Chapter XXIX: What a Stably Organized World Peace Means for Mankind (3)

For what, after all, is it that Japan wants? She wants safety, she declares—just as France wants safety. She wants safety to be Japan, just as France wants safety to be France and England wants safety to be England. And she makes these declarations with considerable justification. For 300 years she believed she had that safety, and we must admit she was the least dangerous state in the whole world. For 300 years Japan waged no foreign wars; she was a peaceful, self-contained hermit. It was American enterprise that dragged her out of her seclusion and fear of Europe that drove her to the practices of modern imperialism. They are not natural Japanese practices. She fought China and grabbed Corea, because otherwise Russia would have held it like a pistol at her throat; she fought Russia, because otherwise Russia would have held Manchuria and Port Arthur against her; she fought in the Great War to oust Germany from Shantung. She is now pursuing an entirely “European” policy in China, intriguing to get a free hand in Manchuria and Eastern Siberia; scheming for concessions, privileges and the creation of obedient puppet governments in a dismembered China; planning to divert the natural resources of China to her own use, primarily because she fears that otherwise these things will be done by rival powers and she will be cut off from trade, from raw materials and all prosperity until at last, when she is sufficiently starved and enfeebled, she will be attacked and Indiaized. These are reasonable, honorable fears. They oblige her to keep armed and aggressive; hers is an “offensive defensive.” There is no other way of allaying her reasonable, just fears except by a permanent binding association of world powers to put an end forever to the headlong scramble for Asia that began a century and a half ago in India between the French and English, to recognize frankly and to put it upon record that that phase of history has closed, and to provide some effective means of restoration now and the prevention of fresh aggressions in the future.

No doubt there is a military caste in Japan loving war and not even dreading modern war. We have to reckon with that. When we ask Japan to release China, we ask for something very much against Japanese habits of thought. Her dominant military note is due both to ancient traditions and recent experience. Japan had most of the fun and little of the bitterness of the Great War and her people may conceivably have a lighter attitude toward aggressive war than any European nation. But if the alternatives presented to her were on the one hand disarmament and a self-denying ordinance of the powers in relation to China, and on the other war against the other chief powers of the world, I doubt if the patriotism of even the most war-loving Japanese would not outbalance his war lust. And I cannot imagine any other permanent settlement of the Pacific situation except a self-denying ordinance to which Japan, America and the European powers can ever possibly agree.

Now, Japan, disarmed and pledged and self-restrained by treaties and associations against aggression on the mainland of Asia, would nevertheless reap enormous benefits from the liberation of China. Given just and reasonable treaties, she can do very well without armaments. Her geographical position would make her naturally and properly the first merchant and the first customer of a renascent China. She would have the first bid for all the coal and ore and foodstuffs she needed. American goods and European goods would have to come past her over thousands of miles of sea. Chinese goods that didn’t come to her would go elsewhere up a steep hill of freight charges. It is a preposterous imagination that China would refuse to sell to her nearest and best customer. Moreover, Japan’s artistic and literary culture, at once so distinctive and so sympathetic with that of China, would receive enormous stimulation, as it has done in the past, by a Chinese revival. Japan would be able to keep in the van of nations not by that headlong imitation and adoption of European devices into which circumstances have forced her hitherto, but by a natural and orderly development of her own idiosyncracies in the face of the enhanced power that modern resources supply. An association of Japan with other nations to insure uninterrupted development to China would insure that to Japan also. It would be a mutual assurance of peace and security.

But there is one set of facts, and one only, that militates against this idea of a pacific and progressive Japan, a splendid leader in civilization amidst a brotherhood of nations, and that is this, that Japan is already overpopulated, she has to import not only food but industrial raw material, and that her population increases now by the tremendous figure of half a million a year. That is the reality that gives substance to the aggressive imperialism of Japan. That is why she casts about for such regions for expansion as Eastern Siberia—a region not represented at the conference, and so beyond its purview, and that is why she covets some preferential control in Chinese metals and minerals and food. Were it not for this steady invasion of the world by hungry lives, the principle of Japan for the Japanese, China for the Chinese, England for the English, Eastern Siberia for its own people, would give us the simplest, most satisfactory principle for international peace. But Japan teems.

Has any country a right to slop its population over and beyond its boundaries or to claim trade and food because of its heedless self-congestion? Diplomacy is curiously mealy mouthed about many things; I have made a British official here blush at the words of birth control, but it is a fact that this aggressive fecundity of peoples is something that can be changed and restrained within a country, and that this sort of modesty and innocence that leads to a morbid development of population and to great wars calls for intelligent discouragement in international relations.

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

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

X
“SECURITY”—THE NEW AND BEAUTIFUL CATCHWORD

Washington, November 20.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XI
FRANCE IN THE LIMELIGHT

Washington, November 21.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One listened incredulous. One waited still incredulous to hear it over again from the interpreter. Yes, we were confirmed; he really had said that. Poor, exhausted Russia, who saved Paris, desiring nothing but to be left alone; bled white, starving, invaded by a score of subsidized adventurers; invaded from Esthonia, from Poland, from Japan, in Murmansk, in the Crimea, in the Ukraine, on the Volga, incessantly invaded, it is this Russia which has put France on the offensive-defensive!

One is reminded of the navvy who kicked his wife to death to protect himself from her violence.

(It is interesting to recall here that one of the Kaiser’s favorite excuses for German armament, when it was Germany and not France which aspired to dominate Europe, was his acute dread of the Yellow Peril.)

When he talked to the journalists in preparation for this display, M. Briand excused France for wanting submarines in quantity because, he said, she was liable to attack upon three coasts, but maturer reflection omitted this aspect of the French case from M. Briand’s attention. It was too thick even for an American audience. And even Mr. Balfour, with all his charming tenderness for a fellow-statesman, could not well have avoided the plain question, “From whom does France anticipate a sea attack?”

France is in about as much danger of an attack upon her three coasts as the United States of America is upon her Canadian frontier. Her ships are as safe upon the sea as a wayfarer on Fifth Avenue. If she builds submarines now, she builds them to attack British commerce and for no other reason whatever. All the Ludendorffs and Soviets in the world do not justify a single submarine. Every submarine she launches is almost as direct a breach of the peace with Britain as though she were to start target practice at Dover Harbor across the straits, and every one in England will understand the aim of her action as clearly. As M. Briand, in his discourse to the journalists, argued that the empire of France was as far-flung as that of Britain, her need to protect her communication was as great. This was in the face of Mr. Balfour’s reminder that Britain can feed its people only for seven weeks if its overseas supplies are cut off. France can feed from her own soil all the year round. The argument was not good enough for a boys’ debating society, and M. Briand, who is prepared to scrap nothing else, was at least well advised to scrap that.

I will confess that I am altogether perplexed by the behavior of France at the present time. I do not understand what she believes she is doing in Europe and I do not understand her position in this conference. Why could she not have co-operated in this conference instead of making it a scene of special pleading? I have already said that the French here seem to be more foreign than any other people and least in touch with the general feeling of the assembly. They seem to have come here as national advocates, as special pleaders, without any of that passionate desire to lay the foundations of a world settlement that certainly animates nearly every other delegation. They do not seem to understand how people here regard either the conference or France.

There is indeed a great and enduring enthusiasm for France in America. Marshal Foch has gone about in America as the greatest of heroes and the most popular figure. He has been overwhelmed by hospitality and smothered by every honor America could heap upon him. The French flag is far more in evidence than the British in both New York and Washington. This may easily give French visitors the idea that they are exceptional favorites here and that France can count upon American backing in any quarrels she chooses to pick with the British or the Germans or Russians.

There could be no greater error. The enthusiasm for Foch is largely personal; he was the General of all the Allies. The enthusiasm for France is largely traditional and it does not extend to the French nationals or the present day. America loves, as all liberal and intelligent men throughout the world must love, France the great liberator of men’s minds; France of the great Revolution; the France of art and light, France, the beautiful and the gallant. It is hard to write bitterly of a country that can give the world an Anatole France, sane and smiling, or so brave and balanced a gentleman as the late Robert d’Humiers. But where is that France today? None of that France has come to the Washington Conference, but only an impenitent apologist for three years of sins against the peace of the world, an apologist for national aggression posturing as fear, and reckless greed disguised as discretion.

Here in New York and Washington I find just the same steady change of opinion about France that is going on in London. I want to write it down as plainly as I can. I want to get it over to my friends in France, because I have loved France greatly, and I do not think the French people realize what is going on among the English-speaking peoples. People here want to see Europe recuperating, and they are beginning to realize that the chief obstacle to a recuperating Europe is the obstinate French resolve to dominate the Continent, to revive and carry out the antiquated and impossible policy of Louis XIV., maintaining an ancient and intolerable quarrel, setting Pole against German and brewing mischief everywhere in order to divide and rule, instead of entering frankly into a European brotherhood.

Feeling about Germany and Austria is changing here, even more rapidly than in England, to pity and indignation; feeling about Russia is drifting the same way. One detects these undercurrents in the minds of the most unlikely people. People are recalling the France of Napoleon III., that restless and mischievous France, which came so near to a conflict with America in Mexico and which kept Europe in a fever for a quarter of a century. It is an enormous loss to the Washington Conference, it is a misfortune to all the world, that the great qualities of the French people, their clear-headedness, their powerful and yet practical imaginations seem at present to be entirely subordinated to the merely rhetorical and emotional side of the French character.

XII
THUS FAR

Washington, Nov. 22.

How are we getting on in Washington?

The general mood is hopefulness tempered by congestion, mental and physical, and by sheer fatigue. There is no rest in Washington, no cessation. Last winter I was a happy invalid at Amalfi, I sat in the Italian sunshine, the hours were vast globes of golden time, my mind and my soul were my own. Now I live to the tune of a telephone bell and the little feverish American hours slip through my hot, dry hands before I can turn my thoughts around. I wish I could attend to everything.

The conference has evolved two committees, one on disarmament and one on Pacific affairs, which meet behind closed doors, so that one has three or four divergent reports of what has happened to choose from; delegates at all hours and in devious ways call together the press men to make more or less epoch-making statements; there are particular conferences with representative business men of this country and educationists of that, and so forth; one is called upon by a multitude of well informed people insistent upon this fact or that point of view, eloquent sidelights from South China, Albania, Czecho-Slovakia clamor for attention. And there is a terrible multitude of mere pesterers who want to do something—they know not what. The weather here is unusually warm and inclined to be cloudy, a brewhouse atmosphere, due entirely, one humorist declares, to the tremendous fermentation that is going on.

The fermenting vat overflows with the press of all the world. All the world, we feel, is present in spirit at Washington.

Three questions stand out as of importance and significance. The naval disarmament discussion, as one could have foretold, becomes a haggle for advantages. Each power seeks to disarm the other fellow. Great Britain detests the big raider submarine and wants none of it; it is America’s only effective long range weapon. A clamor comes to us from across the ocean from the French Senate for unlimited submarines. These will be to attack Great Britain; there can be no other possible use for them. Perhaps the French Senate does not really want war with Britain, but this is the way to get it.

Japan is asking for a seven to ten instead of a six to ten basis for herself. And so on. So long as unsettled differences remain, disarmament discussions are bound to degenerate in this fashion. Settlements and sincere disarmament are inseparably interwoven. The French, however, have led in an important pronouncement, promising evacuations and renunciations in the Chinese area on the part of France, provided Britain and Japan follow suit. Lord Riddle, on behalf of Britain, has followed suit; Britain is ready to relinquish everything, with the justifiable exception of Hongkong, a purely British creation. And M. Briand has explained why France must have an awful army to overawe Europe, but that still leaves certain possibilities of military restraint open for consideration. We are still discussing whether we may not hope to see conscription banished from the earth.

When such things swim up through the boiling activities of the Washington vat, not merely as passing suggestions and happy ideas but embodied in more or less concrete proposals, we cannot fail, however jaded we may feel, from also feeling hopeful. The conference has got only to its third session and we already seem further from war in the Pacific and nearer security there than at any time in the last two years.

And these intimations of success in this world discussion, of which Washington is the controlling nucleus, turn our minds naturally enough to the continuation and final outcome of this great initiative of President Harding’s. The more fruitful the conference seems likely to be in agreements and understandings the more evident is the necessity for something permanent arising out of it, to hold and maintain, in spirit and in fact, this accumulation of agreements and understandings.

The Washington Conference before it breaks up and disperses must in some way lay an egg to reproduce itself. In some fashion it must presently return. Because we have had to bear in mind that in the final and conclusive sense of the word the conference can decide nothing. It has produced a fine and generous atmosphere about it; it will probably arrive at an effectual temporary solution of a large group of problems, but the power of final decision rests with Governments and Legislatures far away.

The American proposals are only suggestive and they have no value as a treaty, unless they are accepted by the powers and until the American Senate has confirmed them by a two-thirds majority. M. Briand may have wished to be generous and broadminded here, but in Paris is this French Senate, inspired by a mad patriotism that would even now begin to arm France for an “inevitable” war with Britain. The French Senate has made a warlike gesture directly at England, has set its feet in a path that can end only in a supreme disaster for both France and England, and it did so, one guesses, in order to remind M. Briand that if he dared to be reasonable, if he dared to be pacific, if he acted for Great France and mankind, instead of at the dictates of Nationalist France, he did so at his peril. He would have been accused of betraying his country. “Conspuez Briand!” they would have cried in their pretty way. So M. Briand has played the patriot’s role.

In Tokio and in London it is an open secret that the same conflict goes on; the cables are busy with the struggle between reason and fierce patriotism. * * * Every concession made by every country at Washington will go back to the home land to be challenged as “weakness,” as “want of patriotism,” as “treason.”

In America and Britain the ugly side of this business has still to come, the outbreak of the patriotic fanatics, of the disappointed politicians who wanted to come here, of the wrecker journalists, the dealers in suspicion, the evil minds of a thousand types. And the lassitude that follows great expectations has also to be reckoned with. What Washington decides will not be the ultimate outcome; what the world will get at last in treaties ratified and things accomplished will be the mangled and tangled remains of the Washington decisions.

For that reason it is imperative that the Washington Conference should meet again. Its work is not done until its decisions are realized. After it has sent over its reports to the Goverments and Parliaments it will adjourn, but it must not cease. With perhaps rather fuller powers, with perhaps a wider or a different representation of the world, it must come again to a renewed invitation, to restore once more that atmosphere of international good will that has been created here, and to go over the attempts to realize, or the failures to realize, the settlement it has already worked out. And there will be many questions ripening then for solution that it cannot deal with now.

Much remains to be done by the Washington Conference, most of its work, indeed, is still to be done, but enough has been demonstrated already here to convince any reasonable man that a new thing, a new instrument, a new organ, has come into human affairs and that it is a thing that the world needs and cannot do without again. This thing has to recur, has to grow. It has to become a recurrent world conference. And this being clear, it is time that public discussion, public opinion, direct itself to the problem of the renewal of the conference in order that before it disperses we may be assured that it will meet again.

As a temporary, transitory thing, it will presently fade out of men’s memories and imaginations; but as a thing going on and living, which has gone, but which, like the King in circuit, will come again to try the new issues that have arisen and to try again the experiments that have fallen short of expectation, it may become the symbol and rallying point of all that vast amount of sane, humanitarian feeling and all that devotion to mankind as a whole, and to peace and justice, that has hitherto been formless and ineffectual in the world, for the need of such a banner.

XIII
THE LARGER QUESTION BEHIND THE CONFERENCE

Washington, November 23.

The Washington Conference, after its tremendous opening, seems now to be running into slack water. It has had its three great days, in which Secretary Hughes and Mr. Balfour and M. Briand have respectively played the leading parts. The broad lines of a possible naval reduction and of a possible Chinese and Pacific settlement are shaping themselves in men’s minds.

M. Briand has spoken and now departs. France will not disarm until she has a binding treaty which her former allies are not yet prepared to give her. She ignores the assurances of her proved allies and the experiences of the Great War. She goes in fear of desolate Russia and bankrupt Germany and she is “assailable on three coasts.” So she retains her great armies, and especially her “colonial” army. M. Briand’s departure has something of the effect of France shaking the dust from her feet and departing from the conference.

But France cannot step out of her share in the leadership of peace in this fashion. France has not finished with the conference yet. She will speak now at Washington with a voice perhaps less romantically impressive but more practically helpful. She has explained the terrors of her position and the assembled delegates have said “There! There!” to her as politely and soothingly as possible. But nobody really believes in the terrors of her position. Mr. Hughes is a man of great tenacity of purpose, and his chief reply to M. Briand’s speech is to keep military disarmament upon the agenda. A third committee of five powers has been added to the two already in existence to deal with land disarmament. It is doubtful if it can get very far unless it can bring in German and Russian representatives to reply to the alarmist charges of M. Briand.

With the formation of this third committee the Washington Conference would seem to have got as much before it as it is likely to handle. The Hughes impetus has done its work and done its work well. The conference has followed his rigorous lead almost too rigorously. It has cut off a manageable part of the vast problem of world peace and seems well on the way to manage it. That is exemplary—if limited. To manage a sample is to go some way toward demonstrating that the whole is manageable. A war on the Pacific has been averted, I think, at least for some years. But the more general problem of world peace as one whole, the problem of ending war for good, still remains untouched, and it is well to bear in mind that that is so.

It is impossible not to contrast this phase in the life of the Washington Conference with the great propositions of the opening days, when President Harding was speaking at Arlington and in the Continental Building of making an end to offensive—and with that of defensive—war forever in the world. It is impossible to ignore this shrinkage of aim and to refrain from measuring the vast omissions. That prelude, one perceives, was the prelude to something greater than this present conference, and more than this conference must ensue from it. The haggling and adjustment that is now going on in the committee of five powers on naval limitation and in the committee of nine powers on the Pacific settlement I will not attempt to follow. It is a matter for the experts and diplomatists; the public is concerned not with the methods of the wrangle but with the general purport and practical outcome.

We of the general public are incapable of judging upon the merits of battle cruisers and the possible limits to the size of submarines. Our concern is to see such things grow rarer and rarer until they disappear. I will not apologize, therefore, for going outside the conference chamber for the matter of my next few papers. I will go back from Mr. Secretary Hughes and his proposals and their consequences to President Harding and to the great expectations with which the conference assembled.

These expectations looked not merely to an arrest of international competition on the Pacific, and to giving threatened China a breathing time to bring itself up to modern conditions; they looked frankly toward the establishment of a world peace. But so far as Europe goes, where as M. Briand’s speech reminded us, the nations are locked together in a state of extreme danger, the conference has as yet done nothing. It is quite possible to believe that it will do very little. It is doubtful if the peace of Europe can ever be dealt with effectually in Washington. The troubles of the European Continent are an old, intricate story, and I believe the attitude ascribed here to the American Centre and West, the attitude of “let Europe solve her own international problems and not bother us with them,” is a thoroughly sound and wise one. America has neither the time and attention to spare nor the particular understandings needed to grasp the tangled difficulties of Europe. Such initiatives as those of President Wilson about Danzig and Fiume settle nothing and leave rankling sores. It is up to Europe to clear up and simplify itself before it comes into the world arena with America.

It is just within the range of possibility, therefore, that some sort of European conference may arise out of the Washington gathering. Such a conference is becoming necessary. The divergence in spirit and aim of France and Britain that Washington has brought out is not a divergence to be smoothed over. Better it should flare now than smoulder later. I have done my own small best to exacerbate it, because I believe that a brisk quarrel and some plain speaking may clear the air for a better understanding. Europe needs ventilation. When France, Britain, Italy and Germany meet together to discuss their common interests, cut through their impossible entanglements and get rid of their mutual suspicions and precautions with the frankness of this Washington gathering, with as open and free a discussion and as ample a public participation, European affairs will be on the mend.

But there is another issue which America cannot keep out of as she can keep out of the Franco-German-British situation, and upon this second issue the world looks to her for some sort of leadership. So far the Washington Conference has excluded any consideration of the economic and financial disorder of the world. But that consideration cannot be indefinitely delayed; it is becoming pressingly necessary. All the while we are debating here about Japanese autocracy and ambitions, and what we really mean by the “open door,” and whether we shall have 40,000 or 90,000 tons of submarines, and so on, the economic dissolution of the world goes on.

The immediate effect of partial disarmament, indeed, both in Britain and Japan, may be even to increase the economic difficulties of these countries by throwing considerable masses of skilled labor out of work. I propose in my next paper to discuss this process of economic and social dissolution which is now going on throughout the world, beneath the surface of our formal international relations. It is the larger reality of the present world situation which the brighter, more dramatic incidents of the earlier sessions at Washington have for a time thrust out of our attention.

XIV
THE REAL THREAT TO CIVILIZATION

Washington, Nov. 25.

In the opening paper of this series I said that Western civilization was undergoing a very rapid process of disorganization, a process that was already nearly complete in Russia and that was spreading out to the whole world. It is a huge secular process demanding unprecedented collective action among the nations if it is to be arrested and I welcome the Washington Conference as the most hopeful beginning of such concerted action.

Now that the Washington Conference has defined its scope and limitations and got down to a definite scheme of work it will be well to return to this ampler question of the decline in the world’s affairs.

Now there are great numbers of people, more particularly in America, who still refuse to recognize this intermittent and variable process, which resumes and goes on again and rests steady for a time and then hurries, which is taking all that we know as civilization in Europe toward a final destruction. The mere statement that this is going on they call “pessimism,” and with a sort of genial hostility they oppose any attempt to consider the possibility of any action to turn back the evil process.

I suppose they would call the note of a fire alarm or the toot of a motor horn “pessimism”—until the thing hit them good and hard. It would have the same effect of a disagreeable warning and interruption to the even tenor of their ways. They argue that this alleged decadence is not going on, or, what is from a soundly practical point of view the same thing, that it is never going to reach them or anything that they really care for.

The starvation of Russia down to an empty shell, the break up of China, the retrogression of Southeastern Europe to barbarism, the sinking of Constantinople to the level of a drunken brothel, the steadily approaching collapse of Germany, is nothing to these “optimists.” America is all right, anyhow, and am I my brother’s keeper? It is just a phase of misfortune “over there” and the people must get out of it as they can.

Wait for the swing of the pendulum, the turn of the tide. Things will come right again—over the heaps of dead. There have been such slumps before in those countries away over there, notoriously less favored by God, as they are, than America.

It may be well therefore to go over this matter a little more fully and to give my grounds for supposing that there is a rot, a coming undone, going on in our system, that will not necessarily recover—that the movement isn’t the swing of a pendulum, nor this ebb an ebb that will turn again. And further, that this rotting process is bound to affect not merely Europe and Asia, but ultimately America.

Now let us recapitulate in the most general terms what has happened and is happening at the present time to impoverish and disorganize the world. First, there has been a very great destruction of life through the war, especially in Europe. Mostly this has been the killing of young men who would otherwise have been the flower of the working mass of these countries at the present time. This in itself is a great loss of energy, but it is a recoverable loss. A new generation is already growing up to replace these millions of dead and to efface the economic loss of this tragic and sorrowful destruction.

Nor is the extraordinary waste of property, of energy and raw material spent in mere destruction, an irreplaceable loss. Given toil, given courage, devastated areas can be restored, fresh energies found to replenish the countless millions and millions of foot pounds of work wasted upon explosives. Many beautiful things, buildings, works of art and the like have gone, never to be gotten again, but their place may conceivably be taken by new efforts of creative, artistic energy, given toil, given confidence and hope.

Far more serious, from the point of view of the future, than the destruction of either things or lives, are certain subtler destructions, because they strike at that toil, that courage and hope and confidence which are essential to any sort of recuperation.

And foremost is the fact of debt, everywhere, but particularly in the European countries. All the billions worth of material that was smashed up and blown to pieces on the front had to be bought from its owners and to secure it every belligerent Government had to incur debts. Lives cost little, but material much. The European combatants are overwhelmed with debts, every European worker and toiler, every European business man, is a debtor; every European enterprise goes on under a crushing burden of taxation because of these debts. An attempt has been made to shift this unendurable burden from the victors to the vanquished, but the vanquished already had as much as they could carry.

Now when first mankind began to experiment with money and credit the lot of the debtor was an intolerable one. He might become the slave of his creditor, he might be subjected to imprisonment and frightful punishments. But it was early discovered that it was not to the general advantage, it was not even to the advantage of the creditor, to drive the debtor to despair. Processes of bankruptcy were devised to clear him up, get what was possible from him and then release him to a fresh start and hope.

But we have not yet extended the same leniency to national bankruptcy because national insolvencies have been rare. And so we have whole nations in Europe so loaded with debts and punitive charges that every worker, every business man, will be under his share in this burden from the cradle to the grave. He will be a debt serf to the domestic or foreign creditor and all his enterprises will be weighed and discouraged by this obligation. Debt is one immense and universal discouragement now throughout all Europe.

But even that might not prevent the recovery of Europe. There is yet another and profounder evil in operation to prevent people “getting to work” to reconstruct their shattered economic life. That is the increasing failure of money to do its work. Europe cannot get to work, cannot get things going again, because over a large part of the world the medium of exchange has become untrustworthy and unusable. That is the immediate thing that is destroying civilization in the Old World.

We have to remember that our whole economic order is based on money. We do not know any way of working a big business, a manufactory, a large farm, a mine, except by money payments. Payment in kind, barter and the like are ancient and clumsy expedients; you cannot imagine a great city like New York getting along with its industrial and business life on any such clumsy basis. Every modern city, London, Paris, Berlin, is built on a money basis and will collapse into utter ruin, as Petersburg has already collapsed, if money fails. But over large and increasing areas of Europe money is now of such fluctuating value, its purchasing power is so uncertain, that men will neither work for it, nor attempt to save it, nor make any monetary bargains ahead.

Such a thing has never occurred to anything like the same extent in all history, and it is killing business enterprise altogether and throwing whole masses of working people out of employment.

Europe without trustworthy money is as paralyzed as a brain without wholesome blood. She cannot act, she cannot move. Employment becomes impossible and production dies away. The towns move steadily toward the starvation that has overtaken Petersburg and the peasants and cultivators cease to grow anything except to satisfy their own needs. To go to market with produce, except to barter, is a mockery. The schools are not working, the hospitals, the public services; the teachers and doctors and officials cannot live upon their pay, they starve or go away.

This state of affairs has been brought about by the reckless manufacture of paper money by nearly every European Government; we can measure their recklessness roughly by comparing their pre-war and post-war exchanges. It is only now that we are beginning to realize the enormity of the disaster which this demoralization of money is bringing upon the world.

We have weakened the link of cash payments, which has hitherto held civilization together, to the breaking point. As the link breaks, the machine stops. The modern city will become a formless mob of unemployed men and the countryside will become a wilderness of food-hoarding peasants—and since the urban masses will have no food and no means of commanding it, we may expect the most violent perturbations before they are persuaded to accept their fate in a philosophical spirit.

Revolutionary social outbreaks are not the results of plots; they are symptoms of social disease. They are not causes but effects. This is what I mean when I write of a breakdown of civilization. I mean the death of town life, which cannot go on without money and the cessation of organized communications. I mean a breakdown of the organizations for keeping the peace. I mean an end to organized education.

I mean the smashing of this social order in which we live, through the smashing of money, which has already occurred to a large extent in Russia, which is going on in many parts of Eastern Europe, which seems likely to occur within a few months in Germany, which may spread into Italy and France, and so to Britain, and even to the American continent, and which can only be arrested by the most vigorous collection action to restore validity to money.

Of which vigorous collective action there is in Washington at the present moment no sign.

XV
THE POSSIBLE BREAKDOWN OF CIVILIZATION

Washington, November 26.

In a previous paper I have set out the plain facts of the condition of Central and Eastern Europe. It is a break-up of the modern civilization system, due to the smashing up of money, without which organized town life, factory production, education and systematic communications are unworkable. If it goes on unchecked to its natural conclusion, Central and Eastern Europe will follow Russia to a condition in which the towns will be dying or dead, empty and ruinous, the railroads passing out of use, and in which few people will be left alive except uneducated and degenerating peasants and farmers, growing their own food and keeping a rough order among themselves in their own fashion. We are faced, indeed with a return to barbarism over all these areas. They are going back to the conditions of rural Asia Minor or the Balkans.

How far is this degeneration going to spread?

Let us recognize at once that it need spread no further. It is not an inevitable process. It could be arrested, it could be turned back and a rapid restoration of our shattered civilization could be set going right away if the leading powers of the world, sinking their political ambitions for a time, could meet frankly to work out a bankruptcy arrangement that would release the impoverished nations from debt and give them again a valid money, a stable money with a trustworthy exchange value, that could be accepted with confidence and saved without deterioration. Upon that things could be set going again quite hopefully. Education has not so degenerated as yet, habits of work and trading and intercourse are still strong enough to make such a recovery possible.

Except perhaps in Russia. Russia, for all we know, may have sunken very deep.

But if there is no vigorous world effort made soon the trading class, the foreman class, the technically educated class, the professional class, the teachers, and so forth, will have been broken up and dispersed. These classes are comparatively easy to destroy, extremely hard to reconstruct. Modern civilization will really have been destroyed, if not for good, for a long period, over great areas if these classes go.

And the process is at present still spreading rapidly. If it gets Germany—and it seems to be getting Germany—then Italy may follow. Italy is linked very closely to Germany economically and financially. The death of Germany will chill the economic blood of Italy. Italy is passionately anxious to disarm on land and sea. But Italy cannot disarm while France maintains a great army and makes great naval preparations. France’s refusal to disarm prevents Italy from disarming. The lira sways and sinks; its value fluctuates not perhaps so widely as do marks and kronen but much too widely for healthy industrial life and social security. And Italy is troubled by its restless nationalists, a whooping flag-waving crew of posturing adventurers without foresight or any genuine love of country. If nothing is done, I think I would give Germany about six months and North Italy two years before a revolutionary collapse occurs.

And France?