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Title: Peacemakers--Blessed and Otherwise
       Observations, Reflections and Irritations at an International Conference

Author: Ida M. Tarbell

Release Date: May 7, 2017 [EBook #54680]

Language: English

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This book does not pretend to be a history or even an adequate review of the work of the Conference on the Limitation of Armament, nor does it pretend to be the writer’s full appraisement of that work. It is what its sub-title suggests, a collection of observations, rejections and irritations. These were set down each week of the first two months of the Conference and were published practically as they stand here by the McClure Syndicate.

When one attempts to set down, with any degree of candor, his impressions of a great gathering like the Conference on the Limitation of Armament, he will find himself swayed from amusement to irritation, from hope to despair, from an interest in the great end to an interest in the game as it is being played. My hopes and interests and irritations over the Washington Conference began weeks before it was called. What could it do? All around me men and women were saying, “It will end war,” and 2possibly—so deep was the demand in them that war be ended—believing what they said. It has always been one of the singular delusions of people with high hopes that if nations disarmed there could be no wars. Take the gun away from the child and he will never hurt himself. If it were so easy!

Their confidence alarmed the authors of the Conference. They did not mean disarmament, but limitation of armament. Moreover it was not even a Conference for but one on limitation. This was equivalent to saying that there were other matters involved in cutting down arms—the causes that had brought them into being in the first place, the belief that only in them was security, and that if you were to do away with them you must find a substitute, and a way to make this substitute continually effective. That is, there were several problems for the Conference to solve if they were to put a limit to armaments, and they 3were not easy problems. But those who kept their eyes on disarmament, pure and simple, refused to face them.

Along with the many who believed the coming Conference could say the magic word were not a few—the sophisticated, who from the start said: “Well, of course, you don’t expect anything to come out of it.” Or, “Are you not rather naïve to suppose that they will do anything?” And generally the comment was followed by “Of course nothing came from Paris.”

This superior attitude—sometimes vanity, sometimes disillusionment, sometimes resentment at trying any new form of international dealing—was quite useless to combat. You had an endless task of course if you attacked them on the point of nothing coming out of Paris when you believed profoundly that a great deal of good, as well as much evil, had come out of Paris, and that the good is bound to increase and the evil to diminish as time goes on.

4Very singular, the way that people dismiss the treaty of Versailles, drop it out of count as a thing so bungling and evil that it is bound to eventuate only in wars, bound to be soon upset. The poor human beings that made the treaty of Versailles lacked omniscience, to be sure, and they certainly strained their “fourteen points,” but it will be noted that not a few of the arrangements that they made are working fairly well.

Moreover, what the Superior forget is that that treaty had an instrument put into it intended for its own correction. The Covenant of the League of Nations is a part of the treaty of Versailles and it says very specifically that if at any time in the future any treaty—if that means anything it must include the treaty of Versailles—becomes “inapplicable,” works disturbance between the nations instead of peace, the League may consider it.

The belief in political magic on one side 5and doubt of all new political ventures on the other, made the preliminary days of the Washington Conference hard for the simple-minded observer, prepared to hope for the best and to take no satisfaction in the worst, not to ask more than the conferring powers thought they could safely undertake, to believe that the negotiators would be as honest as we can expect men to be, and that within the serious limits that are always on negotiators, would do their best.

One had to ask himself, however, what substantial reasons, if any, he had that the Conference would be able to do the things that it had set down as its business. This business was very concisely laid down in an agenda, divided into two parts and running as follows:

Limitation of Armaments:

(1) Limitation of naval armaments under which shall be discussed the following:

(A) Basis of limitation

(B) Extent

(C) Fulfillment

(D) Rules for control of new agencies of warfare

6(E) Limitation of land armaments.

Far Eastern Questions:

(1) Questions relating to China

First. Principles to be applied

Second. Application

Subjects:

(A) Territorial integrity

(B) Administrative integrity

(C) Open door

(D) Concessions, monopolies, preferential privileges

(E) Development of railways, including plans relative to the Chinese Eastern Railway

(F) Preferential railway rates

(G) Status of existing commitments.

Siberia:

Sub-headings the same as those under China.

Mandated Islands:

Sub-headings the same as those under China with railway sections eliminated.

What reasons were there for thinking that the nations—England, France, Italy, China, Japan, Belgium, Holland, Portugal—could, with the United States, handle these problems of the Pacific in such a way that they would be able to cut their armaments, and, cutting them, find a satisfactory substitute. There were several reasons.

A first, and an important one, was that the difficulties to be adjusted were, as defined, 7confined to one side only of the earth’s surface which, if huge, is nevertheless fairly simple, being mostly water. It was the problems of the Pacific Ocean that they prepared to handle. These problems are comparatively definite—the kind of thing that you can get down on paper with something like precision. They had one great advantage, and that is that in the main they did not involve a past running into the dim distance. England has held Hongkong for only about eighty years. We, the United States, have had port privileges in China only since 1844. France first got a stronghold in Cochin China in 1862, and her protectorate over Annam is less than forty years old. It was only twenty-five years ago that the war between Japan and China over Korea began; the complications in eastern Russia are still younger. So are those in Shantung, Yap, the Philippine Islands. That is, the chief bones of contention in the Conference were freshly picked. In most 8of the cases there were men still living who helped in the picking.

It was the same when it came to concessions. The question of the ownership and administration of railroads and mines—they belong to our age. We can put our fingers on their beginnings, trace with some certainty what has happened, find the intriguers, the bribe givers and takers, the law breaker, if such there have been. In the case of most of the concessions we can get our hands upon the very men involved in securing them and in carrying on their development.

How different from the problems of Europe, running as they do through century after century, involving as they do successions of invasions, of settlements, of conquests, of incessant infiltration of different races, and the consequent mingling of social, political, industrial and religious notions. The quarrels of Europe are as old as its civilization, their bases are lost 9in the past. Without minimizing at all the difficulty of the questions on the agenda of the Conference, they did have the advantage of being of recent date.

There was encouragement in the relations of the conferees. These were not enemy nations, fresh from wars, meeting to make treaties. They were nations that for five years had been allies, and from the life-and-death necessity of coöperation had gained a certain solidarity. True, their machinery of coöperation was pretty well shot up. The frictions of peace are harder on international machinery than the shells of war. The former racks it to pieces; the latter solidifies it. Nevertheless, the nations that were coming to the Conference were on terms of fairly friendly acquaintance, an acquaintance which had stood a tremendous test.

These nations had all committed themselves solemnly to certain definite ideals, laid down by the United States of America. 10True, their ideals were badly battered, and as a government we were in the anomalous position of temporarily abandoning them after having committed our friends to them. However, they still stood on their feet, these ideals.

It could be counted as an advantage that the associations of the years of the War had made the men who would represent the different nations at the Conference fairly well acquainted with one another. Whatever disappointments there might be in the delegations we could depend upon it that the men chosen would be tried men. They were pretty sure to be men of trustworthy character, with records of respectable achievement, men like Root and Hughes and Underwood in our own delegation. They would not come unknown to each other or unknown to the nations involved. It would be a simple matter for us, the public, to become acquainted with their records. If by any unhappy chance there 11should be among them a political intriguer, that, too, would be known.

These were all good reasons for expecting that the Conference might do something of what it started out for. How much of it it would do and how permanent that which it did would be would depend in no small degree upon the attitude of mind of this country, whether the backing that we gave the Conference was one of emotionalism or intelligence. We were starting out with a will to succeed; we were going to spend our first day praying for success. It would be well if we injected into those prayers a supplication for self-control, clearness of judgment, and willingness to use our minds as well as our hearts in the struggles that were sure to come.

Alarms went along with these hopes. There were certain very definite things that might get in the way of the success of the Conference—things that often frustrate the best intentions of men, still they were matters 12over which the public and the press would have at least a certain control, if they took a high and intelligent view of their own responsibility.

First, there were the scapegoats. There are bound to be periods in all human undertakings when the way is obscure, when failure threatens, when it is obvious that certain things on which we have set our hearts are unobtainable. Irritation and discouragement always characterize these periods. It is here that we fall back on a scapegoat. An international conference usually picks one or more before it gets through—a nation which everybody combines to call obstinate, unreasonable, greedy, a spoke in the wheel. Then comes a hue and cry, a union of forces—not to persuade but to overwhelm the recalcitrant, to displace it, drive it out of court. The spirit of adjustment, and of accommodation which is of the very essence of success in an undertaking like the Conference 13on the Limitation of Armaments is always imperiled and frequently ruined by fixing on a scapegoat. Would this happen at Washington?

Of course the nation on which irritation and suspicion were concentrated might be in the wrong. It might be deep in evil intrigue. It might be shockingly greedy. But it was a member of the Conference and the problem must be worked out with it. You work nothing out with scapegoats. Abraham Lincoln once laid down a principle of statesmanship which applies. “Honest statesmanship,” he said, “is the employment of individual meanness for the public good.”

It takes brains, humor, self-control to put any such rule as this in force. If unhappily the Conference did not furnish a sufficient amount of these ingredients, would the press and public make good the deficit? They are always in a strategic position where they can insist that everybody must 14be considered innocent until he is proved guilty, that nothing be built on suspicion, everything on facts. Something very important for them to remember if they insisted was that these facts had a history, that they were not isolated but related to a series of preceding events. For instance, there was the high hand that Japan had played with China. We must admit it. But in doing so we must not forget that it was only about sixty years ago that the very nations with whom Japan was now to meet in council in Washington had gathered with their fleets in one of her ports and used their guns to teach her the beauties of Christian civilization. She had decided to learn their lessons. She has wonderful imitative powers. She had followed them into China, and if she had played a higher hand there than any of them—and there might be a question as to that—it should be remembered that she had only sixty years in which to learn the degree of 15greed that can safely be practiced in our modern civilization. We must consider that possibly she had not had sufficient time to learn to temper exploitation with civilized discretion.

No scapegoats. No hues and cries. And certainly no partisanship. Was it possible for the United States to hold a truly national parley, one in which party ambitions and antipathies did not influence the negotiations? We had had within three years a terrible lesson of the lengths to which men’s partisanship will go in wrecking even the peace of the world. Would we repeat that crime? It was an ugly question, and be as optimistic as I would I hated to face it.

There was another danger on the face of things—crudeness of opinion. We love to be thought wise. There are thousands of us who in the pre-Conference days were getting out our maps to find out where Yap lay or the points between which the Eastern Chinese railroad ran, who would be tempted 16sooner or later to become violent partisans of, we will say: Yap for America—Shantung for China—Vladivostok for the Far Eastern Republic. There was danger in obstinate views based on little knowledge or much knowledge of a single factor.

And there were the sacrifices. Were we going to accept beforehand that if we were to have the limitation of armament which we desired—we, the United States might have to sacrifice some definite thing—a piece of soil, a concession, a naval base in the Pacific—and that nothing more fatal to the success of the Conference could be than for us to set our teeth and say: “We must have this”—quite as fatal as setting our teeth and saying: “This or that nation must do this.”

But my chief irritation in these pre-Conference days lay with the agenda. It was illogical to place limitation of armament at the head of the program. That was an effect—not a cause. It looked like an attempt 17to make reduction of taxes more important than settlement of difficulties. Was the Conference to be merely a kind of glorified international committee on tax reduction? Not that I meant to underestimate the relief that would bring.

Suppose the Conference should say: We will reduce at once—by the simplest, most direct method—cut down fifty per cent. of our appropriations—for five years and before the term is ended meet again and make a new contract.

What a restoration of the world’s hope would follow! How quickly the mind sprang to what such a decision would bring to wretched, jobless peoples—the useful work, the schools, the money for more bread, better shelter, leisure for play. How much of the resentment at the huge sums now going into warships, cannon, naval bases, war colleges, would evaporate.

The mere announcement would soothe and revive. Labor bitterly resents the 18thought that it may be again asked to spend its energies in the creation of that which destroys men instead of that which makes for their health and happiness.

“Get them to plowing again, to popping corn by their own firesides, and you can’t get them to shoulder a musket again for fifty years,” Lincoln said of the soldiers that the approaching end of the Civil War would release. As a matter of fact—suppression of the Indians aside—it was only thirty-three years when they were at it again, but there was no great heart in the enterprise; they still preferred their “plows and popcorn,” and the experience of the Great War had only intensified that feeling.

Cut down armament now merely for sake of reducing taxation and you would give the world’s love of peace a chance to grow—and that was something. But it was something which must be qualified.

The history of man’s conduct shows that 19however much he desires his peaceful life, the moment what he conceives to be his country’s interest—which he looks at as his interest—is threatened, he will throw his tools of peace into the corner and seize those of war. It does not matter whether he is prepared or not. Men always have and, unless we can find something beside force to appeal to in a pinch, always will do just as they did at Lexington, as the peasants of Belgium did at the rumor of the advance of the Germans—seize any antiquated kicking musket or blunderbuss they can lay their hands on and attack.

There was another significant possibility to limitation, on which the lovers of peace rightfully counted—certainly believers in war do not overlook it—and that was the chance that the enforced breathing spell would give for improving and developing peace machinery. It would give a fresh chance to preach the new methods, arouse faith in them, stir governments to greater interest in them and less in arms.

20It was a possibility—but to offset it experience shows that with the passing of the threat of war, interest in pacific schemes is generally left to a few tireless and little considered groups of non-official people. Active interest inside governments dies out. The great peace suggestions and ventures of the world have been born of wars fought rather than of wars that might be fought. The breathing spell long continued might end in a general rusting and neglect of the very methods for preventing wars which peace lovers are now pushing.

What it all amounted to was that the most drastic limitation was no sure guarantee against future war. Take away a man’s gun and it is no guarantee that he will not strike if aroused. You must get at the man—enlarge his respect for order, his contempt for violence, change his notion of procedure in disputes, establish his control. It takes more than “gun toting” to make a dangerous citizen, more than relieving him of his gun to make a safe one.

21If the Conference only cut down the number of guns the nations were carrying, it would have done little to insure permanent peace. The President’s conference on unemployment which held its sessions just before the Conference on the Limitation of Armament spent considerable time in considering what the industry of the country might do to prevent industrial crises. Among the principles it laid down was one quite as applicable to international as to business affairs.

“The time to act is before a crisis has become inevitable.”

That was the real reason for the existence of the coming Conference—to act before the jealousies and misunderstandings around the Pacific had gone so far that there was no solution but war. Let us suppose that in 1913 say, England, France, Germany, Austria and Russia had held a conference over an agenda parallel to the one now laid down for the Washington Conference—one 22that not only considered limiting their armies and navies but boldly and openly attacked the fears, the jealousies, the needs, and the ambitions of them all—might it not have been possible that they would have found a way other than war? Are governments incapable in the last analysis of settling difficulties save by force and exhaustion, or are they made impotent by the idea that no machinery and methods for handling international affairs are possible save the ones which have so often landed their peoples in the ditch?

In his farewell words to this country at the end of his recent visit, the late Viscount Bryce remarked that anybody could frighten himself with a possibility but the course of prudence was to watch it and estimate the likelihood that it would ever enter into the sphere of probability.

It is just here that governments have fallen down worst. They might watch the war possibilities, but they have refused or 23not been able to evaluate them. They seemed to have felt usually that closing their eyes to them or at least refusing to admit them was the only proper diplomatic attitude.

As a rule, it has been the non-responsible outsider that has exploited war possibilities. Sometimes this has been done from the highest motives, with knowledge and restraint. More often it has been done on half-knowledge and with reckless indifference to results. There are always a number of people around with access to the public ear who love to handle explosives—never quite happy unless their imaginations are busy with wars and revolutions. There are others possessed by the pride of prophecy—their vanity is demonstrating the inevitable strife in the situation. They are the makers of war scares—the breeders and feeders of war passions. Sometimes war possibilities are the materials for skillful national propaganda—the agent of one nation 24working on a second to convince it of the hostile intent of a third.

It is the governments concerned that should be handling this sort of stuff and handling it in such a way that they would cut under the malicious and the wanton, get at the real truth and get at it in time and get it out to the world.

One of the chief reasons for some sort of active association of nations is that there should be a permanent central agency always working over war possibilities, estimating them, heading them off.

Present diplomacy does not do it. Could the coming Conference find a way for just this service in the Pacific situation?

How could the public be sure the Conference was really seeking these ends? Only by openness and frankness. Could one really expect that? No one of sense and even a very little knowledge of how men achieve results, whether in statecraft or in business, would think for a moment that the 25Conference must sit daily in open session with a public listening to all that it said. There was only one practical way of handling the agenda. The Conference must form itself into groups, each charged with a subject on which it was to arrive at some kind of understanding. The report must be presented at the Conference. But when this was done there should be free, open discussion.

To handle the plenary sessions of the present Conference as they were handled in Paris in 1919 would be a tragic mistake. These plenary conferences were splendidly set scenes. No one who looked on the gathering at which the Covenant of the League of Nations was presented would ever forget it. Nor would he forget how the gloved-and-iron hand of Clemenceau never for a moment released its grip; how effectively, for example, the incipient revolt against the mandate system aimed at making nations the protectors and not the exploiters of the German territories to be disposed of 26was soft-pedaled. Nor would he ever forget certain sinister faces in the great picture that chilled at their birth the high hopes which the Conference championed.

Free discussion, running, if you please, over days at this juncture, might have insured an easier, straighter road for the treaty of Versailles and particularly for the League of Nations.

Frankness would be the greatest ally of all who looked on the great mission of the coming Conference as preventing the Pacific crisis from ever ending in war. Frankness would break the war bubbles that the irresponsible were blowing so gayly. It would be the surest preventive of the fanatical and partisan drives which are almost certain to develop if there was unnecessary secrecy. Naturally, those on the outside would look on a failure to take the public in as proof that sinister forces were at work in the Conference, that dark things were brewing which must be kept out of sight.

As a matter of fact, one look inside would 27probably show a group of worn and anxious gentlemen honestly doing their best to find something on which they could agree with a reasonable hope that the countries that had sent them to Washington would accept their decisions. After one good look the public might change suspicion to sympathy.

There was always the argument from the conventionally minded that “it isn’t done,” that diplomacy must be secret. John Hay didn’t think so. He told his friend Henry Adams in the course of his efforts to establish the “open door” in China that he got on by being “honest and naïf!”

The point in this policy at which most people, in and out of the present Conference, would stick is that word “naïf.” They would prefer to be thought dishonest rather than simple-minded. However, if everybody who had a part in the gathering could be as simple-minded as he was in fact, would pretend to know no more than 28he did in truth and would be as honest as it was in his nature to be, there would be a good chance of keeping Mr. Hay’s door in China open. And if that could be done along with the other things it implied, the Conference would have actually contributed to the chances of more permanent peace in the world and could cut down its armaments, because it had less need of them, not merely because it wanted temporarily to reduce taxation.

It was the Unknown Soldier Boy that put an end to the doubt, the faultfinding, the cynicism that was in the air of Washington as the day for the opening of the Conference approached. It all became vanity, pettiness, beside that bier with its attending thousands of mourning people.

They carried the body to the capitol where for a day it lay in state. Busy with my attempts to learn something of what it was all about, it was not until late in the afternoon that I thought of the ceremony on the hill, and made my way there for my daily walk. It had been a soft, sunny day, the air full of gray haze. Everything around the great plaza—the Capitol, the 30library, the trees, the marble Senate and House buildings right and left—was tender in its outline. There were no crowds, but as I looked I saw massed four abreast from the entrance door to the rotunda, down along terraces of steps, across the plaza as far as I could see, a slowly moving black mass, kept in perfect line by soldiers standing at intervals. I made my way across. Where was its end? I went to find it.

I walked the width of the great plaza and turned down the Avenue. As far as I could see the people were massed—one block, two blocks, three blocks, four—and from every direction you could see men and women hurrying to fall in line. I had had no idea of joining that line, of passing through that rotunda. My only notion was to take a glimpse of the crowd. But to have gone on, to have been no part of something which came upon me as tremendous in its feeling and meaning, would have been a withdrawal from my kind of which I think 31I should always have been ashamed. And so I fell in.

The mass moved slowly, but very steadily. The one strongest impression was of its quietness. Nobody talked. Nobody seemed to want to talk. If a question was asked, the reply was low. We moved on block after block—turned the corner—now we faced the Capitol—amazingly beautiful, proud and strong in the dim light. I never had so deep a feeling that it was something that belonged to me, guarded me, meant something to me, than as I moved slowly with that great mass toward the bier. The sentinels stood rigid, as solemn and as quiet as the people. The only murmur that one heard was now and then a low singing, “Nearer My God to Thee.” How it began, who suggested it, I do not know; but through all that slow walk, the only thing that I heard was women’s voices, now behind me, now before me, humming that air. It took a full three-quarters of an hour to 32reach the door and pass into the rotunda. It took strong self-control not to kneel by the bier. They told me that there were women, bereft mothers, to whom the appeal was too much—mothers of missing boys. This might have been hers. Could she pass? The guards lifted them very gently, and in quiet the great crowd moved forward. I fancy there were thousands that passed that place that day that will have always before their eyes that great dim circle with bank upon bank of flowers, from all over the earth—flowers from kings and queens and governments, from great leaders of armies, from those who labor, from the mothers of men, and hundreds upon hundreds from those who went out with the dead but came back. The only sound that came to us as we passed was the clear voice of a boy, one of a group, once soldiers. They came with a wreath. They carried a flag. The leader was saying his farewell to their buddy.

33A hundred thousand or more men and women made this pilgrimage. A hundred thousand and many more packed the streets of Washington the next day when the bier was carried from the Capitol to the grave at Arlington.

The attending ceremony was one of the most perfect things of the kind ever planned. It had the supreme merit of restraint. Every form of the country’s service had a place—not too many—a few—but they were always of the choicest—from the President of the United States down to the last marine, the best we had were chosen to follow the unknown boy.

There was an immense sincerity to it all. They felt it—the vast, inexpressible sorrow of the war. And no one felt it more than the President of the United States. What he said at Arlington, what he was to say the next day at the opening of the Conference, showed that with all his heart and all his mind the man hated the thing that 34had brought this sorrow to the country, and that he meant to do his part to put an end to it.

The ceremony was for the dead sacrifice, but the feature of it which went deepest to the heart and brought from the massed crowds their one instinctive burst of sympathy and greeting was the passing, almost at the end of the procession, of the War’s living sacrifice—Woodrow Wilson.

The people had stood in silence, reverently baring their heads as the bier of the soldier passed, followed by all the official greatness of the moment—the President of the United States, his cabinet, the Supreme Court, the House, the Senate, Pershing, Foch. And then, quite unexpectedly, a carriage came into view—two figures in it—a white-faced man, a brave woman. Unconscious of what they were doing, the crowd broke into a muffled murmur—“Wilson!” The cry flowed down the long avenue—a surprised, spontaneous recognition. 35It was as if they said: “You—you of all living men belong here. It was you who called the boy we are honoring—you who put into his eye that wonderful light—the light that a great French surgeon declared made him different as a soldier from the boys of any other nation.”

“I don’t know what it is,” he said, “whether it is God, the Monroe Doctrine or President Wilson, but the American soldier has a light in his eye that is not like anything that I have ever seen in men.” Woodrow Wilson, under God, had put it there. His place was with the soldier. The crowd knew it, and told him so by their unconscious outburst.

His carriage left the procession at the White House. Later the crowd followed it. All the afternoon of Armistice Day men and women gathered before his home. All told there were thousands of them. They waited, hoping for his greeting. And when he gave it, briefly, they cheered and cheered. 36But they did not go away. It was dark before that crowd had dispersed.

But this expression of love and loyalty and interest in Woodrow Wilson is no new thing in Washington. For months now, on Sundays and holidays, men, women and children have been walking to his home, standing in groups before it, speaking together in hushed tones as if something solemn and ennobling stirred in them. Curiosity? No. Men chatter and jibe and jostle in curiosity. These people are silent—gentle—orderly. You will see them before the theater, too, when it is known that he is within, quietly waiting for him to come out—one hundred, two hundred, five hundred—even a thousand sometimes, it is said. They cheer him as he passes—and there are chokes in their voices—and always tenderness. Let it be known that he is in his seat in a theater, and the house will rise in homage. Let his face be thrown on a screen, and it will receive a greeting that 37the face of no other living American will receive. It requires explanation.

The people at least recognized him as belonging to the Conference. And, as a matter of fact, the Conference never was able to escape him. Again and again, he appeared at the table. The noblest words that were said were but echoes of what he had been saying through the long struggle. The President’s great slogan—Less of armaments and none of war—was but another way of putting the thing for which he had given all but his last breath. The best they were to do—their limitation of armaments, their substitute to make it possible, were but following in the path that he had cut. The difficulties and hindrances which they were to meet and which were to hamper both program and final settlements were but the difficulties and hindrances which he had met and which hampered his work at Paris. From the start to the finish of the Conference on the Limitation of Armament, 38the onlooker recognized both the spirit and the hand of Woodrow Wilson as the crowd recognized him on Armistice Day.

There was another figure in the memorial procession which deeply touched the crowd and which stayed on, uninvited. She came with the dead soldier boy. She stood by him night and day as he lay in state, followed him to the grave in which they laid him away at Arlington, a symbol of the nation’s grief over all its missing sons. She did not go with the crowds. She took her place at the door of the Conference, and there, day by day, her solemn voice was heard.

“I am the mother of men. Never before have I lifted my voice in your councils. I have been silent because I trusted you. But to-day I speak because I doubt you. I have the right to speak, for without me mankind would end. I bear you with pain, such as you cannot know. I rear you with sacrifice, such as you cannot understand. I am the 39world’s perpetual soldier, facing death that life may be. I do not recoil from my great task. God laid it on me. I have accepted it always. I give my youth that the world may have sons, and I glory in my harvest.

“But I bear sons for fruitful lives of labor and peace and happiness. And what have you done with my work? To-day I mourn the loss of more than ten million dead, more than twenty million wounded, more than six million imprisoned and missing. This is the fruit of what you call your Great War.

“It is I who must face death to replace these dead and maimed boys. I shall do it. But no longer shall I give them to you unquestioning as I have in the past, for I have come to doubt you. You have told me that you used my sons for your honor and my protection, but I have begun to read your books, to listen to your deliberations, to study your maneuvers; I have learned that it is not always your honor and my 40protection that drives you to war. Again and again it is your own love of glory, of power, of wealth; your hate and contempt for those that are not of your race, your color, your point of view. You cannot longer have my sons for such ends. I ask you to remold your souls, to make effective that brotherhood of man of which you talk, to learn to work together, white and black and brown and yellow, as becomes the sons of the same mother.

“I shall never leave your councils again. My daughters shall sit beside you voicing my command—you shall have done with war.”

We shall have to leave November 12, 1921, the opening day of the Conference on the Limitation of Armament, to History for a final appraisement. Arthur Balfour told Mr. Hughes after he had had time to gather himself together from the shock of the American program that in his judgment a new anniversary had been added to the Reconstruction Movement. “If the 11th of November,” said Mr. Balfour, “in the minds of the allied and associated powers, in the minds perhaps not less of all the neutrals—if that is a date imprinted on grateful hearts, I think November 12 will also prove to be an anniversary welcomed and thought of in a grateful spirit by those who in the 42future shall look back upon the arduous struggle now being made by the civilized nations of the world, not merely to restore pre-war conditions, but to see that war conditions shall never again exist.”

Whatever place it may turn out that November 12 shall hold on the calendar of great national days, this thing is sure; it will always be remembered for the shock it gave Old School Diplomacy. That institution really received a heavier bombardment than War, the real objective of the Conference. The shelling reached its very vitals, while it only touched the surface of War’s armor.

Diplomacy has always had her vested interests. They have seemed permanent, impregnable. What made November 12, 1921, portentous was its invasion of these vested interests. Take that first and most important one—Secrecy. When Secretary Hughes followed the opening speech of welcome and of idealism made by President 43Harding, not with another speech of more welcome and more idealism, as diplomacy prescribes for such occasions, but with the boldest and most detailed program of what the United States had in mind for the meeting, Diplomacy’s most sacred interest was for the moment overthrown. To be sure, what Secretary Hughes did was made possible by John Hay’s long struggle to educate his own countrymen to the idea of open diplomacy; by what President Wilson tried to do at the Paris conference. Mr. Wilson won the people of the world to his principle, but his colleagues contrived to block him in the second stage of the Paris game. Mr. Hughes, building on that experience, did not wait for consultation with his colleagues. On his own, in a fashion so unexpected that it was almost brutal, he threw not only the program of the United States on the table, but that which the United States expected of two—two only, please notice—of the eight nations she had invited in, Great Britain and Japan.

44His proposals came one after another exactly like shells from a Big Bertha!—“It is now proposed that for a period of ten years there should be no further construction of capital ships.” One after another the program of destruction followed.

The United States:—to scrap all capital ships now under construction along with fifteen old battleships, in all a tonnage of 845,740 tons;

Great Britain:—to stop her four new Hoods and scrap nineteen capital ships, a tonnage of 583,375 tons;

Japan:—abandon her program of ships not laid down, and scrap enough of existing ones, new and old, to make a tonnage of 448,928 tons.

I once saw a huge bull felled by a sledge hammer in the hands of a powerful Czecho-Slovac farm hand. When Mr. Hughes began hurling one after another his revolutionary propositions the scene kept flashing before my eyes, the heavy thud of the blow on the beast’s head falling on my ears. I felt almost as if I were being hit myself, and I confess to no little feeling of regret that Mr. Hughes should be putting his proposals so bluntly. “It is proposed that Great Britain shall,” etc. “It is proposed 45that Japan shall,” etc. Would it have been less effective as a proposal and would it not have been really more acceptable as a form if he had said—“We shall propose to Great Britain to consider so and so.” But, after all, when you are firing Big Berthas it is not the amenities that you consider.

Mr. Balfour and Sir Auckland Geddes, sitting where I could look them full in the face, had just the faintest expression of “seeing things.” I would not have been surprised if they had raised their hands in that instinctive gesture one makes when he does “see things” that are not there. The Japanese took it without a flicker of an eyelash—neither the delegates at the table nor the rows of attachés and secretaries moved, glanced at one another, changed expression. So far as their faces were concerned Mr. Hughes might have been continuing the Harding welcome—instead of calling publicly on them for a sacrifice unprecedented and undreamed of.

46The program was so big—its presentation was so impressive (Mr. Hughes looked seven feet tall that day and his voice was the voice of the man who years ago arraigned the Insurance Companies) that one regretted that there were omissions so obvious as to force attention. There was a singular one in the otherwise admirable historical introduction Mr. Hughes made to his program. He reviewed there the efforts of the first and second Hague Conferences to bring about disarmament—explained the failure—and jumped from 1907 to 1921 as if in 1919, at the Paris Peace Conference, man’s most valiant effort to bring about disarmament had not been made. He failed to notice the fact that to this effort scores of peoples had subscribed, including all of the nations represented at the council table; that these nations had been working for two years in the League of Nations, under circumstances of indescribable world confusion and disorganization, to gather the information 47and prepare a practical plan not only to limit the world’s arms but to regulate for good and all private traffic in armaments. Before Mr. Hughes sat M. Viviani of France who had been serving on the Commission charged with this business. Before him, too, was man after man fresh from the discussions of the second annual Assembly of the League. Disarmament and many other matters pertaining to world peace had been before them. They came confident that they had done something of value at Geneva however small it might be compared with the immense work still to be done. Arthur Balfour of England, Viviani of France, Wellington Koo of China, Senator Schanzer of Italy, Sastri of India, Van Karnebeck of Holland—were among those that heard Mr. Hughes jump their honest efforts, beginning in 1919, to bring the armaments of the world to a police basis. It must have bewildered them a little—but they are gentlemen who are 48forced by their profession to take hints quickly—they understood that as far as the American Conference on Limitation of Armament was concerned, the League of Nations was not to exist. From that day, if you wanted information on the League from any one of them you had to catch him in private, and he usually made sure nobody was listening before he enlightened you as to his opinions, which invariably were “not for publication.”

One could not but wonder if Mr. Balfour had this omission in mind when at a later session he said in speaking of Mr. Hughes’ review of past disarmament efforts that “some fragments” had been laid before the Conference. What Mr. Hughes really did in ignoring the work for disarmament carried on at Paris and Geneva in the last three years was to call attention to it.

After all, was it not petty to be irritated when something so bold and real had been initiated? Was it not yielding to the desire 49to “rub in” the omission as bad—or worse—than the omission? As a matter of fact, the thing going on at the moment was so staggering that one had no time for more than a momentary irritation. Mr. Hughes swept his house on November 12—swept it off its feet. If secret diplomacy was given by him such a blow as it never had received before, diplomatic etiquette was torn to pieces by the Senate and the House of the United States, each of which had a section of the gallery to itself. Possibly their action was due to a little jealousy. They are accustomed to holding the center of the deliberative stage in Washington, and they always have, possibly always will resent a little the coming of an outside deliberative body which for the time being the public regards as more interesting than themselves. They made it plain from the start that they were not awed. The House of Representatives particularly was a joy to see if it did make a shocking exhibition of 50itself. It looked as if it were at a ball game and conducted itself in the same way. It hung over the gallery, lolled in its seats, and when the President struck his great note, the words which ought to become a slogan of the country—“Less of Armament and None of War”—it rose to its feet and cheered as if there had been a home run.

Having once broke out in unrestrained cheers, they gave again and again what William Allen White called “the yelp of democracy.” Even after the program was over and the remaining formalities customary on such occasions were about at an end, they took things into their own hands and finished their attack on diplomatic etiquette by calling for Briand as they might have called for Babe Ruth. “It isn’t done, you know,” I heard one young Britisher say after it was over. But it had been done, and the chances are that there will be more of it in the future.

If this day does work out to be portentous 51in history, as it possibly may, the time will come when every country will hang great historical pictures of the scene in its public galleries. We should have one, whatever its fate. And I hope the artist that does it will not fail to give full value to the Congress that cracked the proprieties. Let him take his picture from the further left side of the auditorium. In this way he can bring in the House of Representatives. He can afford to leave out the diplomatic gallery, as he would have to do from this position. The diplomatic gallery counted less than any other group in the gathering.

Secrecy and etiquette were not the only vested interests attacked on November 12, 1921. There was a third that received a blow—lighter to be sure, but a blow all the same and a significant one. The exclusive vested right of man to the field of diplomacy was challenged. Not by giving a woman a seat at the table, but by introducing her on the floor, in an official capacity, a new 52official capacity, rather problematical as yet as to its outcome—a capacity which if it ranks lower than that of delegate is still counted higher than that of expert, since it brings the privilege of the floor.

Behind the American delegation facing the hall and inside the sacred space devoted to the principals of the Congress, sat a group of some twenty-one persons, the representatives of a new experiment in diplomacy—a slice of the public brought in to act as a link between the American delegates and the public. Four of these delegates were women—well-chosen women. They are the diplomatic pioneers of the United States.

Who were those people, why were they there? I heard more than one puzzled foreign attaché ask. When you explained that this was an advisory body, openly recognized by the government, they continued, “But why are women included?” They understood the women in the diplomatic 53gallery, the women in the boxes. It was a great ceremony. It was quite within established diplomatic procedure that the ladies of the official world should smile upon such an occasion.

They understood the few women scattered among the scores of men in the press galleries—but women on the floor as part of the Conference? What did that mean? It meant, dear sirs, simply this, that man’s exclusive, vested interest in diplomacy had been invaded—its masculinity attacked like its secrecy and propriety. What would come of the invasion no one could tell.

It is doubtful if ever a program has received heartier acclaim from this country than that of Mr. Hughes. It stirred by its boldness, its breadth. “Scrap!” Whoever had said that word seriously in all the long discussion of disarmament. Ten years!—the longest the most sanguine had suggested was five. It caught the imagination—had the ring of possibility in it. It might be 54putting the cart before the horse, as I had been complaining, but it made it practically certain that the horse would be acquired even if you had to pay a good round sum for him, so desirable had the cart been made.

And then the way the nations addressed picked it up! Three days later their formal acceptances were made. For England, Arthur Balfour accepted in principle, declaring as he did so:

“It is easy to estimate in dollars or in pounds, shillings and pence the saving to the taxpayer of each of the nations concerned which the adoption of this scheme will give. It is easy to show that the relief is great. It is easy to show that indirectly it will, as I hope and believe, greatly stimulate industry, national and international, and do much to diminish the difficulties under which every civilized government is at this time laboring. All that can be weighed, measured, counted; all that is a 55matter of figures. But there is something in this scheme which is above and beyond numerical calculation. There is something which goes to the root, which is concerned with the highest international morality.

“This scheme, after all—what does it do? It makes idealism a practical proposition. It takes hold of the dream which reformers, poets, publicists, even potentates, as we heard the other day, have from time to time put before mankind as the goal to which human endeavor should aspire.”

“Japan,” declared Admiral Baron Kato, “deeply appreciates the sincerity of purpose evident in the plan of the American Government for the limitation of armaments. She is satisfied that the proposed plan will materially relieve the nations of wasteful expenditures and cannot fail to make for the peace of the world.

“She cannot remain unmoved by the high aims which have actuated the American 56project. Gladly accepting, therefore, the proposal in principle, Japan is ready to proceed with determination to a sweeping reduction in her naval armament.”

Italy, through Senator Schanzer, greeted the proposal as “The first effective step toward giving the world a release of such nature as to enable it to start the work of its economic reconstruction.”

France—her Premier, Briand, spoke for her—slid over the naval program. France, he said, had already entered on the right way—the way Mr. Hughes had indicated; her real interest was elsewhere. “I rather turn,” said M. Briand, “to another side of the problem to which Mr. Balfour has alluded, and I thank him for this. Is it only a question here of economy? Is it only a question of estimates and budgets? If it were so, if that were the only purpose you have in view, it will be really unworthy of the great nation that has called us here.

57“So the main question, the crucial question, which is to be discussed here, is to know if the peoples of the world will be at last able to come to an understanding in order to avoid the atrocities of war. And then, gentlemen, when it comes on the agenda, as it will inevitably come, to the question of land armament, a question particularly delicate for France, as you are all aware, we have no intention to eschew this. We shall answer your appeal, fully conscious that this is a question of grave and serious nature for us.”

What more was there to do? England, Japan and the United States had accepted “in principle” a program for the limitation of navies, much more drastic than the majority of people had dreamed possible. To be sure the details were still to be worked out, but that seemed easy. Had not the Conference finished its work? There were people that said so. No. Mr. Hughes had simply awakened the country to what was 58possible if the reasons for armament could be removed.

So far as we, the United States, were concerned, these reasons were fourfold:

(1) Our Pacific possessions. Until we felt reasonably sure that they were safe from possible attack by Japan, we must keep our navy and strengthen our fortifications.

(2) The England-Japan pact. We suspected it. It might be a threat. So long as it existed could we wisely limit our navy?

(3) Our Open Door policy in China. We meant to stand by that. It had been invaded by Japan in the Great War; could we reaffirm it now and secure assurances we trusted that there would be no further encroachments? If not, could we limit our armament?

(4) Our policy of the integrity of nations—China and Russia. We had announced a “moral trusteeship” over both. No more carving up. Let them work it out for themselves. How were we going to back up that policy?

That is, we had possessions and policies for which we were responsible. Could we protect them without armament? That depended, in our judgment, upon England and Japan. Would they be willing to make agreements and concessions which would convince us that they were willing to respect 59our possessions and accept our policies in the Pacific?

If so, what assurances could we give them in return that would convince them that we meant to respect their possessions and policies? How could we prove to them that they need not fear us?

It was within the first month of the Conference that the answers to these questions were worked out “in principle” again.

The morale of an international conference is easily shaken in the public’s mind. Seeming delay will do it. Those who look on feel that whatever is to be done must be done quickly, that things must go in leaps. They mistrust days of plain hard work—work which yields no headlines. It must be, they repeat, because the negotiators have fallen on evil times, are intriguing, bargaining.

Two days after Mr. Hughes had laid out his plan for ship reduction, and it had been accepted in principle and turned over to the naval committee, I heard an eager, suspicious young journalist ask Lord Lee who, at the end of eight hours of committee 61work—grilling business always—was conducting a press conference, if they were really “doing anything.” His tone showed that he doubted it, that in his judgment they must be loafing, deceiving the public; that if they were not, why, by this time the program ought to be ready for his newspaper. Lord Lee was very tired, but he had not lost his sense of humor. He made a patient answer. But one understood that there had already begun in Washington that which one saw and heard so much two years and a half before in Paris—a feeling that taking time to work out problems was a suspicious performance.

The calm of steady effort on the part of the Conference was brief. Mr. Hughes in closing the second plenary session where his naval program had been so generously accepted “in principle,” had said “I express the wish of the Conference that at an opportune time M. Briand will enjoy the opportunity of presenting to the Conference 62most fully the views of France with regard to the subject of land armaments which we must discuss.” Mr. Hughes kept that promise, fixing November 21, nine days after the opening, as the “opportune time.”

The Conference went into M. Briand’s open session serene, confident, self-complacent. It came out excited, scared, ruffled to the very bottom of its soul. In an hour one-third of Mr. Hughes’ agenda had been swept away. Could this have been avoided? I am inclined to think that it would have been if there had been a larger sympathy, a better understanding of the French and their present psychology. If we are to carry on the world coöperatively, as seems inevitable, we must have a much fuller knowledge of one another’s ways and prejudices and ambitions than was shown at the outset of the Washington Conference.

Back of the commotion that M. Briand stirred up on November 21 lay the idiosyncrasies and experiences of France. To understand 63at all the crisis, for so it was called, one must understand something of France—that she is a land which through the centuries has held herself apart as something special, the élite of the nations. The people of no country in the civilized world are so satisfied with themselves and their aim. There are no people that find life at home more precious, guard it so carefully, none who care so little about other lands, and it might be said, know so little of other lands.

It is only within the last twenty years that the Frenchman has come to be anything of a traveler. To-day, in many parts of France, the young man or young woman who comes to America has the same prestige on returning that thirty years ago the person in towns outside of the Atlantic border had in his town when he returned from a trip abroad. I was living in Paris in the early 90’s when Alphonse Daudet made a trip to England. It was a public 64event. Peary discovered the pole with hardly less newspaper talk.

Now this country, so wrapt up in itself and the carrying out of its notions of life—among the most precious notions in my judgment that mankind have—finds itself for a long period really the center of the world’s interests. It makes a superhuman effort, is valiant beyond words, practically the whole civilized world rallies to its help. It comes off victorious, and when it gathers itself together and begins to examine its condition it finds the ghastly wounds of a devastated region; the work of centuries so shattered that it will take centuries to restore the fertility, beauty, interest. It finds itself with an appalling debt; with a population depleted at the point most vital to a nation, in its young men, threatening the oncoming generation. It sees its enemy beaten, to be sure, but with its land practically unimpaired.

France not only had her condition in her 65mind, she had all her past:—reminiscences of invasions, from Attila on. Old obsessions, old policies revived:—the belief that she would never have safety except in a weak Central Europe—a doctrine she had repudiated—broke out.

She came to the peace table in Paris under an accepted program which said: Reparations, but no indemnities. And her bitterness so overwhelmed her that she forgot the principle pledge and demanded indemnities in full. She forgot her pledge to annex nothing and called for the Rhine Border. Every effort to reason with her, to persuade her not to ask the impossible of her beaten enemy, she interpreted as lack of sympathy, and pointed to her devastated region, her debts, her shrunken population. She accused of injustice those who felt that mercy is the great wisdom. Justice became her great cry. Intent on herself, her dreadful woes, her determination to have the last pound, she magnified her perils, saw combinations 66against her, and went about in Europe trying to arm other peoples, to build up a pro-France party. Any effort to persuade her that the spirit which underlay the Versailles Treaty was pro-humanity and not pro-French embittered and antagonized her. She resented the English effort to bring some kind of order into the Continent. She resented the conclusion of the world—slow enough though it was—to let Russia work out her own destiny.

No lover of France has any right to overlook or encourage this attitude. It is the most dangerous course she could take. She is building up anti-French antagonisms in beaten Europe, and she is alienating countries that want to bring the world onto a new basis of Good Will and who believe it can be done.

When M. Briand came to the Washington peace table, he left behind him a country in this abnormal mood—her thoughts centered on herself—her needs, her dangers. 67M. Briand knew well enough that she would not see the program that Mr. Hughes had thrown out as it was intended—a tremendously bold suggestion for world peace—a call to the sacrifice that each country must make if order was to be restored, the awful losses of recent years repaired. M. Briand knew that what France expected him to get at Washington was recognition, sympathy, guarantees. The last thing that she wanted brought back was a request to join in a program of sacrifice.

Moreover, M. Briand came to the Conference at considerable peril to himself. He was Premier, and in this office he had been doing as much as he seems to have thought possible to hold down the military trend of the country. His policy had been fought for a year by a strong party, intent on demonstrating that France was the most powerful nation on the continent of Europe, that it was her right and her ambition to hold first place there. M. Briand’s 68friends thought that he should not come to the United States. But, as he publicly said, he wanted to come in order to persuade the Conference that France was not as military in spirit as much of the world seemed to believe, that she did want peace, that her refusals to disarm came from the fact that she was still threatened by both Germany and Russia and must either have arms or guarantees.

M. Briand knew the line of argument that the Hughes program would awaken in France. This argument was admirably set forth early in the Conference by the semi-official Le Temps:

“I. Under a régime of limited armaments such as that of which Mr. Hughes has defined the basis, each state has the right to possess force proportioned to the dangers to which, in the opinion of all the contracting powers, it may reasonably believe itself to be exposed.

“II. When powers agree among themselves to limit their armaments they oblige themselves by that very fact even though tacitly aiding that one of themselves which should find itself at grips with a danger which its limited armaments would not allow it to subdue.

69“III. It is not possible to have a contractual limitation of armament without there being at the same time among all the contractants a joint and several obligation of mutual aid.”

It is not unfair, I think, to say that when M. Briand came to speak to the Washington Conference on November 21, he was not thinking of the peace of the world; he was thinking of the needs and ambitions of France. Moreover, his mood was not the most conciliatory in the world. His pride and his pride for his country had been deeply wounded on the opening day of the Conference. He had found himself on that occasion set at one side. To be sure, he and his colleagues were given a position at the right of the American delegates, Great Britain being at the left; but when Mr. Hughes presented his naval program, France did not figure in it, except incidentally. The whole discussion was centered on Great Britain, Japan and the United States. France and Italy were set aside with the casual remark that it was not 70thought necessary to discuss their tonnage allowance at that time.

Did Mr. Hughes lack tact and understanding when he confined his opening speech to three nations? I think that the after events point that way. To have invited eight nations and to have spoken to but two at the start was a good deal like inviting eight guests to a dining table and talking to but two of them through the meal. The oversight, if that’s the proper word for it, was forgotten, if noticed by any one in the really tremendous thing that Mr. Hughes did. The trouble is that there is almost always one among a number of neglected guests that does feel and does not forget it.

The opening week of the Conference kept France in about the same position that she had on the opening day. She was not yet a principal, and another point—and one that is hard on the French—they saw here what they began to see in Paris in 1919 and 71so openly resented there—that English is taking the place of French as the language of diplomacy. There is no mistake about this, and I don’t wonder that all Frenchmen resent it. At the opening day every delegate, except M. Briand, spoke in English; the French translations which followed each speech were made purely out of compliment to the French delegation. M. Briand is one of not a few in France who will take no pains, whatever their contracts, to learn a word of English. For the last two years he has been constantly in conference with Lloyd George, he has had most of that time the remarkable interpreter, M. Carmlynck, at his side. I have heard M. Carmlynck say that in all this time M. Briand has not learned a word of English, although Lloyd George, who at the start understood no French at all, is now able to follow closely the arguments in French, and even will at times correct or question the phrasing of the translation into English.

72The French are not a race that conceal their feelings. An Englishman, an American, is apt to accuse anybody who does not cover up disappointment, resentment, of being a poor sport. France’s chief contempt for the Anglo-Saxon is that he is not out and out with everything; that he has reticences and reserves, conceals his dislikes, his vices, his emotions. The French showed at Washington from the start that they were disappointed. They did not mix freely; they did not use the ample offices prepared for them in the Annex to the Pan-American Building, where the delegates sat, although every other nation was making more or less use of these quarters. They insisted on conducting all their press meetings in French alone, although every other nation, when it put up somebody who did not speak English, provided a translator. The result was that the French press gatherings were sparsely attended.

And then came M. Briand’s speech, 73which caused the first Conference crisis. For days after that speech was made, I listened to people remake it, giving their idea of how he might have used the same matter and carried his audience with him, giving them the impression of a courageous people, as they really are, intent not only on the restoration of their tormented and suffering land but willing to do their part to restore the rest of the world. Instead, M. Briand gave an impression of a land in panic, its mind centered on possible dangers from a conquered enemy. It was France Sanglante that he held in upraised arms before the Conference, a bleeding France at whom ravening German and Russian wolves were snapping and threatening. All his powerful oratory, his wealth of emotional gesture, upraised arms, tossed black locks, rolling head, tortured features—all these M. Briand brought into play in his efforts to arouse the Conference to share the fears of France. He could not do it. 74He was talking to people as well informed as himself on the actual facts of Europe, but people who are not interpreting those facts in the way that the French do. He was talking to people who view the situation of the present world as one to be corrected only by hard, steady sacrifice and work in a spirit of good will and mercy. Unhappily he gave them the impression that France thought only of herself and of what the world should do for her to pay her for her terrible sacrifices. In his picture of bleeding France he did not include bleeding Belgium, Italy, England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, all of whom sat at the table and all of whom had suffered losses and are staggering under debts, if not equal, at least comparable to those of France.

It was a mistake of emphasis, that brilliant journalist Simeon Strunsky said. He pointed out that the thing really relevant in M. Briand’s speech was practically concealed 75from the public, that France had disarmament plans on hand which soon would reduce her army one half and her term of military service from three years to eighteen months. M. Briand’s tragic picture of the danger of France so obscured this statement, so vitally important to the work of the Conference, that not a few people contended that no such statement was ever made. One has only to look at the text of the address to see that it was there, though so out of proportion to the bulk of the speech that it failed of its effect.

The speech was disastrous. “I was never so heartsick in my life,” I heard one of the greatest and most important men in Washington say after it was over. Mr. Wells, that ardent advocate of the brotherhood of man, knocked his doctrine all to smithereens by accusing France of wanting arms to turn against England. Lord Curzon, as militant as Mr. Wells, made a most unguarded speech for a man in his position.

76France, sore and sensitive, cried aloud that the United States and Great Britain were trying to isolate her. Mr. Hughes and Mr. Balfour had, to be sure, made consoling speeches after M. Briand’s outburst, but they were rather the efforts of serene elderly friends trying to calm the panic of a frightened child, and their effect was rather to aggravate France’s determination to assert herself, to prove herself the equal, by arms, if necessary, of any nation in the world, England included.

The irritation of that day spread over the world. The Conference was “wrecked,” cried the lovers of gloom and chaos. Washington buzzed with gossip of wrangling between even the heads of delegations. There was a rumor spread of a sharp quarrel between Mr. Balfour and Mr. Hughes on the way the discussions in the committees were to be handled. It was said that Mr. Hughes wanted everything that was voiced put down; that Mr. Balfour thought a digest of 77the discussions would be sufficient. This rumor was followed by the story of an ugly scene in committee between the French Premier, Briand, and the Italian Senator Schanzer over the morals of the Italian army.

Now, luckily the Conference was admirably arranged to scotch vicious rumors. There never has been a great international gathering in which the press had as real an opportunity to learn what was going on. Every morning there was given out at press headquarters a list of delegates who at fixed hours would receive the press. This morning bulletin ran something like this:

and so on. Every day from six to eight opportunities were given to correspondents 78to question principals of the Conference. How much they got depended upon how much they carried—how able they were to ask questions—how sound their judgment was of the answers they received—how honest their intent in interpreting. When ugly rumors such as those which disturbed the second week of the Conference’s life occurred, this method of treating the press was of real advantage to the powers concerned. It was a joy to see the way Secretary Hughes, for instance, handled the rumors at this moment.

It was always a joy to see Mr. Hughes when he was righteously indignant, and he certainly was so on the afternoon of November 25. He lunged at once at the report of the break between himself and Mr. Balfour. The statement had no basis but the imagination of the writer. It was unjust to Mr. Balfour, who had been coöperative from the start. To put him of all men at the Conference in a position of opposing the 79United States was most unfair. There had been no clashes in committees, no quarrels. There had, of course, been differences in points of view, candid statements, free explanations, but any one with common sense knew that such exchange of views must take place. It was a fine, generous, convincing answer to the ugly rumors, and the beauty of it was that you believed Mr. Hughes. You knew that he was not lying to you. I believe this to have been the general conviction of the newspaper men. He convinced them and they were all for him. This was a real achievement for any man, for the press craft are hard to convince and quick to suspect. Many of them have been for years in the thick of public affairs, watching men go up and down; seeing heroes made and unmade; the incorruptible prove corruptible. One wonders sometimes not that they have so little faith, but that they have any. They believed Mr. Hughes. When he denied the rumors his word was 80accepted. But the rumors were out, and had been cabled abroad and were already doing their ugly work there—fighting right and left like mad dogs. There was even riot and bloodshed in Italy over the report that Briand had spoken lightly of their army.

It looked for the moment as if an atmosphere was gathering around the Washington Conference similar to that in which the Paris Conference had done its work. Indeed, already the observer who had been in Paris in 1919, had been more than once startled with the way the two conferences were beginning to parallel each other. Just what happened in Paris had already happened here—a wonderful first stage in which a noble program had been given out—a program to which all the world had responded with joy and hope. Then came a second stage in which the delegates attempted to make their noble ideas realities. It was in this transition period that the first convulsions of public and press began. They saw 81that, as a matter of fact, the Conference had no magic to practice, that it was nothing but the same old hard effort to work out by conferring, by bargaining, by compromise, the best that they could get. And they saw, too, that most of this work was going on behind closed doors. The moment that the Washington Conference attempted to get down to cases there was the same burst of remonstrance, suspicion, accusation that we saw in Paris. “Secret diplomacy.” Then came rumors of quarrels. If it was secret, must it not have been because there were things that they did not want known outside—breaks in their good will? The rumors of quarrels were spread with relish, and often malice. Dislike of this or that nation flared up, mistrust of this or that man. Washington air was saturated with impatience, suspicion, intrigue. Was the Conference to gather about it the same storm of wicked passions that had been so strong in Paris, doing their best to wreck 82the work, and frustrating some of the noblest attempts. That dreadful “outside” of the Paris Conference, created by the unreason, hate, vanity and ambitions of men, seemed about to be duplicated. I had never set down my impressions of the Paris atmosphere at the time of the Peace Conference; I would do it now, that I might have it to compare with what seemed to me was about to develop in Washington.

Men and women who have been spectators of great human tussles are generally possessed by a desire to tell what they saw, thought and felt during its progress, and until they have relieved themselves of this obsession they are uneasy, as from a duty undone. Until one carries for a time such an obsession as this he cannot realize the patness of the vulgar expression getting a thing “off one’s chest.” It lies there, literally a load. He may have a notion—and his delay is probably due to that—that he will only be adding another folio to a more or less pestiferous collection; that, as a matter of fact, he will not, and cannot, communicate anything that others have not already 84communicated. All he can do is to say, “So I saw it; so it seemed to me.”

For three years I had carried around a few impressions of the Paris Conference of 1919. I had meant to keep them to myself—they were so ungracious. Summed up they amounted to a melancholy conclusion that in times of stress, public and press, unrestrained, make a bedlam in which steady constructive effort, if not frustrated utterly, is sure to be hindered and distorted. Taken as a whole the milieu in which the Paris Conference operated, furnished the most perfect example the world has ever seen of the arrogance of the one who calls himself liberal, of the irresponsibility of him who calls himself radical, of the unutterable stupidity of him who calls himself conservative, of the universal habit of saving your face by crying down what others are attempting to do, and of the limitations which the laws of human nature and human society put upon the collective efforts of human beings.

85From the day that the Conference opened you had the impression of each man—I am talking here only of the man on the outside—being for himself in what was plainly and admittedly the world’s most gigantic effort to sink this each man in the whole. It was the insistence of the individual and his way of thinking, so long held in check by the terrific necessities of the war, that caused the first doubts of the undertaking to one who struggled to keep a disinterested outlook. Take the idealists who had accepted the great formula for world peace laid down; they regarded it as something accomplished because for the moment it stood out as the clear desire of the world, and were heedless and contemptuous of the wisest words that were uttered at the start, the words of Georges Clemenceau, who, at the first session, told the delegates of all the nations of the world that if this daring thing, which he doubted but to which he consented, went through it meant sacrifice for everybody. But your idealist had not 86come for sacrifice. He had come to put into operation his particular formula for a perfect world.

With every day the numbers in Paris grew who had come to help—to get a hearing—to help in the group at the top—to be heard by principals. They failed. Disappointment, wounded vanity, the sense that they were somebody, had something to contribute, stirred them to resentment. They would serve, and they were rejected. There was, to be sure, one thing that those who resented this apparent unconsciousness of their importance by those charged with the conduct of things might have done—one surely useful thing, and that was, casting an eye about and seeing the multitude of problems that shrieked for solution, master one, little as it might be:—the case of Teschen, of the Banat of Tamesvar, the history of a boundary, the need of a coal mine here or there—and working, really working, on this particular problem, produce some 87sound presentation, something that men could not get around. The whole bubbling pot of trouble called for such cooling drops of real, carefully considered work.

But this demanded self-direction, poise, a willingness to make a very small contribution, to have no pretense of being called into council, to trust to the gods and your own knowledge of what really counts in solving complications. It called for going aside, of not pretending to be on the inside. Minds were too troubled, vanity was too keen. You eased your mind and poulticed your vanity by talk—talk at dinner tables, over restaurant coffee, over tea—and talk in endless articles.

One of the banes of the Paris Peace Conference was that there were so many men and women on the field under contract to write, to produce so many words every day or every week. There was no contract that these words should add something to the knowledge of the many things about which 88it was so necessary for men and women to learn—no contract that they should contribute by ever so little to the great need of control on every side, that they should comfort, soften hates, stimulate common sense. Writers covered up their ignorance of things doing by prophecies, by shrieks of despair, by poses of intimacy with the great, by elaborately spun-out theories. And they built up superstitions. They created things—absolutely created superstitions that may never be dispelled from the minds of those who read them back home.

There was the superstition of the mysterious four who, without advice, without use of the vast machinery of expert knowledge that had been called into existence, without consideration of political prejudice, of ancient hates and struggles, carved up countries, made artificial boundaries, and did it with a nicely calculated sense of revenge, hate, self-advantage. This “Big-Four” came in popular minds to be a hydra-headed 89tyrant—more irresponsible, brutal, and cynical than any czar of Russia or Machiavelli of the Middle Ages.

And it was a creation that left out of consideration facts that were there for everybody to read if they were willing to work. It was a Putois they created. Who was Putois? Read your Anatole France, or if Crainquebille is not at hand, read Joseph Conrad’s review.

The malevolence of those not charged with the conduct of affairs against those so charged grew thicker and thicker as the days went on. Gossip became more and more unrestrained. It was the only refuge of the numbers who had no definite business in the scene but who had come to watch—often with the idea in their minds that they might be able to contribute some definite, salutary, stimulating something, often again with a very definite idea that they might be able to pull down this or that person having some actual inside hold.

90There were those who set themselves with calculation to destroy the prestige of the President of the United States; not to destroy it by sound criticism of his point of view, by the presentation of a larger aspect of things than his, but to do it by a calculated meanness of mind. In the general and frightful disorder left by the war, everything begged that men should sink their littleness and show bigness, if there was any in them, or if not leave the scene, in order at least, by their absence, there might be so much less of littleness of mind around. But these men—and women—stayed on. They sat at the tables of the Ritz and smacked their lips over a nasty piece of scandal, born of mischief-making partisans in far distant places; the meanness of the “outs” against the leader of the “ins.” And there were always those to listen and to spread.

In the greatness of the calamity that had overwhelmed the world, it would seem that 91men should have gone beyond the point not only of this wanton mischief but beyond the point of sneering. A sneer in the face of this vast destruction of mankind was like a sneer at an angry Jehovah. But men everywhere sneered at the attempts at order, at justice. And, curiously enough, it was those who labeled themselves liberal, humane, that sneered most.

There was a despairing consciousness at times that in every heart some unextinguishable hatred was nourished. There were the hatreds against those who did not believe with you. You began to see growing in Paris among Americans what we have seen growing here at home since the war—the revival of that old, old hate of England. What hope is there of the world, one felt sometimes like asking, when some man or woman who literally had given his life to good works or good causes poured a vial of vitriol on the English nation? It took you back to the Civil War, and the delivery 92up to England, by the wisdom of Abraham Lincoln, of the Confederate commissioners. Owen Lovejoy, lifelong friend of human freedom, enemy of human slavery, rose in the Congress of the United States then and swore, so that all the country heard, his own undying hatred of England.

What was the world problem, after all, but to extinguish hatred?

Unless that hymn of hate could be silenced, what hope was there of peace, order, or the forms of order? And yet the advocates of peace fed the fires in their own hearts and did their best to enkindle them in others.

And it was not alone American hatred of England, French hatred of Germany, or English hatred of Germany that you heard of, but new hates. They ran about like fire maniacs, pouring oil on old factional, national and international troubles,—the Egyptian against the English, the Greek against the Turk—the Pole against the Russian.

93There used to stand in Brittany one of those frank, realistic shrines that the Gallic—honest with the ways of his own heart—so often sets up, a statue to Notre Dame des Haines-Our Lady of the Hates. A mob from all over the earth flocked to Paris, carrying under their arms big or little replicas of Notre Dame des Haines—intent on rearing them at the doors of the Conference.

Savage instincts came to the top, and no contradiction, in all this sea of contradiction, stared at you more hatefully than that of announced pacifists lending all their efforts to a May Day riot, almost panting to see blood run, and perching themselves on possible vantage points, to cheer on any possible disorder at a time when tormented authorities had ordered the public to stay indoors, and had taken taxis and omnibuses from the streets. They wanted the protest of blood against what? As nearly as one could see, it was against the only organized widespread effort then making in the tormented world to bring the peace and 94justice which they had made it their professional business to preach.

A despairing fact was that individuals and groups, whose profession in life it had been to be auxiliaries of peace and order, became auxiliaries of war and disorder. There was one way of counteracting their power, and that was using them, putting it up to them as Mr. Lincoln put it up to Horace Greeley in 1864.

To put it up to them in the way of the Niagara Conference—that was the real wisdom, the real wisdom of the leader always toward protesting groups—let them try their hand. Possibly they can pull it through, contribute something which he and those of his type cannot do. But in this avalanche of demands—causes, old and new; injustices running back to the Flood; with a hundred unsolvable problems for every hour—how place all this pestiferous mob that knew how to do it? It was to bale out the Seine with a teaspoon—a vaster river than the Potomac and a smaller teaspoon.

95And the trying came so often to naught. There was Prinkipo—modeled on the real idealist’s formula, sound enough for a limited scene, with a limited cast—“get together around a table and talk it over.”

But the table? How find it in this still seething land over so much of which the lava was still hot and uncrossable, with so many craters where at every instant new eruptions threatened. They tried it—went into the sea for their table, at a spot of which some of those who chose it had never heard, and to which one at least objected—soundly enough—because the name sounded so like the name of a comic opera.

And the table selected, how get contestants there? In this Europe they were remaking, such was the physical, military and political hampering that there was no spot to which it was certain that everybody could reach. And, as in the Prinkipo case, you ran up against things more unyielding than armies or parties—that hardening of will, that deadening of the spirit of coöperation 96which is one of the most terrible works of revolutions—something happening to men who have all their lives been good men, devoted to the end of human happiness, freezing them until they will no longer work with other men to bring order and peace to a tormented land for which they have always slaved.

To sit at a table and hear a great noble, white-bearded advocate of human rights, turned to bitterness and scorn of those who have ruined his plan of doing things but who, for the moment, are in the saddle, carrying out their own violent, fanatic way, refuse to even meet at the Prinkipo table the representative of those advocates of violence in order to attempt to somehow soften their madness—you know then that you have reached a human limit, a limit to the human being’s capacity to face those who disagree and those whom he despises though in that meeting there may be a remote, though ever so remote, chance to stay a 97murderous hand and soften a murderous spirit.

It was not only such curious impressions of the limitations of the human mind one received, but of the human heart as well. It seemed as if it were not big enough—even in the case of those whose profession it is to be humane—not big enough to cover anything but some special group whose cause they espoused. There were many disheartening exhibits of this limitation. One that will always stick in my mind as one of the most hideous was the tears of a great humanitarian over the German prisoner in France—a prisoner at that time receiving the same rations and even better shelter and more clothes than most French refugees, and an absolute setting of lips and hardness of eyes at the mention of children and women in the caves of Lens, the shattered ruins of Peronne—it was not humanity but an espoused group of humanity that stirred his sympathy.

98Limits to human endurance, human capacity, human kindness, human foresight—that was what every day of the Peace Conference cried louder and louder into your ear.

But Washington was not to parallel Paris. The uproar caused by M. Briand’s speech died away in an amazingly short time—so far as Washington was concerned. The violence and indiscretions of the press to which so much of the disturbance on the other side of the Atlantic was due was not followed up. Those that had been responsible were all of them, I think, a little ashamed, though Mr. Wells obstinately came back once or twice to tell what he thought of the French. Explanations quieted the Italians. M. Briand had never used the offensive word attributed to him, it had been but a mistake of the cables—and a serious mistake, it should be said, too, of the journalist 100that had cabled it without verification. On all sides lectures were read to the correspondents. Go on this way and they could easily wreck the whole thing. Go on this way and peace never at any time could be made in the world. Any effort of man could be easily upset if passionate judgments and unconfirmed suspicions were to be sent broadcast through the newspapers. People believe what they read, unhappily, and have little or no way of verifying. There was much of this reproving talk going on and some of those who handled it most vigorously belonged to the Washington press. It had its effect at once.

Then, too, it was hard to be continuously violent and suspicious in Washington. The lovely days, the wide streets, the freedom from the turmoil of business and industry, the very absence of exciting night life—all tended to calm the spirit. How different from Paris in 1919! There one lived in a city encircled by vast hospitals where thousands 101upon thousands of shattered men tossed on their beds of pain. Soldiers of all nations swarmed everywhere. In many streets of the city the shops were still sealed up. On all sides one found great staring gaps—the wounds of the city made by the shells of Big Bertha or the nightly visits of airplanes. Everywhere you went you saw still the signs “Abri” (shelter), vividly recalling the long years in which no man safely went out without knowing that there was a refuge near by. The streets at night were still dark, and those within still tightened their shutters and drew close their curtains, unable to believe that light was no longer a danger.

You rode in battered taxicabs over streets that were rough from long inattention. In every house you entered the marks of war still remained. Nothing had been mended or repaired in Paris for five years. A heating apparatus out of order, it stayed out of order. A window broken, it stayed broken. 102A hinge off, it stayed off. Carpets and furniture went uncleaned. And in the homes of the rich where there had been beautiful pictures, empty frames hung on the wall, the canvas having been cut out and sent to some place of safety. There was no color. All Paris was in black. Even in the windows of the shops you saw nothing but black. Your dressmaker and milliner had no heart to work in colors, it still to them was bad taste. It was only the influx and the demand of the visiting foreigners, who multiplied as the Conference went on, that brought back colors to the shop windows.

What a contrast to all this was Washington in the fall of 1921, with its gayety and lavishness, its incessant round of lunches and teas and dinners, its over-weighted tables, unbelievable in their abundance to the visiting strangers, so long—and still—on stricter rations. You could not be tragic long in Washington.

103Then there was Mr. Hughes’ steady hand. He laughed daily at his press conferences at the insinuations and solemnity of the questioning press correspondents. Everything was going on swimmingly, he asserted. “Excellent progress.” The naval committee was at work, the Far Eastern committee had begun its sessions, the agenda would be followed step by step, but one thing at a time would be attempted; when they had finished what they were at now they would take up the next step, and not before. It was certainly steadying, if not exciting. It gave confidence, if not headlines. All of this quieted the storm, but it was left to the President of the United States to sweep it entirely from the Conference sky, though whether he did it intentionally or accidentally is still, I think, an unanswered question.

Why did President Harding, without warning, inject an Association of Nations into the Conference on the Limitation of 104Armament, on the last day of its second week of life? The Conference had a definite agenda. Mr. Hughes, its chairman, was following it with the rigor of a good schoolmaster. That agenda made no mention of a conference, association or league of nations. So far as it was concerned, the world war is made up of nine nations. And here came the President of the United States and casually announced that before the work was completed it should include an association of all the nations of the earth.

Why did he do it? Did he want to divert public attention from the dangerous irritations of the moment? We do not yet know enough of the workings of Mr. Harding’s mind to be able to say whether he would, like Napoleon III, gild a dome when there was squally public weather. All we do really know about the President, so far, is his genuinely beneficent intent. Is he canny enough to know that the public is as easily diverted as a child and capable of attempting 105the trick when things are getting a bit out of hand?

Whether this is true or not, he certainly put an end to the ticklish situation in which the Conference found itself in Thanksgiving week. Everybody fell to discussing the proposition. Was the Conference really to end up in an Association of Nations? Did this mean that the United States would suggest to the delegates gathered at the Conference—all of them members of the League of Nations—that they scrap that institution? There had been much speculation in Geneva before the Washington Conference was called as to whether the intention was to force the League out of existence. So great was the anxiety of more than one European country to be in any congregation in which the United States figured, that it was pretty generally agreed that if such a proposition should be made it would be assented to. Was this Mr. Harding’s first feeler then toward substituting something 106of his own for the League? But this was only a speculation. Nobody could get from any official source any confirmation that Mr. Harding had anything definite in mind. And yet they were not unwilling to accept the notion that he had inadvertently thrown out so important a suggestion.

There were those who had an unamiable explanation. We are all human, they said. We must remember that this has ceased to be Mr. Harding’s conference. His fine sentiments on Armistice Day on the opening of the Conference had been greeted with loud acclaim the world over. But after he had opened the Conference he left the hall. Secretary Hughes appeared, and it was Secretary Hughes who stirred the world. From that time on, the Secretary had been the one man quoted. We have had great secretaries—Mr. Root, for instance, who never allowed his shadow to fall across that of the President of the United States. When Mr. Roosevelt was President, Mr. Root prepared some very remarkable state 107papers, but they always began “The President instructs me to say.” Mr. Hughes has been speaking for himself. It is quite possible, said these interpreters, that the President thinks the time has come to let the public know that, after all, it is he who occupies the White House.

I am quite sure that if this had been true, we should have had other evidence of it as time went on, but none came. Mr. Harding knew well enough that a successful Conference was in the long run his triumph. He knew well enough that the only man who could give him this success was Secretary Hughes. Possibly the wisest thing that Mr. Harding has yet done as President has been to let the members of his cabinet do their own work. Jealousy is not, I am sure, an explanation of Mr. Harding’s sudden introduction of an Association of Nations into the Conference on the Limitation of Armament. Was it to be found in M. Briand’s speech?

M. Briand did not convince his audience, 108as we have seen. That is, he did not bring it to the point at which he was aiming. But one thing that he did do was to bring into sharp relief the fact that land and naval armaments cannot be handled separately. They dovetail in the game of war, are mutually defensive and offensive; to cut the navy of a nation whose main defense is ships, without considering the relation of that cut to the size of the armies of those nations in which armies are the chief defense, is to leave an unbalanced situation.

A second realization went along with this, and that was that the scrapping and cutting by nine nations must be done with an eye to the actual or potential naval armaments of the other forty-five or so nations of the earth. Senator Schanzer had already suggested this in his speech made on November 15, accepting in principle for Italy the naval program. “I think it rather difficult,” he said, “to separate the question of Italian and French naval armament limitation from 109the general question of naval armaments of the world.”

M. Briand’s speech made one realize how France and Italy must consider possible continental alliances of powers that were not represented at this Conference; must consider a possible Russian crusade to convert the world by force to its gospel. And if France and Italy must, or thought they must, secure themselves against these possibilities, could England weaken herself disproportionately? When you began to consider the question of armament in terms of the world and not simply of nine nations, you could not if you were candid find any peaceful solution but by bringing everybody in—Germany, Turkey, Russia. Now it may be, though we do not know Mr. Harding well enough yet to say, that the logic of the experiences that the Conference had been through up to date laid hold of him and he said it like a man—“there is but one way out, and that is by One Big Union.”

Of course there is another explanation of 110why he did it and I rather think it may be the true one, after all. The President may have been hearing from the country. One thing that we do know about him is that he is a man who with almost religious care listens to the voices that come up to him from the people. And it was no secret that a multitude of them, strong and weak, had been calling to him in the weeks preceding—“conference,” “association,” “league,” “some method of carrying on in which everybody can join,” “in no other way can we hope for permanent peace.” It may be that Mr. Harding had heard so much of this that he felt he must reply. And if this was true, he did wisely.

We may lay it down as one of the great facts of the present international state of mind, that the world is intent on some sort of an association of nations. It is not set, so far as one can determine, on any particular covenant, though of course there is one to which some fifty nations of the world 111have subscribed and in which for some two years now they have been doing increasingly practical work in adjusting difficulties between nations. The very fact that the League of Nations lives—the divers ways in which its adventures in world unionism come to us—only makes the idea of association stronger in the minds of the peoples of the earth.

The Conference might limit armaments, naval and land, in the nine nations that were here gathered. It might make settlements of the Far Eastern questions, but there still would remain the rest of the world. It is a part of things. The world is one. It has come to a consciousness of its oneness. Nothing can dull that consciousness, stop the determination to realize it. Not Mr. Borah, not Mr. Lodge. Somehow we have got to learn to come together and stay together. Walt Whitman once said of Abraham Lincoln’s passion for the Union that unionism had become “a 112new virtue” with him,—a virtue like honesty, goodness, truthfulness. There is no manner of doubt that in the minds of this world unionism is coming to be regarded as a virtue; that the demand for its realization as the only road to world peace is becoming more and more universal.

Mr. Harding may have seen this. He may have gone over in his mind the steps that in the last twenty-five years—not to go back farther—the world has taken toward this—the steps at the Hague, the various peace conferences, the greatest of all experiments now making at Geneva—and he may have seen that he could no longer deny the demand of this people that he take another step toward the realization of this great hope. Whatever the reason, however, of his unexpected suggestion, it served the excellent purpose of turning the mind of the public to the fact that however complete the work of the Conference might be there would still be more to do if the world was to remain at peace.

113In the meantime the Conference itself was going steadily ahead. Everybody seemed cheerful. Everybody was cheerful. If the Conference had rocked on its base for a moment, it had come back to its position; and it was obvious enough, too, from all that one heard and saw, that there was going soon to be something definite and important to announce as a result of the work that was going on.

Who was the dramatist of the Conference on the Limitation of Armament? Mr. Hughes? I would never have believed it. I could never have conceived of his deliberately staging his diplomatic achievements with an appreciation of the time, the place and the world at large which was really amazing. It did not need Mr. Balfour’s delicate and humorous understanding to point out to those who were present at the opening on November 12 that the dramatic quality of Mr. Hughes’ great speech rivaled, if it did not outstrip, its splendid matter. But who would have believed that he would repeat himself? Yet he did it. Just four weeks from his first great coup he pulled 115off another that had every element of drama which characterized the first—and it had more—strains of genuine emotion and one scene of biting satire. (Not for a moment, however, do I believe that Mr. Hughes intended that.)

The surprise of the opening day of the Conference, November 12, lay in the unexpectedness of what Mr. Hughes had to say. The first surprise, of December 10, lay in the fact that there was to be a full session. It was not until nearly midnight of the 9th that it was announced. A few diners lingering late heard of it. The press of course was informed. But to most of us the news came when we opened our morning paper over our coffee—a full headline across the top of the page—

Of course we realized that it was going to be a big day. For days there had been hidden in the mists about the Conference something 116which those who were able to penetrate near to the center of things declared to be a treaty. Watching this treaty emerge was like watching a ship come out of a thick fog. There were warning signals, faint at first, but growing more and more distinct—the Anglo-Japanese pact was dying. If the United States wished it, it should go; and it was certain that the United States had for a long time wished it,—also Australia and other parts of the British Empire. Then we began to hear more and more from another direction—signals that had been sounded at intervals for weeks before the Conference convened. Japan was uneasy about the naval bases in the Pacific. She would like to have them dismantled. As one listened one began to understand that Mr. Hughes’ program of naval limitation would stay where it was until something had been done about both the Anglo-Japanese Pact and the Islands of the Pacific.

117The logic of the situation began to be clear. The fair-minded began to ask themselves, “Well, now, after all, how can we expect Japan to strip herself of ships, if she must, as seems to be inevitable, give up her understanding with England? How can we expect her to weaken her defenses and take no exception to the fortifications in the waters near her? She is the member of this Conference that is being asked to sacrifice until it hurts, and the only one. Is it fair to ask her to sacrifice without guarantees? Is there any way out but a treaty—a treaty in which we join?”

Moreover, if you ask her to sacrifice without a guarantee, will she do it? Not Japan. Thus it became more and more clear that the success of the naval program depended on some kind of a pact which would satisfy Japan that she could agree to what Mr. Hughes had asked and still have no reason to feel herself in danger.

The first definite black-faced, full-width-of-the-page 118headline came, as I remember, on December 5—“Four Power Entente to Replace Anglo-Japanese Alliance.” The morning after this bold announcement it was not quite so sure. The newspapers were keeping a line of retreat open. As they now put it: “Discussions of the proposals have reached a well-advanced stage,” none of the governments concerned had given final approval. There was enough that was sure, however, to give the wicked a chance to jeer at approaching “entangling alliances.”

By Friday, December 9, the most careful journals were saying, on what they declared to be the best sort of authority, that the United States was going into a pact with Japan and England and France, guaranteeing various things. There was considerable diversity in the assertions about what it guaranteed. Washington said nothing. The news came from all of the capitals of the powers concerned, except our own. It was 119evidently very hard for Washington to say “treaty.”

There was much entertaining gossip running around as to how Tokyo and London and Paris had been able to give the press the news of what was going to be done, while Washington was silent. One story was that a clever Japanese journalist had managed to get a glimpse of the document in preparation and had cabled what he had been able to make out of its contents to Tokyo; that from there it had gone to Paris and London and finally came here. That was one story. Another was a rather thin version of that old, old device of writers of diplomatic fiction—a lively and lovely lady lunches with an elderly diplomat, who, to win her favor, reveals the secret that is in the air. That evening she dines with a young journalist whom she naturally (and necessarily for the purpose of the plot) much prefers, and to prove her devotion she tells him what her elder suitor has revealed. Threadbare 120as the formula is, it was honored the week that the treaty was coming out of the fog by at least one important newspaper.

Mr. Hughes seems to have concluded by the end of Friday, the 9th, that unless he acted quickly his reputation for dramatic diplomacy might be shaken, and so the hasty summons, the thrill at the breakfast table, the quick readjustments of plans, the rush to make sure that your credentials were all right and your ticket waiting you.

From the beginning of the Conference, sun and air were in league with those who were staging it with such a sense of dramatic values. Never was there a morning of lovelier tenderness than that on which they carried the Unknown Soldier to his grave; Mr. Hughes’ big gun was fired under a perfect morning sky—it was only when we came out that things had grown stern and the clouds were dark, as if to give us a sense that a serious thing had been done that morning and it was well to get down to work, if it was to be made good.

121The morning of December 10 there was frost on all the Washington roof tops, the sky was clear, there was an air that put a spring in your heels and it was a joy to hurry down with the crowd to get your ticket; it put you in mood for something exciting, helped enormously the keen anticipation that stirred the town.

The scene in the Conference was what it had been at the three previous open sessions: each delegate in his place, the advisory board banked behind them, the boxes overflowing with ladies, the press in their usual seats, the House gallery even more amusing than on the opening day. It was quite full, for somehow the House had obtained permission to bring its family along, and there were many ladies sprinkled through the gallery. They made it more animated but not a whit more dignified in its behavior.

And then, on the tick of the hour, Mr. Hughes arose. What an orderly mind! A mind that must know where it is headed, 122how it is going to get there, the exact point it has reached at the given moment! He must know himself, and he never fails, when he presents his case, to make sure that you know. Again and again in his talks to the press he would carefully point out to the correspondents who were given to jumping to the future, running back to the past, wanting to know this or that that was not on the agenda by any stretch of the imagination, just what “the muttons” were in this particular Conference. “The agenda is our chart, here is where we have arrived to-day. We are moving in this or that direction. I shall have nothing to say about what we find when we arrive until we are there, then you shall know everything.” That is, Mr. Hughes did his utmost to keep the mind of press and public concentrated on the actual problem under his hand. He started the Plenary Conference of December 10 in the same fashion.

The session, he said, was to be devoted to that part of the agenda which concerned 123itself with the Pacific and Far Eastern questions. The committee charged with these questions had taken up first a consideration of China; certain conclusions in regard to China already given out to the public had been reached. It was the business of the full Conference, however, to assent to these conclusions. In turn, Mr. Hughes reviewed them, and in turn the Conference assented to them:

(1) The four resolutions which will go down in history as the Root resolutions; they are, as Mr. Hughes pointed out eloquently, a charter given China by the eight powers at this Conference, protecting her sovereignty and independence and guaranteeing that no one hereafter shall seek within China special advantages at the expense of the rights of others.

(2) The agreement between powers not to conclude between themselves any treaty affecting China without previously notifying China and giving her an opportunity to participate.

(3) A pledge given by all the members of the Conference not to enter into any treaty or understanding either with one another or with any power which would infringe the principles laid down in the Root resolutions.

This business done, Mr. Hughes sprang the second surprise of the day:

“I shall now ask Senator Lodge to make a communication to the Conference with respect to a 124matter which is not strictly within the agenda, but which should be made known to the Conference at this first opportunity.”

It was the treaty that had been lurking so long behind the fog. A simple enough treaty in form, brief, only 196 words, but how portentous for us, the United States. Those few words bind us to Great Britain, the French Republic, the Empire of Japan in a contract to respect one another’s rights in relation to all insular possessions and dominions in the region of the Pacific Ocean. We agree to settle quarrels, if any there should be, by conference, when it cannot be done by diplomacy. We agree also if the rights of any one of the four associates are threatened from the outside “to communicate with one another fully and frankly as to the most efficient measures to be taken jointly and separately to meet the exigencies of the particular situation.”

Article X of the League of Nations! I pinched myself to be sure I was not asleep. Swift glances right and left reassured me, 125for I could see sly little smiles—and some looks of disgust—on near-by faces. And then I fixed my eyes on the American delegation. They were taking it like gentlemen, though it did seem to me that Mr. Hughes was not sitting quite so straight and looking quite so proud as usual. Article X read by Henry Cabot Lodge! Was the dramatist for the Conference for the Limitation of Armament also a great satirist? Surely you must search far in American history to find another scene so full of irony.

Mr. Lodge read the treaty through in his fine, clear voice; digested it in a few simple words; followed it with a nice little literary talk on the romance that hangs over the isles of the Pacific, which we were protecting from all future aggressors; said some hard things about war, quite justified—but I was incapacitated for appreciating his eloquence, for all I could see was the United States climbing into the League of 126Nations through the pantry window, while Senator Lodge held up the sash.

But it was a fine climb for the United States!

In the week thus opened there followed more agreements, more settlements,—all necessary to round out the Four Power Pact. These were presented to the public not in open sessions of the Conference but through the press in what might be called private rehearsals. Standing at one end of the long audience room, opening from his own office in the State Department, a hundred or more newspaper folk of various nationalities, pressing close to him, Secretary Hughes read on Monday afternoon, December 12, the text of an arrangement with Japan concerning Yap, an arrangement hanging since last June and now settled and settled rightly by a fair give and take on both sides.

He followed this by reading the written consent of the United States to another chunk of the League of Nations. What it 127amounted to was that the United States agreed to the mandate given Japan by the Versailles Treaty over the islands in the Pacific north of the equator, late the property of Germany. The United States also accepted all the terms of the mandate as laid down by the League of Nations. Excellent terms they are, too. We are even to get a copy of the annual report of her stewardship which Japan, like all other League mandatories, is obliged to make, showing that she is really developing and not exploiting the territory which she is being allowed to administer. This was a good deal for one day!

What did it mean? Why, most important of all, that the delegates of the United States had seen that limitation of armament means sacrifice. It was unwillingness to sacrifice that had prevented the disarmament proposed at Paris.

England must have her navy; her security required it.

128France and Italy must have their armies; their security required it.

Each one of the little new nations that one would have supposed to have been so fed up on war that they never again would have been willing to spend a dollar on a soldier, must have their armies; their security required it.

Japan must have her army, her navy, her war loot; her security required it.

That is, no one of the allied nations was ready to make a sacrifice to carry out the plank of disarmament they had adopted. They insisted on applying the plank to the enemy they had beaten, but not to themselves. This was not in any large degree because of greed or revenge, it was because of fear—fear of the vanquished. There was utter lack of confidence in the plan of peaceful international coöperation which they had written into their program. Force alone spelt security in their minds. They had no sense of safety in a mere covenant, 129though all the nations of the world did commit themselves to its provisions.

It has been our boast that we alone asked nothing at Paris. But was this true? When it came to working out the code which the world had acclaimed as the true path to permanent peace, we refused to accept the one point on which all the rest hung; that for an association of nations looking to the continuous peaceful handling of international difficulties. Such an association we saw would invade our isolation and that isolation we have come to believe to be our chief security. That is, in essence, the United States was no more willing to make a sacrifice for permanent peace than were the distracted and disheveled nations of Europe. We and they all held on to the particular device which we had come by national experience to believe essential to safety—England her navy, France her army, Japan her army and her navy, we our freedom from entangling alliances.

130The Four Power Pact proved that we were willing to sacrifice something of our isolation—just how much the future would have to show. But would we be willing to sacrifice anything of our naval program? There had been rumors of changes asked by both England and Japan. The ugliest gesture seen in Washington in the early days of the Conference had greeted these rumors. We were not going to tolerate tampering with the great work. It must be accepted as it was laid down, and if it was not, we would build the biggest navy on earth; we had the money; moreover we would call our foreign loans and then we’d see!

Various rumors of objections to the naval program, now that it had gone to the committee for detailed examination, were said to have been made. There was a disturbing rumor that England wanted the submarine banished from the navies of the world, and that we flatly refused to consider a request which could not but be welcome 131to the mass of the country, anxious to see not only capital ships scrapped, as had been proposed on the opening day, but auxiliary craft of all sorts. The chief irritation, however, had been over Japan’s strenuous objection to doing away with the greatest of her ships—indeed, the greatest ship afloat, the Mutsu. It was just what we might have expected of Japan; her acceptation of the program at the opening of the Conference was a pretense. She was going to object at every point. What the public was still not realizing in regard to the Mutsu was that to Japan it had become a tremendous, almost sacred, symbol. It was a ship designed entirely by the Japanese naval architects, built of materials prepared by Japanese workmen, named for a beloved emperor. The delegation feared to consent to her destruction. So much national pride had been aroused by the great ship that to consent to her destruction might ruin the whole naval program with Japan.

132It was hard for Americans to understand any such feeling as this. We have little or no sentiment about any ship, big or little. They mean nothing to us but taxes. We don’t depend upon battleships for safety as an island nation does. There is Japan, a little land all told, Formosa and Korea included, not as large as the state of Texas, with a sea front of over 18,000 miles. Ships mean food, contacts, security to her. When we asked her to sacrifice them we must remember that we were asking much more of her than we were of ourselves though our ratio might have been larger. We must remember the world is not ruled simply by tons of material. Symbols weigh more with nations than tonnage. We could give up our ships without a sigh; but when Japan scrapped hers, something of her heart went with the scrapping.

So far as the Mutsu was concerned, the answer came three days after the agreement over Yap and the Caroline Islands had 133been made public. On the 15th of December, at six o’clock in the evening, Mr. Hughes staged one of his private rehearsals for the press. It was the decision as to the capital-ship ratio which had been so long expected and which had been settled on the basis that had been proposed on November 12—5–5–3. But, while the ratio had been kept, the details had been changed. Great Britain and the United States had had the good will and the wisdom to recognize that Japan’s feeling about the Mutsu was genuine.

One has only to read the revised agreement to understand what pains the two countries took to readjust the calculations of the United States in such a way that the desired ratio would be preserved and Japan’s pride and sentiment saved. When nations come to the point that they are willing to try to understand and to consider one another’s feelings as well as one another’s force, there is some hope for the peace of the world.

134There was no gainsaying the fact that the great triumph of this dramatic week was Japan’s. It was a legitimate triumph, honestly won. She understood what she gained. As the session of December 10 broke up, one of the ablest members of her delegation—a bitter critic of what had been doing—came out from the Conference hall with tears in his eyes, though they do say that no Japanese knows how to shed tears. “It is the greatest day in the history of the new world,” he said. And that was true,—if Japan would now be as generous toward the rights and aspirations of her great neighbor China as she had been tenacious of her own safety and dignity. The world had recognized her power and her diplomatic skill. Would she now win its confidence in her moral integrity?

But if December 10 was the beginning of Japan’s week of triumph, it was Mr. Balfour’s day. He made a little speech which will stick long in the minds of those who heard it.

135“It so happens,” said Mr. Balfour, “that I was at the head of the British administration which twenty years ago brought the great Anglo-Japanese Alliance into existence. It so happens that I was at the head of the British Administration which brought into existence an entente between the British Empire and France, and through all my life I have been a constant, ardent and persistent advocate of intimate and friendly relations between the two great branches of the English-speaking race.

“You may well conceive, therefore, how deep is my satisfaction when I see all these four powers putting their signatures to a treaty which I believe will for all time insure perfect harmony of coöperation between them in the great region with which the treaty deals.”

That little speech gave one a clearer sense of what through all these years Arthur Balfour has been doing than anything that ever has before come to me. There is something supremely brave about a man of such 136fine understanding, such humorous and distinguished cynicism, standing by through all of the disillusions, disgust, deceptions, forced evil choices of public life, never quitting whatever the temptation. For forty years now Arthur Balfour has stood by. He is, I believe, 73 years old. He has never had so much reason in all his long political career to believe that the good will of men can be mobilized for the world’s service.

It was a great week, noble in its undertaking, dramatic in its planning, the just triumph of a people who know what they want and are willing to wait to get it. And for us, America, it was a week of brave deeds. We were coming to our senses, realizing that we are of the world, and if we are to enjoy its fruits, we must bear our share of its burdens; that if we would have peace, the surest way is to use our strength and our good will to guarantee it.

If we are to succeed in repairing this battered world through the medium of the International Conference, then plainly it is the business of us all to try to understand the methods, the conduct and particularly the moods of this instrument of peace. It is as temperamental as a stock exchange. The Washington Conference began with a period of tremendous exultation. Mr. Hughes’ great naval program lifted the world. For ten days this mood prevailed. Then came the French in the person of their Prime Minister, Briand, and in an hour he had the temple of peace rocking on its base.

It was very interesting to see how the 138men who made up the Conference went steadily ahead from ten to six every day—and sometimes longer—in spite of the excitement M. Briand had stirred up. It was a fine example of the stabilizing effect of a daily task regularly followed. They went on for four weeks and then again stirred the world to enthusiasm by their Four Power Pact; their removal of the Yap irritation; their consent to the Japanese mandate in the Pacific; their acceptance of the Five-Five-Three naval ratio. At one swoop the war with Japan that a part of the American public has so sedulously cultivated for a good term of years was wiped off the map—unless the United States Senate prefer to restore it to its position.

However, the naval program was not a fact accomplished until France and Italy had consented to a ratio. That was the next step, and Mr. Hughes seemed to have turned to it with the utmost confidence—1.75 was the ratio he had fixed on as proper; then suddenly, without any warning, 139the soaring stock of the Conference dropped way below par. A British journalist, with more love of sensation than the honor of his profession, announced that the French had told the naval committee that France wanted to build ten 35,000 ton ships. The effect of those numbers suddenly thrown on a table where the figuring for weeks had been down, not up, was more nearly to throw the Conference delegates off their feet than anything that had happened to date. There was no questioning their dismay, for while Mr. Balfour and Mr. Hughes refused, as it was proper for them to do, to discuss the matter, while the French likewise kept their mouths shut, and complained that they had been betrayed, Mr. Hughes showed his excitement by a long cablegram, appealing to M. Briand, over the head of the then acting chief of the French delegation, M. Sarraut. Outside the Conference an excited world declared the whole thing was wrecked and that France had wrecked it.

Could this unhappy incident have been 140avoided? If the Conference had shown a more sympathetic understanding of the way France is feeling to-day, if there had been the realization which we certainly should expect of the effect of calling her into a gathering of this kind and then letting her Premier sit for a week with practically no attention, it probably would have been. When M. Briand was leaving the Conference on the opening day an American journalist asked him what he thought of it. The American way, he said, “à la Américaine.” And then he went on to remark that when the time came France would do like Mr. Hughes and talk in the American way. Weeks went on and France had no chance to talk in anybody’s way about her naval ratio. Everybody else but herself seems to have taken it for granted that 1.75 was to be her proportion. When her turn finally came, however, she began to hurl capital ships at Mr. Hughes’ program—ten of them, 35,000 tons each. The figures looked appalling, 141preposterous—they produced, as I have said, almost a panic. Now, obviously, the panic would have been avoided, as far as the public is concerned, if the matter had been kept in committee where it belonged and where the French intended to keep it. Given to the public, it stirred up anger on both sides of the water, whipped up suspicion, set all the busybodies at inventing far-fetched explanations and reading sinister meanings into the French proposal.

There was little trouble when Mr. Hughes appealed to M. Briand in getting the capital-ship ratio dropped back to the 1.75 first suggested. But along with this concession in the matter of capital ships went the decision that France would not limit her submarines and auxiliary craft. She wanted unlimited submarines for defense—defense against whom? It must be us, said England. She wanted auxiliary craft for the protection of scattered colonies. Here she took her position and here she remained. 142Mr. Hughes’ naval program leaves the number of submarines and light craft a nation builds at its discretion. Too bad—could it have been avoided?

One thing seems quite certain, that Mr. Hughes missed a tremendous opportunity in not boldly declaring in his original program that as for the United States, it was done with submarines. We did that at Paris in 1919. The head of our delegation, President Wilson, and his naval advisers agreed that in the disarmament pledged by the League of Nations the submarine was one weapon which could and should be put entirely out of existence. Its record of cowardice and plain murder no one could defend. The treaty of Versailles forbade the Germans to construct submarines for any purpose, and it certainly was the farthest from the thought of the majority of those who made that treaty that they were laying down one rule for Germany and another for themselves. The idea there was to disarm and to begin with Germany.

143Why the American delegation should not have followed that policy here in regard to the submarine is not clear. But when it was not done in the opening program, it is still less understandable why they did not seize the British suggestion when it was made by Mr. Balfour. The British had the American program for naval reduction flung into their faces without warning, and they picked it up like wonderful sports, as did the Japanese. But when Mr. Balfour notified the Conference that he should propose complete abolition of the submarine, there was no such response. There were not a few of us who had an uncomfortable chill over the Washington Conference when our government failed promptly to follow the British in this policy, failed to say, “Yes, we are with you, it’s beastly business this submarine warfare—one thing we can do away with. We will join you in outlawing it.” But this was not done, and because it was not done, coupled with France’s determination to seize every chance that came 144along to secure recognition for herself, to enforce her argument that she must be prepared to defend herself, since nobody in the world seemed prepared to give her the guarantees which she thought necessary, if she were to disarm, the submarine came in to trouble Mr. Hughes’ program, and, incidentally, to spoil the Conference’s holiday week.

The regret was the greater because the arguments that Lord Lee and Mr. Balfour had put up for the abolition of the submarine were so weighty and conclusive that if they could have been presented at the start, or at least earlier in the negotiations, there seems to be little doubt that they would not have won over the Conference. These arguments have the backing of Great Britain’s experience with submarines, the most serious and extensive experience that any nation has yet had with this particular weapon. Lord Lee and Mr. Balfour had the facts to show that the German submarine 145fleet was able to accomplish relatively little in the Great War in the way of legitimate naval warfare. It left the British Grand Fleet untouched. In spite of all its efforts, it did not prevent the British taking fifteen million troops across the English Channel, and the Americans two million across the Atlantic. It was of little use to the British in guarding their coast line, which, as Lord Lee pointed out, was almost as great as the combined coast line of the four other powers in the discussion. What the German submarine fleet did do, however, was to destroy some twelve million tons of mercantile shipping and murder twenty thousand non-combatants—men, women and children. The counter defense against the submarine has been so developed, Lord Lee claimed, that an attacking fleet could be equipped to resist any number of them. That is, the methods of detecting, locating and destroying submarines have greatly outstripped their offensive power.

146One of the strong arguments for the abolition of the submarine is the fact that it is possible to abolish it by general consent. Its case is very different from that of poison gas, which is a by-product of essential industries. You do not need to set out to find poison gasses; they come to you in the natural course of chemical research, and they do not have to be manufactured until you are forced to do it for defense. Moreover, they have the enormous advantage of not looking like war. They are disgusting, hateful things against which man instinctively revolts. They do not tempt the adventurous, as the submarine does.

Although the French particularly, through Admiral le Bon and M. Sarraut, did their utmost to combat the British position, their arguments had little weight in comparison with the British. The entire discussion which ran more than a week and which was given out day by day practically in full to the press only emphasized my feeling 147that the French, in insisting on a fleet of submarines all out of proportion to that contemplated in the original American program, were actuated more by a desire to assert themselves in this council of nations, to demonstrate that it is not safe to overlook their susceptibilities, than from any desire to have submarines for defense. If the representatives of the United States are to work successfully with other nations in international conferences, they must learn that diplomats can no more afford to overlook the feelings of other nations than an engineer can afford to overlook the susceptibilities of the iron and steel which he employs. France’s acute sensitiveness, her black imaginations, may irritate Americans who know nothing of invaded and devastated territory, who have not had to sit through five long years with the sound of bursting shells continually in their ears; but if they have not the imagination and the sympathy to tell them what the results 148of such an experience are, then let them accept the judgment of physicians and realize that in whatever negotiations they have with the French people at this time, their shell-shocked minds and souls must be taken into account.

Mr. Hughes lost a second great opportunity in the submarine matter. A few days before Christmas, when it became obvious that the submarine was in danger of destroying the American delegation’s plans for a glorious Christmas present to the nation, Mr. Balfour asked for an open session in which to discuss the matter. For some reason not at all clear, Mr. Hughes did not consent. Our Secretary of State proved himself a superior dramatist at the Conference, but in this instance a poor psychologist! If there was to be no holiday, as had become clear, then an open session with a chance to hear Mr. Balfour, Lord Lee, M. Sarraut, Admiral le Bon, Senator Schanzer, in the free discussion of a matter in which 149the whole country was tremendously interested—such an open session would have been a Christmas present in itself, and it would have done much to have cleared up the thick atmosphere.

In these conferences the atmosphere easily becomes heavy with suspicion. The sight of a group of eminent gentlemen of various nationalities shutting themselves up morning after morning, for hours, considering matters which concern the peace and happiness of the world, if too long continued, stirs up resentment in the best of us. If you are an impersonal, detached, philosophical, fairly well-informed person, it is not difficult for you to visualize what those gentlemen are doing; if you take the trouble you can even build up in your mind what they are saying. Suppose it is a question of the ratio of capital ships. You know that they are listening to disputes over tonnage and the way it has been computed, are studying long arrays of figures, matters dull 150in themselves and requiring the closest attention. Most of us would not remain a half hour, unless we were compelled to when such discussions were going on. But if you are a suspicious person, if you have been trained in the cynical school of sensational journalism, to look for mischief and intrigue—and often it must be confessed finding it—you have dark thoughts about the gentlemen.

The only way in which such suspicions can be cleared up—or better, prevented,—is by frequent open sessions and much freer discussion at those sessions than we had at the Conference for Limitation of Armament. Some of the Americans prominent in the Conference have in the last two years frequently criticized the secrecy with which the Paris Conference was conducted but there was very little difference in the procedure from that in Paris. The work there as here was done in committees. There as here there were daily communications to the 151press. They were more satisfactory here, fuller, but that was made possible by the fact that the situation here was far less complicated and by the rigor with which Mr. Hughes kept one thing at a time on the table. As for the press conferences, in Paris as here they were held daily by the Americans and frequently by all of the other delegations. Nobody in Paris, of course, was so satisfactory to the press as Mr. Hughes. His candor, his good humor, his out-and-out, man-to-man conduct of his daily meeting cannot be too highly praised. He has set a pace for this sort of thing very hard to follow. There was no American in Paris in a position to do for the press what Mr. Hughes did in Washington. President Wilson had not the time. The other members of the delegation were not in Mr. Hughes’ position. Nobody else in our delegation here would have had the authority, even if he had had the ability, to do what Mr. Hughes did. The difference here and in 152Paris was mainly a difference of situation—the difference between an infinitely difficult and complicated situation and a comparatively well defined and definite one.

Mr. Hughes himself was partly responsible for the resentment that the press felt at the failure to follow Mr. Balfour’s suggestion and conduct the submarine discussion in the open. Any one who took the pains to read the text of these discussions as they were printed in the leading journals of the country, can see how well adapted they were to a public meeting. There was nothing in them that would jeopardize any nation; there was much in them that would have been illuminated, its impression intensified, if it could have been heard instead of read. Mr. Hughes in his talk of these discussions to the correspondents was actually tantalizing. When he walked briskly into his press conference at the end of a long committee discussion and told a hundred and more men and women gathered 153around him what an intellectual treat it had been, of how Mr. Balfour had been in his best form, of how lively the exchange had been between French and English, his snapping eyes, his appreciative voice, his glow of enthusiasm, were actually antagonizing. He overlooked entirely the fact that he was making more than one in the assembly say: Selfish man, don’t you suppose that we would have enjoyed seeing and hearing Mr. Balfour in his best form? Is there anything at this Conference that we would have liked so much, except of course hearing you? Do you think we are going to be satisfied with your promise that we shall have full reports of all that was said?

I know very well that it is not considered good form to use the words League of Nations in connection with the Conference on the Limitation of Armament, and no offense is intended—but if one is really interested in trying to decide just how much publicity is wise in such a conference as this, any experience 154of other similar bodies should be considered, and after all it cannot be denied that the assembly of the League of Nations is a similar body to this, the chief difference being that it includes some fifty nations instead of nine. At the second meeting of the assembly of the League last fall, lasting four and a half weeks, there were 33 plenary conferences. One cannot say that the matters under consideration there were less delicate and dangerous than in Washington. They were even more inflamed at the moment, including such open irruptions as the boundary dispute between Jugo-Slavia and Albania.

It was not only Mr. Hughes’ naval program that was seeing heavy weather; the Four Power Pact was in trouble. The President did not agree with the American delegation that the mainland of Japan was covered by the treaty. For my part I had never questioned that when this Four Power Pact talked about insular dominions as 155well as insular possessions it meant what it said, and that Nippon as well as Australia and New Zealand was included. Moreover, Mr. Hughes had repeatedly told the press that was the intention. There seems, however, to have been doubts in some minds, and when finally twelve days after the Pact itself was submitted and accepted by the full Conference, an insistent journalist presented Mr. Harding at his biweekly press meeting with a written question. (The President was now requiring all questions at these gatherings to be submitted in writing.) He remarked in his casual manner, “No, the Japan mainland is not included in the treaty.” To be sure he took it back that night in a public document, but here was food for the trouble makers—a disagreement in the cabinet! All of those who, while loudly declaring themselves advocates of peace, were doing their utmost to belittle the efforts of the responsible, to magnify differences in interpretation, to fan partisan 156jealousies, to read in intrigue and deceit and concealment where there was usually nothing worse than blundering or stupidity, declared with satisfaction or despair that the Conference was now surely wrecked. Joined to the cry of anguish that was rising over the failure to limit the submarine and auxiliary craft, the chorus was dismal enough.

Little by little, however, events shut off the pessimists. For instance, one of the “intrigues” that had been brought to light was that Japan and France had combined on the submarine issue, and were lining up in the Conference against England and America. But Japan destroyed that fine morsel, declaring formally that she felt it would be a misfortune if the Conference failed to come to an agreement on limitation; that she supported the original American proposal of November 12 in regard to auxiliary craft and hoped that agreement would be reached on that basis.

She followed this quieting information by 157an announcement that she did not consider it consistent with her dignity as one of the four powers to accept any special protection, and that she therefore asked that the Four Power treaty be amended so as to exclude her mainland.

Even the submarine became less threatening as the discussion went on. If it was not to be limited in number, it was in field of action—so far as a rule of war could limit. If auxiliary craft were to be built according to the “needs” of each nation, their tonnage was not to run over 10,000 tons each and their guns were to be but eight inch. Add this to the ratio in capital ships now fixed—5–5–3—1.75—1.75—and to a ten years’ naval holiday, and you had a solid something.

One grew philosophical again and reflected how childish it was to suppose that a Conference of this importance could be carried on without sharp differences of opinion, without those periods which we call 158“deadlocks,” without the flaring up at times of century-old feuds, such as that between Great Britain and France. All of these things, we told ourselves, were part of the problem of working out new understandings, and to overemphasize them or willfully to exploit them in order to increase ill will and obstruct a progress which was necessarily slow and difficult, was work fit only for the irresponsible and the malicious.

The naval program was certain of adoption. There were details still unsettled, but it seemed safe to assume that if the patience and good will of the delegates stood the strain, these details would be satisfactorily arranged; but, as from the start, the final success of the Conference depended upon removing the fears that England, Japan and the United States had of one another, of our securing reasonable assurance that our policies of the open door in China and of moral trusteeship for Russia and China were adopted. We had proposed a pact and 159it had been accepted; principles regarding China and they had been accepted; but this was by no means all of the Far Eastern problem. By Christmas we were at the heart of it—the hostile relations of China and Japan, and whether it was possible to help them to peacefully adjust these relations.

A shrewd, reflective and cynical doorman with whom I sometimes discussed affairs of state in Washington, confided to me on one of the busy days just before the opening of the Conference on the Limitation of Armament that in his judgment there was a peck of trouble about to be turned loose on the American Government.

“Take them Japs and Chinamen,” he said, “they’re coming with bags of problems, and they’re going to dump them on us to sort and solve! And to think we brought it on ourselves!”

There were people nearer to the administration than this anxious observer who said the same thing. “The Far East is a 161veritable Pandora’s box, and why did we open it?”

I don’t remember ever to have seen in Washington, even in war times, so many responsible people who gave me the impression of wanting to hold their heads to keep them from splitting.

Of one thing there was no doubt—if the troubles that were to be loosed on the Conference were as serious as these serious observers feared, it was better that they be out than in the box, for they were of a nature that, confined, would be sure to explode, but give them time and they might dissolve under the healing touch of light, sun and air.

But why were there people close to things in Washington aghast at the program of the Conference, people who two months before had looked forward to it with confidence and even exultation? No doubt this was explained partly by the realization that cutting down armaments did not necessarily 162mean long-continued peace; that there must be settlements. When they looked over the problems to be settled, attempted to put themselves in the place of the people concerned, find solutions through agreements which did not require force behind them, they were appalled at the difficulties in the way.

Put the problems which disturbed them into their simplest terms:—Japan could not get enough food on her six big and her 600 little islands for her 60,000,000 people. She was spilling over into China and its dependencies—not merely as a settler, content to till the soil, to work the mines, to sell in the market place, but as an aggressive conqueror, aspiring to military and political control as well as economic opportunity.

China—that is, Young China, the founder of the Republic—said she would not have it, that she must govern and administer her own, and we, China’s friend, were backing the integrity she demanded. But Japan was 163“in China”—“in” as was Great Britain and France. She had an army and navy to back her pretensions and she could very well say—and did—“Why should Great Britain and France be allowed to hold their political and military control in Hongkong and in Tonkin, raise and train troops, not of their own people but of natives, collect taxes, run post offices, and we be forbidden? If they do these things, and they do, why should Japan not have equal privileges?”

Young China answered this pertinent inquiry: “It was Old China that arranged those things. You are dealing now with a new China, one that does not intend to barter its inheritance, that proposes to rule its own; a China that will no longer submit to having a carving knife applied to its heart.

“What Old China did we inherited and must make the best of, but it is our duty to see that no nation on earth ever again takes from us what we do not willingly give. You 164must abandon your effort to direct our policies, administer our railroads, keep your troops on our soil.”

What frightened my doorkeeper, who got his views from the press, and the press that got its views from a hundred conflicting sources, was how peacefully Japan’s right to food for her people and China’s right to her own were to be squared. Could the one inalienable right be fitted into the other inalienable right by other means than force? Of course there were many places on the earth beside China where Japan might expand, but search as they would these anxious observers did not find any available spot except in Asia.

One of the chief occupations of these friends of mine in Washington as the peace conference opened was trying to find some territory from which Japan could get her food; something the Conference could “give” her; something that would satisfy her. As things now are such a search must 165start with the provision that there is nothing for Japan on the Western Hemisphere. Obviously there is no place for her in Europe. Australia will not have her; we will not have her.

“If it were a question of war or restricted immigration,” I asked a Californian in the course of the Far Eastern discussion, “which would you choose?” The look of surprise at the question answered me—“War.” I received the same reply from a Canadian—from an American labor leader—and they were all “pacifists”!

The narrower the confines were drawn around Japan, the more hysterical observers grew in their search, the more they insisted the Conference must “give” Japan something. “Give it Eastern Siberia!” But what right did the Conference have to deal with any part of Siberia? The United States had finally settled her attitude to this suggestion by declaring that she would not consider any partitioning of Russian 166territory. She refused to countenance the carving up of Russia as she did the further carving up of China. She refused even to recognize the government that was now struggling to plant itself in Eastern Siberia. It was Russia’s problem to take care of the Far Eastern Republic. She must be free, as China must be free, to work out her own destiny.

Then “give” Japan Manchuria! She already had important recognized rights in Southern Manchuria, rights that came from old wars; the territory borders on Korea which Japan holds and governs, and undoubtedly the Conference would not dispute her claim to Korea, since that claim stands on about the same kind of a bottom as England’s claim to Hongkong and France’s to Tonkin. It was the fruit of the nation’s dealing with Old China. This being so and Japan having her established hold in Southern Manchuria and having made a remarkable record, give her the country.

167But here came Young China again. “Manchuria is ours,” she said. “We will not recognize the rights that Japan claims through her treaty made in 1915. It really was a treaty with Old China, still alive in our Republic. It was wrested from us by cunning and bribery. There are twenty million Chinese in Manchuria. They have made that province grow more rapidly in wealth in recent years than any other part of the land. They are converting the wilderness, raising such a crop of soy beans as no other part of the earth has ever seen. We propose to stand by our people. We cannot give Manchuria to Japan, nor can we give her Mongolia. Here, too, our people are good, patient, hardy settlers, peacefully converting the wilderness. True, there are great tracts still untouched, but remember that we have surplus millions, and it is here that we expect them to expand.”

What set my doorman and many serious 168onlookers to holding their heads was that they could not find a place to put Japan; that is, a place to which she would not have to fight her way.

But what are they doing in the search of the earth for something to “give” her? Was it anything but following the old formula that has always gone with wars? Was war anything but a necessary corollary to this way of dealing with the earth’s surface? No nation or group of nations ever has or will give away without its consent the property of another nation without sowing trouble for the future.

Races must settle their own destinies. Japan must settle her food problem by war or by peace, and whether it was to be by the one or by the other depended largely upon Young China. What did Young China think about it? Not a hasty, violent Young China, expecting to convert its great masses in an hour to the Republican form of government that came into being ten 169years ago, but a moderate Young China, that has stayed at home, that knows its people, that is conscious of the length of time, the patience, the sacrifices, the pain that adapting the mind of China to a new order requires.

What did this moderate Young China think about the relation of Japan to itself? I looked him up and asked.

He made it quite clear that the Republic had come to stay. He did not attempt to minimize its difficulties. He did claim, however, that whatever the surface indications, the whole Yangtze Valley, which is the very heart of the country, is committed to the Republic, and is coöperating with it. He gave a hundred indications of how from this great central artery running east and west democratic influences are surely and steadily spreading north and south. He showed how in the northern provinces the progress was slowest, most difficult, because here conservatism was strongest, most corrupt. 170He pointed out how Old China is concentrating in the Peking government all its cunning, its wisdom, its appeal to the old thing, but he claimed, and unquestionably believed, that Young China was going to be too much for it. He went over the southern provinces and showed how in all of them, except Canton, there was a steadily improving coöperation with the Peking government.

Moderate Young China thinks Canton is wrong in its haste. He does not believe that the people can assimilate the new ideas as rapidly as Canton claims. He believes that its hurry to make over a great country is one of the most dangerous factors in the nation’s present problem. To sustain, guard, and develop the struggling Peking government is his program.

“We are quarreling, to be sure,” moderate Young China said, “but it is our quarrel. We are like brothers who have fallen to beating one another—let a neighbor interfere 171and both turn on him. China will turn on any nation or nations that attempt to coerce her. She alone can work out her difficulties. She can work out best her disputes with Japan, and if let alone, will do so.”

“Of course,” continued Young China, “Japan must resign control of Shantung, and particularly of the Shantung railroad. Look at the map and you will understand why. If Japan controls the Shantung railroad she can at any moment cut our main rail communication between Peking and Shanghai, destroy the main artery of our circulatory system. She can do more than that. By that control she will be able to cut off the two arteries across the mainland, the Yellow River and the Yangtze. No government in its senses could permit that.

“Nor can we consent to her political and military control, either, in Shantung or Manchuria. But that does not mean, as some people pretend, that we want to drive 172Japan from our country. No intelligent Chinaman does. We need the Japanese to help us open and develop our resources, to buy our raw material; and Japan needs our market in which to sell. We are willing she should have the fullest economic privileges if she will cease to interfere with our policies and will withdraw her troops.

“If she will coöperate with us on an economic basis purely and simply Young China will welcome Japan and there are liberal Japanese that will do that. It is only Military Japan, believing in progress by force, that threatens us.”

“How are you going to carry out your program? How enforce it?”

“The economic boycott,” he said. “It has been successful so far. We’ll neither buy of Japan nor sell to her until she gives up her pretensions.”

There is something tremendous in the idea of that great passive three hundred and twenty-five million or more, the greatest 173single market on earth, and Japan’s natural market, passing by on the other side, leaving the goods untouched on docks and warehouses—but they do it. There are children of China who will refuse a toy to-day if told it was made in Japan, will go hungry rather than eat Japanese food, so they told me, these ardent young Chinamen.

“But if Japan insists on her demands, turns her navy on you?” I asked.

“Ah, then,” said trustful Young China, “our great friend the United States will take a hand. She will not permit Japan to force us.”

This confidence in America’s friendship was China’s strongest card at the peace table. For over sixty years we have been her avowed protector—ever since in 1858 we signed the quaintly worded compact: “They (the United States and China) shall not insult or oppress each other for any trifling cause so as to produce an estrangement between them, and if any other 174nation should act unjustly or oppressively, the United States will exert their good offices on being informed of the case to bring about an amicable arrangement of the question, thus showing their friendly feeling.”

Faith in the protection of the United States has worked its way far inland, to the very sources of the Yellow and the Yangtze rivers. I am told that many Chinamen in those distant places who never have looked on a white face will point to the Stars and Stripes and say “our friend.”

According to moderate Young China’s view of the case, the work of the Conference on the Limitation of Armament was to persuade Japan that her real economic progress lay in giving up the political and military privileges in China which she believes are fairly hers, as spoils of the late war, and to accept full opportunities of “peaceful penetration”—persuade if possible, force if not!

There was no question of where sympathy 175lay at the opening of the Conference—it was with moderate Young China. Sympathy for her and suspicion for Japan—this showed in a catlike watchfulness of Japan’s every move, particularly by the newspaper correspondents.

As a rule, newspaper people are instinctively suspicious. It seems sometimes to be the pride of the profession, and a smart characterization of a suspicion has almost the value of a scoop. There was an instance at the opening of the Conference, just after the naval program was announced, when Ambassador Shidehara fell ill of intestinal trouble. It had been announced that Japan could make no reply to the naval program until she had communicated with Tokyo, and somebody remarked brilliantly that the Baron’s illness was probably a “congestion of the cables.” As a matter of fact it turned out that the poor Baron was seriously ill, but the phrase stuck.

At the first press conference given by 176Admiral Baron Kato there was another evidence of this instinct. An interpreter translated the questions of the correspondent to the Admiral who replied in his native tongue, a delightfully musical voice; you could hardly believe you did not understand him, so understandable did his words sound. Once or twice Baron Kato did not wait for the interpreter to repeat the English question to him, but gave his answer at once in Japanese. Instantaneously there ran around the big circle of men the signal “He understands English.” Any one who has had any experience with a foreign language knows that often one does understand, but cannot speak; moreover, one understands when the question is simple but cannot follow it when involved. The point is simply here, that the moment Baron Kato showed he understood any English, the guards of the men were up. He was a Jap and must be watched. That is, Japan came to the Washington Conference 177handicapped by the suspicion of the American press and public, while China came strong in our good will.

Was there anything to be said for Japan? I had believed so a long time, but felt that my impressions were treasonable, so contrary were they to the expressed judgment of practically all of my liberal and radical friends—many of them knew vastly more than I did about the Far East—and to the feeling of the general public as I caught it in the press and in conversation. My treason consisted in thinking that although, as a matter of fact, Japan had been doing a variety of outrageous things, if you compared her operations with those of most of us, there was little reason to make a scapegoat of her. I have been impressed often in the last three years that there were a good many people trying to help China by crying down Japan—a practice that has played a mischievous part in history. I felt that we were not giving Japan the fair deal we 178should, even if we had no other object than aiding China. The books I read, the observers from the Far East with whom I talked, almost invariably were partisan in their attack. They liked one and did not like the other. Everything that one did was understandable and excusable; everything that the other did was oppressive and inexcusable.

The Japanese had not been long at the Washington Conference, however, before their stock began to rise. The delegation was the most diligent, serious, modest body at the Conference, and so very grateful for every kind word! The contrast between the Chinese and Japanese delegations was striking. Nothing more modernized in manner and appearance, democratized in speech, gathered in Washington than the Chinese. They looked, talked, acted like the most sophisticated and delightful of cultivated Europeans. They understood and practiced every social amenity—suave, 179at home, frank, gay—I have never encountered anything more socially superior than some of the young Chinese. The two delegations were perfectly characterized by a woman friend of mine familiar with both peoples—“The Chinese look down on everybody; the Japanese look up to everybody.” That was the impression. But when it came to diplomacy, the Chinaman was the aristocrat begging favors, the Japanese the plebeian fighting for his rights.

The Japanese seemed to have felt that possibly there might be some intent on the part of their Western brothers to throw them out of China and go in themselves. We cannot blame Japan for such a thought if we review her experience with the West in the last twenty-five years. She was forced into Korea, after China had agreed with her to jointly suppress disorders if they broke out and both of them to withdraw when there was no longer need for their work. It was China’s refusal to abide 180by the treaty of 1885 that led Japan into war and that brought her, as a result of that war, Formosa, the Pescadores, Liaotung, with Port Arthur and Dalny. We all remember—that is, those of us living then—how only a few days after the treaty with China which gave Japan these territories the Czar stepped in and told Japan that he would “give her a new proof of his sincere friendship” by taking over Liaotung. There was nothing for Japan to do but accept the offer.

Pretty nearly all Europe at once proceeded, as everybody remembers, to give China and Japan further “proofs of sincere friendship.” Germany took over Kiaochow; England, Weihaiwei; France, Kwang chowwan. This is only a little over twenty years ago.

It was Russia’s obvious effort to get Japan out of Korea that caused the Russo-Japanese war, a war which amazed the world by its result, put Japan on the map, 181very possibly turned her head a bit. She had been studying the West, and the remarkable thing about this country which we call imitative, in studying it she had learned not only its power but its weakness. She had accepted its militarism at its full face value, but she had quickly put her finger on the weak spots in the militarism of different nations. She had seen how corruption, bribery, self-indulgence had weakened the militarism of Russia; she saw how the half-heartedness of France and England in war weakened them, how liberalism and pacifism undermined militarism; she saw how Germany had the pure science and undivided devotion, and she took Germany as her model. And then in 1914 her great chance came. She did exactly what the Prussian would have done if he had been in her place. She joined the strong, her great ally, England, against Germany, for Germany had possessions in China which Japan coveted. She out-Prussianized Prussia in 182the demands she made upon the corrupt and unstable Peking crowd. There is no shadow of defense for the twenty-one demands, except the defense that she was applying the lessons that she had learned from Russia, from Germany—lessons which she had seen applied, in a modified form, it is true, but still in a form by England and by the United States in the Philippines.

I could never forget all this in Paris. Japan came to the Conference peace table with her treaties—read them in that invaluable compilation of treaties which John McMurray has made and the Carnegie Peace Foundation published. England there sets down her approval; France sets down her approval; they promise the German rights in Shantung to Japan when the treaty shall be made; they promise her the Caroline Islands and the other island possessions of Germany north of the equator. This is all written down in the books, and this was what faced President Wilson when the matter 183of Shantung was taken up. What were England and France to do? England had gone into a war and we had followed her, largely, so we both claimed, because a treaty had been regarded as a scrap of paper. Were you now to treat other treaties as scraps of paper?

Italy would not have it so. She held France and England to their war promises. And when President Wilson balked, she left the peace table.

One of the things that interested me most in Paris was that Japan never left the peace table. She was apparently willing to trade anything to get that recognition of racial equality denied her, so far as one can make out, because she is so able, not at all because she is an inferior. She hung on, and by the sheer strength of her position, her refusal, whatever she got or did not get to quit the game, came out with a recognition, partial at least, of what may be correctly called her nefarious demands.

184And then she found herself with a whole world jumping on her back. She had played the Western game and the West despised her. I could not help feeling in Paris that Japan must have been bewildered a little by the contradictions of the Occident she had tried so faithfully to follow. She saw the doctrine of force she had accepted grappling with the gospel of the brotherhood of man. There are many who think that the brotherhood got the worst of it in Paris. That gospel was driven into the world as never before there. More people were committed to it than ever before. More people realized that it is a power that you must count with in the affairs of nations as well as of individuals. More people accepted it and tried to get together to make it a practical reality. Japan herself bowed before the power of this spirit before she left Paris. She never gave up more because of it than she felt she must, but she gave up rather than quit the game. She was learning. She has been learning ever since. She has never 185stayed away from any international attempt to bring order to the world. She has had a bevy of her people at every meeting of the League of Nations. She has taken an active part in the work of all of its commissions. In 1919 Japan had eighty-seven delegates at the International Labor Conference held in Washington, and those delegates accepted the radical program there adopted. Japan means to understand the Occident; and she is making the same valiant attempt to ally herself with the best of the Occident that before the war she made to ally herself with the worst.

What we have to remember is that Japan is, like all nations to a degree, a dual nation; there are two Japans—the one clinging to the old militaristic, autocratic notion of government, the other struggling to understand and realize the meaning of a united, coöperating world in which each man and each nation shall have a chance at peaceful, prosperous living.

The most difficult problems with which the Conference for the Limitation of Armament had to deal were those centering about China. We wanted China to have her own. We wanted her to be let alone, to run her government to suit herself, to be free from exploitation, duress, intrigues. As a people we wanted this very much. We came as near being sentimental over China as one nation can be over another. We like the Chinese as a people. We would like to see them as sanitary as they are friendly, as honest as they are industrious, as free from their own vices as they are from most of ours.

We are more sentimental about them because 187our own dealings with them have been on the whole so fair. We are proud of the position we have taken as a nation toward China and we would like to keep up our record, justifying the Chinese conviction that we are a disinterested and reliable friend. Our dealings have been decent—the policy of the Open Door, the return of a large share of the Boxer indemnity, the protest that we made in 1915 when we learned of the outrageous twenty-one demands that Japan had forced from the Peking government: we have prided ourselves on these things, and when at Paris in 1919 President Wilson consented to the transfer of the German rights in Shantung to Japan, there was a chorus of disapproval, and we came to this Conference resolved that Shantung should be restored to China; moreover, that a long list of interferences with her freedom of administration should cease. The disappointment came in finding that what China wanted, and we 188wanted her to have, was much more difficult to realize than we had appreciated, and that in a majority of cases, probably the worst thing that could happen would be to have her full requests granted.

The primary difficulty in China’s getting what she wanted was that she has no stable government, nothing upon which she can depend and with which the nations can deal with any assurance that the engagements that are entered into will be faithfully carried out. The Conference began with an exhibit of disorganization in the Peking government which was most unfortunate—the failure to pay a loan due us at that moment. Moreover, it soon became a matter of common knowledge at the Conference that the Peking government was failing to meet all sorts of financial obligations at home as well as abroad, that it was not paying the salaries of its officials, its school-teachers. There were delegates in Washington who, it was claimed, had had no funds from their 189government for many months. A greater part of the moneys collected seemed to go into the pockets of the military chiefs of the provinces, whose leading occupation was to make life and property unsafe for the rich and to prevent political conditions becoming settled.

All of this had an important relation to these demands that the Chinese delegation presented to the Conference. Take the matter of tariff autonomy—nothing shows better China’s position. She does not and has not for many years controlled her customs. They are fixed by treaty with the powers and collected by them. They have been netting her recently but 3½ per cent. on her importations. Moreover, there have been vexatious discriminations and special taxes which have been both unfair and humiliating. China came to the Conference begging for freedom from all these restrictions. She wanted a tariff autonomy like other nations, and on the face of it what more reasonable 190request? And yet, after a very thorough inquiry by a sub-committee of the Conference, headed by Secretary Underwood, control of her tariff was denied her. To be sure, some of the worst of the discriminations were cleared up. She was given a rate which would immediately raise her revenue by some $17,000,000, and the promise of other changes in the near future which would increase the amount to something like $156,000,000. It looks small enough!

But why should China’s tariffs remain in the hands of foreigners? Why should she not be allowed to collect more than an effective 5 per cent. on her importations, while her exportations to this country, for instance, are weighted with tariffs all the way from 20 to 100 per cent.? Why, simply because the committee, after a long study made, as it declares and as there is no reason to doubt, in a spirit of sympathy and friendliness, believed that tariff autonomy would be a bad thing for China herself. 191When the committee presented its report, Senator Underwood said: “I am sure this sub-committee and the committee to which I am now addressing myself would gladly do much more for China if conditions in China were such that the outside powers felt they could do so with justice to China herself. I do not think there was any doubt in the minds of the sub-committee on this question that, if China at present had the unlimited control of levying taxes at the customs house, in view of the unsettled conditions now existing in China, it would probably work in the end to China’s detriment and to the injury of the world.”

So far as tariff autonomy was concerned, this judgment had to be accepted. It did not, however, answer the question why China should be able to collect but 5 per cent. on the machinery we send her, and we collect 35 to 50 per cent. on her silks. That is, it does not seem that if the powers believe that it is for the good of China that her 192duties should be kept at this low rate they would feel, as a matter of fairness, that they should grant reciprocity and collect no more on her goods than she is allowed to collect on theirs.

When you come to the question of extra-territoriality, by which is meant the establishment and conduct of judicial courts by foreigners in China, a humiliating condition that dates back almost to the beginning of her treaty relations with other countries, you find her own delegates asking no more than that the powers coöperate with China in taking initial steps toward improving and eventually abolishing the existing system.

There is no real solution of most of the problems which the Chinese delegation pleaded so eloquently and persistently in Washington to have solved, except the establishment within the country of a stable, representative government. That is, if the fine young Chinese that represented their 193country want to see their program carried out, they must go back to China and work within the country to secure order, education, development of their people along modern lines. There were too many Chinese at the Washington Conference who had spent the greater part of their lives in Europe and America and who were actually unfamiliar with home conditions.

A stable Chinese Republic depends, then, upon long, faithful efforts at reconstruction as well as upon freeing China from foreign encroachments. Not a few people came to the Conference believing that the only problem was to expel the Japanese from Shantung and force her to withdraw her twenty-one demands. If China had had a strong, united government in the past there would have been no Japanese now in Shantung, and no twenty-one demands. Shantung is a spoil of war and under the old code by which the world has acquired power and possessions “belonged” to Japan. That is, 194her claim to it was as valid as the claim of many nations, ourselves included, to certain territories which we hold without dispute. Japan pointed out that she had spent blood and treasure for Shantung, and this is true. And always when in the past men spent blood and treasure, the world has sanctioned their performance. Japan’s right to Shantung was questioned now because of the new code we are trying to put in force. That is, men are trying to prove that it shall be no longer by blood and treasure that we progress, but by good will, fair dealing, superior efficiency of mind and hand. The practical question now seems to be, When is this new code to begin to operate? In 1922, as Japan wished, or with the first entrance of the foreigner into China, as radical Chinese wished? And if it is to be adopted, is it to apply only to China? The code that would sweep Japan entirely out of China would also sweep us out of the Philippines and Haiti; England 195out of India and Egypt. There are strong young nationalist parties to-day in the Philippines and in Haiti, in India and in Egypt, using the same arguments that the Chinese delegation used in Washington, that the foreigners shall go; and in all of these countries as in China to-day, the reason given by the protecting or invading power, as you choose to regard it, that they stay, is that their going would be the worst thing in the world that could happen to the country.

In the case of Shantung and the twenty-one demands, the solution was going to depend upon how far Japan realized that these “valid” claims of hers—that is, valid under the old code—were handicaps and not advantages to her. How far she realized that by attempting to keep them in force she was going to cripple her own real advancement in China, increase and prolong the boycott of her goods, and incur the ill will of other nations, particularly of this nation.

196It became clear early in the Washington Conference that we were not going to help China’s case, or encourage Japan in generous dealing by continuing to cultivate mistrust and hatred of the Japanese. A systematic effort to make one nation hate another belongs to the old way of doing things. Indeed, it has been one of the chief methods by which we have thought to progress in the world. You built up distrust, dislike, suspicion, until you had created an enemy in the minds of the mass of the people so hateful that it became an almost religious duty to overthrow it. We have had this sort of thing going on in this country in regard to Japan for years, a calculated, nation-wide, extremely able effort to make the American people fear and despise the Japanese, to bring them to a point where they would gladly, as a relief to their feelings, undertake a war against Japan. I do not know that a sterner rebuke to the American public—the sterner because unconscious—could 197have been given than the remarks of Prince Tokugawa in one of his little talks before he sailed for home. He was telling how surprised as well as grateful the Japanese had been at American hospitality, “Because,” he said, “when we came we feared that the Americans were so hostile to us that it might be impossible for us to go with safety on the streets.”

Those who know the Orient best all agree that its future peace, and therefore the future peace of the world, depends largely upon Japan. She is the one strong, stable, unified nation in the East. She has, it is true, a powerful militaristic party, but opposed to that is a great liberal group. Prince Tokugawa, who played so fine a part in his delegation during the Conference, is a man who has taken keen interest in labor questions, education of the people, the development of industry, and has thrown all his great interest against the military spirit. It is said by those who know much 198of Japan’s interior workings that the Empress herself is convinced that either the empire must have a democratic leadership, a constitutional monarchy with a responsible cabinet, an army and navy under civil control, or that it will be overthrown, and that the reason that the young Crown Prince was sent on his visit to England was that he might have a look at a democratic monarchy. There are many Japanese saying openly in the press and in public assemblies that the future of Japan depends upon an entire change of policy, that the hard dealings in Korea, the wresting of the twenty-one demands from Peking, the methods in Shantung have all been a mistake, that Japan must deny them, correct the wrongs done under them if she is to have the sympathy and enjoy the coöperation of the outside world. It is most important that the people of the United States particularly should understand these liberal leanings in Japan, should give them all the support within their power.

199There was much irritation at different times in Washington because the Japanese delegation insisted on holding up the march of negotiations until it could hear from Tokyo, and between Tokyo and poor cable connections the answers were slow in coming. The delegation always insisted on waiting, however, and in this it was wise. It could go no further safely than the government at home would back it. If it attempted to do so, it would mean the final repudiation of the measures to which it had agreed. Certainly Americans should have understood this. It might take time for the Japanese to stop at every point in the negotiations to consult their government, but it was a much safer method in the long run than making such haste that a situation could arise such as that between our own delegation and the President of the United States—the difference in the interpretation of the Four Power Pact, a difference which no doubt arose from a failure to see that the busy President did have in his head 200just what the meaning of the short and simple document really was. It sometimes pays to make haste slowly.

If the Japanese were cautious in their dealings, haggled over details, were slow to make concessions which it was likely they intended all the time to make, gave up nothing until they were sure they would be backed by the home government, it might be exasperating but it was not necessarily a proof of intrigue or of a lack of sympathy with the larger purposes of the Conference. In spite of these methods so irritating to people whose only thought is to put things through in the shortest time possible, the Japanese made a better impression on the Conference than the Chinese, for the simple reason that the one were workers, the other talkers. More than once in the course of the negotiations it was necessary to recall the Chinese’s attention to the fact that what was under discussion was not theories, but conditions. All one’s sympathies were with 201the talkers, and all one’s practical sense with the workers.

The nations in adopting the principles that they did in regard to China, in insuring her a protecting ring within which they promise to see that she has the chance to develop and maintain effective and stable government, and to give all nations an equal opportunity of carrying on commerce and industry with her, are attempting something that has never before been done in this world—they are insuring a great weak, divided nation its chance. Never again under the protection adopted, if the promises made are kept, can anybody chip off a piece of Chinese territory, secure a monopoly of her resources; never again can there be in China a Shantung, a Twenty-one demands, a Port Arthur. The pacts and principles adopted establish over China that “moral trusteeship” of which Mr. Hughes talks. They put upon all nations agreeing and particularly upon this nation 202the obligation to see that this moral trusteeship is something more than a phrase.

Although the immediate results to China are not as sweeping and generous as many of her friends desire and many believe would have been possible and wise, they are substantial. She will control her own post offices beginning with January, 1923; the correction of the humiliating extra-territoriality is being undertaken; foreign troops will be withdrawn; a beginning at least toward tariff autonomy has been made. No future concessions and agreements will be made by China to other powers except under an international board of review, the office of which will be to see that no terms unjust to China or discriminatory in the favor of any particular outside nation are made. This leaves old commitments where they are, but it is fair to suppose, if the board does its duty, that any manifest injustice or flagrant discrimination now existing can and will be eventually cured.

203The Shantung question has been settled—settled in the way that President Wilson believed at Paris that it finally would be settled—by Japan’s withdrawing. The real bone of contention between the two countries—the Tsingtau-Tsinanfu railway—will go back entirely to China within a few years—five at the shortest, fifteen at the longest—upon terms of payment and of management which, if painful to both countries—Japan feeling that she is giving up too much, China that she is getting too little—yet seemed reasonable and the best that could be done by the American and British delegation.

With the withdrawal of Japan from Shantung, will go England’s from Weihaiwei, and probably a little later, France’s from Kwangchow-wan.

As for the twenty-one demands, Japan so thoroughly realized the discredit they had brought her in the eyes of the liberal world that she began the discussion upon them by 204voluntarily withdrawing one whole section, that which compelled China to employ Japanese advisers in the military, financial and political departments of her government. She also declared her intention to give up her preferential rights in Southern Manchuria and to open to the international consortium the railway loans in Manchuria and Mongolia which she has been holding as her exclusive possession. This is going a long way to clear up the difficulties under the commitments. With this start and with intelligent international supervision, it ought to be possible in a reasonable time to free China entirely from whatever is oppressive in the twenty-one demands.

It is a beginning. If Young China will take hold vigorously now there is reason to believe that the thongs about her feet will in time be cut. She has work, long, slow work, before her, but she is assured sympathy and protection in carrying it on. That is a vastly more important result than to 205have been granted all the demands of her eager young democrats and left alone in the world.

It is the old, old story—nations must climb step by step—they have no wings.

How are we to measure the Washington Conference? There are people who think it should be by the things that it did not undertake to do. The Conference was indicted in Washington in January by a league of people of considerable ability who declared that it had not lessened the chance of war by a fraction of one per cent. The reason they gave for this verdict was that it had not taken up the causes of India, Korea, the Far Eastern Republic, Persia, the Philippines, Haiti, the “Republic of Mt. Lebanon.”

It is certain that the world is going to have no quiet until these troubled countries 207are satisfied. But they are not the only problems to be solved. Mr. Hughes named a considerable number on his agenda. Is an international conference to be declared a farce because it selects one set of problems instead of another, and believes it more practical to give exclusive attention to one side of the globe than to the entire surface? You could not persuade Mr. Hughes and his colleagues that any other policy than that of one thing at a time would contribute a “fraction of one per cent.” to the peace of the earth. They believe the block system is the only practical one for setting the world aright. They lay it out something like this:

“Let us clean up the Pacific, then we can disarm. Having disarmed, we can lend a hand in the next most distressed and troublesome block—France, Central Europe, Russia. Having helped set them straight, one at a time, then possibly we may consider an association of nations—but not 208now.” So convinced was Mr. Hughes of the soundness of his system that he threw out one of the chief subjects on his agenda—the limitation of land armament—when he discovered he must leave his block—the Pacific—and pass into Europe if it was considered.

The only system a man can successfully handle is that in which he has faith,—the only fair way to judge what he does is by what he undertakes to do—not what you would like him to undertake. Measured by the method it adopted and the limitations it set for itself, how does the Conference come out?

I began my observations on the Conference with a quarrel with the agenda. Putting the problem of the limitation of armament before the settlement of the difficulties or threats of difficulties in the Pacific, which were keeping the countries concerned in arms, looked illogical. It proved good psychology. The naval program stirred the 209imagination of the country, became at once something tremendously desirable—a real move toward peace. When England and Japan at once agreed it became possible and practical. If they agreed, why, then—it must be—the difficulties could be settled which many had doubted. The Conference thus at the start gained what it needed most, popular faith that it meant to do a concrete, tangible thing. The proposition that England, the United States, Japan, France and Italy should adopt a naval ratio of 5–5–3, 1.75—1.25 and agree not to build for ten years was a big, substantial, stirring fact. To have them accept, as they did, strengthened the faith of the world. It was the first time big powers had ever said “scrap,” had ever been actually eager for a naval holiday.

The fact that neither the submarine nor the auxiliary craft are to be limited in tonnage, as the original program proposed, if disappointing, still does not upset the 210achievement. The submarine comes out of the Conference unlimited in number but crippled in its field of action. Merchant ships are forbidden it on penalty of piracy. That will not in the thick of war prevent merchant ships being destroyed but it will take the heart out of the business. Outlawry helps if it does not prohibit. There is compensation also in the failure in regard to the tonnage of auxiliary craft, for at least their size is limited—to 10,000 tons—and their guns to 8 inches, and that is a fairly satisfactory substitute for the original proposal.

In spite of the changes, cutting and trimming, the naval program remains something which the country wants, something which it feels to be a blow at war as well as a relief to its tax burdens.

If the naval program could stand on its own feet, it alone would make the Conference a brilliant success, but it cannot. It was no sooner raised to its feet than its makers had to rush in with props. The 211first was a policy in regard to China. The reason was clear enough. Unless the nations at the Conference could agree among themselves on a method of assisting in the development of China which would prevent any one of them taking an unfair advantage of the others, there were sure to be quarrels sooner or later and they would need their ships. Unless they could fix on a policy under which not only they each had a fair chance but nations outside—not at the Conference, but likely in the future to desire to invest in China—were not discriminated against, they would need their ships. They would surely need them, too, one of these days, if they did not satisfy China that what they agreed upon was as good for her as for them.

Mr. Root hurried in with his four principles. Mr. Hughes outlined his Nine Power Pact, which was to assent to the principles and the practical applications of them which were to be worked out.

But the naval program had to have another 212prop before it could proceed. It was not worth the paper it was written on unless England and Japan agreed to it. They agreed in principle at the start, but in practice they could and would not until they were sure that the nation that was asking them to disarm wanted peace in the Pacific badly enough to join them in a league to assure it by coöperation. Before they scrapped their ships they wanted to know whether their present boundaries and rights were to be respected by their colleagues—whether if one of them suffered aggression from without the others were to remain indifferent or were willing to pledge at least moral support. The Four Power Pact was the prop desired. England, the United States, France and Japan agree in it to face the future in the Pacific together. Pull out this prop and your program for scrapping ships and a naval holiday falls flat—as flat as the disarmament of France has fallen and for the same reason. If this Conference for 213the Limitation of Armament does nothing more than to make the American public understand better what has been at the bottom of the conduct of France since the Armistice, it will have been worth all it cost.

France has held up the peace of Europe, delayed its reconstruction, lessened her own chances of reparation, alienated her best friends by her persistent militarism. Go back to the peace treaty of 1919 when disarmament was one of the fundamental principles adopted by the allied nations. From the start France’s argument in regard to disarmament was that for her it was impossible unless England and the United States would guarantee her against aggression from Germany—if they would do that she would disarm. In order to get disarmament, Mr. Wilson and Lloyd George agreed to protect France against unprovoked attacks. Our Senate refused to ratify the agreement.

214Having no guarantees, France kept her arms. Keeping her arms, the military spirit spread, the military group grew stronger. How strong recent events have shown.

One-third of the agenda of the Washington Conference—that in regard to land disarmament—had to be scrapped ten days after the opening because a reduction of land armament still meant to France a guarantee, the same kind of a guarantee in principle that a little later we gave to Japan in order to make it possible for her to agree with Great Britain and ourselves on the naval program. Perhaps the greatest achievement of the Conference on the Limitation of Armament is its demonstration that disarmament means a union of the nations that disarm, that in no other way, the world being what it is, can it be accomplished.

Along with this demonstration has gone another, frequently repeated, that this union 215to which you are to pin your faith instead of ships and armies, if it is to be permanent, must be all inclusive.

Again and again the Conference ran up against the difficulty that although all the nations represented in Washington might make agreements to cut down their capital ships, limit their auxiliary craft to 10,000 tons and their guns to 8 inches, put the mark of pirate on a submarine that attacked a merchant vessel, forbid chemical warfare, limit the number of air-craft ships—any one or all of these restrictions might overnight be frustrated by one nation or a group of nations outside of the alliance, entering on an ambitious and aggressive campaign of naval construction. That is, this fine program for the limitation of armament—almost certain to be carried out if the Four Power Pact in regard to the waters of the Pacific and the Nine Power Pact in regard to the protection of China are ratified by the different governments—still may 216be destroyed overnight by some part of the world not included in this union for peace. So obvious is this that the naval pact includes an agreement that in case any one of the signing nations finds itself in a dangerous position in regard to an aggressive neighbor, it shall have the right to withdraw. Every step that has been taken in the Washington Conference leads inevitably to the conclusion that it is all or none—if the work is to stand.

The difficulty in the way of most people and most nations accepting this conclusion is that they do not believe any such union of all nations practical. They cannot see men of all races working together, settling only by agreement the misunderstandings that inevitably come up.

If the Conference on the Limitation of Armament has demonstrated the necessity of world coöperation if we are to have peace, it has also demonstrated its practicability. Mr. Hughes started off by calling on the two 217nations which the people of this country have for a long time regarded with the most suspicion—the two nations against which we have conducted a persistent campaign of ill will—England and Japan. Yet for three months the delegations of these two nations worked with ours in the utmost friendliness. Again and again I heard Mr. Hughes declare that nobody could have been more coöperative, as he expressed it, than the delegates from England and Japan. It was obvious that those countries were quite as eager as ourselves to work out agreements that would enable them to declare a naval holiday. All those initial suspicions that we had of England and Japan and that England and Japan had of us did not prevent the delegates of the three countries from coming to conclusions on matters on which they had differed. What it seems to prove is that you can get peace by friendly negotiation, that a coöperation of nations is not a dream, that it is a reality.

218What more amazing and convincing proof of this than the fact that China and Japan did, by conference, agree on Shantung? Who would have believed it possible? What made it possible was the faith and the wisdom of Mr. Hughes and Mr. Balfour, their determination that the Chinese and Japanese should learn to work together. “Talk it over” was their instruction. “The Shantung question can only be settled peaceably by yourselves.” It was one of the wisest, one of the most significant decisions of the Washington Conference. Day after day the Chinese and Japanese held conversations—not conferences. They talked, they quarreled. Day after day they went home in wrath and disgust, refusing suggested compromises, pleading the danger of losing their heads if they consented. If the Chinese delegates offered Peking anything less than an immediate and completely free Shantung, they could never again pass the border of China. If the Japanese gave up even what 219they had promised to give up, their lives would not be worth a song in Tokyo. Yet, day by day, Japan was giving in a little, China becoming a little more coöperative. Mr. Harding, Mr. Hughes and Mr. Balfour stayed on the outside, genial but determined friends—determined that these two Eastern neighbors should begin now to settle their disagreements. More than once, China came to them: “Make Japan be good, great friends. You know Shantung is ours. Make her be good.”

Patience won the day. It took thirty-eight “conversations,” interminable cables, breaks, returns, the constant counsel of Mr. Balfour and Mr. Hughes—“Steady now, steady. Don’t give it up. You must do it yourselves”—to bring a final agreement between the two nations. But in the end they did settle the Shantung difficulty. It was a tremendous victory for the new international method of handling quarrels.

How reasonable it is that it should be so. 220It is a direct attack on a difficulty not a roundabout one by correspondence through ambassadors. Face to face, you examine the basis of suspicion. You ask, Is this true or not? Are you doing so-and-so or not? Do you aim to do so-and-so? Thus the actual situation, not the imagined one, is arrived at. It becomes the actual property of a group of negotiators sitting at the same table; and when the actuality is before them all, being turned over and examined by them all, adjustment is almost certain if there is good will. And here you come to the crux of the whole matter—you get no adjustment unless the negotiators are working in a spirit of good will.

When I first set out to observe the Washington Conference I looked up a man unusually wise and experienced in international affairs, one who for many years has been collecting, arranging and explaining the diplomatic adventures of men and of nations so that each coming generation might have, if it would, the materials from which 221to find out what men had already done in making peace and, if it were wise enough, why they so often had failed. I was in search of just the material of which he of all men knew most. “What shall I read first?” I asked him. His instant reply was, “Æsop’s Fables. That should be the textbook of the Conference. Read Æsop,” he said, “to see what they can do, and follow with Don Quixote to see what they cannot do.

“But there is one book more important than all for the Conference—the Gospels. But not King James’ version. That is a great and wonderful translation, but it has done some harm in the world by not always giving true values to great truths. It promises peace on earth and good will to men. But that is not what was promised. Peace was promised to men of good will. The success of the Conference will depend upon the degree to which men of good will are able to prevail over those of ill will.”

This is the way it turned out in Washington. 222At every stage it was good will which carried the undertaking forward. What will happen now in the various countries to which the pacts of the Conference go will depend upon the spirit of the peoples to which they are submitted, whether it be malicious or charitable. Will there be good will enough in Japan to make such rearrangements of her claims in China that Chinese bitterness and suspicion will be removed? Will there be enough good will in China to coöperate when these rearrangements are made? Will there be enough in the United States to accept the pledges of mutual support which must be made if the nations concerned are to limit their armaments? Have we enough faith in men to accept the only possible alternative in the present world to unlimited armament, and that is, a union of peoples pledged to face misunderstandings at their beginning, to separate them into their elements, and to bring all the force of collective judgment and intelligence to adjustment?

223It may be that the United States does not yet sufficiently understand that the principle of unionism which is its strength is a world principle, that one primary cause of wars in this world is isolation, with its necessity of being suspicious, on guard, ready to strike—like a rattlesnake. Æsop is a guide here, with his fable of the bundle of sticks—sticks easy to break if separated, unbreakable when bound together.

It may be that the Senate of the United States will refuse to back this pact of good will which is just as essential to carrying out the program of limitation of naval armament as a guarantee to France against unprovoked aggression was two years ago (and is still) to European disarmament. But, refuse it or not, the day will come—and nothing has ever demonstrated it more clearly than the Washington Conference,—when we are going to understand that the world can only remain in peace through a union which is a practical application of 224the brotherhood of man, not a limited brotherhood of man, such as Mr. Wells preached in his final comment on the Arms Parley, but one including all men.

Mr. Wells’ idea of a brotherhood of nations is—or was!—one that includes not every state of the world but “the peoples who speak English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Japanese, with such states as Holland and Norway and Bohemia, great in quality if not great in power—sympathetic in training and tradition.” He would admit only people of like ideals, exclude Russia, India, China. Could there be a surer way to throw Russia and India and China into an alliance against this so-called “Brotherhood of Man”? Is there a surer way to awaken an ambition for liberty, to spread ideals than to share what you have with those that seem to you—and yet never in all respects are—backward nations? Is there any brotherhood of man worthy the name which does not include all men?

225However we may feel about it as a nation to-day, though we may ruin the present program for limitation of armament by rejection of its underlying pacts, the day will surely come when we shall realize and admit the fullest international association and coöperation. It is the one real asset humanity has carried from this war—the sense of the oneness of the world, the impossibility of order and progress and peace except as each is allowed to develop its individuality, in a free continuing union of all.

Eventually the Washington Conference for the Limitation of Armament will be judged by what it contributes to this union of nations, exactly as all its predecessors will be judged. The Washington Conference is but one in a long chain of international undertakings looking to peace. It is built on the experience of many different men, of many different countries, running back literally for centuries. Its immediate 226predecessor was the Hague Conferences and tribunal and the Paris Conference with its resultant League of Nations. So far the League of Nations is at once the most idealistic and the most practical scheme men have yet framed, the broadest in its scope and the most democratic in its spirit. It may prove that humanity is as yet too backward to grasp and realize its intent and its possibilities. It may make too great a demand on their faith, their charity, their love; but nothing can destroy the great fact that it has been undertaken by fifty-one nations, that it is alive and at work. That fact will stand as a hope and a guide to the future.

The present Conference has boldly and nobly attempted to do in a limited field something of what the Paris Conference attempted to do for the whole world. The limitation of armament it proposes rests, like world disarmament, on unionism, standing together. Unionism requires 227faith; have we enough of it? It requires, too, men of good will. Have we enough of them? In the final analysis, it is with them that “peace on earth” rests.

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