—if America
understands.
But does America understand the scale and urgency of the present
situation? Is she prepared to act now? This decadence of Europe is
urgent—urgent. So far, this Washington Conference has not touched more
than the outer threads of the writhing international tangle that has to
be dealt with if European civilization is to be saved.
So far, these economic and financial troubles which are already at a
crisis of disaster in Europe have been treated as though they did not
exist. But they are the very heart of the trouble across the Atlantic,
and with America, the rich creditor of all Europe and the holder of most
of the gold in the world, lie enormous possibilities of salvation. The
political situation becomes more and more subordinated to the economic.
If America is willing, America is able to reinstate Europe and turn back
the decline, _and she is in so strong a position that she can make the
effectual permanent disarmament of Europe a primary condition of her
assistance_. If she have the clearness of mind to set aside the eloquent
apologetics of that one power that is still militant, adventurous and
malignant among the ruins, she can oblige the remnant of Europe to get
together and settle outstanding differences by the sheer strength of her
financial controls. She can demand a “League to Enforce Peace,” and she
can enforce it.
Will she do that now, or will she let this occasion pass from her—never
to return?
XVII
EBB TIDE AT WASHINGTON
Washington, Nov. 28.
The League of Nations was the first American initiative toward an
organized world peace. Its beginning, the world-wide enthusiasm evoked
by its early promise, its struggle to exist, its abandonment by America,
its blunders and omissions and the useful, incomplete body that now
represents it at Geneva, are the material of an immense conflicting
literature. For a time at least the League is in the background. It has
not kept hold of the popular imagination of the world.
I will not touch here upon the mistakes and disputes, the possible
arrogance, the possible jealousies, the inadvisable compromises, the
unnecessary concessions that made the League a lesser thing than it
promised to be. I will not discuss why so entirely American a project,
into which many nations came mainly to please America, failed to retain
the official support of the American Government. Of such things the
historian or the novelist may write but not the journalist. The fact
remains that the project was a project noble and hopeful in its
beginnings, a very great thing indeed in human history, a dawn in the
darkness of international conflict and competition, an adventure which
threw a halo of greatness about the Nation that produced it and about
that splendid and yet so humanly limited man who has been chiefly
identified with its promise and its partial failure.
It was, I insist, very largely an American idea, and only America,
because of her freedom from the complex and bitter-spirited traditions
of the European Foreign Offices, could have brought such a proposal into
the arena of practical politics. The American Nation is exceptionally
free from ancient traditions of empire, ascendancy, expansion, glory and
the like. It is haunted by a dream, an obstinate recurrent dream, of a
whole world organized for peace. It comes back to that with a notable
persistence.
The League of Nations stands now, as it were, on the shelf, an
experiment not wholly satisfactory, not wholly a failure, destined for
searching reconsideration at no distant date. Meanwhile, the American
mind, with much freshness and boldness, has produced this second
experiment, in a widely different direction, the First Washington
Conference for the Limitation of Armaments. The League of Nations was
too definite and cramped in its constitution, too wide in its powers. It
was a premature superstate. One standard objection, and a very
reasonable one, was that America might be outvoted by quite minor powers
and be obliged to undertake responsibilities for which it had no taste.
The second experiment, therefore, has been tried, very properly, with
the loosest of constitutions, and the most severely defined and limited
of aims. We are beginning to see that it too is an experiment, likely to
be successful within its limits but again not wholly satisfactory.
Instead of a world constitution we have had a world conversation.
That conversation has passed from the open sessions of the conference to
the two committees of five upon the limitation of land and sea armaments
and the Pacific Committee of nine. In all these committees there are
wide fluctuations of thought and temper. There are daily communications
to the press from this committee or that, from this delegation or that,
from a score of propagandas. It is really not worth the while of the
ordinary citizen to follow these squabbles and flights and
recriminations and excitements. Certain broad principles have been
established. The ordinary citizen will be advised to hold firmly to
these and see that he gets them carried through.
And now there has been a decided ebb in the high spirit of the
conference. These disputes about details have produced a considerable
amount of fatigue, attention is fatigued and the exploit of M. Briand
has for a time shattered and confused the general mentality. The
American public was in a state of pure and simple enthusiasm for peace
and disarmament and quite unprepared for the exploit of M. Briand. Like
all serious shocks, it did not at first produce its full result.
The mood was so amiable here, so eager for cheering and emotional human
brotherhood, that when France, in the person of M. Briand, snapped her
fingers at the mere idea of disarmament and quoted a twenty-year-old
passage from a dead German Field Marshal to justify a vast army and an
aggressive naval programme in the face of an exhausted Europe, there was
a touching disposition on the part of a considerable section of the
American press to greet this display as in some way conducive to our
millennial efforts. Only a few of us called a spade a spade right away
and declined to pretend that the irony and restrained indignation of Mr.
Balfour and Signor Schanzer were “indorsements” of M. Briand’s
stupendous claim that France with her submarines and Senegalese might do
as she pleased in Europe.
The facts that the caustic and restrained utterances of these gentlemen
could be so construed, and that the London Daily Mail should attempt to
break and mutilate my comments on the French attitude, demonstrate
beyond doubt the need there was for the utmost outspokenness in this
matter. But the situation is now better realized. The air is already
clearer for the outburst. France, we realize, has to stop bullying
Germany and threatening Italy; Europe can only be saved by the honest
and unreserved co-operation of Italy, France and Britain for mutual aid
and reassurance.
The repercussion of the Franco-British clash was immediately evident
upon the other issues of the conference. The practical refusal of France
to join in the generous renunciations of America and Britain, the
feeling of insecurity created in Western Europe weakened Britain in her
ability to work with America on the Pacific for a secure China and for
restraint upon the possible imperialism of Japan. Britain cannot do that
with a hostile neighbor behind her and an uncertain America at her side,
and the prospects of a free China and for an effective limitation of the
Japanese naval strength were greatly imperilled. Japanese demands
stiffened. “Ten to six,” said America. “Ten to seven,” answered Japan.
The effect upon what I might call the Washington state of mind
throughout the world was depressing. The easy onrush of the opening days
was checked. Here was hard work ahead, complications, the traditions and
mental habits of two great European peoples were in conflict and had
somewhat to be adjusted if we were to get on. The Anglo-French Entente,
we discovered, was in a very unsatisfactory state; it had suddenly to be
sent to the wash and the washing had to be done in public, and this
happened at a phase of lassitude. In the ebb of the great enthusiasm all
sorts of buried rocks and shoals became apparent again. Party politics
reappeared—and remained showing.
I am an innocent child in American politics; I know that I make my
artless remarks upon these things at considerable peril. But I gather
from the self-betrayals of one or two influential people that things are
somewhat in this frame. The Democrats feel that so far they have been
almost supernaturally “good” about the conference. They haven’t said a
word by way of criticism; they have hailed and helped and smiled and
cheered. Still——If things should so turn out that a kind of
insufficiency should appear, and if people’s minds should revert
thereupon toward the Democratic League of Nations idea, so much under a
cloud at present, it would be rather more than human not to feel a faint
gleam of pleasure and perhaps even to give the gentlest of pushes to the
process of disillusionment.
And on the other hand, there betrays itself now and then a slight
nervous eagerness on the part of loyal rather than good Republicans to
call anything that happens a success and to become indignant when, as in
the case of the Briand oration, a spade is called a spade. And that
childish, undignified and dwindling tendency of certain American types
to regard all foreign powers in general, and Britain in particular, as
forever engaged in diabolical machinations against the peace and purity
of American life is also increasingly evident. There is an open, if
incoherent, press campaign against disarmament, against the British,
against foreigners generally, against—any troublesome thing you like.
These are ebb tide phenomena. These are the limitations of our poor
humanity under fatigue. None the less, matters have to be thrashed out
and will be thrashed out. As I said in the beginning, it is hard to keep
hold.
And so it was high time that the President, who embodies so much of the
simplicity and strength of that real America, in which I am a profound
and obstinate believer, should come back into the limelight from which
he receded after delivering his great speech and leaving the chair on
the opening day of the conference. In the indirect way customary with
Presidents here he has been making some very important pronouncements.
My friend Mr. Michelson some days ago published a sketch of very
important proposals that had already received wide support in the
informal discussions that pervade Washington—for partial rescinding of
the Allied debts, subject to disarmament conditions, to be considered by
a second conference to be presently assembled. Following on this news
the President has been talking for publication of a third experiment in
the form of a second Washington Conference to take up these issues. And
he has also been talking of a third conference to confirm and go on with
the disarmament arrangements, a conference at which Germany and the
Spanish-speaking powers, if not Russia, are apparently to have a voice.
Such a periodic repetition of the conference would presently organize
itself for a continuing life and so develop gradually and naturally into
that Association of Nations we are all seeking.
These are refreshing promises in these days of ebb; they show that the
impulse that began so splendidly two weeks ago is not dead, that the
tide rises toward world discussion and world organized peace will flow
again presently, wider and stronger than its previous flow. And
meanwhile these frank discussions of attitude and detail must go on;
they cannot be ignored, but at the same time they must not be magnified
into incurable quarrels and insurmountable difficulties. They are
unavoidable and necessary things, but not the big things, the main
things. While the tide is out our main projects, stranded in this
estuary that leads perhaps to the ocean of peace, must needs keel over
and look askew; we must scrape our keels, calk leaks and wait for the
great waters to return.
XVIII
AMERICA AND ENTANGLING ALLIANCES
Washington, Nov. 30.
The power of the American impulse toward a world peace is undeniable. It
has produced in succession the great dream of a League of Nations and
now this second great dream of a gradually developing Association of
Nations arising out of a series of such conferences as this one. No
other nation could have raised such hopes and no other political system
has the freedom of action needed to give these projects the substance
and dignity which the initiative of the head of the state involves.
But if these projects are to carry through into the world of
accomplished realities, if in a lifetime or so this glorious dream of a
world peace—going on, as a world at peace must now inevitably do, from
achievement to achievement—if that dream is to be realized, certain
peculiarities of the American people and the American situation have at
no very distant date to be faced.
All such gatherings and conferences as this are haunted by a peculiar
foggy ghost called “Tact,” which is constantly seeking to cover up and
conceal and obliterate some vitally important but rather troublesome
reality in the matter. “Tact” is apparently a modern survival of the
ancient “Tabu.” For example, a pleasant Indian gentleman sits among the
British delegates at the conference; “Tact” demands that no one shall
ever ask him or of him, “What do you conceive will be the place of India
in that great World Association half a century ahead? Will it still be a
British appendix?” And “Tact” becomes hysterical at the slightest
whisper of the word “Senegalese,” or any inquiry about the possible uses
of the French submarine. And a third question, hitherto veiled by “Tact”
under the very thickest wrappings of fog, to which, greatly daring, I
propose to address myself now, is: “How far is America really prepared
to fix and adhere to any wide schemes for the permanent adjustment of
the world’s affairs that may be arrived at by this conference or its
successors?”
The other day a friend of mine in New York made a profoundly wise remark
to me. “I have found,” she said, “that one can have nothing and do
nothing without paying for it. If you do well or if you do ill, just the
same you have to pay for it. If a mother wants to do her best by her
children, she must pay for it, in giving up personal ambitions, dreams
of writing or art, throughout the best years of life. If a man wants to
do his best in business or politics, he must sacrifice dreams of travel
and adventure.” And whatever America does with herself in the next few
years, she too must be prepared to pay.
If she desires isolation, moral exaltation, irresponsibility and
self-sufficiency, “America for the Americans and never mind the
consequences,” she must be prepared to witness the decline and fall of
the white civilization in Europe and the consolidation of a profoundly
alien system across the Pacific. If, on the other hand, she now takes up
this task for which she seems so inclined, as the leader and helper of
white civilization, the task of organizing the permanent peace of the
world upon the lines of the system of civilization to which she belongs,
then for that nobler role also there is a price to be paid. She has to
assume not only the dignity but the responsibilities of leadership. She
has not merely to express noble sentiments, but to lay hold upon the
difficulties and intricacies of the problem before her. She has not
merely to criticise but to consider and sympathize and help, and she has
to make decisions and abide by them.
When America really makes decisions, she abides by them—vigorously. The
Monroe Doctrine was such a decision. It has saved South America for
South Americans; it has saved Europe from a ruinous scramble for the
Spanish inheritance. It was the first great feat of Americanism in world
politics. The exponents of “Tact” will, I know, be outraged by the
reminder that for a long time tacit approval of Britain and the
existence of the British fleet provided a support and shield to the
Monroe Doctrine, and also by the further reminder that the one serious
attack upon it was made by Napoleon III. during the American Civil
War—at which time, I admit, the attitude of Great Britain to the
disunited States was also far from impeccable. But helped or assailed,
the Monroe Doctrine held good.
The Washington Conference has developed a position with regard to the
Pacific that calls for an American decision of equal vigor. It is as
plain as daylight that Japanese liberal tendencies can be supported and
the aggressive ambitions of Japanese imperialism can be restrained, that
China can be saved for the Chinese and Eastern Siberia from foreign
conquest, provided America places herself unequivocally side by side
with Great Britain and France in framing and _sustaining_ a definite
system of guarantees and prohibitions in Eastern Asia. The
Anglo-Japanese agreement could be ended in favor of such a new
peace-pact and an enormous step forward toward world peace be made. It
would mark an epoch in world statecraft.
But this means an agreement of the nature of a treaty; a mere
Presidential declaration, which means some later President might set
aside or some newly elected Senate reverse, is not enough. If the reader
will study the position of Australia and of the British commitments in
Eastern Asia, he will see why it is not enough. Britain is not strong
enough to risk being left alone as the chivalrous protector of a weak,
if renascent, China. She has her own people in Australia to consider.
And besides, Britain alone—as the protector of China—after all that has
happened in the past.... It is moral as well as material help in
sustaining the new understanding that the British will require.
The plain fact of the Pacific situation is that there are only three
courses before the world—either unchallenged Japanese domination in
Eastern Asia from now on, or a war to prevent it soon, or an alliance of
America, Britain and Japan, with whatever government China may develop,
and with the other powers concerned, though perhaps less urgently
concerned—an alliance of all these, for mutual restraint and mutual
protection. And it is an equally plain fact, though “Tact” cries “Hush!”
at the words, that the tradition of America for a hundred years, a
tradition which was sustained in her refusal to come into the League of
Nations, has been against any such alliance.
George Washington’s advice to his countrymen to avoid “permanent
alliances” for the balance of power and suchlike ends, and Jefferson’s
reiterated council to his countrymen to avoid “entangling alliances”
have been interpreted too long as injunctions to avoid any alliances
whatever, entangling or disentangling. The habit of avoiding association
in balance-of-power schemes and the like has broadened out into a
general habit of non-association. But alliances which are not aimed at a
common enemy but only at a common end were not, I submit, within the
intention of George Washington.