Chapter XXIX: What a Stably Organized World Peace Means for Mankind (2)

None of these factors would be strong enough to prevent his being mainly Northern and much the same mixture altogether as the American citizen of 1950 is likely to be. He would be a white man with a touch of Asia and a touch of color. And he would be young—I should guess about twenty-one or twenty-two—still boyish, probably unmarried rather than married, with a father and mother alive and with the memories and imaginations of the home he was born in still fresh and vivid in his mind when he died. We could even, I suppose, figure in general terms how he died. He was struck in daylight amid the strange noises and confusion of a modern battlefield by something out of the unknown—bullet, shell fragment or the like. At the moment he had been just a little scared—every one is a little scared on a battlefield—but much more excited than scared and trying hard to remember his training and do his job properly. When he was hit he was not so much hurt at first as astonished. I should guess that the first sensation of a man hard hit on a battlefield is not so much pain as an immense chagrin.

I suppose it would be possible to go on and work out how long it was before he died after he was hit, how long he suffered and wondered, how long he lay before his ghost fell in with that immense still muster in the shades, those millions of his kind who had no longer country to serve nor years of life before them, who had been cut off as he had been cut off suddenly from sights and sounds and hopes and passions. But rather let us think of the motives and feelings that had brought him, in so gallant and cheerful a frame of mind, to this complete sacrifice.

What did the Unknown Soldier of the great war think he was doing when he died? What did we, we people who got him into the great war and who are still in possession of this world of his, what did we persuade him to think he was doing and what is the obligation we have incurred to him to atone for his death, for the life and sunlight he will know no more?

He was still too young a man to have his motives very clear. To conceive what moved him and what he desired is a difficult and disputable task. M. George Nobelmaire at a recent meeting of the League of Nations Assembly declared that he had heard French lads whisper “Vive la France!” and die. He suggested that German boys may have died saying, “Colonel, say to my mother, ‘Vive l’Allemagne!’” Possibly. But the French are trained harder in patriotism than any other people. I doubt if it was the common mood. It was certainly not the common mood among the British.

I cannot imagine many English boys using their last breath to say “Rule Britannia!” or “King George for Merry England!” Some of our young men swore out of vexation and fretted; some, and it was not always the youngest, became childish again and cried touchingly for their mothers; many maintained the ironical flippancy of our people to the end; many died in the vein of a young miner from Durham with whom I talked one morning in the trenches near Martinpuich, trenches which had been badly “strafed” overnight. War, he said, was a beastly job, “but we’ve got to clean this up.” That is the spirit of the lifeboat man or fireman. That is the great spirit. I believe that was far nearer to the true mind of the Unknown Soldier than any tinpot Viva-ing of any flag, nation or empire whatever.

I believe that when we generalize the motives that took the youth who died in the great war out of the light of life and took them out at precisely the age when life is most desirable, we shall find that the dominating purpose was certainly no narrow devotion to the “glory” or “expansion” of any particular country, but a wide-spirited hostility to wrong and oppression. That is clearly shown by the nature of the appeals that were made in every country to sustain the spirit of its soldiers.

If national glory and patriotism had been the ruling motive of these young men, then manifestly their propaganda would have concerned themselves mainly with national honor and flag idolatry. But they did not do so. Nowadays flags fly better on parades and stoop fronts than on battlefields. The war propagandas dwelt steadily and insistently upon the wickedness and unrighteousness of the enemy, upon the dangers of being overwhelmed by foreign tyranny, and particularly upon the fact that the enemy had planned and made the war. These boys fought best on that—everywhere.

So far as the common men in every belligerent country went, therefore, the great war was a war against wrong, against force, against war itself. Whatever it was in the thoughts of the diplomatists, it was that in the minds of the boys who died. In the minds of these young and generous millions who are personified in the Unknown Soldier of the great war, in the minds of the Germans and Russians who fought so stoutly, quite as much as the Americans, British, French or Italians, the war was a war to end war.

And that marks our obligation.

Every speech that is made beside the graves of these Unknown Soldiers who lie now in the comradeship of youthful death, every speech which exalts patriotism above peace, which hints at reparations and revenges, which cries for mean alliances to sustain the traditions of the conflict, which exalts national security over the common welfare, which wags the “glorious flag” of this nation or that in the face of the universal courage and tragedy of mankind, is an insult and an outrage upon the dead youth who lies below. He sought justice and law in the world as he conceived these things, and whoever approaches his resting place unprepared to serve the establishment of a world law and world justice, breathing the vulgar cants and catchwords of a patriotism outworn and of conflicts that he died to end, commits a monstrous sacrilege and sins against all mankind.

V
THE PRESIDENT AT ARLINGTON

Washington, Nov. 11.

I am writing this just after my return from the funeral, in the National Cemetery, of the American Unknown Soldier at Arlington, a very stately and moving ceremony, under the bright blue sky and the cold, keen air of a Virginia November day. The body had been lying in state at the Capitol and it was carried through Washington to the cemetery at the head of a great procession in which the Supreme Court, the Cabinet, Senators, members of the House of Representatives, war veterans and a multitude of societies marched on foot, a march of nearly two hours and a half duration. Much of this gathering was of the substance of all such processions, but one or two of the contingents were rich with association and suggestion.

There were fifty or sixty, I should guess, very old men, bent, white-headed—one with a conspicuous long, white beard—veterans of a civil war that was fought out to an end before I was born. They came close to a contingent of men who had been specially decorated in the great war, erect and eager, still on the better side of the prime of life. These older men had fought in a great fight against a division, a separation that today, thanks to their sacrifice, has become inconceivable. They had fought to seal the Federal Union of what were else warring States. The young men who marched before them had fought in a war upon the greater stage of the whole world. Some day the tale of those abundant heroes will have shrunken to the dimensions of that little band of pathetic and glorious old men. Will they live to as complete an assurance that their cause also has been won forever, the newer veterans of the greater union that has yet to come?

There were many points of contrast between the ceremony I have just witnessed in the graceful marble amphitheatre in the beautiful Virginian open country and the burials that have taken place in the very hearts of London, Paris and Rome. In the face of a common identity of idea, they mark an essential difference in the nature of the occasion.

Thursday I went to see the people who were filing past the flag-covered coffin. It was a crowd fairly representative, I thought, of the Washington population as one sees it on the streets; all classes were represented, but chiefly it consisted of that well-dressed, healthy looking middle class sort of people who predominate in the streets of most American cities. They came to honor a national hero, the personification of American courage and loyalty. Few, I think, were actual mourners of a dead soldier. The couples and groups of people I saw hurrying up the sloping paths to the entrance of the Capitol, filing up the steps to the rotunda or dispersing on the other side were characterized by a sort of bright eagerness and approval.

They contrasted very strongly with my memory of the great column of still and mournful people under the dark London sky, eight deep, stretching all up Whitehall and down Northumberland Avenue and along the Embankment for a great distance, a column which moved on slowly, step by step, and which faded away at night to be replaced by fresh mourners on the morrow to do honor to the Unknown Warrior in London. That crowd, with its wreaths and flowers, represented the families, the lovers, the sisters and friends of perhaps a quarter of a million of dead men from London and the south and centre of England; the massed, mute tragedy of its loss was overwhelming. It reduced all the ceremony that had gathered it to comparative unimportance. But the remote distances of America forbade any such concentration of sorrow. There may have been the relations and friends of perhaps a thousand men upon the scene at Arlington. The loss to the District of Columbia itself was less than six hundred killed. A group of wounded men in the amphitheatre struck the most intimate note. The rest of the gathering at Arlington shared a less personal grief. They were sympathizers rather than sufferers.

Because of this emotional difference, the Arlington ceremony presented itself primarily as a ceremony. For most there it was a holiday, a fine and noble holiday, but a holiday. By it, America did not so much mourn the tragedy of war as seek to arouse itself to that tragedy. Everywhere the Stars and Stripes, the most decorative and exhilarating of national flags, waved and fluttered, and an irresistible expression of America’s private life and buoyant well-being mingled in the proceedings. For most of the gathering that coffin under the great flag held nothing they had ever touched personally; it was not America’s lost treasure of youth, but rather a warning of the fate that may yet overtake the youth of America if war is not to end. At Arlington, throughout the length and breadth of America, when for two minutes at mid-day all work and movement stopped and America stood still, an innumerable host of fathers and mothers and wives and friends could whisper thanks to God in their hearts that their sons and their beloved remained alive.

And I suppose it is largely because America is still so much less war-stricken than any of the other belligerents of the great war that so much more powerful a sense of will was apparent in all these proceedings. The burial of the Unknown Soldier in America was not a thing in itself as it was in London, in Paris or Rome; it was a solemn prelude to action, the action of the great conference which is to seek peace and enduring peace for all mankind. This note was struck even in the Chaplain’s opening invocation. He said:

“Facing the events of the morrow, when from the workbench of the world there will be taken an unusual task, we ask that Thou wilt accord exceptional judgment, foresight and tactfulness of approach to those who seek to bring about a better understanding among men and nations to the end that discord, which provokes war, may disappear and that there may be world tranquillity.”

And the very fine oration of President Harding, following closely upon this line.

I saw the President for the first time at Arlington. He is a very big, fine-looking man and his voice is a wonderful instrument. He spoke slowly and very distinctly, his gestures admirably controlled. He is—how can I say it?—more statuesque than any of the American Presidents of recent times, but without a trace in his movements or appearance of posturing or vanity. Men say he is a sincerely modest man, determined to do the best that is in him and at once appalled and inspired by the world situation in which he finds himself among the most prominent figures. Not only in its main circumstances but in many of its incidents is the position of the President of the United States appalling. The President stood in the apse to the right of the Unknown Soldier and to the other side of him was a black box upon a stand, a box perhaps two feet by one. This was the receiver that was to carry his voice, intensely amplified, to still greater gatherings in New York, in San Francisco and over the whole United States. Never was human utterance so magnified. Every syllable, every slip was recorded. He slipped once at an antithesis and was obliged to repeat. From the Atlantic to the Pacific that slip was noted.

I have heard much detraction of the President both before I came to America and since I have been here, but here I have found also a growing and spreading belief in him. And this address of his, rhetorical though it was in a simple and popular American way, was nevertheless a very dignified address and one inspired by a spirit that is undeniably great. Here is a fine saying:

“His patriotism was none less if he craved more than triumph of country; rather, it was greater if he hoped for a victory for all human kind. Indeed, I revere that citizen whose confidence in the righteousness of his country inspired belief that its triumph is the victory of humanity.

“This American soldier went forth to battle with no hatred for any people in the world, but hating war and hating the purpose of every war for conquest.”

We are to seek “the rule under which reason and righteousness shall prevail.” There is to be “the commanding voice of a conscious civilization against armed warfare,” “a new and lasting era of peace on earth.” And with a fine instinct for effect the President ended his oration with the Lord’s Prayer, with its appeal for one universal law for mankind: “Thy kingdom come on earth....”

Every other gossip tells you that President Harding comes from Main Street and repeats the story of Mrs. Harding saying: “We’re just folk.” If President Harding is a fair sample of Main Street, Sinclair Lewis has not told us the full story and Main Street is destined to save the world.

VI
THE FIRST MEETING

Washington, Nov. 13.

It was difficult at first to imagine the conference as anything more than an admirably well managed social occasion.

Continental Hall is a quite charming building, not too big for intimacy, not too small for a sufficient gathering of people. The chief members of the delegations had still to assemble; they were to sit at green baize covered tables in the body of the hall. About this central arena sat the massed attaches, and under the galleries the press representatives. In the boxes clustered the ladies of the diplomatic world. Members of the House of Representatives, the Senators, their friends and a sprinkling of privileged people occupied the big galleries above.

There was a great chatter of conversation when I entered. Everybody was greeting friends, flitting from group to group. It was one of those gatherings where everybody seemed to know everybody. Socially, it was extraordinarily like a very smart first night in a prominent London theatre.

“Last time I came to America,” I found myself saying, “I brought a silk hat and morning coat, and never wore them once. Now everybody seems to be wearing a morning coat and a silk hat.” It was the sort of occasion one dresses for. And that was the tone of the conversation.

It was difficult to believe that this gathering could be the beginning of anything of supreme historical importance.

Came a slight hush in the conversation. The delegates appeared, all with tremendously familiar faces taken out of the illustrated papers. They disposed themselves in their seats in leisurely fashion. One seat remained vacant for a time—the seat of the President. Then appeared President Harding, and there was a great clapping of hands. It became more and more like a first night. Then a hushing of enthusiasm, and silence, and he spoke.

It was a fine speech, less ornate and more direct than the Arlington oration. And the galleries above, behaving more and more like a first night audience, interrupted with rounds of applause whenever there were definite allusions to disarmament. He finished and declared the conference open and departed. Mr. Balfour followed, echoing the President’s sentiments in a few well chosen words and proposing Secretary Hughes for the Chairman of the conference.

The Hall became aware of a check in the onward flow of the proceedings. An interpreter got up and repeated Mr. Balfour’s speech in French for the benefit of the French delegation. He had made a shorthand note as Mr. Balfour spoke. This, we learned, was to be the procedure throughout the conference. Every speech, question and interruption was to be dealt with in this interlinear manner. Fortunately, it was not necessary to do this in the case of the President’s address, nor was it necessary in the case of the address of Secretary Hughes, which was now impending because these had already been printed and distributed and a translation made of them.

Their linguistic isolation is likely to prove unfortunate for the French. The Belgian, the Dutch, the Chinese, Japanese and Portuguese delegations all speak in English and listen to the English speeches. Consequently, the French are in a position in which they seem to be the most foreign people present. This must be disconcerting to them now.

It will be much more disconcerting if, at a later stage, German delegates speaking English should appear upon some extension or side committee of the conference. But I do not see how it can be avoided. The French are a little out of touch in the conference because of this; they must be much more out of touch with the incessant conversation in clubs and at dinner tables and everywhere in Washington, which makes the atmosphere in which the conference is working.

This, however, is a note by the way. Secretary Hughes took the chair and delivered his address. It was a very carefully arranged surprise and its effect was really dramatical. It jumped the conference abruptly from the fine generalizations that had hitherto engaged it to immediately practical things. Secretary Hughes sketched out what was evidently a carefully worked out scheme, a most explicit scheme, for the complete cessation of naval armament competition.

America wanted at the very outset, he said, to convince the world that she meant business in the conference, and so she had taken this unexpected step of putting immediate practical proposals upon the table. She would scrap completely all the ships she had still under construction and all her older ships and she would discontinue all naval construction for ten years if Britain and Japan would do the same.

She proposed that the naval strength of the three powers concerned should remain for ten years in the ratio of: Britain, 22; America, 18, and Japan, 10. In other words, she proposed so to fix things that no two of these three powers can wage a conclusive naval war against each other, but with America and Britain in a position to do so jointly against Japan and with Japan at a great disadvantage against America, even if she were to risk an inconclusive war with America on the chance of Britain’s not coming in. And having unfolded this scheme, Secretary Hughes concluded.

We were a little stunned. We had expected the opening meeting to be preliminary, to stick to generalities. After Secretary Hughes had finished, there was a feeling that we wanted to go away and think. But the members of the House of Representatives were enjoying an unwonted sense of being in the gallery, quite irresponsibly in the gallery, with somebody else upon the floor. They burst in upon our statesmanlike thoughts below with loud cries for “Briand!”

The atmosphere of friendly festival was reestablished. M. Briand spoke eloquently—saying nothing whatever about the proposals of Secretary Hughes—and sat down, and his still quite abstract praises of peace were translated into English.

“Japan!” shouted the members of the House of Representatives, a theatre gallery now in full cry. Japan spoke in English and its sentiments were translated into French for the benefit of the foreigners. Japan expressed admirable sentiments and said nothing whatever about the proposals of Secretary Hughes.

Thereafter it would have been discourteous not to call for something from Italy, China, Belgium, Holland and Portugal. They all spoke in English, even Belgium spoke in English, and what they said was translated into French. Nobody said anything whatever about the proposals of Secretary Hughes. The gallery applauded each speech heartily and the atmosphere of a first night was completely restored. We dispersed to luncheons and tea parties and to talk before we wrote about it. And as we tried to get it into focus in our minds it became clear that much more than a ceremonial opening of the conference had occurred.

Secretary Hughes has made proposals that challenge the whole situation in the Pacific. For if Japan accepts them—I do not see how they could be otherwise than acceptable to the British—it puts Japan to so definite and permanent a disadvantage that it amounts to an abandonment on the part of Japan of the idea of fighting a war on the Pacific except as the last desperate defensive resort under the pressure of an unavoidable attack, and Japan can abandon that idea only if she can see her way clearly without a war to all that she believes to be vitally necessary to her.

It is possible to say that Secretary Hughes has narrowed down the work of the conference by this sudden focusing of attention upon naval warfare and Japan. But I do not think that is the case. The challenge he has made cannot be taken up until a number of associated issues are settled. Certainly his proposals have precipitated the work of the conference from the clouds and beautiful generalities to the earth and very concrete realities.

“You accept these proposals,” America says in effect. “If not, why not?”

Japan must accept or reply so and so. So from armaments we shall get to the aims behind armaments; for no battleship is launched except against a specific antagonist and for a specific end. And in the matter of aims also the conference will presently have to consider what each power must scrap for the common good and what it may be permitted to keep for its own satisfaction.

Since Secretary Hughes made it clear that the conference is to approach the inevitable general discussion of world peace by way of the sea and the Pacific, since for a time France and Europe generally will sit somewhat out of the limelight, it will be well, perhaps, if in my next article I discuss a few elementary considerations about Japan.

VII
WHAT IS JAPAN?

Washington, Nov. 15.

Of all the national delegations assembled here in Washington, the most acutely scrutinized, the most discussed and probably the least understood is the Japanese. The limelight gravitates toward it, moved, one feels, not so much by an extreme respect as by an inordinate curiosity.

Of only one other people—I write as a spectator from overseas—does one feel the same sense of the possibility of dramatically unexpected things, and that is the Americans. The Japanese, we feel, we have not found out, and the Americans, we feel, have not found out themselves. Already the Americans have sprung one great surprise upon the conference. Britain, France, Italy and the other powers in attendance are comparatively calculable—so far as their representation goes. But Japan is different; it is not built upon the same lines, it follows different laws.

I went on Sunday night to the press reception at the Japanese headquarters. The Ambassador is a buoyant man of the world, speaking excellent English and thoroughly acclimatized to an American press gathering. But many of the Japanese faces about him set my imagination busy, putting them back into the voluminous robes and the sashes holding the double swords with which I had first met them long ago in Japanese prints, and which would have become them so much better.

Admiral Kato spoke in Japanese and Prince Tokugawa in English; they welcomed the Hughes proposals with warm generalities and hopes for peace—as we all hope for peace—with insufficient particulars. I got no conversation with any Japanese; they were not talking to us; they did not want to talk; it was a reception of hearty politeness and no exchanges. I found myself falling back upon an earlier impression.

Some weeks ago I had a very illuminating talk in my garden at home with two Japanese visitors, Mr. Mashiko and Mr. Negushi, who had come to discuss various educational ideas with me. And they told me things that seem to me to be fundamentally important in this question. “We build up our children,” said Mr. Mushiko, “upon a diametrically different plan from yours. We turn them the other way round. Obedience and devotion are our leading thoughts. All our sentiment, all our stories and poetry, the traditions of centuries, teach loyalty, blind, unquestioning loyalty, of wife to husband, of man to his lord, of every one to the monarch.

“The loyalty is religious. So far as political and social questions go, it is fundamental. But your training cultivates independence, free thought, the unsparing criticism of superiors, institutions, relationships. Perhaps it is better in the end and more invigorating; but it seems to us wild and dangerous. * * * We begin to have a sort of public opinion, but it is still diffident and timid.”

An American and an Englishman, he said, cared for his country because he believed it belonged to him. A Japanese cared for his country because he believed he belonged to it. One could not pass from one habit of mind to the other, he thought, without grave risks and dangers. It is easier to destroy obedience than to create responsibility.

I was reminded of that conversation the other day by a remark made by a fellow journalist on the train to Washington:

“A Chinese will tell you what he thinks—like an American—but a Japanese always feels he is an agent, even if he isn’t an accredited one.”

Now, this is very interesting and probably a very fundamental comparison. This difference in spirit will make the Japanese people a very different instrument from the American and English or French people. It will make the Japanese Government a different thing from the Governments it will be meeting in Washington. A people built up on obedience can be held and wielded as no modern democratic people can be held and wielded. It is different in kind.

Unless this point is kept in mind, there are certain to be great and possibly dangerous misunderstandings in the Washington discussions. There have possibly been very dangerous misunderstandings already of the European powers by the Japanese. The Japanese are likely to think the Atlantic Governments are more free to decide than they really are, and that what they say is more conclusive than it really is, and the Atlantic peoples are likely to think too much of the appearance of a liberal public opinion in Japan and to imagine that a Japanese Government may be thrown out and its policy changed much more easily than is the case. But indeed Japan is a Government, a military Government, holding its people in its hand like a staff or a weapon, while America and France and Britain are people operating the Governments, more or less imperfectly. In no relationship is confusion upon this point more probable and more dangerous than between Japan and Britain or France at the present time, and in no connection is there greater need of perfectly plain statement.

Seeing that Britain is still a monarchy with many aristocratic forms, it is fatally easy for a Japanese statesman to fall into the belief that the British Government is as completely in control, and its officials as able to bind or loose, as the Japanese Government and officials, and because of this belief to trust to the private assurance and general attitude of personages in high places far more than they are justified in doing. The British democracy is very like the American democracy in its inability to keep watching what is happening overseas; it is preoccupied by domestic questions and things that are near to it. You cannot expect a Wiltshire farmer or a Lancashire cotton spinner to keep up, day by day, with the concession-hunting game in Persia or South China. But if that game of concession hunting piles up to sufficiently serious consequences, these democracies are likely to wake up in a manner quite outside the Japanese range of possibilities. And to a large extent the same is true of France.

It is the blessed privilege of an irresponsible journalist to say things that no diplomatist could ever say, and upon the relations of Japan, America and England there are certain truths that seem to need saying very plainly at the present time. But though I am an irresponsible journalist, it is also to be noted that I am a very English Englishman and that I know the way of thinking of my people.

The British people have been sleeping happily upon the belief that war with America is impossible. And for them it is impossible. In this matter the British have a special and extraordinary instinct. They will not fight the United States of America. I will not go into the peculiar feelings that produce this disposition; they are feelings great numbers of Americans do not understand and have indeed taken great pains not to understand. But to the common British, fighting Americans would have much the same relation to fighting other peoples that cannibalism would have to eating meat.

I hear a certain type of American over here slowly and heavily debating the Hughes proposals on the assumption that there may be a war of America against Britain and Japan. Such an assumption is—if I may be permitted the word—idiotic. As a people, the British have not been thinking very much about the Pacific question. They have been preoccupied by Ireland and their own economic troubles. But if that question presently moves toward a level of intensity where war is possible, let there be no mistake about it in Japan, the ordinary English will be thinking with the Americans. They will read much the same stuff because they have the same language, and think in the same way because they have kindred habits of thought.

It will not matter then what assurances and sentiments the Japanese may have had for official personages in Great Britain. For we are dealing here not with a matter of agreements but with a kind of moral gravitation. If there is a conflict the British masses will want to come in on the American side, and if it seems likely to be in the least an inconclusive conflict they will certainly come in. If the rulers of the Japanese dream that any other combination is possible in the Pacific they are under as dangerous a delusion as ever lured a great nation to disaster.

But there are many signs that if ever the ruling people of Japan entertained this delusion they are being disillusionized and that they begin to realize that a war with America in the Pacific will mean a war with America, Britain, and possibly—to judge from the recent astonishing remark by that able writer “Pertinax”—France. France may use her influence at Washington on behalf of Japan in certain matters, but that is all Japan will get from France. The Japanese, I believe, now fully realize this, and the trend of recent Japanese utterances is all in the direction of discussion and the disavowal of any belligerent dreams.

Yet, Japan continues to arm, and though she now disavows war as her method, she sits very proudly and stiffly in her weapons at the parley. She may have limited and restrained her dreams, but there is still some minimum in her mind beyond which she will not retreat without a struggle. What is that minimum which will satisfy her without war? Will it satisfy her for good, will it seem so permanently satisfactory to her that she will be willing not only to set aside the thought of and preparation for an immediate war, but—what is of far more importance—enter into such a binding contract for her future international relationships as will enable her to beat the swords of her Samurai into ploughshares for good and all?

Is Japan peculiarly an obstacle to the practical, if informal, federation of the world to which we all hope that things are moving?

When I try to frame a hopeful answer to that question, it occurs to me with added force that Japan is not a people trying to express itself through a Government as we Atlantic peoples are, but a Government, a small ruling class, in effective possession of an obedience-loving people. And I remember that that small ruling class has a long tradition of romantic and chivalrous swordsmanship. Is that ruling class going to keep its power and is it going to preserve its tradition? No one would be more urgent than I for the complete disarmament of the entire world, but no one could be more convinced of the unwisdom of disarmament by America or any other power while any single country in the world maintains a spirit that must lead at last to a resumption of warfare. TO DISARM IN SUCH A SITUATION IS TO LEAVE THE TROUBLE TO ACCUMULATE UPON OUR GRAND-CHILDREN; TO PATCH UP A TEMPORARY PEACE BASED ON THE PERMITTED “EXPANSION” OF SUCH A POWER IS SIMPLY TO PREPARE FOR AN EXPANDED WAR IN THE FUTURE.

But is that Japanese ruling class resolved at any cost, even at the cost of another World War and at the risk of destroying Japan, to hold onto its present power and to adhere rigidly to its tradition? In the last hundred years Japan, because of her aristocracy and because of her general obedience, has achieved feats of adaptation to new conditions that are unparalleled in history. As we have noted, there have recently been indications of further changes in the spirit of Japan.

She is said to be pressing forward with the education of the common people and the liberation of thought and discussion. In the long run, what is happening in the schools of Japan is of more importance to mankind than what is happening in her dockyards. But at present we do not know what is happening in the schools of Japan. One hears much of New Japan and Liberal Japan, and there is even an unofficial representative of the Japanese Opposition in Washington. But, so far as we can judge at this distance, we must be guided by the policy and methods of the Japanese Government.

Before we can judge these we must consider the nature of the field in which they seem to clash most with American ideas and with American and European interests, namely, China and Eastern Asia generally. In my next paper I will ask, “What is China?” and consider the nature of the needs and claims of Japan in regard to China and the prohibitions and the renunciations the Western powers want to impose upon her. For it is on account of these restrictions and prohibitions that Japan has been building her battleships. Her fighting fleet is to secure her a free hand in China and Siberia; it can have no other purpose. And I shall take up the question whether the prohibitions and renunciations we want to force upon Japan are not prohibitions and restrictions that we are bound in fairness to impose equally upon all powers concerned with China and the Far East. If the other powers are not prepared for extreme general retractions and renunciation in China; if they want to bar out Japan from aggressive practices and exclusive advantages that other powers retain; if we cling to any sort of racial distinction in these matters, then I shall submit, we are asking impossible things from Japan and we are forcing her toward what must must be indeed a very desperate gamble for her, a refusal to enter into this proposed disarmament agreement—and that means war.

VIII
CHINA IN THE BACKGROUND

Washington, Nov. 16.

The Chinese propaganda in America and Western Europe seems on the whole to be conducted more efficiently than the Japanese. And the Chinese student, it seems to me, gets into closer touch with the educated American and European because his is a democratic and not an aristocratic habit of mind. He has an intensely Western sense of public opinion.

The masses of China may be destitute, ignorant and disordered, but in their mental habits they are modern and not mediæval, in the same sense that the Japanese are mediæval and not modern. The Chinese seem to “get on” with their Western social equivalents better than any of the Asiatic people. And increasing multitudes of Chinese are learning English today; it is the second language in China.

Now, if Japan is the figure in the limelight at Washington today, China is the giant in the background and scene of the present Pacific drama. We have had so much in the papers lately about these two countries, we have been treated to such a feast of particulars about them, that most of us have long since forgotten very thoroughly the broad facts of the case, and it will be refreshing to recall them here and now.

Let us remind ourselves that China is a country with a population amounting at the lowest estimate to between twice and three times the population of the United States, or of France and England put together. This population has the longest unbroken tradition of peaceful industry in the world. It is essentially civilized; it respects learning and civility profoundly. A common literature and ancient traditions keep its people one.

In the past China has been divided again and again—always to reunite. But it has become “old-fashioned,” dangerously old-fashioned, perhaps by reason of its very stability; it has lagged behind most of the world in the development of its transport and economic possibilities. In mineral deposits and other natural resources and in the industrial capability of its sturdy and intelligent population it has more undeveloped wealth than any other single people in the world. It is only in the last century or so that China has lagged behind.

Only a few centuries ago China was as civilized as Europe and politically more stable. In a century or so she may be again the most civilized and intelligent power in the world, flourishing in fellowship and perfect understanding with the great states of America and Europe.

She may be—if she is not torn to pieces and kept in a state of enfeeblement and disorder by the hostile action of external powers.

But at present China is in a state of political impotence. Her Manchu imperialism has proved itself to be hopelessly inefficient and China is now struggling to reconstruct upon modern republican lines, obviously suggested by the American example. A few decades ago Japan astonished the world by Europeanizing herself upon Prussian lines. China now, under far less favorable conditions and with a vaster country and a less disciplined people, is struggling to Americanize herself.

But it is no easy task to make over a people at one stride from a mediæval autocracy to a modern democracy. It is far easier to Prussianize than to Americanize, for in the one case you have only to train an official class and in the other you must educate a whole people. China is torn by dissensions; the south jars with the north; she has two or more Governments, each claiming to be THE Chinese Government, and whole provinces have fallen under the sway of military adventurers. It is a distressing spectacle, but it was probably an inevitable phase in the development of New China.

Before we fall a prey to anti-Chinese propaganda it is well to recall how long it has always taken to build up the necessary understandings and habits of association upon which a new political system rests.

France, for example, was a land of revolutions and political instability for nearly a century after the Great Revolution. America wrangled feebly and dangerously for several years after the War of Independence, before she established her Federal Government; she only cemented her union after a colossal struggle; she was not really and securely one until a century had elapsed.

During these long decades of probation foreign observers preached endlessly about the fickleness of the French and the political inefficiency of the Americans and foretold the certainty of a break-up of the United States, just as today they sneer at Young China and foretell the political disintegration of the Chinese. And we have to bear in mind that the forces of reorganization and renewal in China struggle against peculiar difficulties and interferences quite outside the happier experiences of France and America. In particular, they struggle against an intolerable and paralyzing amount of foreign interference.

The brilliant series of adventures and accidents by which a London trading company added the Empire of Great Mogul as a picturesque but incongruously big jewel to the British Crown set an extraordinarily bad precedent in Asiatic affairs. It obsessed European political thought with the impossible dream of carving up all Asia into similar domains. The Mogul’s empire was itself an empire of conquest in a land saturated by ideas of caste, and this gave all these European adventurers the attitude of high caste men benevolently consuming inferior races.

In that spirit, Europe—with Japan coming in presently as a hopeful student of European methods—had been trying to cook, carve up and fight for the portions of China for nearly a century, treating these wonderful people as an inferior race. The very worst that can be said about Japan with regard to China is that she has been too vigorously European.

Consider how it would have been with the United States in the years of discord that led up to the Civil War if these difficulties had been complicated by three such embarrassments as these: First, that most foreigners, except now the Germans and Austrians, are outside the reach of the native courts, that their disputes with Chinese go before special foreign courts, that they are specially favored in regard to property and shipping; secondly, that the Chinese Government is restricted from raising revenue by any tariff above a flat rate of 5 per cent., and that they are also strictly restricted to 2½ per cent. in their interior dues upon foreign (but not Chinese) trade, so that they are in fact unable to raise enough revenue to maintain an efficient Government; and thirdly, that nearly all the Chinese railways—and as every American knows, transport is the very life of modern state—are in the grip of this foreign country or that.

These are the open and manifest inconveniences of the situation, but behind these more open aspects there is a vast tangle of intervention between Chinamen and Chinese affairs—schemes for further exploitation, financial entanglements, vast concession plans and projects for “spheres of influence” for this aggressive foreign nation or that. And this foreign influence is not the influence of one foreign power pursuing a single and consistent policy but a number of competing powers, all pursuing different ends and pulling things this way and that. How could any country reconstruct itself while it was entangled in such a net of interference? No people on earth could do such a thing.

The plain fact is that if China is to reconstruct herself that net has to be cut away. It is not enough to warn Japan out of China or to say “open door” for China. The open door is good for the ventilation of that great apartment, but what is also needed is a clearing out of the encumbrance inside. These encumbrances are not primarily Japanese.

The five great powers sit at a green table in the form of a horseshoe in the conference and the four lesser powers are at a straight table like the armature of a horseshoe magnet. At the left hand corner, next the Japanese, are the three Chinese representatives. I gather they will be allowed to say “Shantung” at the conference in moderation but not Thibet nor Tonquin nor the East China—or indeed any—railway. I doubt if either Mr. Balfour or M. Briand will nerve himself to say these forbidden words. But an irresponsible journalist may write them.

If there is to be a real end to war and disarmament there has to be release of China to free Chinese control, and that means a self-denying ordinance from ALL the great powers. It will be an easy one for America and Italy to accept, but it will be a difficult sacrifice indeed for those two hoary leaders in the break-up of China, Great Britain and France. Neither country has a bad heart, but long ago in the East they acquired some very bad habits. This is a time when bad habits lead very quickly to disaster.

The real test of the quality of the conference will appear when some issue arises which involves an assertion or denial of the principle of “Unhand and keep your hands off China.” If the Chinese are worth while, the conference has to establish that principle. It cannot be gracefully advanced by America because America has so little to relinquish. It CAN be established at the initiative of either Britain or France.

It seems plain to me that official America is waiting for some move in this direction from either or both of these powers. If that principle of a free China is established at the Washington Conference the way will have been opened in the not very remote future to a healthy and vigorous United States of China, a great modern, pacific and progressive power. And when I write “China” I mean what any sensible man means when he writes “China”—I mean all those parts of Asia in which the Chinese people and the Chinese culture prevail. I include at least South Manchuria, which is as surely Chinese as Texas is American, and which can no more be GIVEN to any other power without the consent of China than my overcoat can be given by one passerby to another.

The plain alternative to a released and renascent China is the cutting up of China among the aggressive powers to the tune of that popular American air “The Open Door,” the demoralization and disintegration of the Chinese, international elbowing, competition, quarrels among the powers who have “shared” China, and, at last, the next great war—which it will be just as easy for America to keep out of as the great war of 1914–1918.

IX
THE FUTURE OF JAPAN

Washington, Nov. 18.

If we adopt as our guiding principle that China is “worth while,” if we make up our minds—and it seems to me that the American public at least is making up its mind—that China is to bring itself up to date and to reorganize itself as a great union of states under purely Chinese control, and that it is to be protected by mutual agreement among the powers from outside interference during the age of reorganization, then it is clear that all dreams of empire in China or any fragments of China on the part of any other power must cease.

This building up of a united, peaceful China by the conscious, self-denying action of the chief powers of the world is evidently, under present conditions, the only sane policy before the powers assembled at Washington, but it is, unhappily, quite diametrically opposed to all traditions of competitive nationality. And I find a most extraordinary conflict going on in men’s minds here in Washington between the manifest sanities of the world situation and those habits of thought and action in which we have all been bred. Competitive nationalism and the long established competitive traditions of European diplomacy have gone far toward wrecking the world; and they may yet go far toward wrecking the Washington Conference. We have all got these traditions strong in us, every one of us. These traditions, these ideas of international intercourse as a sort of game to beat the other fellow, have as tough a vitality as the appetite of the wasp, which will go on eating greedily after its abdomen has been cut off. Indeed, some of the representatives of the powers at Washington seem still to be clinging to the ambition of finally devouring China, or large parts of China—a feast which they will not have the remotest prospect of digesting.

If that sort of thing goes on, a continuation of war preparation, a renewal of war and the consummation of the social smash now in progress is inevitable. Yet, on the face of that plain, inevitable consequence, my diplomatic friends in Washington go on talking about such insane projects as that of ceding Manchuria to Japan right down the Great Wall; of giving Japan practical possession of the mines of China; of giving “compensation” in the matter of Chinese railways to France; of getting this “advantage” or that for Great Britain, and so forth and so on. I remain permanently astounded before the Foreign Office officials. They have such excellent, brilliant minds, but, alas! so highly specialized—so highly specialized—that at times one doubts whether they have, in the general sense of the word, any minds at all.

In the face of the universal hopefulness for satisfactory results from the conference I find myself full of doubts. The naval disarmament proposal of Secretary Hughes was obviously meant only as the opening proposition, the quite splendid opening proposition, of the conference. The second meeting, I felt, would find Mr. Balfour and Admiral Kato and M. Briand in eloquent sympathy, saying: “Certainly. All this and more also we can do on the understanding that a stable, explicit, exhaustive, permanent Pacific agreement can be framed by this conference that will remove all causes of war whatever.” But the second meeting was disappointing. One nation after another agreed, as Mr. Balfour, that “old parliamentary hand,” put it, “in principle. But”——And now we are all playing four-handed chess with reservations about dockyards, naval stations, cruisers, large submarines, and the like. We are all trying to put the effective disarmament onto the other fellow. Meanwhile the nine powers are sitting in secret session on the Pacific question, and it is clear from the rumors that nine-handed chess is in progress there.

Yet the fact, plain enough to any one who is not lost in the game of diplomacy, is that this conference is an occasion for generosity and renunciation. There is no way out of the Pacific imbroglio except to disentangle China and form a self-denying ordinance of all the powers concerned to leave her alone while she reconstructs. I submit that even Japan, most intent of all the chess players, will do best to fall in line with such a plan.

Would a world covenant to protect China from aggression and to concede her the progressive abolition of extra-territorial privileges and the same unlimited rights over her own railways and soil and revenue that are enjoyed by the Americans and Japanese over theirs be any serious harm to Japan? Would it not release Japan from her imitative career as a pseudo-Britain or a pseudo-Germany and enable her to get on with her own proper business, which is to be, to the fullest, completest and richest extent, Japan?