Part 14

I do not see how Americans who have never seen anything of the wrecked state of Eastern Europe and the shabbiness and privation of the Centre can be expected to feel and see the vision I find it so hard to keep vivid in my thoughts. Here is a country where money is still good; the $10 notes in my pocket assure me I can go down to the Treasury here and get gold for them whenever I think fit. (I believe them so thoroughly that I do not even think fit.) My intimations of the progressive dissolution over there must read like a gloomy fiction. And it is the hardest, most important fact in the world.

Everywhere here there is festival. I go to splendid balls, to glittering receptions; I am whirled off to a most hilarious barbecue, an ox in chains, roasts and drips over a wood fire—think of that in Russia! Thanksgiving Day was an inordinate feast. The portions of food they give you in hotels, clubs and restaurants are enormous, by present European standards; one seems always to be eating little bits and throwing the rest away.

Neither New York nor Washington shows a trace yet, that I can see, of the European shadow. There is much unemployment, but not enough yet to alarm people. Nothing of it has struck upon my perceptions either here or in New York. In the midst of this gay prosperity comes a letter from my wife describing how the police had to censor the bitter inscriptions upon the wreaths that were laid upon the London cenotaph on Armistice Day and how the veterans of the Great War who marched in the unemployed processions in London wore pawn tickets in the place of their medals.

I am forced by these contrasts to the question: “Suppose America patches up a fairly stable peace with Japan; lets Japan accumulate in Manchuria, Siberia, and finally China; cuts her naval expenditure to nothing, and allows the rest of the world, including the old English-speaking home, to slide and go over into the abyss—apart from the moral loss, will she suffer very greatly?”

That is a very interesting speculation.

I think she may adjust herself to a self-contained system and, in a sense, pull through. It may involve some very severe stresses. At present she grows more food than she can eat or waste; she exports foodstuffs. The American farmer sells so much of his produce for export, not a very great percentage, but enough to form an important item in his affairs. Given a Europe and Asia too impoverished and broken up to import food stuffs, that trade goes. The American farmer will have to sell to a shrunken demand; he will have either to shrink himself or undersell his fellow farmer. This will mean bad times for the American farmer as Europe sinks; farmers will be unable to buy as freely as usual; many agriculturists will be going out of business.

Firms like Ford will be embarrassed by overproduction. American manufacturers are also, to a very marked but not overwhelming extent exporters and much of their internal trade is to the farmers—whose purchasing power will be diminishing. Bad times for the industrial regions also will follow the European disaster, perhaps even very bad times. New York and the Eastern cities, so far as the overseas traffic goes, may suffer exceptionally. For them there may be less power of recovery, for with the fall of Europe into barbarism, the centre of American interests will shift to the interior. But after a series of crises, a lot of business failures and so on, I do not see why the United States—if there is no war with Japan—very little reduced from the large splendor of its present habits, should not still be getting along in a fashion. America is not tied up to the European system, to live and die with it, as France or Britain is tied.

And there is a limit also to the areas of the Old World affected by the collapse of the cash and credit system in Europe. Outside the European seacoast towns, Asia Minor is not likely to go much lower than it is at present, though most of Europe sink to the level of the Balkans and Asia Minor. The dissolution of Asia Minor resulted from the great wars of the Eastern Empire and Persia; all that land was ruined country before the days of Islam. It has never recovered and Europe may never recover.

Given an enfeebled Britain, there will probably be a collapse into conflict and discord throughout most of India; and China, unhelped, may continue in a state of confusion which is steadily destroying her ancient educated class and her ancient traditions without replacing them by any modernized educational organization. But here again upon the Western Pacific there may be regions which need not go the whole way down to citylessness, illiteracy and the peasant life.

Japan is still solvent and energetic, the war has probably strained her very little more than it has strained America, and her participation in the world credit system is still so recent that, like America, she may be able to draw herself together and maintain herself and expand her rule and culture, unimpeded, over the whole of Eastern Asia. She will be the more able to do this if a phase of disarmament gives her time to rest and consolidate before her expansion is resumed. A war between Japan and America would be a long and costly affair and it would no doubt topple both powers into the same process of dissolution in which Europe now welters, but I am assuming that America takes no risk of such a war for the sake of China or suchlike remote cause and that Japan is not eager for California. An America indifferent to the fall of Europe would probably not trouble itself seriously if presently Australia came under Japanese domination. It would not trouble—until the Monroe Doctrine was invaded. And it would get along very comfortably and happily.

So far as material considerations go, therefore, there is not much force in an appeal to the ordinary plain man in America to interest himself, much less to exert himself, in the tangled troubles of Europe and Asia now. He can remain as proudly “isolated” as his fathers; he can refuse help, he can “avoid entangling alliances,” and rely on his own strength; he can weather the smash, insist on pressing any sparks of recovery out of the European debtor, and so far as he and his children, and possibly even his children’s children, are concerned, America can expect to go on living an extremely tolerable life. There will still be plenty of Fords, plenty of food, movies and other amusing inventions; seed time, harvest and thanksgiving; no armament and very light taxation and as high a percentage of moral, well-regulated lives as any community has ever shown upon this planet. Until that long-distant time when the great Asiatic Empire of Japan turns its attention seriously to expansion in the New World.

So far as present material considerations go....

But I belong to one of the races that have populated America. I know the imagination of my own people and something of most of the peoples who have sent their best to this land, I have watched the people here, and listened to them and read about them; there has been no degeneration here but progress and invigoration, and I will not believe that the American spirit, distilled from all the best of Europe, will tolerate this surrender of the future, this quite hoggish abandonment of the leadership of mankind that continuing isolation implies.

The American people has grown great unawares; it still does not realize its immense predominance now in wealth, in strength, in hope, happiness and unbroken courage among the children of men. The cream of all the white races did not come to this continent to reap and sow and eat and waste, smoke in its shirtsleeves in a rocking-chair, and let the great world from which its fathers came go hang. It did not come here for sluggish ease. It came here for liberty and to make the new beginning of a greater civilization upon our globe. The years of America’s growth and training are coming to an end, the phase of world action has begun. All America is too small a world for the American people; the world of their interest now is the whole round world.

I have no doubt of the heart and enterprise of America—if America understands.

But does America understand the scale and urgency of the present situation? Is she prepared to act now? This decadence of Europe is urgent—urgent. So far, this Washington Conference has not touched more than the outer threads of the writhing international tangle that has to be dealt with if European civilization is to be saved.

So far, these economic and financial troubles which are already at a crisis of disaster in Europe have been treated as though they did not exist. But they are the very heart of the trouble across the Atlantic, and with America, the rich creditor of all Europe and the holder of most of the gold in the world, lie enormous possibilities of salvation. The political situation becomes more and more subordinated to the economic.

If America is willing, America is able to reinstate Europe and turn back the decline, and she is in so strong a position that she can make the effectual permanent disarmament of Europe a primary condition of her assistance. If she have the clearness of mind to set aside the eloquent apologetics of that one power that is still militant, adventurous and malignant among the ruins, she can oblige the remnant of Europe to get together and settle outstanding differences by the sheer strength of her financial controls. She can demand a “League to Enforce Peace,” and she can enforce it.

Will she do that now, or will she let this occasion pass from her—never to return?

XVII EBB TIDE AT WASHINGTON

Washington, Nov. 28.

The League of Nations was the first American initiative toward an organized world peace. Its beginning, the world-wide enthusiasm evoked by its early promise, its struggle to exist, its abandonment by America, its blunders and omissions and the useful, incomplete body that now represents it at Geneva, are the material of an immense conflicting literature. For a time at least the League is in the background. It has not kept hold of the popular imagination of the world.

I will not touch here upon the mistakes and disputes, the possible arrogance, the possible jealousies, the inadvisable compromises, the unnecessary concessions that made the League a lesser thing than it promised to be. I will not discuss why so entirely American a project, into which many nations came mainly to please America, failed to retain the official support of the American Government. Of such things the historian or the novelist may write but not the journalist. The fact remains that the project was a project noble and hopeful in its beginnings, a very great thing indeed in human history, a dawn in the darkness of international conflict and competition, an adventure which threw a halo of greatness about the Nation that produced it and about that splendid and yet so humanly limited man who has been chiefly identified with its promise and its partial failure.

It was, I insist, very largely an American idea, and only America, because of her freedom from the complex and bitter-spirited traditions of the European Foreign Offices, could have brought such a proposal into the arena of practical politics. The American Nation is exceptionally free from ancient traditions of empire, ascendancy, expansion, glory and the like. It is haunted by a dream, an obstinate recurrent dream, of a whole world organized for peace. It comes back to that with a notable persistence.

The League of Nations stands now, as it were, on the shelf, an experiment not wholly satisfactory, not wholly a failure, destined for searching reconsideration at no distant date. Meanwhile, the American mind, with much freshness and boldness, has produced this second experiment, in a widely different direction, the First Washington Conference for the Limitation of Armaments. The League of Nations was too definite and cramped in its constitution, too wide in its powers. It was a premature superstate. One standard objection, and a very reasonable one, was that America might be outvoted by quite minor powers and be obliged to undertake responsibilities for which it had no taste. The second experiment, therefore, has been tried, very properly, with the loosest of constitutions, and the most severely defined and limited of aims. We are beginning to see that it too is an experiment, likely to be successful within its limits but again not wholly satisfactory. Instead of a world constitution we have had a world conversation.

That conversation has passed from the open sessions of the conference to the two committees of five upon the limitation of land and sea armaments and the Pacific Committee of nine. In all these committees there are wide fluctuations of thought and temper. There are daily communications to the press from this committee or that, from this delegation or that, from a score of propagandas. It is really not worth the while of the ordinary citizen to follow these squabbles and flights and recriminations and excitements. Certain broad principles have been established. The ordinary citizen will be advised to hold firmly to these and see that he gets them carried through.

And now there has been a decided ebb in the high spirit of the conference. These disputes about details have produced a considerable amount of fatigue, attention is fatigued and the exploit of M. Briand has for a time shattered and confused the general mentality. The American public was in a state of pure and simple enthusiasm for peace and disarmament and quite unprepared for the exploit of M. Briand. Like all serious shocks, it did not at first produce its full result.

The mood was so amiable here, so eager for cheering and emotional human brotherhood, that when France, in the person of M. Briand, snapped her fingers at the mere idea of disarmament and quoted a twenty-year-old passage from a dead German Field Marshal to justify a vast army and an aggressive naval programme in the face of an exhausted Europe, there was a touching disposition on the part of a considerable section of the American press to greet this display as in some way conducive to our millennial efforts. Only a few of us called a spade a spade right away and declined to pretend that the irony and restrained indignation of Mr. Balfour and Signor Schanzer were “indorsements” of M. Briand’s stupendous claim that France with her submarines and Senegalese might do as she pleased in Europe.