England, or if America and Japan start in for a good, long, mutually
destructive struggle. You may say that war between France and England is
unthinkable, but so far from that being the case, certain worthy souls
in France have been thinking about it hard. Hard but not intelligently.
They do not understand the moral impossibility of Britain fighting
America, they have never heard of Canada, they have never examined the
text of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, and so they dream of a wonderful
time when America will be fighting England and Japan, and when France,
with magnificent gestures and with submarines and Senegalese at last
gloriously justified, will “come to her aid.” So France will divide and
rule and clamber to dizzy destinies. Blushing and embarrassed American
statesmen have already had to listen, I guess, to some insidious
whispers. Even among our distresses there is something amusing in the
thought of this hot breath of Old World diplomacy on the fresh American
cheek. I do not say that these are the thoughts and acts of France, or
of any great section of the French people, but they are certainly the
thoughts and proceedings of a noisy Nationalist minority in France which
is at present in a position of dangerous ascendancy there.
Still, apart from the fact that the British will always refuse to fight
America, there does seem to be no real reason why, in the absence of a
developing peace alliance to prevent it, either of the other two matches
I have cited should not be played. In the long run, you cannot avoid
fighting if you avoid comprehensive alliances and standing arrangements
for the settlement of differences with the people you may otherwise
fight.
So let us try and imagine a war between a pair of these four powers,
five or ten years ahead. They have avoided any entangling alliances, or
agreements, or settlements, kept their freedom of action and are
thoroughly—_prepared_.
Let us not fall into the trap of supposing that these wars will follow
the lines of the Great War of 1914–18 and that we shall have a rapid
line-up of great entrenched armies, with massed parks of artillery
behind them, tank attacks and all the rest of it. That sort of war is
already out of fashion, and the fact that these wars that we are
considering will be overseas wars puts any possibility of such a dead
lock of land armies out of the case. The combatants will have to set
about getting at each other in quite other fashions.
Let us recall the maxim that the object of all fighting is to produce a
state of mind in the adversary, a state of mind conducive to a
discontinuance of the struggle and to submission and acquiescence to the
will of the victor. Old-time wars aimed simply at the small antagonist
army and at the antagonist Government, but in these democratic days the
will for peace or war has descended among the people and diffused itself
among them, and it is the state of mind of the whole enemy population
that has become the objective in war. The old idea of an invading army
marching on a capital, gives place, therefore, to a new conception of an
attack through propaganda, through operations designed to produce acute
economic distress, and through the air, upon the enemy population.
I will take the latter branch first. Few people have any clear ideas at
present of the possibilities of air warfare. The closing years of the
Great War gave the world only a very slight experience of what aerial
offensives can be. Always, air operations were subsidiary to the vast
surface engagements of the European belligerents; they were scouting,
irritating, raiding operations; there were neither the funds nor the
energy available to work them out thoroughly. In these possible overseas
wars we are considering, the land armies and the big guns will not be
the main factors and the air and sea forces will. The powers we have
considered will therefore push their air equipment on a quite different
scale; they will be bound to deliver their chief blows with it; we may
certainly reckon on the biggest long-range airplanes possible, on the
largest bombs and the deadliest contents for them. We may certainly
reckon that, within three or four hours of a declaration of war between
France and England, huge bombs of high explosive, or poison gas, or
incendiary stuff, will have got through the always ineffectual barrage
and be livening up the streets of Paris and London. Because it is the
peculiarity of air warfare that there are no _fronts_ and no effectual
parries. You bomb the other fellow almost anywhere, and similarly he
bombs you.
Many people seem to think that America and Japan are too far from each
other for this sort of thing, but I believe there is nothing
insurmountable in these distances for an air offensive. It will be a
question of days instead of hours, that is all, before the babies of
Tokio or San Francisco get their whiffs of the last thing in gas. The
job will be a little more elaborate; it will involve getting the air
material to a convenient distance from the desired objective by means of
a submersible cruiser; that is all the difference.
All the fleets in the world could hot prevent a properly prepared Japan
from pouncing upon some unprotected point of the California or Mexican
coast, setting up a temporary air base there, and getting to work over a
radius of a thousand miles. She might even keep an air base at sea. And
it would be equally easy for America to do likewise to Japan. The
citizen of Los Angeles, as he blew to pieces, or coughed up his lungs
and choked to death, or was crushed under the falling, burning
buildings, could at least console himself by the thought that America
was so thoroughly _prepared_ that his fellow man in Tokio was certainly
getting it worse, and that he blew to pieces on the soundest American
lines unentangled by any alliances with decadent Old World powers. And
an air war between America and Japan need not be confined to the Pacific
Slope. I do not see anything to prevent Japan, if she wanted to do so,
with the aid of a venial neutral or so, getting around into the Atlantic
to New York and testing the stability of the great buildings downtown
with a few five-ton bombs. The submarine would certainly be able to
prevent any armies landing on either side of the Pacific to stop the
preparation and launching of such expeditions.
I do not know how American populations would stand repeated bombing. In
the late war there was not a single intrusion of air warfare into
American home life. The hum of the Gotha and the long crescendo of the
barrage as the thing gets near were not in the list of familiar American
war sounds. Some of the European populations subjected to that kind of
thing got very badly “rattled.” And yet, as I have noted, the whole
force of the combatants was not in the air operations in Europe. One
result in nearly every country was an outbreak of spy mania; everybody
with a foreign name or a foreign look in England, for example, was
suspected of “signalling.” There was much mental trouble; London
possesses now a considerable number of air raid lunatics and air raid
defective children, and these are only the extreme instances of a
widespread overstrain. As the war went on, air stress interwoven with
the acute stresses produced in public life by the development of
propaganda. Public life in France, Germany and England got more and more
crazy about propaganda; there was a fear of insidious whispering
mischief afoot, more like the fear of witchcraft than anything else;
until at last it became dangerous and ineffective to make any utterance
at all except the most ferocious threats and accusations against the
enemy. And a kind of paralysis of suspicion even affected the adoption
of inventions. All this mental and moral confusion and deterioration is
bound to happen in any highly organized community that goes into a well
prepared war again. The only difference will be that it will all be
larger, and intenser, and bitterer, and worse. And I will not even
attempt to elaborate the consequences of the economic attack by
submarines, upon shipping, and by raids of airplane fleets, assisted
possibly by spies and traitors, upon the bridges, factories, depots,
grain stores, ports and so forth, of the combatant countries.
If such things are not practicable across the Pacific now they will be
practicable in ten years’ time.
But my subject at Washington is peace, and not war. I think it was
Nevinson’s recent account of the new things in poison gas that set my
imagination wandering into these possibilities of the Great Alternative
to entangling treaties and difficult settlements. I will return to
certain neglected problems of the Peace Conference in my next article.
XXII
SOME STIFLED VOICES
Washington, December 6.
I do not think my outline sketch of the Washington Conference will be
complete if I do not give an account of certain figures and groups in
this simmering Washington gathering who have no official standing
whatever and who are here in the unpopular role of qualifications and
complications of the simpler conception of the Washington issues. They
are not conspicuous absentees as are Germany and Russia. They come upon
the scene but they come rather like that young woman with the baby who
stands reproachfully at the church door watching the wedding in the
melodramatic picture. They are full of reproaches—and intimations of
troubles yet in store.
The other evening, for example, I found myself dining with a comfortably
housed Corean delegation and listening to the tale of a nation
overwhelmed.
Corea is as much of a nation as—Ireland. She had so recent an
independence that she has treaties with the United States recognizing
and promising to respect her independence. Yet she is now gripped, held
down and treated as Posen was in the days of Prussian possession. She is
being “assimilated” by Japan. “What is to be done about us?” my hosts
asked.
One fellow guest thought nothing could be done because the Corean vote
in the United States is not strong enough to affect an election.
Amid the tumult of voices here one hears ever and again an appeal for
something to be done for Corea. Such appeals are addressed chiefly to
American public opinion, but it is also felt to be worth while to let
Britain know, at least to the extent of letting me in on this occasion.
I was introduced to an editor of a Corean paper which had recently been
suppressed, and I listened to an account, an amazing account, of the
freedom of the press as it is understood in Corea under Japanese rule.
Yet it sounded very familiar to me. Indeed, I had listened to much the
same story of suppressions, rather worse suppressions, the night before.
Then I had been the host of two friends of mine, Mr. Houssain and Mr.
Sapre, who have had extensive experiences of suppression in India. They
are both here in much the same spirit as the Coreans.
Whenever I talk to Mr. Houssain we always get to a sort of polite
quarrel in which he treats me more and more like the Indian Government
in its defense, and I become more and more like the British ascendancy.
I adopt, almost inadvertently, as much as is adoptable of the manner and
tone of the late Lord Cromer and say: “Yes, yes. But are you _ripe_ for
self-government?” These gentlemen say frankly that the British rule in
India has displayed so much stupidity in such cases as the Amritsar
massacre, and the recent suffocation of the Moplah prisoners, and that
its complete suppression of any frank public discussion of Indian
affairs in India is so intolerable, that it is becoming unendurable.
Everybody is talking of insurrection in India now; nobody talked of it
three years ago. These have been three years of stupid “firmness.” Now
that that dinner party is past and gone, I can confess that I think Mr.
Houssain’s argument that under British rule India has no chance of
getting politically educated, because she is prevented from airing her
ideas, and that if her discontent is incoherent and disorderly it is
because of the complete suppression, completer now than ever before, of
discussion, is a very strong argument indeed.
India and Britain cannot talk together about their common future if
India remains gagged and without ever a chance of learning to talk. If a
break comes in India it is likely to be a bad and hopeless one, because
of her lack of worked-out political conceptions, due to her long mental
restraint, while all the rest of the world from Corea to Peru has been
trying over political self-expression.
But it is interesting and perhaps not quite so pathetically hopeless as
it seems at the first glance to find these two men in this city, side by
side with the Coreans, trying to get “something done about it” at the
Washington assembly. And a day or so ago I had a call from another
unofficial delegate, a Syrian Moslem who wanted to talk over the
education of his people, also fretting beneath the wide surfaces of the
Treaty of Versailles, with the ambition to manage the affairs of Syria
for themselves.
And as another case of the stifled voice here are the representatives of
the Cantonese Chinese Government, who made a scene the other day when
the Peking representatives went into secret session with the Japanese.
There was an assembly of hostile Chinese shouting “Traitor!” and
things—apparently very disagreeable things—in Chinese. Here again there
is a clamor for attention that gets short drift from the official
conference.
And, lest these stifled outcries should fill the American reader with
self-righteousness, I will note in passing that the entrance to the
second plenary conference was besieged by an array of banners reminding
us that that evidently most gentle and worthy man, Mr. Debs, is still in
prison for saying his honest thought about conscription, and also that I
have received, I suppose, over twenty letters about an unfortunate young
Englishman, a minor poet named Mr. Charles Ashleigh, who seems to have
come into America looking like a person of advanced views, to have done
some publicity work for the I. W. W., and to have been caught in a gale
of indiscriminate suppression and given a sentence of ten years for
nothing at all. The offense of Mr. Debs and the alleged offense of Mr.
Ashleigh, I may note further, were a premature craving for universal
peace which might have weakened the will for war.
All these suppressions of opinion strike me as black sins against
civilization, which can only maintain itself and grow and flourish
through the free expression and discussion of ideas. The temptation to
ride off from the main business of the conference upon some Quixotic
championship of Corea or India or Mr. Ashleigh is therefore very
considerable. But when we consider that all these particular injustices
are incidents in that general disorder which permits the aggression of
nation upon nation and which blinds justice with cruel passion and
urgent necessities of war, these cases appear in a different light.
Corea and the suppressed and imprisoned Indian Liberals and Mr. Ashleigh
are like people hit casually in a great combat, and the immediate work
of the ordinary combatant is surely not to specialize upon these special
cases but to go on with the general fight for world peace which will
render the atmosphere that created these particular wrongs impossible.
Japan is attempting to crush and assimilate Corea because Japan wants to
be bigger and stronger, and she wants to be bigger and stronger because
of the fear of war and humiliation. Britain holds down India and is
reluctant to loose her hold on Ireland for the same cause; if she relax,
some one else may seize and use. America also crushes out the
anti-conscriptionist because otherwise he may embarrass the conduct of
the next war.
In the present conference the liberal forces of the world may be able to
establish a precedent that will at once reflect upon the position of
both Corea and India, and to open such a prospect of peace as will make
the release of Messrs. Debs and Ashleigh inevitable. But that can only
be if we stick to the main business of the conference and do not fuss
things up at present with too much focusing upon Corea or India or the
case of Mr. Debs.
The precedent that may be established through the conference is the
liberation of China, when China is militarily impotent and politically
disordered, not only from fresh foreign aggression but from existing
foreign domination. The establishment of such a precedent is a thing of
supreme importance to all men. If the conference does not get so far as
that—so far as to establish the principle that an Asiatic people has a
right to control its own destinies and to protection while it adjusts
these destinies, in spite of the fact that it cannot as an efficient
power defend that right—it will have made a very wide step indeed not
only toward world peace but toward a general liberation of Asiatic
peoples held in tutelage.
It is so important to mankind that that step should be made that I
grudge any diversion of energy to minor injustices, however glaring, or
any complication of the issue whatever. So far as the conference goes, I
am convinced that “Stick to the freedom of China” is the watchword for
all liberal thinkers. By the extent to which China is liberated and
secured the conference will have to be judged. Even the vast problem of
India cannot overshadow that issue.
XXIII
INDIA, THE BRITISH EMPIRE AND THE ASSOCIATION OF NATIONS
Washington, Dec. 7.
It is difficult to think of any subject more completely out of the
agenda of the Washington Conference than the future of India. But none
demands our attention more urgently, if we are to build up anything like
a working conception of an Association of Nations.
Some days ago Senator Johnson declared he had received assurances from
President Harding that no further steps toward a definite organization
of an Association of Nations were to be taken for the present; but these
assurances will not hinder the drift of thoughts and events toward such
a developing system of understandings as must at last, in fact if not in
name, constitute a World Association. Indeed, the less we try to fix
such a thing at present, and the more we think it out, the more probable
and safe is its coming.
Let the President go on, therefore, taking no steps directly toward his
Association but proceeding, as he must do very soon, with some sort of
international conference upon the economic disorders of the world, and
also with the creation of some arrangement, permanent understanding or
whatever other name may be given to that commission which is inevitable
if the peace of the Pacific is to be made secure. Let us who are dealers
in the flimsier preparatory stuff of ideas and public opinion get on
with our discussion of the wider stabilizing understanding that looms
behind.
I have already said that from every country world peace and universal
prosperity will demand a price. The price America will need to pay if
she is to impose her conception of a universal peace upon the world is a
great intellectual effort—an effort of sympathy, an abandonment of some
venerated traditions. And in addition she must nerve herself to what may
seem at first very great financial generosities. France must pay by
laying aside an ancient and cherished quarrel, her glorious and tragic
militarism and the last vestige of her imperial ambition. The thought of
predominance and the thought of revenge must be the German sacrifice.
And Britain also must pay in an altered attitude to those wide
“possessions” of hers inhabited by alien peoples that have hitherto
constituted the bulk of her empire.
The destiny of all the English speaking democracies that have risen now
from being British colonies to semi-independent states seems fairly
clear. They will go on to nationhood; their links to Great Britain,
continually less formal and legal and more and more strongly
sympathetic, will be supplemented by their attraction toward America,
due to affinity and a common character. All the mischief makers in the
world cannot, I think, prevent the Dutch-English of South Africa, the
English-French of Canada, the English-French of Australia, the
English-Scotch of New Zealand, the Americans, this new emancipated
Ireland and Britain, being drawn together at last by all their common
habits of thought and speech, and even by the mellowed memories of their
past conflicts, into a conscious brotherhood of independent but
co-operative nations.
The day has come for the Irish to recognize that the future is of more
value than the past. Even without any other states, this girdle of
English speaking states about the globe could be of a great predominant
association. Within this English speaking circle of peoples a whole
series of experiments in separation, independent action, readjustment,
co-operation and federation have been made in the last century and a
half, and are still going on, of the utmost significance in the problem
of human association.
No other series of communities have had such experiences. No other
communities have so much to give mankind in these matters. The German
coalescences have been marred by old methods of force, methods which
have usually failed in the English cases. Spain and Latin America are at
least half a century behind the English speaking world in the arts and
experience of political co-operation.
But when we turn to India we turn to something absolutely outside the
English speaking world girdle.
One of the many manifest faults of that most premature project the
League of Nations was the fiction that brought in India as a
self-governing nation, as if she were the same sort of thing as these
self-governing Western states. It was indeed a most amazing assumption.
India is not a nation, or anything like a nation. India is a confused
variety of states, languages and races, and so far from being
self-governing, her peoples are under an amount of political repression
which is now perhaps greater there than anywhere else in the world.
Politically she is a profound mystery. We do not know what the political
thoughts of these peoples are, nor indeed whether they have in the mass
any political concepts at all parallel to those of the Western
civilizations. The Indian representative at the Washington Conference,
Mr. Srinivastra Sastri, is obviously a British nominee; he is not so
much a representative as a specimen Indian gentleman. We do not know
what national forces there are behind him, or indeed if there is any
collective will behind him at all. But it would be hard to substitute
for him anything very much more representative.
What constituency is there, what Electoral College, to send any one?
India is not in fact so constituted as to send a real representative to
a conference or an Association of Nations at the present time. She is a
thing of a different kind, a different sort of human accumulation. She
belongs to a different order of creature from the English speaking and
European states and from Japan. She is as little fitted to deal on equal
terms with them as a jungle deer, let us say, is to join a conference of
the larger Cetacea in the North Polar seas.
India is far less able to play an effective and genuine part as a member
of an Association of Nations even than China. She has no real democratic
institutions and she may never develop them in forms familiar to
European and American minds. We American and English are too apt to
suppose that our own democratic methods, our voting and elections and
debates and press campaigns and parliamentary methods, which have grown
up through long ages to suit our peculiar idiosyncracies, are
necessarily adaptable to all the world. In India they may prove
altogether misfitting.
India, were she given freedom of self-government, under the stimulus of
modern appliances and modern thought, would probably induce an entirely
different series of institutions from those of Europe, institutions
perhaps equally conducive to freedom and development but different in
kind. And China also, with untrammelled initiatives, may invent methods
of freedom and co-operation at once dissimilar and parallel to Western
institutions.