assurer à leurs abonnés belges et allemands, elles ne peuvent
fournir à la division qu'un total de vingt entrées par jour (10
pour chacune d'elle).
L'établissement d'ailleurs ne travaille pas la nuit et observe
strictement le repos dominical. D'autre part les ressources de la
ville ne permettent pas, paraît-il, d'augmenter le personnel. Dans
ces conditions, en vue d'éviter tout désordre et de ne pas demander
à ces femmes un travail audessus de leurs forces, les mesures
suivantes seront prises:
(2.) JOURS DE TRAVAIL: Tous les jours de la semaine, sauf le
dimanche.
RENDEMENT MAXIMUM: Chaque jour chaque femme reçoit 10 hommes, soit
20 pour les deux personnes, 120 par semaine.
HEURES D'OUVERTURE: 17 heures à 21 heures. Aucune réception n'aura
lieu en dehors de ces heures.
TARIF: Pour un séjour d'un quart heure (entrée et sortie de
l'établissement comprises) ... 5 marks.
CONSOMMATIONS: La maison ne vend aucune boisson. Il n'y a pas de
salle d'attente. Les clients doivent donc se présenter par deux.
(3.) RÉPARTITION: Les 6 jours de la semaine sont donnés: Le
lundi--1er bat. du 164 et C.H.R. Le mardi--1er bat. du 169 et
C.H.R. Le mercredi--2e bat. du 164 et C.H.R. Le jeudi--2e bat. du
169 et C.H.R. Le vendredi--3e bat. du 164. Le samedi--3e bat. du
169.
(4.) Dans chaque bataillon il sera établi le jour qui leur est
fixé, 20 tickets déposés aux bureaux des sergents-majeur à raison
de 5 par compagnie. Les hommes désireux de rendre visite à
l'établissement réclamerout au bureau de leur sergent-majeur, 1
ticket qui leur donnera driot de priorité.
The value of that document derives from its having been issued as an
ordinary regulation, from its having been reproduced in a widely
circulated journal of the capital without evolving comment, and from the
strong light which it projects upon one of the darkest corners of the
civilization which has been so often and so eloquently eulogized.
Manifestly the currents of the new moral life which the Conference was
to have set flowing are as yet somewhat weak, the new ideals are still
remote and the foreshadowings of a nobler future are faint. Another
token of the change which is going forward in the world was reported
from the Far East, but passed almost unnoticed in Europe. The Chinese
Ministry of Public Instruction, by an edict of November 3, 1919,
officially introduced in all secondary schools a phonetic system of
writing in place of the ideograms theretofore employed. This is
undoubtedly an event of the highest importance in the history of
culture, little though it may interest the Western world to-day. At the
same time, as a philologist by profession, I agree with a continental
authority[42] who holds that, owing to the monosyllabic character of the
Chinese language and to the further disadvantage that it lacks wholly or
partly several consonants,[43] it will be practically impossible, as the
Japanese have already found, to apply the new alphabet to the
traditional literary idiom. Neither can it be employed for the needs of
education, journalism, of the administration, or for telegraphing. It
will, however, be of great value for elementary instruction and for
postal correspondence. It is also certain to develop and extend. But its
main significance is twofold: as a sign of China's awakening and as an
innovation, the certain effect of which will be to weaken national unity
and extend regionalism at its expense. From this point of view the
reform is portentous.
Another of the signs of the new times which calls for mention is the
spread and militancy of the labor movement, to which the war and its
concomitants gave a potent impulse. It is differentiated from all
previous ferments by this, that it constitutes merely an episode in the
universal insurgency of the masses, who are fast breaking through the
thin social crust formed by the upper classes and are emerging rapidly
above the surface. One of the most impressive illustrations of this
general phenomenon is the rise of wages, which in Paris has set the
municipal street-sweepers above university professors, the former
receiving from 7,600 to 8,000 francs a year, whereas the salary of the
latter is some 500 francs less.[44]
This general disturbance is the outcome of many causes, among which are
the over-population of the world, the spread of education and of equal
opportunity, the anonymity of industrial enterprises, scientific and
unscientific theories, the specialization of labor and its depressing
influence.[45] These factors produced a labor organization which the
railways, newspapers, and telegraph contributed to perfect and transform
into a proletarian league, and now all progressive humanity is tending
steadily and painfully to become one vast collectivity for producing and
sharing on more equitable lines the means of living decently. This
consummation is coming about with the fatality of a natural law, and the
utmost the wisest of governments can do is to direct it through pacific
channels and dislodge artificial obstacles in its course.
One of the first reforms toward which labor is tending with more or
less conscious effort is the abolition of the hereditary principle in
the possession of wealth and influence and of the means of obtaining
them. The division of labor in the past caused the dissociation of the
so-called nobler avocations from manual work, and gradually those who
followed higher pursuits grew into a sort of hereditary caste which
bestowed relative immunity from the worst hardships of life's struggle
and formed a ruling class. To-day the masses have their hands on the
principal levers for shattering this top crust of the social sphere and
seem resolved to press them.
The problem for the solution of which they now menacingly clamor is the
establishment of an approximately equitable principle for the
redistribution of the world's resources--land, capital, industries,
monopolies, mines, transports, and colonies. Whether
socialization--their favorite prescription--is the most effectual way of
achieving this object may well be doubted, but must be thoroughly
examined and discussed. The end once achieved, it is expected that
mankind will have become one gigantic living entity, endowed with
senses, nerves, heart, arteries, and all the organs necessary to operate
and employ the forces and wealth of the planet. The process will be
complex because the factors are numerous and of various orders, and for
this reason few political thinkers have realized that its many phases
are aspects of one phenomenon. That is also a partial explanation of the
circumstance that at the Conference the political questions were
separated from the economic and treated by politicians as paramount, the
others being relegated to the background. The labor legislation passed
in Paris reduced itself, therefore, to counsels of perfection.
That the Conference was incapable of solving a problem of this magnitude
is self-evident. But the delegates could and should have referred it to
an international parliament, fully representative of all the interests
concerned. For the best way of distributing the necessaries and comforts
of life, which have been acquired or created by manual toil, is a
problem that can neither be ignored nor reasoned away. So long as it
remains a problem it will be a source of intermittent trouble and
disorder throughout the civilized world. The titles, which the classes
heretofore privileged could invoke in favor of possession, are now being
rapidly acquired by the workers, who in addition dispose of the force
conferred by organization, numbers, and resolve. At the same time most
of the stimuli and inventives to individual enterprise are being
gradually weakened by legislation, which it would be absurd to condemn
and dangerous to regard as a settlement. In the meanwhile productivity
is falling off, while the demand for the products of labor is growing
proportionately to the increase of population and culture.
Hitherto the laws of distribution were framed by the strong, who were
few and utilized the many. To-day their relative positions have shifted;
the many have waxed strong and are no longer minded to serve as
instruments in the hands of a class, hereditary or selected. But the
division of mankind into producers and utilizers has ever been the solid
and durable mainstay of that type of civilization from which progressive
nations are now fast moving away, and the laws and usages against which
the proletariat is up in arms are but its organic expression.
From the days of the building of the Pyramids down to those of the
digging of the Panama Canal the chasm between the two social orders
remained open. The abolition of slavery changed but little in the
arrangement--was, indeed, effected more in the interests of the old
economics than in deference to any strong religious or moral sentiment.
In substance the traditional ordering continued to exist in a form
better adapted to the modified conditions. But the filling up of that
chasm, which is now going forward, involves the overthrow of the system
in its entirety, and the necessity of either rearing a wholly new
structure, of which even the keen-sighted are unable to discern the
outlines, or else the restoration of the old one on a somewhat different
basis. And the only basis conceivable to-day is that which would start
from the postulate that some races of men come into the world devoid of
the capacity for any more useful part in the progress of mankind than
that which was heretofore allotted to the proletariat. It cannot be
gainsaid that there are races on the globe which are incapable of
assimilating the higher forms of civilization, but which might well be
made to render valuable services in the lower without either suffering
injustice themselves or demoralizing others. And it seems nowise
impossible that one day these reserves may be mobilized and
systematically employed in virtue of the principle that the weal of the
great progressive community necessitates such a distribution of parts as
will set each organ to perform the functions for which it is best
qualified.
Since the close of the war internationalism was in the air, and the
labor movement intensified it. It stirred the thought and warmed the
imagination alike of exploiters and exploited. Reformers and pacifists
yearned for it as a means of establishing a well-knit society of
progressive and pacific peoples and setting a term to sanguinary wars.
Some financiers may have longed for it in a spirit analogous to that in
which Nero wished that the Roman people had but one neck. And the
Conference chiefs seemed to have pictured it to themselves--if, indeed,
they meditated such an abstract matter--in the guise of a _pax
Anglo-Saxonica_, the distinctive feature of which would lie in the
transfer to the two principal peoples--and not to a board representing
all nations--of those attributes of sovereignty which the other states
would be constrained to give up. Of these three currents flowing in the
direction of internationalism only one--that of finance--appears for the
moment likely to reach its goal....
FOOTNOTES:
[36] _L'Humanité,_ March 6 and 18, 1919.
[37] Cf. _L'Humanité_, April 10,1919.
[38] The sentence was subsequently commuted.
[39] _La Gazette de Lausanne_, May 26, 1919.
[40] 128th Division.
[41] It was reproduced by the French Syndicalist organ, _L'Humanité_ of
July 7, 1919.
[42] R. de Saussure. Cf. _Journal de Genève_, August 18, and also May
26, 1919.
[43] d, r, t, l, g (partly) and p, except at the beginning of a word.
[44] Cf. the French papers generally for the month of May--also
_Bonsoir_, July 26, 1919.
[45] Walther Rathenau has dealt with this question in several of his
recent pamphlets, which are not before me at the moment.
III
THE DELEGATES
The plenipotentiaries, who became the world's arbiters for a while, were
truly representative men. But they mirrored forth not so much the souls
of their respective peoples as the surface spirit that flitted over an
evanescent epoch. They stood for national grandeur, territorial
expansion, party interests, and even abstract ideas. Exponents of a
narrow section of the old order at its lowest ebb, they were in no sense
heralds of the new. Amid a labyrinth of ruins they had no clue to guide
their footsteps, in which the peoples of the world were told to follow.
Only true political vision, breadth of judgment, thorough mastery of the
elements of the situation, an instinct for discerning central issues,
genuine concern for high principles of governance, and the rare moral
courage that disregards popularity as a mainspring of action--could have
fitted any set of legislators to tackle the complex and thorny problems
that pressed for settlement and to effect the necessary preliminary
changes. That the delegates of the principal Powers were devoid of many
of these qualities cannot fairly be made a subject of reproach. It was
merely an accident. But it was as unfortunate as their honest conviction
that they could accomplish the grandiose enterprise of remodeling the
communities of the world without becoming conversant with their
interests, acquainted with their needs, or even aware of their
whereabouts. For their failure, which was inevitable, was also bound to
be tragic, inasmuch as it must involve, not merely their own ambition to
live in history as the makers of a new and regenerate era, but also the
destinies of the nations and races which confidently looked up to them
for the conditions of future pacific progress, nay, of normal existence.
During the Conference it was the fashion in most European countries to
question the motives as well as to belittle the qualifications of the
delegates. Now that political passion has somewhat abated and the
atmosphere is becoming lighter and clearer, one may without provoking
contradiction pay a well-deserved tribute to their sincerity, high
purpose, and quick response to the calls of public duty and moral
sentiment. They were animated with the best intentions, not only for
their respective countries, but for humanity as a whole. One and all
they burned with the desire to go as far as feasible toward ending the
era of destructive wars. Steady, uninterrupted, pacific development was
their common ideal, and they were prepared to give up all that they
reasonably could to achieve it. It is my belief, for example, that if
Mr. Wilson had persisted in making his League project the cornerstone of
the new world structure and in applying his principles without favor,
the Italians would have accepted it almost without discussion, and the
other states would have followed their example. All the delegates must
have felt that the old order of things, having been shaken to pieces by
the war and its concomitants, could not possibly survive, and they
naturally desired to keep within evolutionary bounds the process of
transition to the new system, thus accomplishing by policy what
revolution would fain accomplish by violence. It was only when they came
to define that policy with a view to its application that their
unanimity was broken up and they split into two camps, the pacifists and
the militarists, or the democrats and imperialists, as they have been
roughly labeled. Here, too, each member of the assembly worked with
commendable single-mindedness, and under a sense of high responsibility,
for that solution of the problem which to him seemed the most conducive
to the general weal. And they wrestled heroically one with the other for
what they held to be right and true relatively to the prevalent
conditions. The circumstance that the cause and effects of this clash of
opinions and sentiments were so widely at variance with early
anticipations had its roots partly in their limited survey of the
complex problem, and partly, too, in its overwhelming vastness and their
own unfitness to cope with it.
The delegates who aimed at disarmament and a society of pacific peoples
made out as good a case--once their premises were admitted--as those who
insisted upon guarantees, economic and territorial. Everything depended,
for the theory adopted, upon each individual's breadth of view, and for
its realization upon the temper of the peoples and that of their
neighbors. As under the given circumstances either solution was sure to
encounter formidable opposition, which only a doughty spirit would dare
to affront, compromise, offering a side-exit out of the quandary, was
avidly taken. In this way the collective sagacities, working in
materials the nature of which they hardly understood, brought forth
strange products. Some of the incongruities of the details, such, for
instance, as the invitation to Prinkipo, despatched anonymously,
occasionally surpass satire, but their bewildered authors are entitled
to the benefit of extenuating circumstances.
On the momentous issue of a permanent peace based on Mr. Wilson's
pristine concept of a league of nations, and in accordance with rigid
principles applied equally to all the states, there was no discussion.
In other words, it was tacitly agreed that the fourteen points should
not form a bar to the vital postulates of any of the Great Powers. It
was only on the subject of the lesser states and the equality of nations
that the debates were intense, protracted, and for a long while
fruitless. At times words flamed perilously high. For months the
solutions of the Adriatic, the Austrian, Turkish, and Thracian problems
hung in poignant suspense, the public looking on with diminishing
interest and waxing dissatisfaction. The usual optimistic assurances
that all would soon run smoothly and swiftly fell upon deaf ears. Faith
in the Conference was melting away.
The plight of the Supreme Council and the vain exhortations to believe
in its efficiency reminded me of the following story.
A French parish priest was once spiritually comforting a member of his
flock who was tormented by doubts about the goodness of God as measured
by the imperfection of His creation. Having listened to a vivid account
of the troubled soul's high expectation of its Maker and of its deep
disappointment at His work, the pious old curé said: "Yes, my child. The
world is indeed bad, as you say, and you are right to deplore it. But
don't you think you may have formed to yourself an exaggerated idea of
God?" An analogous reflection would not be out of place when passing
judgment on the Conference which implicitly arrogated to itself some of
the highest attributes of the Deity, and thus heightened the contrast
between promise and achievement. Certainly people expected much more
from it than it could possibly give. But it was the delegates themselves
who had aroused these expectations announcing the coming of a new epoch
at their fiat. The peoples were publicly told by Mr. Lloyd George and
several of his colleagues that the war of 1914-18 would be the last. His
"Never again" became a winged phrase, and the more buoyant optimists
expected to see over the palace of arbitration which was to be
substituted for the battlefield, the inspiring inscription: "A la
dernière des guerres, l'humanité reconnaissante."[46] Mr. Wilson's vast
project was still more attractive.
Mr. Lloyd George is too well known in his capacity of British
parliamentarian to need to be characterized. The splendid services he
rendered the Empire during the war, when even his defects proved
occasionally helpful, will never be forgotten. Typifying not only the
aims, but also the methods, of the British people, he never seems to
distrust his own counsels whencesoever they spring nor to lack the
courage to change them in a twinkling. He stirred the soul of the nation
in its darkest hour and communicated his own glowing faith in its star.
During the vicissitudes of the world struggle he was the right man for
the responsible post which he occupied, and I am proud of having been
one of the first to work in my own modest way to have him placed there.
But a good war-leader may be a poor peace-negotiator, and, as a matter
of fact, there are few tasks concerned with the welfare of the nation
which Mr. Lloyd George could not have tackled with incomparably greater
chances of accomplishing it than that of remodeling the world. His
antecedents were all against him. His lack of general equipment was
prohibitive; even his inborn gifts were disqualifications. One need not
pay too great heed to acrimonious colleagues who set him down as a
word-weaving trimmer, between whose utterances and thoughts there is no
organic nexus, who declines to take the initiative unless he sees
adequate forces behind him ready to his to his support, who lacks the
moral courage that serves as a parachute for a fall from popularity,
but possesses in abundance that of taking at the flood the rising tide
which balloon-like lifts its possessor high above his fellows. But
judging him in the light of the historic events in which he played a
prominent part, one cannot dismiss these criticisms as groundless.
Opportunism is an essential element of statecraft, which is the art of
the possible. But there is a line beyond which it becomes shiftiness,
and it would be rash to assert that Mr. Lloyd George is careful to keep
on the right side of it. At the Conference his conduct appeared to
careful observers to be traced mainly by outside influences, and as
these were various and changing the result was a zigzag. One day he
would lay down a certain proposition as a dogma not to be modified, and
before the week was out he would advance the contrary proposition and
maintain that with equal warmth and doubtless with equal conviction.
Guided by no sound knowledge and devoid of the ballast of principle, he
was tossed and driven hither and thither like a wreck on the ocean. Mr.
Melville Stone, the veteran American journalist, gave his countrymen his
impression of the first British delegate. "Mr. Lloyd George," he said,
"has a very keen sense of humor and a great power over the multitude,
but with this he displays a startling indifference to, if not ignorance
of, the larger affairs of nations." In the course of a walk Mr. Lloyd
George expressed surprise when informed that in the United States the
war-making power was invested in Congress. "What!" exclaimed the
Premier, "you mean to tell me that the President of the United States
cannot declare war? I never heard that before." Later, when questions of
national ambitions were being discussed, Mr. Lloyd George asked, "What
is that place Rumania is so anxious to get?" meaning Transylvania.[47]