There was one institution created by the peacemakers which held out a
promise of a better relationship between nations than that of military
alliances and armed force divided into an uncertain Balance of Power.
All that was wrong in the Peace Treaties might be put right by the
League of Nations. The seeds of war sown by the Treaties might be
made to blossom into the laurels of peace by the League. Although
the Supreme Council set up by the Allies for the enforcement of its
military provisions might act on purely nationalistic lines, the League
of Nations would build up the international moral sense, and establish
a Court of Appeal by which injustice, aggression, and the war spirit
could be extirpated between all nations subscribing to its code of
laws, and the spirit of arbitration.
President Wilson comforted himself for any little defects which might
have crept into the Peace Treaties by this new instrument of idealism
which he had helped to create with a very passionate enthusiasm. It
was his great gift to the world and, as he hoped, the fulfilment of
the promises he had made to the world in his messages before and after
the ending of the war, appealing so poignantly to the secret hopes
of humanity that when he came to Europe as the great arbitrator of
its councils, he was received as the leader, spokesman, and prophet
of the New World which was to be built out of the ruins of the Old.
The rejection by the American Senate of all that he had done killed
Wilson. It also destroyed all immediate hopes of European recovery
based upon the League as an instrument of reconstruction, co-operation
and peace. It was one of the great tragedies of history. Yet, looking
back now upon the reasons of the American refusal to enter the League
of Nations, it is clear that it was not entirely due to the personal
antagonism which President Wilson had aroused by certain defects of
character—his autocratic methods, his rejection of good counsel,
and his mentality in the beginning of the war, nor to a national
selfishness on the part of the American people, desiring to withdraw
rapidly from responsibilities which they had incurred by their entry
into the war. From the American point of view, at that time, the war
had proved more than ever the supreme good fortune of the United States
in being remote from the hatreds and quarrels of that mess of races
in Europe out of which their people had escaped in the past. They did
not understand Europe. They had no direct interest in its national
rivalries. They could not control or abate its passions. All opponents
of the Wilson policy regarded it as a calamity that the United States
should surrender its geographical immunity from the evil heritage of
the Old World and deliberately involve its future in that arena of
ancient feuds. By entering the League of Nations it seemed to many
that the people of the United States would be dragged into new wars
in which they would have no direct or indirect interest, and that
they would have to support and enforce the maintenance of European
frontiers, re-drawn by the Peace Treaties, and already the cause of
passionate resentment. They did not approve of all that parcelling
up of territories which had taken place under the benignant name of
“mandates”—British dominion in Palestine and Mesopotamia, French rule
in Syria, the gobbling up of German Africa, the Greek Empire in Asia
Minor. Were they to use their strength to support that new combination
of powers which one day was bound to be challenged and resisted? Above
all was the New World to enter into military alliance with France and
Great Britain to support a policy of domination in Europe which could
only last as long as the German people and their Allies were suffering
from war exhaustion—a one-sided pact which would make for the tyranny
of certain powers, or at least their military supremacy over other
nations of the world? That would be a surrender of the whole spirit
of the American people, who believed their destiny to be that of free
arbitrators, and not partisans, in the future of civilisation; friends
of liberty and democracy everywhere, and not allies on one side of
a line. They had come into the war, they believed, as crusaders for
that ideal, defenders of liberty wantonly attacked. They hated the
thought that the ideal should be narrowed down to the future defence
of one group of powers, who might in their turn attack or oppress
the democratic liberties of their neighbours. For this reason, among
others, they rejected the pact of security given by President Wilson
to France in agreement with England. For these reasons, not ignoble or
merely selfish—although, I think, unsound—they refused to enter the
League of Nations.
This withdrawal of the United States took away the strongest pillar
upon which the League had been founded. Its weakness was immediately
apparent. It was incapable of world judgments backed by the greatest
economic power in the world. The exclusion of Russia, Germany, Austria
and Hungary from its deliberations and decisions made it seem—to
hostile observers—an instrument designed merely as a partisan body,
upholding the opinions of the victorious Allies and giving a sham
morality to their policy.
That was unfair, because the Assembly, and its work behind the scenes
at Geneva, in which forty-three nations were represented, did very
quickly develop a spirit of international co-operation and law rising
above the low moralities of national selfishness. The representatives
of the League included large numbers of men who were passionately
inspired with the purpose of restoring order into the chaotic
conditions of Europe after war, healing its wounds, creating good will
in causes of quarrel by methods of arbitration and persuasion, for the
commonweal of peoples. The work and spirit of Geneva was one source of
light in a world of darkness, in those dreadful years from which we
have just emerged, and for that reason it raised a standard of idealism
round which millions of men and women in many countries—even in the
United States—rallied as the one hope of the future.
It may be said without exaggeration that for the six years following
the war civilised humanity has been sharply divided into two camps
of thought—those who believe in the spirit of the League of Nations,
with its message of international co-operation and its faith in peace
by arbitration; and those who have no faith at all in this idealistic
purpose, and who believe in Force as the only method of international
relationship and the settlement of quarrels. Those two camps still
exist. The argument between them still goes on, and will never cease
until civilisation gives allegiance to a new code of law.
What frustrated the League in its work and decisions, after the
withdrawal of the United States, was the interpretation of the Peace
Treaties by the Great Powers, and the economic folly which took
possession of European statesmen. The League as one half of the
Peace Treaty found that its other half thwarted it in every possible
way. The left hand worked against the right. It was useless for the
League of Nations to press for the economic co-operation of Europe
when the Supreme Council and the Allied statesmen enforced decisions
which enlarged the area of ruin and thrust stricken people deeper
into misery. It was futile for the League to discuss disarmament when
France was building up a system of military alliances, creating a
Black Army, and lending enormous sums of money to Poland and other
States for maintaining their standing armies. It was almost hopeless
for the League of Nations to offer its services for arbitration and to
talk high moralities about international justice when, to avenge the
murder of some officers by unknown assassins, Italy bombarded Corfu,
killing innocent children; and when Italy and France were secretly
conniving with the Nationalist Turks for a war against Greece, which
was abandoned in its agony to the horror of Smyrna.