Hughes can possibly he accepted without a Pacific settlement, nor how
that settlement can be sustained except by some sort of alliance,
meeting periodically in conference to apply or adapt the settlement to
such particular issues as may arise. If America is not prepared to go as
far as that, then I do not understand the enthusiasm of America for the
Washington Conference. I do not understand the mentality that can
contemplate world disarmament without at least that much provision for
the prevention of future conflicts.
And similarly, I do not see how any effectual disarmament is possible in
Europe or how any dealing with the economic and financial situation
there can be possible unless America is prepared to bind itself in an
alliance of mutual protection and accommodation with at least France,
Germany, Britain and Italy to sustain a similar series of conferences
and adjustments. At the back of the French refusal to disarm there is a
suppressed demand for a protective alliance. That is an entirely
reasonable demand. The form of this alliance that the French have
demanded hitherto is an entangling alliance, an alliance of America and
Britain and France against, at least, Germany and Russia. The necessary
alliance to which France and Britain will presently assent, and which
America will come to recognize as the only way to its peacemaking aims,
will be against no one; it is an alliance of an entirely beneficial
character, an alliance not to entangle but to release.
The disposition of the European delegations and of the British and
foreign writers at Washington to treat the idea of America making
treaties of alliance as outside the range of possibility, as indeed an
idea _tabu_, seems to me a profoundly mistaken one. It is “Tact” in its
extremest form. I have heard talk of the “immense inertia” of political
dogmas held for a hundred years. For “immense inertia” I would rather
write “expiring impulse.” The policy of non-interference in affairs
outside America was an excellent thing, no doubt, for a young Republic
in the self-protective state; it is a policy entirely unworthy of a
Republic which has now become the predominant state in the world.
XIX
AN ASSOCIATION OF NATIONS
The futility of the idea of a limitation of armaments or any limitation
of warfare as a possible remedy for the present distresses of mankind,
without some sort of permanent settlement of the conflicts of interest
and ambition which lie at the root of warfare, has grown clearer and
clearer with each day’s work of the Washington Conference. And the
conviction that no permanent settlement is conceivable without a binding
alliance to sustain it also grows stronger each day. For security and
peace in the Pacific an alliance of at least America, Britain and Japan
is imperative, and Britain cannot play her part therein unless Europe is
safe also, through a binding alliance of at least France, Germany,
Britain and America. To arrest the economic decadence of the world a
still wider bond is needed.
So the inflexible logic of the situation brings us back to the problem
of a world alliance and a world guarantee, the problem of which the
League of Nations was the first attempted solution. The conference is
being forced toward that ampler problem again, in spite of the severe
restrictions of its agenda. After President Wilson’s “League” comes
President Harding’s “Association.” Senator Borah, in alarm, emerges from
the silence he has hitherto kept during the conference to declare that
this “Association” is only another name for the “League.” On that we may
differ from him. Association and League are alike in seeking to organize
the peace of the world but in every other respect they are different
schemes, differing in aims, scope and spirit.
The primary difference is that, while the League was a very clearly
defined thing, planned complete from the outset, a thing as precise and
inalterable as the United States Constitution, the Harding project is a
tentative, experimental thing, capable of great adaptations by trial and
corrected error, a flexible and living thing that is intended to grow
and change in response to the needs of our perplexing and incalculable
world.
The Harding idea, as it is growing up in people’s minds in Washington,
seems to be something after this fashion: That this present conference
shall be followed by others having a sort of genetic relationship to it,
varying in their scope, in their terms of reference, in the number of
states invited to participate. A successor to the present one seems to
be already imminent in the form of a conference on the economic and
financial disorder of the world. Such a conference would probably
include German and Spanish, and possibly Russian, representatives, and
it might take on in addition to its economic discussion any issues that
this present conference may leave outstanding.
These Washington Conferences, it is hoped, will become a sort of
international habit, will grow into a world institution in which
experience will determine usages and usage harden into a customary rule.
They will become by insensible degrees a World Parliament, with an
authority that will grow or decline with the success or failure of the
recommendations.
One advantage of having experiments made will occur at once to those who
have been present at the plenary sittings of the present conference. The
method of trial and error will afford an opportunity of working out the
grave inconveniences of the language difficulty. It is plain that, with
only three languages going, French, Japanese and English, proceedings
may easily become very tedious; there is no true debate, no possibility
of interpolating a question or a comment, no real and vivid discussion.
The real debating goes on in notes and counter notes, in prearranged
speeches, communications to the press representatives, and so forth.
The plenary sessions exist only to announce or confirm. They are
essentially _ceremonial_. In any polyglot gathering it seems inevitable
that this should be so. The framers of the League of Nations
constitution, with its Council and Assembly, seem to have been far too
much influenced by the analogy of single language governing bodies in
which spontaneous discussion is frequent and free. World conferences are
much more likely to do their work by translated correspondence and by
private sessions of preparatory committees, and to use the general
meeting only for announcement, indorsement and confirmation.
But the preparatory committees are only the first organs developed by
the conference. Certain other organs are also likely to arise out of it
as necessary to its complete function. Whatever agreements are arrived
at here about either the limitation of armaments or the permanent
regulation of the affairs of China and the Pacific, it is clear that
they will speedily become seed beds of troublesome misunderstanding and
divergent interpretation unless some sort of permanent body is created
in each case, with very wide powers intrusted to it by the treaty making
authorities of all the countries concerned to interpret, defend and
apply the provisions of the agreement. Such permanent commissions seem
to me to be dictated by the practical logic of the situation. Quite
apart from the later conferences that President Harding has promised, a
standing Naval Armament Commission and a Pacific Commission, with very
considerable powers to fix things, seems to be a necessary outcome of
the First Washington Conference.
But these two commissions will not cover all the ground involved. This
conference cannot leave European disarmament and the European situation
with its present ragged and raw ends. Nothing has been more remarkable,
nothing deserves closer study by the thoughtful Americans, than the
fluctuations of the British delegation at this conference with regard to
a Pacific settlement. I see that able writer upon Chinese affairs, Dr.
John Dewey, comments upon these changes of front and hints at some
profound disingenuousness on the part of the British. But the reasons
for these fluctuations lie on the surface of things. They are to be
found in the European situation.
Britain, secure in Europe, unthreatened on her Mediterranean routes, can
play the part of a strong supporter of American ideals in China. She
seems, indeed, willing and anxious to do so—in spite of her past. But
threatened in Europe, she can do nothing of the sort. She cannot extend
an arm to help shield China while a knife is held at her throat. So the
Pacific is entangled with the Mediterranean and the coasts of France,
and it becomes plain that a Peace Commission for Europe is a third
necessary consequence of this conference, if this conference is to count
as a success.
Suppose now that this present conference produces the first two
commissions I have sketched and gives way to a second conference, with
an ampler representation of the European powers, which will direct its
attention mainly to the reassurance and disarmament of France and
Germany and Britain, a second conference whose findings may be finally
embodied in this third commission I have suggested; and suppose,
further, that an International Debt and Currency Conference presently
gets to effective work, surely we may claim that the promised
Association of Nations is well on its way towards crystallization.
Simply and naturally, step by step, the President of the United States
will have become the official summoner of a rudimentary World
Parliament. By the time that stage is reached a series of important
questions of detailed organization will have arisen. Each executive
commission, as the successive conference brings these commissions into
being, will require in its several spheres agents, officials, a
secretariat, a home for its archives, a budget. These conferences cannot
go on meeting without the development of such a living and continuing
body of world administration through the commissions they must needs
create. Presumably that body of commissions will grow up mainly in and
about Washington. If it does, it will be the most amazing addition to
Congress conceivable; it will be the voluntary and gradual aggregation
of a sort of loose World Empire round the monument of George Washington.
But I do not see that all these commissions and Parliaments need sit in
Washington or that it is desirable that they should. A world commission
for land disarmament might function in Paris or Rome, a world commission
for finance in New York or London. And meanwhile, at Geneva or in
Vienna, to which place there is some project of removal, the League of
Nations, that first concrete realization of the American spirit, will be
going on in its own rather cramped, rather too strictly defined lines.
It also will have thrown out world organizations in connection with
health, with such world interests as the white slave traffic, and so
forth. It will be conducting European arbitrations and it will be
providing boundary commissions and the like. And somewhere there will
also be a sort of World Supreme Court getting to work upon judicial
international differences.
Now this, I submit, is the way that world unity is likely to arise out
of our dreams into reality, and this partial, dispersed, experimenting
way of growth is perhaps the only way in which it can come about. It is
not so splendid and impressive a vision as that of some World
Parliament, some perfected League, suddenly flashing into being and
assuming the leadership of the world. It will not be set up like a
pavilion but it will grow like a tree. But it is a reality and it comes.
The Association of Nations grows before our eyes.
And meanwhile there is an immense task before teachers and writers,
before parents and talkers and all who instruct and make and change
opinion, and that is the task of building up a new spirit in the hearts
of men and a new dream in their minds, the spirit of fellowship to all
men, the dream of a great world released forever from the obsession of
warfare and international struggle; a great world of steadily developing
unity in which all races and all kinds of men will be free to make their
distinctive contributions to the gathering achievements of the race.
XX
FRANCE AND ENGLAND—THE PLAIN FACTS OF THE CASE
If we are to have any fundamental improvements in the present relations
of nations, if we are to achieve that change of heart which is needed as
the fundamental thing for the establishment of a world peace, then we
must look the facts of international friction squarely in the face. It
is no good pretending there is no jar when there is a jar. This business
of the world peace effort, of which the Washington Conference is now the
centre, is not to smooth over international difficulties; it is to
expose, examine, diagnose and cure them.
Now here is this Franco-British clash, a plain quarrel and one very
disturbing to the American audience. The Americans generally don’t like
this quarrel. They are torn between a very strong traditional affection
for the French and a kind of liking for at least one or two congenial
things about the British. They would like to hear no more of it,
therefore. They just simply want peace. But there the quarrel is. Was it
an avoidable quarrel? Or was it inevitable? Perhaps it is something very
fundamental to the European situation. Perhaps if we analyze it and
probe right down to the final causes of it we may learn something worth
while for the aims and ends of the Washington Conference.
Now, let us get a firm hold upon one very important fact, indeed. This
clash is a clash between the present French Government and the present
British Government, but it is not a clash between all the French and all
the British. It is not an outbreak of national antipathy or any
horrible, irreconcilable thing of that sort. There are elements in
France strongly opposed to the French Government upon the issues raised
in this dispute. There is a section of the English press fantastically
on the “French” side and bitterly opposed even to the public criticism
of the public speeches of the French Premier in English. The party
politics of both France and Britain and, what is worse, those bitter
animosities that centre upon political personalities have got into this
dispute.
It may help to clear the issue if we disregard the attitude of the two
Governments in naming the sides to the dispute, and if instead of
speaking of the “French” or the “British” sides we speak of the
“Keep-Germany-down” and the “Give-Germany-a-chance” sides, or better, if
we call them the “Insisters,” who insist upon the uttermost farthing of
repayment and penitence from Germany, and the “Believers,” who don’t.
For it is upon Germany that the whole dispute turns.
There is a very powerful “Insister” party in Great Britain; there is a
growing “Believer” party in France. And while France has been steadily
“Insister” since the armistice, Britain and the British Government have
changed round from “Insister” to “Believer” in the last year or so. This
change has produced extraordinary strains and recriminations between
French and British political groups and individuals, as such changes of
front must always do. Such disputes often make far more noise than deep
and vital national misunderstandings, and it is well that the
intelligent observer, and particularly the American observer, should
distinguish the note of the disconcerted party man in a rage from the
note of genuine patriotic anger.
The beginnings of the present trouble are to be found in the Versailles
Conference. There the only “Relievers” seem to have been the American
representatives. Those were the days of the British Khaki election, when
“Hang the Kaiser” and “Make the Germans Pay!” were the slogans that
carried Mr. Lloyd George to power. For about four months the dispute
went on between moderation and overwhelming demands. America stood alone
for moderation. The British insisted upon the uttermost farthing, at
least as strenuously as the French, and it was Gen. Smuts, of all
people, who added the last straw to the intolerable burden of
indebtedness that was then piled upon vanquished and ruined Germany. And
both America and Britain were parties to the arrangements that give
France the power, the Shylock right, of carving into Germany and
disintegrating her more and more if Germany fail to keep up with the
impossible payments that were then fixed upon her.
The position of the French Government in this business is therefore a
perfectly legal and logical one. France can adhere, as M. Briand says
she will, to the Treaty of Versailles, she can flout and disregard any
disposition of the Washington Conference to qualify or revise that
treaty, and the British Government, in a hopelessly embarrassed and
illogical position, can appeal only to the hard logic of reality.
Britain is much more dependent upon her overseas trade than France, and
so the British have earlier realized the enormous injury that the social
and economic breakdown of Russia has done and the still more enormous
injury that the breaking up of Central European civilization will do.
“You are quite within your rights,” these newly converted “Relievers”
say to the obdurate “Insisters,” “but you will wreck all Europe.”
That idea that the possible destruction of civilization has not yet
entered so many minds in France as it has in Britain. Germany is nearer
to France than to Britain, and the fear of a renascent and vindictive
Germany is greater in France than in Britain. In the French mind, the
possibility of a German invasion for revenge twenty years hence still
overshadows the possibility of an economic breakdown in a year or two
years’ time. The British are nearer the breakdown and further from the
Germans. That is the reality of this Franco-British clash.
Upon that reality bad temper, party feeling, personal spites, irrational
prejudices, are building up a great mass of nasty, quarrelsome matter.
And the French Government and the French nationalist majority are
pressing on to naval and military preparations that distinctly threaten
Britain. It is no good pretending that they do not do so when they do.
The French submarines are aimed at Britain.
Empty civilities between France and Britain are of no value in a case of
this sort. Both countries are being worried by their infernal
politicians and both are in a state of financial distress and raw
nerves. It is not a time when deliberation and clear reasoning are easy.
But when we get down to the fundamentals of the case we find that the
antagonism comes out to these two propositions that are not necessarily
irreconcilable:
(I) _That Germany, for the good of the whole world, must not be
destroyed further, but, instead, assisted to keep upon her feet
(“Relievers”), and_
(II) _That Germany must nevermore become a danger to France
(“Insisters”)_.
And these two propositions are completely reconcilable, and this
particular clash can be entirely cured and ended by one thing and by one
thing only, a binding alliance, watched and sustained by a standing
commission of France, Germany, Britain, America, and possibly Italy and
Spain, to guarantee France and Germany from further invasions and
internal interference, if France follows the dictates of her better
nature and the advice of her wiser citizens, foregoes her impossible
claims and lets up on Germany from now on.
_And from no country can the initiative of such an alliance come more
effectively than from the United States of America, the universal
creditor, who can bring home to France, as no other power can, the
beauty and desirability of financial mercifulness._
I submit that these are the broad lines, the elements, the A B C of the
present situation and that there is nothing whatever between France and
Britain that is not entirely secondary and subordinate to this issue
between Insistence and Relief.
And moreover the issue between France in general and Britain in general
is an issue that is going on in parallel forms all over the world. Old
Japan _insists_ upon the Versailles treaty; young Japan would relieve
China,—how much is not yet clear. The American scene is a conflict
between those who insist fiercely upon the British debt and those who
would devise relieving conditions. It is nowhere a struggle between
peoples and races, it is everywhere a struggle between logic and reason,
between the stipulated thing, the traditional thing and the humane and
helpful thing, between old ways of thinking and new, between the letter
and the spirit. Old Shylock was the supreme insister, and since Portia
was the triumphant reliever, we may reasonably look to the woman voter
and the women’s organizations of Britain and America for a particular
impetus towards relief. And the sooner relief comes the better, for once
Shylock’s knife has cut down sufficiently to the living flesh, the cause
of the reliever and of civilization will have been lost forever.
XXI
A REMINDER ABOUT WAR
Washington, December 5.
An examination of the situation that has arisen in Europe between
France, England and Germany brings us out to exactly the same conclusion
as an examination of the Pacific situation. There is no other
alternative than this: Either to fight it out and establish the definite
ascendancy of some one power or to form an alliance based on an explicit
settlement, an alliance, indeed, sustaining a common executive
commission to watch and maintain the observance of that settlement.
There is no way out of war but an organized peace. Washington
illuminates that point. We must be prepared to see an Association of
Nations in conference growing into an organic system of world controls
for world affairs and the keeping of the world’s peace, or we must be
prepared for—a continuation of war. So it is worth considering what that
continuation of war will be like. If you will not organize peace through
some such association, then organize for war, for certainly war will
come again to you, or to your children.
And for reasons set out in my earlier papers, reasons amply confirmed by
the experiences of the Washington gathering, a mere limitation of
armaments can be little more than a strategic truce. It may indeed even
cut out expensive items and so cheapen and facilitate war.
Let me note here in passing that the case for some Association of
Nations to discuss and control the common interests of mankind rests on
a wider basis than the mere prevention of war; the economic and social
divisions and discords of mankind provide, perhaps, in the long run, a
stronger and more conclusive argument for human unity than the mere war
evil, but in this paper I will narrow the issue down to war, simply, and
ask the reader to consider the probable nature of war in the future if
the development of warfare is not checked by deliberate human effort.
And I will not deal with the ill-equipped cut-throat war that has been
going on, and, thanks to the divisions and rivalries of France and
Britain, is likely still to go on in Eastern Europe for some time to
come; the wars of the little, self-determined nations that the Treaty of
Versailles set loose upon each other; the raids of Poland into Ukrainia,
and of Roumania into Hungary; and of Serbia into Albania; the
old-fashioned game enlivened by rape and robbery that was brought to its
highest perfection long ago in the Thirty Years’ War. These are not so
much wars as spasms of energy, phases of accelerated destruction, in the
rotting body of East European civilization.