Chapter 7

Already several States, and particularly the Government of the United States of America, have signed treaties of arbitration, and The Hague Tribunal spins a first web of obligations, exemplary if gossamer, between the countries of the world. But these are but the faint initial suggestions of much greater possibilities, and it is these greater possibilities that have now to be realized if all the talk we have had about a war to end war is to bear any fruit. What is now with each week of the present struggle becoming more practicable is the setting up of a new assembly that will take the place of the various embassies and diplomatic organizations, of a mediaeval pattern and tradition, which have hitherto conducted international affairs.

This war must end in a public settlement, to which all of the belligerents will set their hands; it will not be a bundle of treaties, but one treaty binding eight or nine or more powers. This settlement will almost certainly be attained at a conference of representatives of the various Foreign Offices involved. Quite possibly interested neutral powers will also send representatives. There is no reason whatever why this conference should dissolve, why it should not become a permanent conference upon the inter-relations of the participating powers and the maintenance of the peace of the world. It could have a seat and officials, a staff, and a revenue of its own; it could sit and debate openly, publish the generally binding treaties between its constituent powers, and claim for the support of its decisions their military and naval resources.

The predominance of the greater powers could be secured either by the representatives having multiple votes, according to the population represented, or by some sort of proportional representation. Each power could appoint its representatives through its Foreign Office or by whatever other means it thought fit. They could as conveniently be elected by a legislature or a nation. And such a body would not only be of enormous authority in the statement, interpretation, and enforcement of treaties, but it could also discharge a hundred useful functions in relation to world hygiene, international trade and travel, the control of the ocean, the exploration and conservation of the world's supplies of raw material and food supply. It would be, in fact, a World Council.

Today this is an entirely practicable and hopeful proposal if only we can overcome the opposition of those who cling to the belief that it is possible for a country to be at the same time entirely pacific and entirely unresponsible to and detached from the rest of mankind.

Given such a body, such a great alliance of world powers, much else in the direction of world pacification becomes possible. Without it we may perhaps expect a certain benefit from the improved good feeling of mankind and the salutary overthrow of the German military culture, but we cannot hope for any real organized establishment of peace.

I believe that a powerful support for the assembly and continuance of such a world congress as this could be easily and rapidly developed in North and South America, in Britain and the British Empire generally, in France and Italy, in all the smaller States of northern, central, and western Europe. It would probably have the personal support of the Czar, unless he has profoundly changed the opinions with which he opened his reign, the warm accordance of educated China and Japan, and the good will of a renascent Germany. It would open a new era for mankind.

III.

Now, this idea of a congress of the belligerents to arrange the peace settlements after this war, expanding by the accession of neutral powers into a permanent world congress for the enforcement of international law and the maintenance of the peace of mankind, is so reasonable and attractive and desirable that if it were properly explained it would probably receive the support of nineteen out of every twenty intelligent persons.

Nevertheless, its realization is, on the whole, improbable. A mere universal disgust with war is no more likely to end war than the universal dislike for dying has ended death. And though war, unlike dying, seems to be an avoidable fate, it does not follow that its present extreme unpopularity will end it unless people not only desire but see to the accomplishment of their desire.

And here again one is likely to meet an active and influential opposition. Though the general will and welfare may point to the future management of international relations through a world congress, the whole mass of those whose business has been the direction of international relations is likely to be either skeptical or actively hostile to such an experiment. All the foreign offices and foreign ministers, the diplomatists universally, the politicians who have specialized in national assertion, and the courts that have symbolized and embodied it, all the people, in fact, who will be in control of the settlement, are likely to be against so revolutionary a change.

For it would be an entirely revolutionary change. It would put an end to secrecy. It would end all that is usually understood by diplomacy. It would clear the world altogether of those private understandings and provisional secret agreements, those intrigues, wire-pullings, and quasi-financial operations that have been the very substance of international relations hitherto. To these able and interested people, for the most part highly seasoned by the present conditions, finished and elaborated players at the old game, this is to propose a new, crude, difficult, and unsympathetic game. They may all of them, or most of them, hate war, but they will cling to the belief that their method of operating may now, after a new settlement, be able to prevent or palliate war.

All men get set in a way of living, and it is as little in human nature to give up cheerfully in the middle of life a familiar method of dealing with things in favor of a new and untried one as it is to change one's language or emigrate to an entirely different land. I realize what this proposal means to diplomatists when I try to suppose myself united to assist in the abolition of written books and journalism in favor of the gramophone and the cinematograph. Or united to adopt German as my means of expression. It is only by an enormous pressure of opinion in the world behind these monarchs, ministers, and representatives that they will be induced even to consider the possibility of adapting themselves to this novel style of international dealing through a permanent congress. It is only the consideration of its enormous hopefulness for the rest of the world that gives one the courage to advocate it.

In the question of the possible abolition of the present diplomatic system, just as in the case of the possible abolition of war, while on the side for abolition there must be a hugely preponderating interest and a hugely preponderating majority, it is, nevertheless, a dispersed interest and an unorganized, miscellaneous majority. The minority is, on the other hand, compact, more intensively and more immediately interested and able to resist such great changes with a maximum of efficiency. There is a tremendous need, therefore, for a world congress organization propaganda if this advantageously posted minority is to be overcome.

And from such countries as the American States in particular, and from the small liberal neutrals in Europe, whose diplomacy is least developed and least influential, liberal-minded people through the world are most disposed to expect, and do expect, a lead in this particular matter. The liberal forces in Britain, France, and Russia are extraordinarily embarrassed and enslaved by the vast belligerent necessities into which their lives have been caught. But they would take up such a lead with the utmost vigor and enthusiasm.

No one who has followed the diplomatic history of the negotiations that led to this war can doubt that if there had been no secret treaties, but instead open proclamations of intentions and an open discussion of international ambitions, the world might have been saved this catastrophe. It is no condemnation of any person or country to say this. The reserves and hesitations and misconceptions that led Germany to suppose that England would wait patiently while France and Belgium were destroyed before she herself received attention were unavoidable under the existing diplomatic conditions. What reasonable people have to do now is not to recriminate over the details in the working of a system that we can now all of us perceive to be hopelessly bad, but to do our utmost in this season of opportunity to destroy the obscurities in which fresh mischief may fester for our children.

Let me restate this section in slightly different words. At the end of this war there must be a congress of adjustment. The suggestion in this section is to make this congress permanent, to use it as a clearing house of international relationships and to abolish embassies.

Instead of there being a British Ambassador, for example, at every sufficiently important capital, and an ambassador from every important State in London, and a complex tangle of relationships, misstatements, and misconceptions arising from the ill-co-ordinated activities of this double system of agents, it is proposed to send one or several ambassadors to some central point, such as The Hague, to meet there all the ambassadors of all the significant States in the world and to deal with international questions with a novel frankness in a collective meeting.

This has now become a possible way of doing the world's business because of the development of the means of communication and information. The embassy in a foreign country, as a watching, remonstrating, proposing extension of its country of origin, a sort of eye and finger at the heart of the host country, is now clumsy, unnecessary, inefficient, and dangerous. For most routine work, for reports of all sorts, for legal action, and so forth, on behalf of traveling nationals, the consular service is adequate, or can easily be made adequate. What remains of the ambassadorial apparatus might very well merge with the consular system and the embassy become an international court civility, a ceremonial vestige without any diplomatic value at all.

IV.

Given a permanent world congress developed out of the congress of settlement between the belligerents, a world alliance, with as a last resort a call upon the forces of the associated powers, for dealing with recalcitrants, then a great number of possibilities open out to humanity that must otherwise remain inaccessible. But before we go on to consider these it may be wise to point out how much more likely a world congress is to effect a satisfactory settlement at the end of this war than a congress confined to the belligerents.

The war has progressed sufficiently to convince every one that there is now no possibility of an overwhelming victory for Germany. It must end in a more or less complete defeat of the German and Turkish alliance, and in a considerable readjustment of Austrian and Turkish boundaries. Assisted by the generosity of the doomed Austrians and Turks, the Germans are fighting now to secure a voice as large as possible in the final settlement, and it is conceivable that in the end that settlement may be made quite an attractive one for Germany proper by the crowning sacrifice of suicide on the part of her two subordinated allies.

There can be little doubt that Russia will gain the enormous advantage of a free opening into the Mediterranean and that the battle of the Marne turned the fortunes of France from disaster to expansion. But the rest of the settlement is still vague and uncertain, and German imperialism, at least, is already working hard and intelligently for a favorable situation at the climax, a situation that will enable this militarist empire to emerge still strong, still capable of recuperation and of a renewal at no very remote date of the struggle for European predominance. This is a thing as little for the good of the saner German people as it is for the rest of the world, but it is the only way in which militant imperialism can survive at all.

The alternative of an imperialism shorn of the glamour of aggression, becoming constitutional and democratic--the alternative, that is to say, of a great liberal Germany--is one that will be as distasteful almost to the people who control the destinies of Germany today, and who will speak and act for Germany in the final settlement, as a complete submission to a Serbian conqueror would be.

At the final conference of settlement Germany will not be really represented at all. The Prussian militarist empire will still be in existence, and it will sit at the council, working primarily for its own survival. Unless the Allies insist upon the presence of representatives of Saxony, Bavaria, and so forth, and demand the evidence of popular sanctions--a thing they are very unlikely to demand--that is what "Germany" will signify at the conference. And what is true of Germany will be true, more or less, of several other of the allied powers.

A conference confined purely to the belligerents will be, in fact, a conference not even representative of the belligerents. And it will be tainted with all the traditional policies, aggressions, suspicions, and subterfuges that led up to the war. It will not be the end of the old game, but the readjustment of the old game, the old game which is such an abominable nuisance to the development of modern civilization. The idealism of the great alliance will certainly be subjected to enormous strains, and the whole energy of the Central European diplomatists will be directed to developing and utilizing these stresses.

This, I think, must be manifest even to the foreign offices most concerned. They must see already ahead of them a terrible puzzle of arrangement, a puzzle their own bad traditions will certainly never permit them to solve. "God save us," they may very well pray, "from our own cleverness and sharp dealing," and they may even welcome the promise of an enlarged outlook that the entry of the neutral powers would bring with it.

Every foreign office has its ugly, evil elements, and probably every foreign office dreads those elements. There are certainly Russian fools who dream about India, German fools who dream about Canada and South America, British fools who dream about Africa and the East; aggressionists in the blood, people who can no more let nations live in peace than kleptomaniacs can keep their hands in their own pockets. But quite conceivably there are honest monarchs and sane foreign ministers very ready to snatch at the chance of swamping the evil in their own Chancelleries.

It is just here that the value of neutral participation will come in. Whatever ambitions the neutral powers may have of their own, it may be said generally that they are keenly interested in preventing the settlement from degenerating into a deal in points of vantage for any further aggressions in any direction. Both the United States of America and China are traditionally and incurably pacific powers, professing and practicing an unaggressive policy, and the chief outstanding minor States are equally concerned in securing a settlement that shall settle.

And moreover, so wide reaching now are all international agreements that they have not only a claim to intervene juridically, but they have the much more pressing claim to participate on the ground that no sort of readjustment of Europe, Western Asia, and Africa can leave their own futures unaffected. They are wanted not only in the interests of the belligerent peoples, but for their own sakes and the welfare of the world all together.

V.

Now a world conference, once it is assembled, can take up certain questions that no partial treatment can ever hope to meet. The first of the questions is disarmament. No one who has watched the politics of the last forty years can doubt the very great share the business and finance of armament manufacture has played in bringing about the present horrible killing, and no one who has read accounts of the fighting can doubt how much this industry has enhanced the torment, cruelty, and monstrosity of war.

In the old warfare a man was either stabbed, shot, or thrust through after an hour or so of excitement, and all the wounded on the field were either comfortably murdered or attended to before the dawn of the next day. One was killed by human hands, with understandable and tolerable injuries. But in this war the bulk of the dead--of the western Allies, at any rate--have been killed by machinery, the wounds have been often of an inconceivable horribleness, and the fate of the wounded has been more frightful than was ever the plight of wounded in the hands of victorious savages. For days multitudes of men have been left mangled, half buried in mud and filth, or soaked with water, or frozen, crying, raving between the contending trenches. The number of men that the war, without actual physical wounds, has shattered mentally and driven insane because of its noise, its stresses, its strange unnaturalness, is enormous. Horror in this war has overcome more men than did all the arrows of Cressy.

Almost all this enhanced terribleness of war is due to the novel machinery of destruction that science has rendered possible. The wholesale mangling and destroying of men by implements they have never seen, without any chance of retaliation, has been its most constant feature. You cannot open a paper of any date since the war began without reading of men burned, scalded, and drowned by the bursting of torpedoes from submarines, of men falling out of the sky from shattered aeroplanes, of women and children in Antwerp or Paris mutilated frightfully or torn to ribbons by aerial bombs, of men smashed and buried alive by shells. An indiscriminate, diabolical violence of explosives resulting in cruelties for the most part ineffective from the military point of view is the incessant refrain of this history.

The increased dreadfulness of war due to modern weapons is, however, only one consequence of their development. The practicability of aggressive war in settled countries now is entirely dependent on the use of elaborate artillery on land and warships at sea. Were there only rifles in the world, were an ordinary rifle the largest kind of gun permitted, and were ships specifically made for war not so made, then it would be impossible to invade any country defended by a patriotic and spirited population with any hopes of success because of the enormous defensive capacity of entrenched riflemen not subjected to an unhampered artillery attack.

Modern war is entirely dependent upon equipment of the most costly and elaborate sort. A general agreement to reduce that equipment would not only greatly minimize the evil of any war that did break out, but it would go a long way toward the abolition of war. A community of men might be unwilling to renounce their right of fighting one another if occasion arose, but they might still be willing to agree not to carry arms or to carry arms of a not too lethal sort, to carry pistols instead of rifles or sticks instead of swords. That, indeed, has been the history of social amelioration in a number of communities; it has led straight to a reduction in the number of encounters. So in the same way the powers of the world might be willing to adopt such a limitation of armaments, while still retaining the sovereign right of declaring war in certain eventualities. Under the assurances of a world council threatening a general intervention, such a partial disarmament would be greatly facilitated.

And another aspect of disarmament which needs to be taken up and which only a world congress can take up must be the arming of barbaric or industrially backward powers by the industrially and artillery forces in such countries as efficient powers, the creation of navies Turkey, Servia, Peru, and the like. In Belgium countless Germans were blown to pieces by German-made guns, Europe arms Mexico against the United States; China, Africa, Arabia are full of European and American weapons. It is only the mutual jealousies of the highly organized States that permit this leakage of power. The tremendous warnings of our war should serve to temper their foolish hostilities, and now, if ever, is the time to restrain this insane arming of the less advanced communities.

But before that can be done it is necessary that the manufacture of war material should cease to be a private industry and a source of profit to private individuals, that all the invention and enterprise that blossoms about business should be directed no longer to the steady improvement of man-killing. It is a preposterous and unanticipated thing that respectable British gentlemen should be directing magnificently organized masses of artisans upon the Tyneside in the business of making weapons that may ultimately smash some of those very artisans to smithereens.

At the risk of being called "Utopian" I would submit that the world is not so foolish as to allow that sort of thing to go on indefinitely. It is, indeed, quite a recent human development. All this great business of armament upon commercial lines is the growth of half a century. But it has grown with the vigor of an evil weed, it has thrown out a dark jungle of indirect advertisement, and it has compromised and corrupted great numbers of investors and financial people. It is perhaps the most powerful single interest of all those that will fight against the systematic minimization and abolition of war, and rather than lose his end it may be necessary for the pacifist to buy out all these concerns, to insist upon the various States that have sheltered them taking them over, lock, stock, and barrel, as going businesses.

From what we know of officialism everywhere, the mere transfer will involve almost at once a decline in their vigor and innovating energy. It is perhaps fortunate that the very crown of the private armaments business is the Krupp organization and that its capture and suppression is a matter of supreme importance to all the allied powers. Russia, with her huge population, has not as yet developed armament works upon a very large scale and would probably welcome proposals that minimized the value of machinery and so enhanced that of men. Beyond this and certain American plants for the making of rifles and machine guns only British and French capital is very deeply involved in the armaments trade. The problem is surely not too difficult for human art and honesty.

It is not being suggested that the making of arms should cease in the world, but only that in every country it should become a State monopoly and so completely under Government control. If the State can monopolize the manufacture and sale of spirits, as Russia has done, if it can, after the manner of Great Britain, control the making and sale of such a small, elusive substance as saccharin, it is ridiculous to suppose that it cannot keep itself fully informed of the existence of such elaborated machinery as is needed to make a modern rifle barrel. And it demands a very minimum of alertness, good faith, and good intentions for the various manufacturing countries to keep each other and the world generally informed upon the question of the respective military equipments. From this state of affairs to a definition of a permissible maximum of strength on land and sea for all the high contracting powers is an altogether practicable step. Disarmament is not a dream; it is a thing more practicable than a general hygienic convention and more easily enforced than custom and excise.