Part 16

The Harding idea, as it is growing up in people’s minds in Washington, seems to be something after this fashion: That this present conference shall be followed by others having a sort of genetic relationship to it, varying in their scope, in their terms of reference, in the number of states invited to participate. A successor to the present one seems to be already imminent in the form of a conference on the economic and financial disorder of the world. Such a conference would probably include German and Spanish, and possibly Russian, representatives, and it might take on in addition to its economic discussion any issues that this present conference may leave outstanding.

These Washington Conferences, it is hoped, will become a sort of international habit, will grow into a world institution in which experience will determine usages and usage harden into a customary rule. They will become by insensible degrees a World Parliament, with an authority that will grow or decline with the success or failure of the recommendations.

One advantage of having experiments made will occur at once to those who have been present at the plenary sittings of the present conference. The method of trial and error will afford an opportunity of working out the grave inconveniences of the language difficulty. It is plain that, with only three languages going, French, Japanese and English, proceedings may easily become very tedious; there is no true debate, no possibility of interpolating a question or a comment, no real and vivid discussion. The real debating goes on in notes and counter notes, in prearranged speeches, communications to the press representatives, and so forth.

The plenary sessions exist only to announce or confirm. They are essentially ceremonial. In any polyglot gathering it seems inevitable that this should be so. The framers of the League of Nations constitution, with its Council and Assembly, seem to have been far too much influenced by the analogy of single language governing bodies in which spontaneous discussion is frequent and free. World conferences are much more likely to do their work by translated correspondence and by private sessions of preparatory committees, and to use the general meeting only for announcement, indorsement and confirmation.

But the preparatory committees are only the first organs developed by the conference. Certain other organs are also likely to arise out of it as necessary to its complete function. Whatever agreements are arrived at here about either the limitation of armaments or the permanent regulation of the affairs of China and the Pacific, it is clear that they will speedily become seed beds of troublesome misunderstanding and divergent interpretation unless some sort of permanent body is created in each case, with very wide powers intrusted to it by the treaty making authorities of all the countries concerned to interpret, defend and apply the provisions of the agreement. Such permanent commissions seem to me to be dictated by the practical logic of the situation. Quite apart from the later conferences that President Harding has promised, a standing Naval Armament Commission and a Pacific Commission, with very considerable powers to fix things, seems to be a necessary outcome of the First Washington Conference.

But these two commissions will not cover all the ground involved. This conference cannot leave European disarmament and the European situation with its present ragged and raw ends. Nothing has been more remarkable, nothing deserves closer study by the thoughtful Americans, than the fluctuations of the British delegation at this conference with regard to a Pacific settlement. I see that able writer upon Chinese affairs, Dr. John Dewey, comments upon these changes of front and hints at some profound disingenuousness on the part of the British. But the reasons for these fluctuations lie on the surface of things. They are to be found in the European situation.

Britain, secure in Europe, unthreatened on her Mediterranean routes, can play the part of a strong supporter of American ideals in China. She seems, indeed, willing and anxious to do so—in spite of her past. But threatened in Europe, she can do nothing of the sort. She cannot extend an arm to help shield China while a knife is held at her throat. So the Pacific is entangled with the Mediterranean and the coasts of France, and it becomes plain that a Peace Commission for Europe is a third necessary consequence of this conference, if this conference is to count as a success.

Suppose now that this present conference produces the first two commissions I have sketched and gives way to a second conference, with an ampler representation of the European powers, which will direct its attention mainly to the reassurance and disarmament of France and Germany and Britain, a second conference whose findings may be finally embodied in this third commission I have suggested; and suppose, further, that an International Debt and Currency Conference presently gets to effective work, surely we may claim that the promised Association of Nations is well on its way towards crystallization.

Simply and naturally, step by step, the President of the United States will have become the official summoner of a rudimentary World Parliament. By the time that stage is reached a series of important questions of detailed organization will have arisen. Each executive commission, as the successive conference brings these commissions into being, will require in its several spheres agents, officials, a secretariat, a home for its archives, a budget. These conferences cannot go on meeting without the development of such a living and continuing body of world administration through the commissions they must needs create. Presumably that body of commissions will grow up mainly in and about Washington. If it does, it will be the most amazing addition to Congress conceivable; it will be the voluntary and gradual aggregation of a sort of loose World Empire round the monument of George Washington.

But I do not see that all these commissions and Parliaments need sit in Washington or that it is desirable that they should. A world commission for land disarmament might function in Paris or Rome, a world commission for finance in New York or London. And meanwhile, at Geneva or in Vienna, to which place there is some project of removal, the League of Nations, that first concrete realization of the American spirit, will be going on in its own rather cramped, rather too strictly defined lines.

It also will have thrown out world organizations in connection with health, with such world interests as the white slave traffic, and so forth. It will be conducting European arbitrations and it will be providing boundary commissions and the like. And somewhere there will also be a sort of World Supreme Court getting to work upon judicial international differences.

Now this, I submit, is the way that world unity is likely to arise out of our dreams into reality, and this partial, dispersed, experimenting way of growth is perhaps the only way in which it can come about. It is not so splendid and impressive a vision as that of some World Parliament, some perfected League, suddenly flashing into being and assuming the leadership of the world. It will not be set up like a pavilion but it will grow like a tree. But it is a reality and it comes. The Association of Nations grows before our eyes.

And meanwhile there is an immense task before teachers and writers, before parents and talkers and all who instruct and make and change opinion, and that is the task of building up a new spirit in the hearts of men and a new dream in their minds, the spirit of fellowship to all men, the dream of a great world released forever from the obsession of warfare and international struggle; a great world of steadily developing unity in which all races and all kinds of men will be free to make their distinctive contributions to the gathering achievements of the race.

XX FRANCE AND ENGLAND—THE PLAIN FACTS OF THE CASE

If we are to have any fundamental improvements in the present relations of nations, if we are to achieve that change of heart which is needed as the fundamental thing for the establishment of a world peace, then we must look the facts of international friction squarely in the face. It is no good pretending there is no jar when there is a jar. This business of the world peace effort, of which the Washington Conference is now the centre, is not to smooth over international difficulties; it is to expose, examine, diagnose and cure them.

Now here is this Franco-British clash, a plain quarrel and one very disturbing to the American audience. The Americans generally don’t like this quarrel. They are torn between a very strong traditional affection for the French and a kind of liking for at least one or two congenial things about the British. They would like to hear no more of it, therefore. They just simply want peace. But there the quarrel is. Was it an avoidable quarrel? Or was it inevitable? Perhaps it is something very fundamental to the European situation. Perhaps if we analyze it and probe right down to the final causes of it we may learn something worth while for the aims and ends of the Washington Conference.

Now, let us get a firm hold upon one very important fact, indeed. This clash is a clash between the present French Government and the present British Government, but it is not a clash between all the French and all the British. It is not an outbreak of national antipathy or any horrible, irreconcilable thing of that sort. There are elements in France strongly opposed to the French Government upon the issues raised in this dispute. There is a section of the English press fantastically on the “French” side and bitterly opposed even to the public criticism of the public speeches of the French Premier in English. The party politics of both France and Britain and, what is worse, those bitter animosities that centre upon political personalities have got into this dispute.

It may help to clear the issue if we disregard the attitude of the two Governments in naming the sides to the dispute, and if instead of speaking of the “French” or the “British” sides we speak of the “Keep-Germany-down” and the “Give-Germany-a-chance” sides, or better, if we call them the “Insisters,” who insist upon the uttermost farthing of repayment and penitence from Germany, and the “Believers,” who don’t. For it is upon Germany that the whole dispute turns.

There is a very powerful “Insister” party in Great Britain; there is a growing “Believer” party in France. And while France has been steadily “Insister” since the armistice, Britain and the British Government have changed round from “Insister” to “Believer” in the last year or so. This change has produced extraordinary strains and recriminations between French and British political groups and individuals, as such changes of front must always do. Such disputes often make far more noise than deep and vital national misunderstandings, and it is well that the intelligent observer, and particularly the American observer, should distinguish the note of the disconcerted party man in a rage from the note of genuine patriotic anger.

The beginnings of the present trouble are to be found in the Versailles Conference. There the only “Relievers” seem to have been the American representatives. Those were the days of the British Khaki election, when “Hang the Kaiser” and “Make the Germans Pay!” were the slogans that carried Mr. Lloyd George to power. For about four months the dispute went on between moderation and overwhelming demands. America stood alone for moderation. The British insisted upon the uttermost farthing, at least as strenuously as the French, and it was Gen. Smuts, of all people, who added the last straw to the intolerable burden of indebtedness that was then piled upon vanquished and ruined Germany. And both America and Britain were parties to the arrangements that give France the power, the Shylock right, of carving into Germany and disintegrating her more and more if Germany fail to keep up with the impossible payments that were then fixed upon her.

The position of the French Government in this business is therefore a perfectly legal and logical one. France can adhere, as M. Briand says she will, to the Treaty of Versailles, she can flout and disregard any disposition of the Washington Conference to qualify or revise that treaty, and the British Government, in a hopelessly embarrassed and illogical position, can appeal only to the hard logic of reality.

Britain is much more dependent upon her overseas trade than France, and so the British have earlier realized the enormous injury that the social and economic breakdown of Russia has done and the still more enormous injury that the breaking up of Central European civilization will do.

“You are quite within your rights,” these newly converted “Relievers” say to the obdurate “Insisters,” “but you will wreck all Europe.”

That idea that the possible destruction of civilization has not yet entered so many minds in France as it has in Britain. Germany is nearer to France than to Britain, and the fear of a renascent and vindictive Germany is greater in France than in Britain. In the French mind, the possibility of a German invasion for revenge twenty years hence still overshadows the possibility of an economic breakdown in a year or two years’ time. The British are nearer the breakdown and further from the Germans. That is the reality of this Franco-British clash.

Upon that reality bad temper, party feeling, personal spites, irrational prejudices, are building up a great mass of nasty, quarrelsome matter. And the French Government and the French nationalist majority are pressing on to naval and military preparations that distinctly threaten Britain. It is no good pretending that they do not do so when they do. The French submarines are aimed at Britain.

Empty civilities between France and Britain are of no value in a case of this sort. Both countries are being worried by their infernal politicians and both are in a state of financial distress and raw nerves. It is not a time when deliberation and clear reasoning are easy. But when we get down to the fundamentals of the case we find that the antagonism comes out to these two propositions that are not necessarily irreconcilable:

(I) That Germany, for the good of the whole world, must not be destroyed further, but, instead, assisted to keep upon her feet (“Relievers”), and

(II) That Germany must nevermore become a danger to France (“Insisters”).