Part 10

Japan has modernized itself in many respects, but its social organization, its family system, is a very ancient and primitive one, involving an extreme domestication of women and a maximum of babies. While the sanitation and hygiene of Japan were still mediæval, a sufficient proportion of these babies died soon and prevented any overpressure of population, but now that Japan has modernized itself in most respects it needs to modernize itself in this respect also.

I submit that the troubles arising from excessive fecundity within a country justify not an aggressive imperialism on the part of that country, but a sufficient amount of birth control within its proper boundaries.

X “SECURITY”—THE NEW AND BEAUTIFUL CATCHWORD

Washington, November 20.

The new and really quite beautiful catchword that dominates the Washington Conference is “security.” The word was produced originally, I believe, in France. France wants nothing in the world now but security; she has abandoned all dreams of conquest or glory, all aggressive economic intentions; she is the white lamb of international affairs, washed and redeemed by the Great War. Only—she must be secure.

Great Britain, Japan are in complete unison with France on this subject. Great Britain asks for nothing but a predominant fleet and naval arsenals in perfect going order. Mr. Balfour’s eloquent speech at the second session of the conference made the necessity of this for security incontrovertible. Japan wants East Siberia, the special control of raw material in Manchuria, a grip upon China, because she is driven by the same passionate craving for peace and rest. We have had this explained to us very clearly here in Washington by representative Japanese.

All these powers will accept every proposal Secretary Hughes makes, or is prepared to make, eloquently and sincerely—“in principle.” They then proceed to state their minimum requirements for that feeling of security which is the goal of all peoples at the present time. When these requirements have been stated it becomes plain that these states are not to be so much disarmed as stripped for action, with highly efficient instead of unwieldy and overwhelmingly expensive equipment. They do not so much propose to give up war as to bring it back by a gentlemanly agreement within the restricted possibilities of their austere bankruptcy.

The French conception of security is particularly attractive. France stipulates, I gather, for a dominant army upon the Continent of Europe, for a Germany retained permanently by agreement among the powers at the extremest pitch of wretchedness and feebleness, for an outcast Russia, or a series of alliances by which such countries as Poland will be militarized in the French interest rather than industrialized in their own. And France, in further pursuit of the idea of perfect peace (for France), is training great masses of barbaric Senegalese for war, with the view of using them to police white populations and sustain their millennium in Europe. They can have no other use now.

If they return to Africa, these trained soldiers will accumulate as a new and interesting element in African life until some black Napoleon arises to demand “security” for Africa.

At present France displays an astonishing confidence in the British, but no doubt, if her amazing peasants and her wonderful soil presently lead to partial recuperation, she will realize the need of bringing her now neglected fleet up to “security” standards also. And it is axiomatic among the experts that no power with a coast line is really secure unless it has a fleet at least the double of any other fleet that can possibly operate upon that coast.

These statements are not the facetious inventions of an irresponsible writer; they are fair samples of the sort of thing that the various deputations have brought with them to Washington. These are the things we talk of and are gradually talking out of sight. And if the Washington Conference served no other purpose at all in the world, it would have been quite worth while in order to get together all these totally incomparable conceptions of security and by that approximation to demonstrate their utter absurdity. Along the lines of either unregulated or regulated armament there can be no security for any race or people.

The only security for a modern state now is a binding and mutually satisfactory alliance with the power or powers that might otherwise attack. The only real security for France against a German revenge is a generous and complete understanding between the French and German Republics so that they will have a mutual interest in each other’s prosperity. Germany is naturally a rather bigger country than France, and nothing on earth can alter that. Other powers or all the powers may come into such a treaty as guarantors, but the essential thing for peace between France and Germany is peace made good and clear between them, a cessation of mutual injuries and hostile preparations.

The only effectual security for the communications of the British Empire is the recognition by all mankind that this great system of English-speaking states round and about the world is a good thing for all mankind and a resolute effort of these states to keep to that level. There is no other real security.

This is not “lofty idealism”; it is common sense; and the idea of “security” by armament and by the enfeeblement of possible rivals is not a “practical recognition of present limitations,” but a feeble surrender to entirely vicious tendencies of the human mind.

I believe that for a little while yet Washington will continue its researches into the meaning of armed “security,” and that then it will turn its attention to the alternative idea, with which the nimble French mind has also been playing, and that is security by treaty. The French have been disposed in the past to welcome an Anglo-American-French treaty to guarantee France against attack. The idea in that form is dead, but the possibility of a far more comprehensive agreement, a loose-fitting but effectual association of all the nations of the world to keep the peace and arrange their differences by conference, is bound to recur again as the impossibility of disarmament without settlement becomes increasingly apparent.

There drifts into my memory here a curious feast of “security” which occurred long ago in some Eastern equivalent of Versailles. The great Abbassid family had suffered many things from the Ommayyad Caliphs, and at last it rose against them and overcame them and secured the leadership of Islam. The remnants of the Ommayyad clan were summoned to witness and celebrate the new peace. But some of the Abbassids, inspired by quite modern ideas of “security,” had all the Ommayyads massacred before the banquet began. A beautiful carpet was spread over the dead and dying and the Abbassids feasted thereon. Here was “security” to satisfy the most exacting modern European ideals. Yet the Abbassids made little of their security. They never rose to the glory of the Ommayyads; the drive and strength seemed to have gone out of Arab Islam; their history for all this “security” is one of division, decline, decay. It takes all men to make a world.

Let us get through with this futile haggling for national advantages and securities and let us get on to the organization of that brotherhood which can alone save the world.

XI FRANCE IN THE LIMELIGHT

Washington, November 21.

The first session of the Washington Conference featured, as the cinematograph people say, President Harding and Mr. Secretary Hughes; the second day was Mr. Balfour’s day; this third, from which I have just come, was the session of M. Briand.

The four personalities contrast very strikingly. President Harding was a stately figure making a very noble oration in the best American fashion; Mr. Hughes was hard, exact, clear-cut, very earnest and explicit; Mr. Balfour slender and stooping, silvery-haired and urbane, made his carefully worded impromptu speech with a care that left no ragged end to a sentence and no gap for applause. All three are taller and neater men than M. Briand, whose mane of hair flows back from his face in leonine style, whose mobile face and fluent gestures reinforce the stirring notes of his wonderful voice. His eloquence was so great that many Congressmen in the gallery above, quite innocent of French, were moved to applause by the sheer grace and music of the performance.

Eloquence could not save the day or the occasion. M. Briand spoke to a gathering that was saturated with scepticism for the cause he had to plead. I watched the quiet, scrutinizing countenances of the six men he turned about to face as he spoke—Root, Lodge and Hughes, as immobile as judges; Balfour trying to look like a sympathetic ally in the face of a discourse that insultingly ignored Great Britain as a factor of the European situation; Lord Lee, obliquely prostrate and judicial; Geddes, with that faintly smiling face of his, the mask of an unbeliever.

The voice of the orator rose and fell, boomed at them, pleaded, sought to stir them—like seas breaking over rocks. Their still implacable faces, hardly or politely, retained the effect of listening to a special pleader—a special pleader doing his best, his foamy best, with an intolerably bad case.

M. Briand put before the conference no definite proposals at all. After Mr. Hughes, with that magnificent discourse of his, punctuated by “we propose to scrap,” M. Briand was an anticlimax. France proposed to scrap nothing. France does not know how to scrap. She learns nothing and forgets nothing. It is her supreme misfortune. He explained the position of France in a melodious discourse of apologetics and excuses. The French contribution to the Disarmament Conference is that France has not the slightest intention of disarming. She is reducing her term of service with the colors from three years to two. In a Europe of untrained men this is not disarmament, but economy.

The great feature of M. Briand’s discourse was his pretense of the absolute unimportance of England in European affairs. France, for whom, as Mr. Balfour in a few words of infinite gentleness reminded M. Briand, France, for whom the British Empire lost a million dead—very nearly as many men as France herself lost; France, to whose rescue from German attack came Britain, Russia and presently Italy and America; France, M. Briand declared, was alone in the world, friendless and terribly threatened by Germany and Russia. And on the nonsensical assumption of French isolation, M. Briand unfolded a case that was either—I hesitate to consider which—and how shall I put that old alternative?—deficient in its estimate of reality, or else—just special pleading.

The plain fact of the case is that France is maintaining a vast army in the face of a disarmed world and she is preparing energetically for fresh warlike operations in Europe and for war under sea against Great Britain. To excuse this line of action M. Briand unfolded a fabulous account of the German preparation for a renewal of hostilities; every soldier in the small force of troops allowed to Germany is an officer or non-commissioned officer, so that practically the German Army can expand at any moment to millions, and Germany is not morally disarmed because Ludendorff—M. Briand quoted him at some length—is still writing and talking militant nonsense.

Even M. Briand has to admit that the present German Government is honest and well meaning, but it is a weak Government. It is not the real thing. The real Germany is the Germany necessary for M. Briand’s argument. And behind Germany is Russia. He conjured up a great phantom of Soviet Russia which would have conquered all Europe but for the French Armies and Poland. That iniquitous attack of Poland upon Russia last May was, he assured his six quiet-eyed auditors and the rest of us, a violent invasion of Western civilization by Russia.

“There were those in Germany,” he said in a voice to make our flesh creep, “who beckoned them on.” The French had saved us from that. The French Army, with its gallant Senegalese, was the peacemaker and guardian of all Europe.