intellectual standing came to Europe, attracted by the great drama and
business of the Peace Conference, and to prepare the way for the
reconstruction of civilization after the years of conflict. They were
statesmen, bankers, lawyers, writers, and financiers. I met some of them
in Paris, Rome, Vienna, London, and other cities of Europe. They were
the onlookers and the critics of the new conflict that had followed the
old, the conflict of ideas, policy, and passion which raged outside the
quiet chamber at Versailles, where President Wilson, Lloyd George,
Clemenceau, and a few less important mortals were redrawing the
frontiers of Europe, Asia, and other parts of the globe. From the first,
many of these men were frank in private conversation about the hostility
that was growing up in the United States against President Wilson, and
the distrust of the American people in a league of nations which might
involve the United States in European entanglements alien to her
interests and without the consent of her people. At the same time, and
at that time when there still seemed to be a chance of arriving at a new
compact between nations which would eliminate the necessity of
world-wide war, and of washing out the blood-stains of strife by new
springs of human tolerance and international common sense, these
American visitors did not throw down the general scheme for a league of
nations, and looked to the Peace Conference to put forward a treaty
which might at least embody the general aspirations of stricken peoples.
Gradually these onlookers sickened with disgust. They sickened at the
interminable delays in the work of the Conference, and the
imperialistic ambitions of the Allied powers, and the greedy rivalries
of the little nations, at all the falsity of lip-service to high
principles while hatred, vengeance, injustice, and sordid interests were
in the spirit of that document which might have been the new Charter of
Rights for the peoples of the world. They saw that Clemenceau's vision
of peace was limited to the immediate degradation and ruin of the
Central Powers, and that he did not care for safeguarding the future or
for giving liberty and justice and a chance of economic life to
democracies liberated from military serfdom. They saw that Lloyd George
was shifting his ground continually as pressure was brought to bear on
him now from one side of the Cabinet and now from the other, so that his
policy was a strange compound of extreme imperialism and democratic
idealism, with the imperialist ambition winning most of the time. They
saw that Wilson was being hoodwinked by the subtlety of diplomatists who
played on his vanity, and paid homage to his ideals, and made a prologue
of his principles to a drama of injustice. Our American visitors were
perplexed and distressed. They had desired to be heart and soul with the
Allies in the settlement of peace. They still cherished the ideals
which had uplifted them in the early days of the war. They were resolved
that the United States should not play a selfish part in the settlement
or profit by the distress of nations who had been hard hit. But
gradually they became disillusioned with the statecraft of Europe, and
disappointed with the low level of intelligence and morality reflected
in the newspaper press of Europe, which still wrote in the old strain of
"propaganda" when insincerity and manufactured falsehood took the place
of truth. They hardened visibly, I think, against the view that the
United States should be pledged by Wilson to the political and economic
schemes of the big powers in Europe, which, far from healing the wounds
of the world, kept them raw and bleeding, while arranging, not
deliberately, but very certainly, for future strife into which America
would be dragged against her will. England and France failed to see the
American point of view, which seems to me reasonable and sound.
The generous way in which the United States came to the rescue of
starving peoples in the early days of the war was not deserted by her
when the armistice and the peace that followed revealed the frightful
distress in Poland, Hungary, and Austria. While the doom of these people
was being pronounced by statesmen not naturally cruel, but nevertheless
sentencing great populations to starvation, and while the blockade was
still in force, American representatives of a higher law than that of
vengeance went into these ruined countries and organized relief on a
great scale for suffering childhood and despairing womanhood. I saw the
work of the American Relief Committee in Vienna and remember it as one
of the noblest achievements I have seen. All ancient enmity, all demands
for punishment or reparation, went down before the agony of Austria.
Vienna, a city of two and a half million souls, once the capital of a
great empire, for centuries a rendezvous of gayety and genius, the
greatest school of medicine in the world, the birthplace and home of
many great musicians, and the dwelling-place of a happy, careless, and
luxurious people, was now delivered over to beggary and lingering death.
With all its provinces amputated so that it was cut off from its old
natural resources of food and raw material, it had no means of
livelihood and no hope. Austrian paper money had fallen away to mere
trash. The krone tumbled down to the value of a cent, and it needed many
kronen to buy any article of life--2,000 for a suit of clothes, 800 for
a pair of boots, 25 for the smallest piece of meat in any restaurant.
Middle-class people lived almost exclusively on cabbage soup, with now
and then potatoes. A young doctor I met had a salary of 60 kronen a
week. When I asked him how he lived he said: "I don't. This is not
life." The situation goes into a nutshell when I say--as an actual
fact--that the combined salaries of the Austrian Cabinet amounted,
according to the rate of exchange, to the wages of three old women who
look after the lavatories in Lucerne. Many people, once rich, lived on
bundles of paper money which they flung away as leaves are scattered
from autumn trees. They were the lucky ones, though ruin stared them in
the eyes. By smuggling, which became an open and acknowledged system,
they could afford to pay the ever-mounting prices of the peasants for at
least enough food to keep themselves alive. But the working-classes, who
did not work because factories were closed for lack of coal and raw
material, just starved, keeping the flame of life aflicker by a thin and
miserable diet, until the weakest died. Eighty-three per cent. of the
children had rickets in an advanced stage. Children of three and four
had never sat up or walked. Thousands of children were just living
skeletons, with gaunt cheek-bones and bloodless lips. They padded after
one in the street, like little old monkeys, holding out their claws for
alms.
The American Relief Committee got to work in the early months of 1919.
They brought truck-loads of food to Vienna, established distributing
centers and feeding centers in old Viennese palaces, and when I was
there in the early autumn they were giving 200,000 children a meal a
day. I went round these places with a young American naval
officer--Lieutenant Stockton--one of the leading organizers of relief,
and I remember him as one of the best types of manhood I have ever met
up and down the roads of life. His soul was in his job, but there was
nothing sloppy about his sentiment or his system. He was a master of
organization and details and had established the machinery of relief,
with Austrian ladies doing the drudgery with splendid devotion (as he
told me, and as I saw), so that it was in perfect working order. As a
picture of childhood receiving rescue from the agony of hunger, I
remember nothing so moving nor so tragic as one of those scenes when I
saw a thousand children sitting down to the meal that came from America.
Here before them in that bowl of soup was life and warmth. In their eyes
there was the light of ecstasy, the spiritual gratitude of children for
the joy that had come after pain. For a little while they had been
reprieved from the hunger-death.
American agents of the Y. M. C. A., nurses, members of American missions
and philanthropic societies, penetrated Europe in far and strange
places. I met a crowd of them on the "Entente train" from Vienna to
Paris, and in various Italian towns. They were all people with shrewd,
observant eyes, a quiet sense of humor, and a repugnance to be "fudged
off" from actual facts by any humbug of theorists. They studied the
economic conditions of the countries through which they traveled,
studied poverty by personal visits to slum areas and working-class
homes, and did not put on colored spectacles to stare at the life in
which they found themselves. The American girls were as frank and
courageous as the men in their facing of naked truth, and they had no
false prudery or sentimental shrinking from the spectacle of pain and
misery. Their greatest drawback was an ignorance of foreign languages,
which prevented many of them from getting more than superficial views of
national psychology, and I think many of them suffered from the defect
of admirable qualities by a humorous contempt of foreign habits and
ideas. That did not make them popular with people whom they were not
directly helping. Their hearty laughter, their bunching together in
groups in which conversation was apt to become noisy, and their cheerful
disregard of conventionality in places where Europeans were on their
"best behavior" had an irritating effect at times upon foreign
observers, who said: "Those Americans have not learned good manners.
They are the new barbarians in Europe." English people, traveling as
tourists before the war, were accused of the same lack of respect and
courtesy, and were unpopular for the same reason.
Toward the end of 1919 and in the beginning of 1920 I came into touch
with a number of Americans who came to Europe on business enterprises
or to visit the battlefields. In private conversation they did not
disguise their sense of distress that there were strained relations
between the public opinion of England and America. Several of them asked
me if it were true that England was as hostile to America as the
newspapers tried to make out. By way of answer I asked them whether
America were as hostile to us as the newspapers asked us to believe.
They admitted at once that this was a just and illuminating reply,
because the intelligent section of American society--people of decent
education and good will--was far from being hostile to England, but on
the contrary believed firmly that the safety and happiness of the world
depended a good deal upon Anglo-American friendship. It was true that
the average citizen of the United States, even if he were uninfluenced
by Irish-American propaganda, believed that England was treating Ireland
stupidly and unjustly--to which I answered that the majority of English
people agreed with that view, though realizing the difficulty of
satisfying Ireland by any measure short of absolute independence and
separation. It was also true, they told me, that there was a general
suspicion in the United States that England had made a big grab in the
peace terms for imperial aggrandizement, masked under the high-sounding
name of "mandate" for the protection of African and Oriental states. My
reply to that, not as a political argument, but as simple sincerity, was
the necessity of some control of such states, if the power of the Turk
were to be abolished from his old strongholds, and a claim for the
British tradition as an administrator of native races; but I added
another statement which my American friends found it hard to believe,
though it is the absolute truth, as nine Englishmen out of ten will
affirm. So far from desiring an extension of our empire, the vast and
overwhelming majority of British people, not only in England, but in our
dominions beyond the seas, are aghast at the new responsibilities which
we have undertaken, and would relinquish many of them, especially in
Asia, with a sense of profound relief. We have been saddled with new and
perilous burdens by the ambition of certain statesmen who have earned
the bitter animosity of the great body of the British people entirely
out of sympathy with their imperialistic ideals.
I have not encountered a single American in Europe who has not
expressed, with what I believe is absolute sincerity, a friendly and
affectionate regard for England, whose people and whose ways of life
they like, and whose language, literature, and ideals belong to our
united civilization. They have not found in England any of that
hostility which they were told to expect, apart from a few blackguardly
articles in low-class journals. On the contrary, they have found a
friendly folk, grateful for their help in the war, full of admiration
for American methods, and welcoming them to our little old island.
They have gone back to the United States with the conviction, which I
share, with all my soul, that commercial rivalry, political differences,
and minor irritations, inevitable between two progressive peoples of
strong character, must never be allowed to divide our two nations, who
fundamentally belong to the same type of civilization and to the same
code of principles. Most of the so-called hostility between us is the
mere froth of foul-mouthed men on both sides, and the rest of it is due
to the ignorance of the masses. We must get to know each other, as the
Americans in Europe have learned to know us and to like us, and as all
of us who have crossed the Atlantic the other way about have learned to
know and like the American people. For the sake of the future of the
world and all the hopes of humanity we must get to the heart of each
other and establish a lasting and unbreakable friendship. It is only
folly that will prevent us.
THE END