Senator Lodge just as previous ones had “featured” Secretary Hughes, Mr.
Balfour and M. Briand. Fifteen years ago I came to Washington and
Senator Lodge showed me a collection of prehistoric objects from Central
America and talked very delightfully about them. Fifteen years have
changed Washington very greatly but they have not changed Senator Lodge.
He seems perhaps just a little slenderer and neater than before, but
that may be a change in my own standards, and it was entirely in
character with my former impressions of him that in putting the
four-power treaty before the conference he should indulge himself and
his hearers in a vision of the realities of the Pacific, the
multitudinous interests of its innumerable islands, its infinite variety
of races, customs, climates and atmospheres.
It was a most curious and attractive phase of the always-interesting
conference to have this gray-headed, cultivated gentleman breaking
through all the abstract jargon of diplomacy and militarism, all the
talk of powers, radii of action, fortifications, spheres of influence,
and so forth, in his attempt to make us realize the physical loveliness
and intellectual charm of this enormous area of the world’s surface that
the four-power treaty may perhaps save now and forevermore from the fear
and horrors of war.
The proposed four-power treaty which thus starts upon its uncertain but
hopeful journey toward ratification by the Senates, Legislatures and
Governments of the world is essentially a departure from the normal
tradition of the treaties of the nineteenth century. It is the first
attempt to realize—what shall I call it?—the American way or the new way
in international affairs. Its distinctive feature is the participation
of two possible antagonists, America and Japan. Instead of a war they
make a treaty and call in Britain and France to assist. It is a treaty
for peace and not against an antagonist.
I think that the difference between “treaties for” and “treaties
against” is one that needs to be stressed. The Anglo-Japanese treaty was
a “treaty against,” a treaty against first Russia, then Germany and then
against some vaguely conceived assailant. It is a great thing to have
Japan and England cordially immolating that treaty now that this
four-power treaty of the new spirit may be born.
After Senator Lodge came M. Viviani with a very fine, if guarded,
speech. M. Viviani is a great speaker but he is not merely eloquent, and
I find people here saying little about his wonderful voice or his
overtones and undertones or his romantic charm but much about the subtle
things he said. In a gathering that is tense with attention one is apt,
perhaps, to transfer one’s own thoughts and expectations to the
gathering as a whole, but it seems to me that when M. Viviani rose to
welcome this great beginning on the Pacific, we were all thinking: “And
how much further and to what other regions of the world are you prepared
to extend this spirit and method of this Pacific bond? There is another
rather threadbare ‘treaty against’ or at least an ‘understanding
against,’ known as the Anglo-French entente. Is the time due yet for the
merger of that also in another and greater bond of peace?”
I do not know how far the question that was in his mind was in the mind
of the meeting, but I think that M. Viviani made it very plain that it
was in the background of his own mind. His speech was designed to bring
the simplicity, the easiness of the Pacific problem into sharp contrast
with the tortured complexity of the Atlantic—the Afro-European problem.
He spoke of the freedom of the Pacific from long established hate
traditions. He reminded us of the twenty centuries of war and trampled
frontiers and outrages and counter-outrages that had left Europe and
North Africa scarred and festering.
He conjured up no bogies; he had nothing to say about those 7,000,000
phantom Germans ready to extract their hidden rifles from 7,000,000
mattresses and haylofts and rush upon France; but he reminded the
conference, gravely and wisely, of the relative complexity of the
European problem, of the new untried nationalities that had been
liberated, of the vast heritage of tradition and suspicion that had to
be overcome. He addressed not only the conference but the impatient
liberal aspirations of the world. “I ask you for forbearance,” he said,
and repeated that—“I ask for forbearance.”
Now that was a great speech, and M. Viviani is manifestly the sort of
Frenchman with whom the new spirit can deal. “Forbearance” might well
serve now as the watchword of Europe. And I wish that Mr. Balfour could
have shown a fuller recognition of what M. Viviani had said. Mr. Balfour
had been so fine on several occasions at this conference that I felt it
is a little ungracious to him to confess, as I must do, that twice in
this day of the fourth plenary session, once in the conference and also
in the evening when he replied for the Allies at the Gridiron Club, he
seemed to be missing an opportunity—the opportunity of holding out a
hand of friendship to liberal France.
For the reactionary France, for the France of submarines and Senegalese
and inflated army and navy estimates, neither Britain nor America nor
any other part of the world has any use, and the more often we say that
and the more distinctly we say it the better for every one; but toward a
France that can teach and practice forbearance and come into great
associations for the common welfare of mankind we ought to hold out both
hands. Most of the bitterness that has been directed towards France of
late is not the bitterness of any natural hatred; it is the bitterness
of acute disappointment that France, the generous leader of freedom upon
both the American and European Continents, no longer leads, seems to
care no longer for either freedom or generosity. And twice I have seen
opportunities lost for an appropriate gesture of reconciliation.
Sooner or later France and England have to say to each other: “We have
been sore and sick and exasperated and suspicious and narrow. Let us
take a lesson from this American plan and set about discussing an
Atlantic treaty, an Afro-European treaty, worthy to put beside this
Pacific treaty.”
And since this has to be said, it was a pity that Mr. Balfour could not
take up M. Viviani’s half lead and begin to say it at the fourth plenary
session of the Washington Conference.
XXVII
ABOUT THE WAR DEBTS
Washington, Dec. 13.
In the official proceedings of the Washington Conference the war debts
are never mentioned. It is an improper subject.
In the talks and discussions and the journalistic writings round and
about the Washington Conference the war debts are perpetually debated.
The nature of the discussion is so curious and interesting, it throws so
strong a light upon the difficulties that impede our path to any
settlement of the world’s affairs upon the sound democratic basis of a
world-wide will, that some brief analysis of it is necessary if this
outline of the peace situation is to be complete.
In private talk almost universally, in the weekly and monthly
publications that are here called “highbrow,” I find a very general
agreement that the bulk of these war debts and war preparation debts as
between Russia and France, and between the European allies and Britain,
and between Britain and America, and the bulk of the indemnity and
reparation debt of Germany to the Allies, cannot be paid and ought not
to be paid, and that the sooner that this legend of indebtedness is
swept out of men’s imaginations the sooner we shall get on to the work
of world reconstruction.
Only one of these debts is even remotely payable and that is the British
debt to America. But with regard to that debt the situation rises to a
high level of absurdity. The British authorities—it is an open
secret—have been offering to begin the liquidation of their debt now.
They cannot pay in gold, because most of the gold in the world is
already sleeping uselessly in American vaults; but they offer what gold
they have and, in addition, they are willing to get their factories to
work and supply manufactured goods to the American creditor—clothes,
boots, automobiles, ships, agricultural and other machinery, crockery,
and so on, and so on.
Nothing could be fairer. Britain is full of unemployed—they must be fed
anyhow—and if America insists upon her industries being buried under a
pyramid of gold and manufactured articles, the British bankers and
manufacturers believe they can, with an effort, manage the job and pull
through. The exchange may take some strange flights and dives in the
process, the British system may collapse even as the German system seems
to be collapsing, but it is a strained situation anyhow. The British
think the effort worth trying and the risk worth taking. And so behind
the scenes it is Washington rather than London that wants at present to
hold up the payment of the British debt.
Only one other of the outstanding debts looks at all payable at the
present time, and that is so much of the reparation debts of Germany to
France as can be paid in kind, in building material and manufactured
goods not produced in France. The idea of any other European debt
payments in full is just nonsense. The gold is not there and the stuff
is not there, and there is no ability to produce anything like
sufficient stuff under present conditions.
Now the interesting thing about the situation here is that the
understanding people in America do not seem to be explaining this very
simple situation as frankly as they might do to the mass of American
people or at least that this explanation has not got through to the
American people. There is a widespread conviction, which is sedulously
sustained by the less intelligent or less scrupulous organs of the
American press, that the wicked old European countries, and particularly
Britain, that arch deceiver, are trying very meanly and cunningly to
evade the payment of a righteous obligation.
Every effort to present the financial and economic disorder of the world
as a world task in which the prosperous and fortunate American people
may reasonably play a leading, intelligent and helpful part is
misrepresented in this fashion. There is a vast vague clamor for
repayment—aimed at Britain. Dealers in the old Irish hate business and
the German hate business, now a little out of their original stock of
grievances, join with shrill but syndicated Hindus in warning the simple
citizen against counsels of financial sanity as though they were
insidious propaganda. Until at last an Englishman is sorely tempted to
an exasperated, “Well, _take_ your debt!”—which does no justice to the
patience and intelligence of either England or America.
Let us be clear upon one point. So far as the British debt goes, the
Americans can have it if they prefer to take that line. The British here
in Washington and the British writers here are here because the
Americans invited them to come to discuss the world situation and the
possibilities of world peace. They are not here to beg. The time is not
likely to arrive when one English speaking community will beg from
another. It certainly has not arrived now.
However, I am an obstinate believer in the common sense and good will of
the American people, and I do not believe that a press campaign,
designed to make a great people behave after the fashion of some
hysterical back-street Oriental usurer who has struck a bad debt, is
likely to do anything but recoil severely on the heads of those who have
set it going. And I am not a believer in that sort of “tact” which would
avoid reminding the American public of the circumstances under which
these war debts were incurred.
The Russian debt to France was spent largely upon war and war
preparations while Russia was the ally and helper of France; the war
debts of the European Allies to Britain and America and the British debt
to America were spent upon war material. All these debts are for efforts
spent upon a common cause. Each country spent according to its
resources, as good allies should. Russia gave life and blood—and blood.
She gave 4,000,000 men; she smashed up her own social fabric. France and
Britain gave the lives of men beyond the million mark. Also they gave
much material, an enormous industrial effort. So also did Italy,
according to her power.
The British developed a vast production of munitions as the war went on,
using great supplies of material from America, for which they paid high
prices and on which great profits were made in America. At last America
joined the war, with her enormous reserves and strength, and gave not
only great stores of material but the lives of between 50,000 and 75,000
men. And so, altogether, America and the Allied Powers, giving their
lives and substance as they could, saved civilization from imperialism.
The British do not grudge the contribution they have made and all that
they have still to contribute for their share in that colossal victory,
but some of us English here are growing a little irritated at being
dunned as defaulters when we are not going to default, and at having our
attempts to work in co-operation with the Americans for the
rehabilitation of a strained and collapsing civilization explained as
the interested approaches of a cadging poor relation.
I wish that Americans would think of the Europeans more frequently as
people like themselves. The boys who came to Europe saw the European
armies in ranks like their own, good stuff and kindred stuff. They were
their comrades in arms; they fought and died beside them. They saw
countries and a common life very like the American country life; they
discovered that the French and British and Italians were also “just
folk.”
But these American papers of the hostile sort write of France or Britain
as if they were wicked old spiders. They write of Britain as a monster
with a crown and an eyeglass and such like concomitants loathsome to all
sound democratic instincts. They write of the “designs” of France and
Italy and Britain as if these horrid monsters were all playing a
fearsome game with each other for the soul and body of America. It is
easy enough then to clamor for repayments of war debts. It is easy then
to excite people by a clamor for a war bonus for the veterans of the
Great War to be saddled upon the European debtor.
But let me remind the American soldier that the real European debtor,
the fellow on whom it will fall, the fellow who will have to toil and
pay and want, if you can realize that dream of pitiless exaction, is no
legendary monster France or Britain; it is that other fellow over there
you fought beside, it is the wounded man in blue or khaki you passed by
as you went into action, it is the man who smiled his courage at you as
you blundered against him in the din and confusion of battle.
If you listen to these stay-at-home patriots and these exotic advisers
of yours, it is he who will pay, he and his wife and his child; they
will all pay in toil and privation and worry and stunted lives. It is
they who will pay—but you will not receive. You too will pay in
disorganized business, in restricted production, in underemployment. You
will get nothing else out of it except whatever satisfaction you may
feel in having made those other fellows over there in Europe pay—and pay
bitterly.
XXVIII
THE FOUNDATION STONE AND THE BUILDING
Washington, Dec. 14.
Beginning with the fourth plenary session of the Washington Conference,
the registration of “results” in the Pacific, in disarmament, in China,
has begun. They are good results, assembled on a basis of broad
principles, that may sustain at last an organized permanent peace for
the whole world. If there is one thing to be noted more than another
about the work that has led up to this settlement it is the
adaptability, the intelligent and sympathetic understanding shown by
Japan in these transactions. The Japanese seem to be the most flexible
minded of peoples. They win my respect more and more.
In the days of imperialistic competition they stiffened to a
conscientious selfishness and a splendid fighting energy. Now that a new
spirit of discussion, compromise and the desire for brotherhood spreads
about the world, they catch the new note and they sound it with obvious
sincerity and good will. No people has been under such keen and
suspicious observation here as the Japanese. The idea of them as of a
people insanely patriotic, patriotically subtle and treacherous,
mysterious and mentally inaccessible has been largely dispelled. I
myself have tried that view over in my mind and dismissed it, and
multitudes of the commonplace men have gone through the same experience
here. Our Western world, I am convinced, can work with the Japanese and
understand and trust them.
It will be for other and abler pens to record the detailed working out
of the results of this great conference, this new experiment in human
reasonableness, as far as it affects Shantung and Yap and Hongkong and
Port Arthur and so forth. My time in Washington is drawing to an end,
and I will confine myself now rather to that broader and vaguer question
in which I am more interested—the question of what lies behind and
beyond this most successful and hopeful beginning in open international
co-operation.
Great and important as the conference is, the growth of a real and
understandable project for the steady, systematic development of an
effective international world peace, which has been going on in men’s
minds here and in the world generally in the last two months is a much
greater thing. It is a quite amazing mental growth; something very quiet
and simple and yet astonishing, like a clear crystallization out of a
turbid solution. Before the conference gathered, civilized people
throughout the world were, I think, quite confused about how the peace
of the world could ever be organized and rather hopeless about its being
done.
Now I think there is a widespread and spreading unanimity that there is
a way, a practicable way and a hopeful way, by successive conferences,
by widening peace agreements, by the establishment of permanent joint
commissions, by systematic education and the sedulous cultivation of
confidence, along which humanity may struggle and will struggle out of
its present miseries and dangers toward the dawn of a new life.
The next conferences that are indicated will gather in a mood of
hopefulness and experience that will be the most precious legacy of the
present conference. One that must follow very soon must deal with the
economic rehabilitation of Europe. Here, it seems to me, America,
Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Russia at least must meet. And soon.
In the Christmas mood, in the phase of relief that radiates from
Washington and Ireland now, we must not let our elation blind us to the
fact that, for all the light that breaks in upon us, we are not yet out
of the woods. Millions are starving today, great masses of men
degenerate physically and morally in unemployment, European
industrialism crawls and staggers still.
We have laid the foundations of a new era, but the building has scarcely
begun. And in addition to the world economic conference there is also
need of another conference to face the still more difficult task of
military disarmament and the re-examination of the factors of conflict
in the Afro-European area. Personally, I want to see America in that
conference also, because I do recognize that the freshness of mind, the
deliberate diplomatic inexperience of America, is a factor of priceless
value in these discussions. I would like to see that conference also
held in an American atmosphere and before an American audience—if only
for the sake of Europe. And if America can be interested in Kwangtung, I
don’t see why America should not also be interested in Silesia, or
Cilicia, or Senegal, or the Congo, which are all very much nearer.
The appetite for conferences, the belief in conferences, will grow with
what it feeds upon. One sees these gatherings, with their accessory
commissions, permanent secretariats and increasing world services,
becoming a customary and necessary peace control of the earth.
And the peace control, growing in this natural fashion, will consist
always and solely of the efficient and willing nations of the world.
There will be no forced conclusions and no premature admission of
incompetent and feeble peoples. The pedantry that would give every
sovereign power, however little or rotten, a vote, a nice, saleable
vote, in the management of the world’s affairs will play no part in this
evolution.
The Association of Nations will be a growing brotherhood of strong and
healthy and understanding peoples, bound only by a bond of self-denial
and mutual restraint toward the weaker folk of the earth. The
co-operation of the English speaking peoples, and particularly the
American will for peace, must needs play a very conspicuous part in the
crystallization of this Association, and so it is inevitable that a
certain sort of international “expert” will be screaming that the world
is threatened by an Anglo-American imperialism. It may be worth while to
say a word or so to dispel this idea.
Let us bear in mind that the Washington Conference, whose results may be
the cornerstone of the organized peace of the world, is a conference of
withdrawal and abstinence, self-restraint and mutual restraint, with
regard to China and the Pacific; its key idea is the cessation of
aggressions upon weaker or less advantageously circumstanced people. If
America and her kindred nations are most active in pressing for such
results, it is not that they are moved by any thoughts of world
predominance but by liberal ideas that are the monopoly of no race and
people. It is their fortunate lot to have been most accessible to such
ideas and to be able now to play the leading, most powerful part in
establishing them in the world. But these ideas have a broader basis and
claim a wider allegiance than merely that of the English speaking
peoples.
Liberalism, the idea of great nations of free citizens held together by
bonds of mutual confidence, roots very wide and deep in humanity. It
derives from the great traditions of the Greek and Roman Republics and
from the traditions of freedom of the Scandinavian and Teutonic peoples.
The America of today did not grow from American seed. Let America bear
that in mind. The American idea is the embodiment particularly of the
liberal thought of England and France in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. France cannot destroy the greatness of her past or the
greatness of her future by a phase of momentary folly with her
submarines and Senegalese, her Polish ally and all the rest of it.
All peoples have such lapses. A few years ago Britain was disgusting
with her jingoistic imperialism. Let us forget our lapses and get back
to our more enduring selves. Latin America, quite as much as English
speaking America, belongs to that great tradition of Franco-British
liberalism. Liberal Germany in 1848 and again today struggles to take
its fitting place among the emancipated peoples, as Italy did half a
century ago. These are the peoples who can best understand now and help
now. They are all in our system of ideas; they can be brought together
into one purpose.
It is natural and necessary that the peoples most saturated in that
great tradition of European liberalism should be the first full members
of the coming Association and should be prepared to lead the rest of the
world toward the new order. All peoples are not equally prepared. It is
not a question of ascendancy; it is a question of those who are able
doing the task that they alone are prepared to perform.
When I think of an Association of Nations I think, therefore, of a sort
of club or brotherhood, not of every state in the world but of the
peoples who speak English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and
Japanese, as the big brotherhood of the world, with such states as
Holland and Norway and Bohemia, and so forth, great in quality if not
great in power and entirely sympathetic by training and tradition,
associated with them in a great bond for two ends; for peace among
themselves and for restraint and patience toward the rest of mankind. I
think of such a brotherhood as the brain and backbone of the organized
peace of the world, and I cannot see how it is possible to take in the
other peoples of the world as helpers until they respond to the same
ideals.