Washington and the Riddle of Peace

Part 1

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Washington and the Riddle of Peace

BY H. G. WELLS

=New York= THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1922 All rights reserved

Copyright, 1921, BY THE PRESS PUBLISHING COMPANY AND THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE.

Copyright, 1922, BY H. G. WELLS.

Set up and electrotyped. Published January, 1922.

Printed in the United States of America

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INTRODUCTION

These twenty-nine papers do not profess to be a record or description of the Washington Conference. They give merely the impressions and fluctuating ideas of one visitor to that conference. They show the reaction of that gathering upon a mind keenly set upon the idea of an organized world peace; they record phases of enthusiasm, hope, doubt, depression and irritation. They have scarcely been touched, except to correct a word or a phrase here or there; they are dated; in all essentials they are the articles just as they appeared in the New York World, the Chicago Tribune, and the other American and European papers which first gave them publicity. It is due to the enterprise and driving energy of the New York World, be it noted, that they were ever written at all. But in spite of the daily change and renewal of mood and attitude, inevitable under the circumstances, they do tell a consecutive story; they tell of the growth and elaboration of a conviction of how things can be done, and of how they need to be done, if our civilization is indeed to be rescued from the dangers that encompass it and set again upon the path of progress. They record—and in a very friendly and appreciative spirit—the birth and unfolding of the “Association of Nations” idea, the Harding idea, of world pacification, they note some of the peculiar circumstances of that birth, and they study the chief difficulties on its way to realization. It is, the writer believes, the most practical and hopeful method of attacking this riddle of the Sphinx that has hitherto been proposed.

H. G. WELLS.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

I THE IMMENSITY OF THE ISSUE AND THE TRIVIALITY OF MEN

II ARMAMENTS THE FUTILITY OF MERE LIMITATION

III THE TRAIL OF VERSAILLES TWO GREAT POWERS ARE SILENT AND ABSENT

IV THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER OF THE GREAT WAR

V THE PRESIDENT AT ARLINGTON

VI THE FIRST MEETING

VII WHAT IS JAPAN?

VIII CHINA IN THE BACKGROUND

IX THE FUTURE OF JAPAN

X “SECURITY”—THE NEW AND BEAUTIFUL CATCHWORD

XI FRANCE IN THE LIMELIGHT

XII THUS FAR

XIII THE LARGER QUESTION BEHIND THE CONFERENCE

XIV THE REAL THREAT TO CIVILIZATION

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XV THE POSSIBLE BREAKDOWN OF CIVILIZATION

XVI WHAT OF AMERICA?

XVII EBB TIDE AT WASHINGTON

XVIII AMERICA AND ENTANGLING ALLIANCES

XIX AN ASSOCIATION OF NATIONS

XX FRANCE AND ENGLAND—THE PLAIN FACTS OF THE CASE

XXI A REMINDER ABOUT WAR

XXII SOME STIFLED VOICES

XXIII INDIA, THE BRITISH EMPIRE AND THE ASSOCIATION OF NATIONS

XXIV THE OTHER END OF PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE—THE SIEVE FOR GOOD INTENTIONS

XXV AFRICA AND THE ASSOCIATION OF NATIONS

XXVI THE FOURTH PLENARY SESSION

XXVII ABOUT THE WAR DEBTS

XXVIII THE FOUNDATION STONE AND THE BUILDING

XXIX WHAT A STABLY ORGANIZED WORLD PEACE MEANS FOR MANKIND

I THE IMMENSITY OF THE ISSUE AND THE TRIVIALITY OF MEN

Washington, Nov. 7.

The conference nominally for the limitation of armaments that now gathers at Washington may become a cardinal event in the history of mankind. It may mark a turning point in human affairs or it may go on record as one of the last failures to stave off the disasters and destruction that gather about our race.

In August, 1914, an age of insecure progress and accumulation came to an end. When at last, on the most momentous summer night in history, the long preparations of militarism burst their bounds and the little Belgian village Vise went up in flames, men said: “This is a catastrophe.” But they found it hard to anticipate the nature of the catastrophe. They thought for the most part of the wounds and killing and burning of war and imagined that when at last the war was over we should count our losses and go on again much as we did before 1914.

As well might a little shopkeeper murder his wife in the night and expect to carry on “business as usual” in the morning. “Business as usual”—that was the catchword in Britain in 1914; of all the catchwords of the world it carries now the heaviest charge of irony.

The catastrophe of 1914 is still going on. It does not end; it increases and spreads. This winter more people will suffer dreadful things and more people will die untimely through the clash of 1914 than suffered and died in the first year of the war. It is true that the social collapse of Russia in 1917 and the exhaustion of food and munitions in Central Europe in 1918 produced a sort of degradation and enfeeblement of the combatant efforts of our race and that a futile conference at Versailles settled nothing, with an air of settling everything, but that was no more an end to disaster than it would be if a man who was standing up and receiving horrible wounds were to fall down and writhe and bleed in the dust. It would be merely a new phase of disaster. Since 1919 this world has not so much healed its wounds as realized its injuries.

Chief among these injuries is the progressive economic breakdown, the magnitude of which we are only beginning to apprehend. The breakdown is a real decay that spreads and spreads. In a time of universal shortage there is an increasing paralysis in production; and there is a paralysis of production because the monetary system of the world, which was sustained by the honest co-operation of Governments, is breaking down. The fluctuations in the real value of money become greater and greater and they shake and shatter the entire fabric of social co-operation.

Our civilization is, materially, a cash and credit system, dependent on men’s confidence in the value of money. But now money fails us and cheats us; we work for wages and they give us uncertain paper. No one now dare make contracts ahead; no one can fix up a stable wages agreement; no one knows what one hundred dollars or francs or pounds will mean in two years’ time.

What is the good of saving? What is the good of foresight? Business and employment become impossible. Unless money can be steadied and restored, our economic and social life will go on disintegrating, and it can be restored only by a world effort.

But such a world effort to restore business and prosperity is only possible between governments sincerely at peace, and because of the failure of Versailles there is no such sincere peace. Everywhere the Governments, and notably Japan and France, arm. Amidst the steady disintegration of the present system of things, they prepare for fresh wars, wars that can have only one end—an extension of the famine and social collapse that have already engulfed Russia to the rest of the world.

In Russia, in Austria, in many parts of Germany, this social decay is visible in actual ruins, in broken down railways and suchlike machinery falling out of use. But even in Western Europe, in France and England, there is a shabbiness, there is a decline visible to any one with a keen memory.

The other day my friend Mr. Charlie Chaplin brought his keen observant eyes back to London, after an absence of ten years.

“People are not laughing and careless here as they used to be,” he told me. “It isn’t the London I remember. They are anxious. Something hangs over them.”

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Coming as I do from Europe to America, I am amazed at the apparent buoyancy and abundance of New York. The place seems to possess an inexhaustible vitality. But this towering, thundering, congested city, with such a torrent of traffic and such a concourse of people as I have never seen before, is, after all, the European door of America; it draws this superabundant and astounding life from trade, from a trade whose roots are dying.

When one looks at New York its assurance is amazing; when one reflects we realize its tremendous peril. It is going on—as London is going on—by accumulated inertia. With the possible exception of London, the position of New York seems to me the most perilous of that of any city in the world. What is to happen to this immense crowd of people if the trade that feeds it ebbs? As assuredly it will ebb unless the decline of European money and business can be arrested, unless, that is, the world problem of trade and credit can be grappled with as a world affair.

The world’s economic life, its civilization, embodied in its great towns, is disintegrating and collapsing through the strains of the modern war threat and of the disunited control of modern affairs.

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