Part 21

And, following upon its assent to those resolutions, the conference voted upon certain special applications of them. The abolitions of the extra territorial grievance, the right of China as a neutral power to escape the fate of Belgium and the right of China to be informed on the article of any treaty affecting her were established as far as a resolution of the conference could establish them.

And then came Senator Lodge. For the fourth plenary session “featured” Senator Lodge just as previous ones had “featured” Secretary Hughes, Mr. Balfour and M. Briand. Fifteen years ago I came to Washington and Senator Lodge showed me a collection of prehistoric objects from Central America and talked very delightfully about them. Fifteen years have changed Washington very greatly but they have not changed Senator Lodge.

He seems perhaps just a little slenderer and neater than before, but that may be a change in my own standards, and it was entirely in character with my former impressions of him that in putting the four-power treaty before the conference he should indulge himself and his hearers in a vision of the realities of the Pacific, the multitudinous interests of its innumerable islands, its infinite variety of races, customs, climates and atmospheres.

It was a most curious and attractive phase of the always-interesting conference to have this gray-headed, cultivated gentleman breaking through all the abstract jargon of diplomacy and militarism, all the talk of powers, radii of action, fortifications, spheres of influence, and so forth, in his attempt to make us realize the physical loveliness and intellectual charm of this enormous area of the world’s surface that the four-power treaty may perhaps save now and forevermore from the fear and horrors of war.

The proposed four-power treaty which thus starts upon its uncertain but hopeful journey toward ratification by the Senates, Legislatures and Governments of the world is essentially a departure from the normal tradition of the treaties of the nineteenth century. It is the first attempt to realize—what shall I call it?—the American way or the new way in international affairs. Its distinctive feature is the participation of two possible antagonists, America and Japan. Instead of a war they make a treaty and call in Britain and France to assist. It is a treaty for peace and not against an antagonist.

I think that the difference between “treaties for” and “treaties against” is one that needs to be stressed. The Anglo-Japanese treaty was a “treaty against,” a treaty against first Russia, then Germany and then against some vaguely conceived assailant. It is a great thing to have Japan and England cordially immolating that treaty now that this four-power treaty of the new spirit may be born.

After Senator Lodge came M. Viviani with a very fine, if guarded, speech. M. Viviani is a great speaker but he is not merely eloquent, and I find people here saying little about his wonderful voice or his overtones and undertones or his romantic charm but much about the subtle things he said. In a gathering that is tense with attention one is apt, perhaps, to transfer one’s own thoughts and expectations to the gathering as a whole, but it seems to me that when M. Viviani rose to welcome this great beginning on the Pacific, we were all thinking: “And how much further and to what other regions of the world are you prepared to extend this spirit and method of this Pacific bond? There is another rather threadbare ‘treaty against’ or at least an ‘understanding against,’ known as the Anglo-French entente. Is the time due yet for the merger of that also in another and greater bond of peace?”

I do not know how far the question that was in his mind was in the mind of the meeting, but I think that M. Viviani made it very plain that it was in the background of his own mind. His speech was designed to bring the simplicity, the easiness of the Pacific problem into sharp contrast with the tortured complexity of the Atlantic—the Afro-European problem. He spoke of the freedom of the Pacific from long established hate traditions. He reminded us of the twenty centuries of war and trampled frontiers and outrages and counter-outrages that had left Europe and North Africa scarred and festering.

He conjured up no bogies; he had nothing to say about those 7,000,000 phantom Germans ready to extract their hidden rifles from 7,000,000 mattresses and haylofts and rush upon France; but he reminded the conference, gravely and wisely, of the relative complexity of the European problem, of the new untried nationalities that had been liberated, of the vast heritage of tradition and suspicion that had to be overcome. He addressed not only the conference but the impatient liberal aspirations of the world. “I ask you for forbearance,” he said, and repeated that—“I ask for forbearance.”

Now that was a great speech, and M. Viviani is manifestly the sort of Frenchman with whom the new spirit can deal. “Forbearance” might well serve now as the watchword of Europe. And I wish that Mr. Balfour could have shown a fuller recognition of what M. Viviani had said. Mr. Balfour had been so fine on several occasions at this conference that I felt it is a little ungracious to him to confess, as I must do, that twice in this day of the fourth plenary session, once in the conference and also in the evening when he replied for the Allies at the Gridiron Club, he seemed to be missing an opportunity—the opportunity of holding out a hand of friendship to liberal France.

For the reactionary France, for the France of submarines and Senegalese and inflated army and navy estimates, neither Britain nor America nor any other part of the world has any use, and the more often we say that and the more distinctly we say it the better for every one; but toward a France that can teach and practice forbearance and come into great associations for the common welfare of mankind we ought to hold out both hands. Most of the bitterness that has been directed towards France of late is not the bitterness of any natural hatred; it is the bitterness of acute disappointment that France, the generous leader of freedom upon both the American and European Continents, no longer leads, seems to care no longer for either freedom or generosity. And twice I have seen opportunities lost for an appropriate gesture of reconciliation.

Sooner or later France and England have to say to each other: “We have been sore and sick and exasperated and suspicious and narrow. Let us take a lesson from this American plan and set about discussing an Atlantic treaty, an Afro-European treaty, worthy to put beside this Pacific treaty.”

And since this has to be said, it was a pity that Mr. Balfour could not take up M. Viviani’s half lead and begin to say it at the fourth plenary session of the Washington Conference.

XXVII ABOUT THE WAR DEBTS

Washington, Dec. 13.

In the official proceedings of the Washington Conference the war debts are never mentioned. It is an improper subject.

In the talks and discussions and the journalistic writings round and about the Washington Conference the war debts are perpetually debated. The nature of the discussion is so curious and interesting, it throws so strong a light upon the difficulties that impede our path to any settlement of the world’s affairs upon the sound democratic basis of a world-wide will, that some brief analysis of it is necessary if this outline of the peace situation is to be complete.

In private talk almost universally, in the weekly and monthly publications that are here called “highbrow,” I find a very general agreement that the bulk of these war debts and war preparation debts as between Russia and France, and between the European allies and Britain, and between Britain and America, and the bulk of the indemnity and reparation debt of Germany to the Allies, cannot be paid and ought not to be paid, and that the sooner that this legend of indebtedness is swept out of men’s imaginations the sooner we shall get on to the work of world reconstruction.

Only one of these debts is even remotely payable and that is the British debt to America. But with regard to that debt the situation rises to a high level of absurdity. The British authorities—it is an open secret—have been offering to begin the liquidation of their debt now. They cannot pay in gold, because most of the gold in the world is already sleeping uselessly in American vaults; but they offer what gold they have and, in addition, they are willing to get their factories to work and supply manufactured goods to the American creditor—clothes, boots, automobiles, ships, agricultural and other machinery, crockery, and so on, and so on.

Nothing could be fairer. Britain is full of unemployed—they must be fed anyhow—and if America insists upon her industries being buried under a pyramid of gold and manufactured articles, the British bankers and manufacturers believe they can, with an effort, manage the job and pull through. The exchange may take some strange flights and dives in the process, the British system may collapse even as the German system seems to be collapsing, but it is a strained situation anyhow. The British think the effort worth trying and the risk worth taking. And so behind the scenes it is Washington rather than London that wants at present to hold up the payment of the British debt.

Only one other of the outstanding debts looks at all payable at the present time, and that is so much of the reparation debts of Germany to France as can be paid in kind, in building material and manufactured goods not produced in France. The idea of any other European debt payments in full is just nonsense. The gold is not there and the stuff is not there, and there is no ability to produce anything like sufficient stuff under present conditions.

Now the interesting thing about the situation here is that the understanding people in America do not seem to be explaining this very simple situation as frankly as they might do to the mass of American people or at least that this explanation has not got through to the American people. There is a widespread conviction, which is sedulously sustained by the less intelligent or less scrupulous organs of the American press, that the wicked old European countries, and particularly Britain, that arch deceiver, are trying very meanly and cunningly to evade the payment of a righteous obligation.

Every effort to present the financial and economic disorder of the world as a world task in which the prosperous and fortunate American people may reasonably play a leading, intelligent and helpful part is misrepresented in this fashion. There is a vast vague clamor for repayment—aimed at Britain. Dealers in the old Irish hate business and the German hate business, now a little out of their original stock of grievances, join with shrill but syndicated Hindus in warning the simple citizen against counsels of financial sanity as though they were insidious propaganda. Until at last an Englishman is sorely tempted to an exasperated, “Well, take your debt!”—which does no justice to the patience and intelligence of either England or America.

Let us be clear upon one point. So far as the British debt goes, the Americans can have it if they prefer to take that line. The British here in Washington and the British writers here are here because the Americans invited them to come to discuss the world situation and the possibilities of world peace. They are not here to beg. The time is not likely to arrive when one English speaking community will beg from another. It certainly has not arrived now.

However, I am an obstinate believer in the common sense and good will of the American people, and I do not believe that a press campaign, designed to make a great people behave after the fashion of some hysterical back-street Oriental usurer who has struck a bad debt, is likely to do anything but recoil severely on the heads of those who have set it going. And I am not a believer in that sort of “tact” which would avoid reminding the American public of the circumstances under which these war debts were incurred.

The Russian debt to France was spent largely upon war and war preparations while Russia was the ally and helper of France; the war debts of the European Allies to Britain and America and the British debt to America were spent upon war material. All these debts are for efforts spent upon a common cause. Each country spent according to its resources, as good allies should. Russia gave life and blood—and blood. She gave 4,000,000 men; she smashed up her own social fabric. France and Britain gave the lives of men beyond the million mark. Also they gave much material, an enormous industrial effort. So also did Italy, according to her power.

The British developed a vast production of munitions as the war went on, using great supplies of material from America, for which they paid high prices and on which great profits were made in America. At last America joined the war, with her enormous reserves and strength, and gave not only great stores of material but the lives of between 50,000 and 75,000 men. And so, altogether, America and the Allied Powers, giving their lives and substance as they could, saved civilization from imperialism.

The British do not grudge the contribution they have made and all that they have still to contribute for their share in that colossal victory, but some of us English here are growing a little irritated at being dunned as defaulters when we are not going to default, and at having our attempts to work in co-operation with the Americans for the rehabilitation of a strained and collapsing civilization explained as the interested approaches of a cadging poor relation.