the precedent of China to India. The discussions and perplexities of the
last two or three years which have culminated in the Washington
Conference have slowly worked out and made clear the possibility of a
new method in Asia. This is the method of concerted abstinence and
withdrawal, the idea of a binding agreement of all the nations
interested in China and tempted to make aggressions upon China to come
out of and to keep out of that country while it consolidated itself and
develops upon its own lines.
This new method, which has had its first trial at the Washington
Conference, is a complete reversal of the method of dealing with
politically confused or impotent countries and regions adopted at
Versailles. It is an altogether more civilized and more hopeful method.
Versailles and the League of Nations were ridden by the idea of
mandates. All over the world where disorder or weakness reigned a single
mandatory power was to go in, making vague promises of good behavior, to
rule and exploit that country. It was the thinnest, cheapest camouflage
for annexation; it was a hopeless attempt to continue the worst
territory-seizing traditions of the nineteenth century while seeming to
abandon them. It was Pecksniff imperialism. So we had the snatching of
Syria, of Mesopotamia, and so forth. But any soundly constituted League
or Association of Nations should render that sort of thing unnecessary
and inexcusable.
The reason lying at the base of the British occupation of India, of the
Japanese occupation of Corea, of the French in Indo-China, and so forth,
is a perfectly sound reason so long as there is no Association of
Nations, and it is an entirely worthless one when there is such an
association—it is that some other power may otherwise come into the
occupied and dominated country and use it for purposes of offense. The
case of the British in India, that they have kept an imperial peace for
all the peoples of that land, that they warded off the Afghan raiders
who devastated India in the early eighteenth century and afterward the
long arm of Russia, is a very good one indeed. The British have little
cause to be ashamed of their past in India and many things to be proud
of. But they have very good cause, indeed, for being ashamed of their
disregard of any Indian future. They have sat tight and turned peace
into paralysis. They have not educated enough or released enough. Always
the excuse for suppression has been that fear of the rival.
Well, the whole purpose of an Association of Nations is to eliminate
that fear of a rival and all that that fear entails in war
possibilities.
The Asiatic “empires” over alien peoples, these “possessions” of other
people’s lands and lives, have played their part in the world’s
development. They have become tyrannies and exasperations and tawdry
grounds for rivalry. A real Association of Nations can have no place for
“possessions,” “mandates” or “subject peoples” within its scheme.
XXIV
THE OTHER END OF PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE—THE SIEVE FOR GOOD INTENTIONS
Washington, Dec. 9.
I went to hear the President address Congress on its reassembling on
Tuesday. He spoke to a joint session of the Senate and House of
Representatives held, as is customary, in the chamber of Representatives
because it is the larger of the two chambers.
Hitherto my observations have centred upon the Continental Building and
the Pan-American Building, up by the White House, and they have
concerned the good intentions and great projects that glow and expand
like great iridescent bubbles about the conference that is going on in
this region.
But the conference, whatever freedom it has to think and discuss, has no
power to act. Until the Senate by a two-thirds majority has indorsed the
recommendations of the President, the United States cannot be committed
to any engagement with the outside world. This is a fact that needs to
be written in large letters as a perpetual reminder in the editorial
rooms and diplomatic offices of all those Europeans who write about or
deal with the foreign relations of the United States. For the
Constitution of the United States is as carelessly read over there as
the Anglo-Japanese alliance has been read here, and it is as dangerously
misconceived. Through that first disastrous year of the peace Europe
imagined that the President was the owner rather than the leader of the
United States.
It was with great interest and curiosity, therefore, that I went down to
this assembly at the Capitol to see the President dealing with his
Legislature. Here was the place not of suggestions but of decisions.
What goes through here is accomplished and done—subject only to one
thing, the recognition by the Supreme Court, if it is challenged, that
the thing is constitutional.
I went down with—what shall I say?—some prejudiced expectations. The
Americans resemble the English very closely in one particular—they abuse
their own institutions continually. Prohibition and the police—but these
are outside my scope! I have heard scarcely a good word for Congress
since I landed here, and the Senate, by the unanimous testimony of the
conversationalists of the United States, combines the ignoble with the
diabolical in a peculiarly revolting mixture. Even individual Senators
have admitted as much—with a sinister pride.
It is exactly how we talk about Parliament in London—though with more
justice. But this sort of talk soaks into the innocent from abroad, and,
though one takes none of it seriously, the whole of it produces an
effect. I had the feeling that I was going to see a gathering of
wreckers, a barrier, perhaps an insurmountable barrier, in the way to
the realization of any dream of America taking her place as the leading
power in the world, as the first embodiment of the New Thing in
international affairs.
It puts all this sort of feeling right to see these two bodies in their
proper home and to talk to these creatures of legend, the
Representatives and the Senators. One perceives they are not a malignant
sub-species of mankind; one discovers a concourse of men very interested
about and unexpectedly open-minded upon foreign policy. They are
critical but not hostile to the new projects and ideas. One realizes
that Congress is not a blank barrier but a sieve, and probably a very
necessary sieve, for the new international impulse in America.
The ceremonial of the gathering was simple and with the dignity of
simplicity. The big galleries for visitors, which always impress the
British observer by their size, were full of visitors after their kind,
ladies predominating, and particularly full was the press gallery, which
overhangs the Speaker and the Presidential chair. Some faint vestige of
a sound religious upbringing had reminded me that the first are
sometimes last and the last first; I had fallen into the tail of the
procession of my fellow newspaper men from their special room to the
House of Representatives, and so I found myself with the overflow of the
journalists, not with everything under my chin but very conveniently
seated on the floor of the House behind the Representatives, and feeling
much more like a Congressman than I could otherwise have done.
Away to the right were the members of the Cabinet—the British visitor
always has to remind himself that they cannot be either Representatives
or Senators. Presently the ninety-odd Senators came in by the central
door, two by two, and were distributed upon the seats in front of their
hosts; the Representatives.
There was applause, and I saw Sir Auckland Geddes, with that large, bare
smile of his, and the rest of the British delegation entering from
behind the Chair, for the delegations had also been invited to come down
from the unrealities of the conference and had been assigned the front
row of seats. Other delegations followed and seated themselves. At last
came a hush and the clapping of hands, and the President entered and
went to his place, looking extremely like a headmaster coming in to
address the school assembly at the beginning of the term. He is more
like George Washington in appearance, I perceive, than any intervening
President.
He read his address in that effective voice of his which seems to get
everywhere without an effort. I listened attentively to every sentence
of it, although I knew that upstairs there would be a printed copy of it
for me as soon as the delivery was over. Yet, although I was listening
closely, I also found I was thinking a great deal about this most potent
gathering, for potent it is, which has been raised up now to a position
of quite cardinal importance in human affairs.
President Harding is on what are nowadays for a President exceptionally
good terms with Congress. He means to keep so. In his address he
reiterated his point that even the full constitutional powers of the
President are too great and that he has no intention to use them, much
less to strain them. Nevertheless, or even in consequence of that, he is
very manifestly the leader of his Legislature. The atmosphere was
non-contentious. He was not like a party leader speaking to his
supporters and the opposition. He was much more like America
soliloquizing. His address was a statement of intentions.
I think the President feels that officially he is not so much the elect
of America as the voice of America, and instead of wanting to make that
voice say characteristic and epoch-making things, he tries to get as
close as he can to the national thought and will. What President Harding
says today America will do tomorrow. One human and amusing thing he
did—he was careful to drag in that much-disputed word of his,
“normalcy,” which he has resolved, apparently, shall oust out
“normality” from current English.
And from the point of view of those who are concerned about the dark
troubles of the world outside America it was, I think, a very hopeful
address. It reinforced the impression I had already received of
President Harding as of a man feeling his way carefully but steadily
towards great ends. America’s growing recognition of her “inescapable
relationship to world finance and trade” came early and his little
lecture on the need to give and take in foreign trade was a lecture that
is being repeated in every main street in America.
He spoke of Russia and returned to that topic. “We do not forget the
tradition of Russian friendship” was a good sentence that some countries
in Europe may well mark. The growing belief in America of the
possibility of going into Russia through the agency of the American
Relief Administration and of getting to dealing with the revived
co-operative organizations of Russia is very notable. And though there
was no mention of the Association of Nations as such, there were
allusions to the “world hope centered upon this capital city” and to the
universal desire for permanent peace.
And while I listened I was also thinking of all these men immediately
before me, between four and five hundred men, including the ninety-six
Senators, with whom rested the power of decision upon the role America
will play in the world. I have met and talked now with a number of them,
and particularly with quite a fair sample of the Senatorial body. And I
think now that it is going to be a much better body for international
purposes than my reading about it before I came to Washington has led me
to suppose.
We hear too much in Europe of the rule of “jobs” and “interests” in
Washington. No doubt that sort of thing goes on here, as in every
Legislature, but it has to be borne in mind that it has very little
bearing upon the international situation. It is not a matter affecting
the world generally. I doubt if there is nearly as much business and
financial intrigue in the lobbies of Washington as in the lobbies of
Westminster; but, anyhow, what there is here is essentially a domestic
question. Both Representatives and Senators approach international
questions as comparatively free—if rather inexperienced—men.
Probably the only strong permanent force hitherto in international
affairs here has been the anti-British vote, based on the Irish hate of
Britain. If the Irish settlement weakens or abolishes that, Congress
will deal with the world’s affairs without any perceptible bias at all.
The average Senator is a prosperous, intelligent, American-thinking man,
elected to the Senate upon political grounds that have no bearing
whatever upon international affairs. He is an amateur in matters
international.
A bitter political issue at home may make him do any old thing with
international affairs, and that was the situation during the last years
of President Wilson. Poor, war-battered Europe became a pawn in a
constitutional struggle. But the Harding regime is to be one of
co-operation with the Senate, and the dignity of the Senate is restored.
This very various assembly of vigorous-minded Americans, for that and
other reasons, is getting to grips now with international questions with
all the freshness and vigor of good amateurs, with a detached
disinterestedness, a growing sense of responsibility and the old
peace-enforcing traditions of America strong in it.
If only it does not delay things too long; I doubt if those who desire
to see the peace of the world organized and secure are likely to have
any quarrel with the Senate of the United States. The worst evil I fear
from the American Senate, now that I have seen something of it
individually and collectively, is the impartial leisureliness of the
detached in its dealings with international affairs.
The President finished his discourse and the stir of dispersal began. I
had assisted at America reviewing her position in the world. I thought
the occasion simple and fine and dignified. I found myself leaving the
Capitol in a mood of quite unanticipated respect.
XXV
AFRICA AND THE ASSOCIATION OF NATIONS
Washington, Dec. 9.
In a previous paper I wrote of certain “stifled voices” at Washington.
There is yet another stifled voice here that I have heard, and to speak
of it opens up another great group of questions that stand in the way to
any effectual organization of world peace through an Association of
Nations. Until we get some provisional decision about this set of issues
the Association of Nations remains a project in the air.
This stifled voice of which I am now writing is the voice of the colored
people. As a novelist—a novelist in my spare time—and as a man very
curious by nature, about human reactions, the peculiar situations
created by “color” in America have always appealed to me. I do not
understand why American fiction does not treat of them more frequently.
It is the educated, highly intelligent colored people who get my
interest and sympathy. I cannot get up any race feeling about them.
I am particularly proud to have known Booker T. Washington and to know
Mr. Dubois, and this time, in spite of a great pressure of engagements,
I was able to spend two hours last Sunday listening to the proceedings
of the Washington Correspondence Club, an organization which battles by
letter and interview and appeal against the harsh exclusions from
theatres, schools, meetings, restaurants, libraries and the like, that
prevail here.
I will not discuss here the rights and wrongs of a bar that cuts off
most of the intellectual necessities and conveniences of life from many
people who would pass as refined and cultivated whites in any European
country. I mention this gathering merely to note a very interesting
topic upon which I was called to account thereat.
Once or twice in these papers—I do not know if the reader has noted it—I
have mentioned the French training of Senegalese troops and the
objection felt by other European peoples to their extensive employment
in Europe. I was asked at the Correspondence Club whether the objections
I had made to this were not “fostering race prejudice,” and some
interesting exchanges followed.
I was inclined to argue that the importation of African negroes into
Europe for military purposes was as objectionable as their importation
to America for economic services, but some of my hosts, some of the
younger men, did not see it in that light. They are warmed toward the
French by the notable absence of racial exclusiveness in France, and
they see the ideals of that epoch-making book, “La France Negre,” from
an entirely different angle. Why not a black France as big or bigger
than white France and a new people who have learned military discipline,
military service and united action from Europe?
“Why not an African Napoleon presently?” said the young man, a little
wanting, I thought, in that abject meekness which is the American ideal
of colored behavior.
He was imagining, I suppose, something happening in Africa rather after
the fashion of the emancipation of Hayti and of great African armies
pushing their former rulers back to the sea. But Col. Taylor has
recently suggested another possibility, namely, that of France finding
herself in the grip of a black Pretorian Guard. It is a just,
conceivable fancy—a Pretorian Guard, French-speaking and
ultra-patriotic, keeping French Socialists and pacifists and Bolsheviks
in their proper place.
I do not believe very much in either of these possibilities nor even in
the third possibility of European powers fighting each other with black
armies in Africa, but I do perceive that dreams of a world peace will
remain very insubstantial dreams, indeed, until we can work out a scheme
or at least general principles of action for the treatment of Africa
between the Sahara and the Zambesi River, a scheme that will give some
sort of a quietus to the jealousies and hostilities evoked by the
economic and political exploitations of annexed and mandatory
territories upon nationalist and competitive lines in this region of the
earth.
For it seems to be the fact that tropical and sub-tropical Africa has
another function in the world than to be the home of the great family of
negro peoples. Africa is economically necessary to European civilization
as the chief source of vegetable oils and fats and various other
products of no great value to the native population. European
civilization can scarcely get along without these natural resources of
Africa.
Now here we are up against a problem entirely different from the problem
that arises in the case of India, Indo-China and China, which is the
problem of a politically powerless but essentially civilized population
which can be trusted to modernize itself and come into line with the
existing efficient powers if only it is protected from oppressive and
disintegrating forces while it adjusts itself.
Africa is quite incapable of anything of the sort. Negro Africa is
mainly still in a state of tribal barbarism; in the latter half of the
nineteenth century its peoples were in a condition of deepening disorder
and misery due to the spread of European diseases and to the raiding of
the Arab and native adventurers who had obtained possession of modern
firearms. The small village communities of tropical Africa were quite
unable to stand up against the brigand enterprises of mere bands of
ruffians armed with rifles.
The scramble for Africa on the part of the European great powers toward
the close of the nineteenth century—a scramble largely dictated by
economic appetites—did a little to mitigate the miseries and destruction
in progress by establishing a sort of order through large areas of
Africa, a sort of order that in some regions was scarcely less cruel
than the disorders it replaced. But if continuing access to the
resources of Africa is to be maintained, and if a return to the Arab
raider and general chaos and massacres is to be avoided, it is clear
that in some form the control of the central parts of Africa by the
modern civilized world must continue.
But we must be clear upon one point. If that control is to be
maintained, as at present it is maintained by various European powers
acting independently of one another and competing against one another,
in the not very remote future Central Africa is bound to become a cause
of war. Central Africa was one of the great prizes before the German
imagination in 1914, and it is now held in a state of unstable
equilibrium by the chief European victors in the Great War.
As they recuperate the African danger will increase. Africa, next after
Eastern Europe and the Near East, is likely to become in the course of a
dozen years or so the chief danger region of the world.
It behooves all those who are dreaming of an organized world peace
through an Association of Nations to keep this African rock ahead in
mind and to think out the possible method of linking this great region
with the rest of the world in a universal peace scheme.
I submit that it is not premature for those who are concerned with the
future of our race to consider the necessity of three chief things:
(1) The complete abandonment and prohibition now of the enlistment and
military use of the African native population.
(2) The application of the principle of the “open door” and equal
trading opportunities for all comers in the regions between the Sahara
and the Zambesi.
(3) A more organized care of the native African population by a
tightening up of the existing restrictions upon the arms and drink
trades and the development of some sort of elementary education
throughout Africa that will give these very various and largely still
untried peoples a chance of showing what latent abilities they have for
self-government and participation in the general human common weal.
For my own part, it seems to me that any real “League of Nations,” any
effective “Association of Nations,” must necessarily supersede the
existing “empires” and imperial systems and take over their alien
“possessions” and that one commission embodying the collective will of
all the efficient civilized nations of the world is the only practicable
form of security for all those parts of Africa incapable or not yet
capable of self-government.
XXVI
THE FOURTH PLENARY SESSION
Washington, Dec. 12.
The reader will have seen verbatim reports of the speeches at the fourth
plenary session of the Washington Conference and he will know already
what decisions were handed out to us from the more or less secret
session that prepared them for us.
There has been a good deal of discussion here about the secret sessions
and a certain indignation at their secrecy that I do not share. It is a
matter of decency rather than concealment that men speaking various
languages, representing complicated interests and feeling their way
toward understandings, should not be exposed to embarrassing observation
and comment until they have properly hammered out what they have to say.
It is far better to digest conclusions under cover and to present the
agreed-upon conclusion. This is no offense against democracy, no
conspiracy against publicity. The mischief of secrecy lies in secret
treaties and secret understandings and not in protected interchanges.
There is no sound objection to secret bargaining in committee provided
that finally the public is informed of the agreement arrived at and _of
all the considerations in the bargain_.
The conclusions announced are important enough in themselves; but to all
who care for the peace of the world they are far more important in the
vista of possibilities they open up. Certain notable precedents are
established. The four Root resolutions do put very clearly those ideals
of withdrawal and abstinence which must become the universal rule of
conduct between efficient and politically confused or enfeebled states
if the peace of the world is to be preserved. That is the new way in
international politics. _It is the beginning of the end of all Asiatic
imperialisms._
And, following upon its assent to those resolutions, the conference
voted upon certain special applications of them. The abolitions of the
extra territorial grievance, the right of China as a neutral power to
escape the fate of Belgium and the right of China to be informed on the
article of any treaty affecting her were established as far as a
resolution of the conference could establish them.