CHAPTER VIII

THE MOODS OF AN INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

If we are to succeed in repairing this battered world through the medium of the International Conference, then plainly it is the business of us all to try to understand the methods, the conduct and particularly the moods of this instrument of peace. It is as temperamental as a stock exchange. The Washington Conference began with a period of tremendous exultation. Mr. Hughes’ great naval program lifted the world. For ten days this mood prevailed. Then came the French in the person of their Prime Minister, Briand, and in an hour he had the temple of peace rocking on its base.

It was very interesting to see how the men who made up the Conference went steadily ahead from ten to six every day—and sometimes longer—in spite of the excitement M. Briand had stirred up. It was a fine example of the stabilizing effect of a daily task regularly followed. They went on for four weeks and then again stirred the world to enthusiasm by their Four Power Pact; their removal of the Yap irritation; their consent to the Japanese mandate in the Pacific; their acceptance of the Five-Five-Three naval ratio. At one swoop the war with Japan that a part of the American public has so sedulously cultivated for a good term of years was wiped off the map—unless the United States Senate prefer to restore it to its position.

However, the naval program was not a fact accomplished until France and Italy had consented to a ratio. That was the next step, and Mr. Hughes seemed to have turned to it with the utmost confidence—1.75 was the ratio he had fixed on as proper; then suddenly, without any warning, the soaring stock of the Conference dropped way below par. A British journalist, with more love of sensation than the honor of his profession, announced that the French had told the naval committee that France wanted to build ten 35,000 ton ships. The effect of those numbers suddenly thrown on a table where the figuring for weeks had been down, not up, was more nearly to throw the Conference delegates off their feet than anything that had happened to date. There was no questioning their dismay, for while Mr. Balfour and Mr. Hughes refused, as it was proper for them to do, to discuss the matter, while the French likewise kept their mouths shut, and complained that they had been betrayed, Mr. Hughes showed his excitement by a long cablegram, appealing to M. Briand, over the head of the then acting chief of the French delegation, M. Sarraut. Outside the Conference an excited world declared the whole thing was wrecked and that France had wrecked it.

Could this unhappy incident have been avoided? If the Conference had shown a more sympathetic understanding of the way France is feeling to-day, if there had been the realization which we certainly should expect of the effect of calling her into a gathering of this kind and then letting her Premier sit for a week with practically no attention, it probably would have been. When M. Briand was leaving the Conference on the opening day an American journalist asked him what he thought of it. The American way, he said, “à la Américaine.” And then he went on to remark that when the time came France would do like Mr. Hughes and talk in the American way. Weeks went on and France had no chance to talk in anybody’s way about her naval ratio. Everybody else but herself seems to have taken it for granted that 1.75 was to be her proportion. When her turn finally came, however, she began to hurl capital ships at Mr. Hughes’ program—ten of them, 35,000 tons each. The figures looked appalling, preposterous—they produced, as I have said, almost a panic. Now, obviously, the panic would have been avoided, as far as the public is concerned, if the matter had been kept in committee where it belonged and where the French intended to keep it. Given to the public, it stirred up anger on both sides of the water, whipped up suspicion, set all the busybodies at inventing far-fetched explanations and reading sinister meanings into the French proposal.

There was little trouble when Mr. Hughes appealed to M. Briand in getting the capital-ship ratio dropped back to the 1.75 first suggested. But along with this concession in the matter of capital ships went the decision that France would not limit her submarines and auxiliary craft. She wanted unlimited submarines for defense—defense against whom? It must be us, said England. She wanted auxiliary craft for the protection of scattered colonies. Here she took her position and here she remained. Mr. Hughes’ naval program leaves the number of submarines and light craft a nation builds at its discretion. Too bad—could it have been avoided?

One thing seems quite certain, that Mr. Hughes missed a tremendous opportunity in not boldly declaring in his original program that as for the United States, it was done with submarines. We did that at Paris in 1919. The head of our delegation, President Wilson, and his naval advisers agreed that in the disarmament pledged by the League of Nations the submarine was one weapon which could and should be put entirely out of existence. Its record of cowardice and plain murder no one could defend. The treaty of Versailles forbade the Germans to construct submarines for any purpose, and it certainly was the farthest from the thought of the majority of those who made that treaty that they were laying down one rule for Germany and another for themselves. The idea there was to disarm and to begin with Germany.

Why the American delegation should not have followed that policy here in regard to the submarine is not clear. But when it was not done in the opening program, it is still less understandable why they did not seize the British suggestion when it was made by Mr. Balfour. The British had the American program for naval reduction flung into their faces without warning, and they picked it up like wonderful sports, as did the Japanese. But when Mr. Balfour notified the Conference that he should propose complete abolition of the submarine, there was no such response. There were not a few of us who had an uncomfortable chill over the Washington Conference when our government failed promptly to follow the British in this policy, failed to say, “Yes, we are with you, it’s beastly business this submarine warfare—one thing we can do away with. We will join you in outlawing it.” But this was not done, and because it was not done, coupled with France’s determination to seize every chance that came along to secure recognition for herself, to enforce her argument that she must be prepared to defend herself, since nobody in the world seemed prepared to give her the guarantees which she thought necessary, if she were to disarm, the submarine came in to trouble Mr. Hughes’ program, and, incidentally, to spoil the Conference’s holiday week.

The regret was the greater because the arguments that Lord Lee and Mr. Balfour had put up for the abolition of the submarine were so weighty and conclusive that if they could have been presented at the start, or at least earlier in the negotiations, there seems to be little doubt that they would not have won over the Conference. These arguments have the backing of Great Britain’s experience with submarines, the most serious and extensive experience that any nation has yet had with this particular weapon. Lord Lee and Mr. Balfour had the facts to show that the German submarine fleet was able to accomplish relatively little in the Great War in the way of legitimate naval warfare. It left the British Grand Fleet untouched. In spite of all its efforts, it did not prevent the British taking fifteen million troops across the English Channel, and the Americans two million across the Atlantic. It was of little use to the British in guarding their coast line, which, as Lord Lee pointed out, was almost as great as the combined coast line of the four other powers in the discussion. What the German submarine fleet did do, however, was to destroy some twelve million tons of mercantile shipping and murder twenty thousand non-combatants—men, women and children. The counter defense against the submarine has been so developed, Lord Lee claimed, that an attacking fleet could be equipped to resist any number of them. That is, the methods of detecting, locating and destroying submarines have greatly outstripped their offensive power.

One of the strong arguments for the abolition of the submarine is the fact that it is possible to abolish it by general consent. Its case is very different from that of poison gas, which is a by-product of essential industries. You do not need to set out to find poison gasses; they come to you in the natural course of chemical research, and they do not have to be manufactured until you are forced to do it for defense. Moreover, they have the enormous advantage of not looking like war. They are disgusting, hateful things against which man instinctively revolts. They do not tempt the adventurous, as the submarine does.

Although the French particularly, through Admiral le Bon and M. Sarraut, did their utmost to combat the British position, their arguments had little weight in comparison with the British. The entire discussion which ran more than a week and which was given out day by day practically in full to the press only emphasized my feeling that the French, in insisting on a fleet of submarines all out of proportion to that contemplated in the original American program, were actuated more by a desire to assert themselves in this council of nations, to demonstrate that it is not safe to overlook their susceptibilities, than from any desire to have submarines for defense. If the representatives of the United States are to work successfully with other nations in international conferences, they must learn that diplomats can no more afford to overlook the feelings of other nations than an engineer can afford to overlook the susceptibilities of the iron and steel which he employs. France’s acute sensitiveness, her black imaginations, may irritate Americans who know nothing of invaded and devastated territory, who have not had to sit through five long years with the sound of bursting shells continually in their ears; but if they have not the imagination and the sympathy to tell them what the results of such an experience are, then let them accept the judgment of physicians and realize that in whatever negotiations they have with the French people at this time, their shell-shocked minds and souls must be taken into account.

Mr. Hughes lost a second great opportunity in the submarine matter. A few days before Christmas, when it became obvious that the submarine was in danger of destroying the American delegation’s plans for a glorious Christmas present to the nation, Mr. Balfour asked for an open session in which to discuss the matter. For some reason not at all clear, Mr. Hughes did not consent. Our Secretary of State proved himself a superior dramatist at the Conference, but in this instance a poor psychologist! If there was to be no holiday, as had become clear, then an open session with a chance to hear Mr. Balfour, Lord Lee, M. Sarraut, Admiral le Bon, Senator Schanzer, in the free discussion of a matter in which the whole country was tremendously interested—such an open session would have been a Christmas present in itself, and it would have done much to have cleared up the thick atmosphere.

In these conferences the atmosphere easily becomes heavy with suspicion. The sight of a group of eminent gentlemen of various nationalities shutting themselves up morning after morning, for hours, considering matters which concern the peace and happiness of the world, if too long continued, stirs up resentment in the best of us. If you are an impersonal, detached, philosophical, fairly well-informed person, it is not difficult for you to visualize what those gentlemen are doing; if you take the trouble you can even build up in your mind what they are saying. Suppose it is a question of the ratio of capital ships. You know that they are listening to disputes over tonnage and the way it has been computed, are studying long arrays of figures, matters dull in themselves and requiring the closest attention. Most of us would not remain a half hour, unless we were compelled to when such discussions were going on. But if you are a suspicious person, if you have been trained in the cynical school of sensational journalism, to look for mischief and intrigue—and often it must be confessed finding it—you have dark thoughts about the gentlemen.

The only way in which such suspicions can be cleared up—or better, prevented,—is by frequent open sessions and much freer discussion at those sessions than we had at the Conference for Limitation of Armament. Some of the Americans prominent in the Conference have in the last two years frequently criticized the secrecy with which the Paris Conference was conducted but there was very little difference in the procedure from that in Paris. The work there as here was done in committees. There as here there were daily communications to the press. They were more satisfactory here, fuller, but that was made possible by the fact that the situation here was far less complicated and by the rigor with which Mr. Hughes kept one thing at a time on the table. As for the press conferences, in Paris as here they were held daily by the Americans and frequently by all of the other delegations. Nobody in Paris, of course, was so satisfactory to the press as Mr. Hughes. His candor, his good humor, his out-and-out, man-to-man conduct of his daily meeting cannot be too highly praised. He has set a pace for this sort of thing very hard to follow. There was no American in Paris in a position to do for the press what Mr. Hughes did in Washington. President Wilson had not the time. The other members of the delegation were not in Mr. Hughes’ position. Nobody else in our delegation here would have had the authority, even if he had had the ability, to do what Mr. Hughes did. The difference here and in Paris was mainly a difference of situation—the difference between an infinitely difficult and complicated situation and a comparatively well defined and definite one.

Mr. Hughes himself was partly responsible for the resentment that the press felt at the failure to follow Mr. Balfour’s suggestion and conduct the submarine discussion in the open. Any one who took the pains to read the text of these discussions as they were printed in the leading journals of the country, can see how well adapted they were to a public meeting. There was nothing in them that would jeopardize any nation; there was much in them that would have been illuminated, its impression intensified, if it could have been heard instead of read. Mr. Hughes in his talk of these discussions to the correspondents was actually tantalizing. When he walked briskly into his press conference at the end of a long committee discussion and told a hundred and more men and women gathered around him what an intellectual treat it had been, of how Mr. Balfour had been in his best form, of how lively the exchange had been between French and English, his snapping eyes, his appreciative voice, his glow of enthusiasm, were actually antagonizing. He overlooked entirely the fact that he was making more than one in the assembly say: Selfish man, don’t you suppose that we would have enjoyed seeing and hearing Mr. Balfour in his best form? Is there anything at this Conference that we would have liked so much, except of course hearing you? Do you think we are going to be satisfied with your promise that we shall have full reports of all that was said?

I know very well that it is not considered good form to use the words League of Nations in connection with the Conference on the Limitation of Armament, and no offense is intended—but if one is really interested in trying to decide just how much publicity is wise in such a conference as this, any experience of other similar bodies should be considered, and after all it cannot be denied that the assembly of the League of Nations is a similar body to this, the chief difference being that it includes some fifty nations instead of nine. At the second meeting of the assembly of the League last fall, lasting four and a half weeks, there were 33 plenary conferences. One cannot say that the matters under consideration there were less delicate and dangerous than in Washington. They were even more inflamed at the moment, including such open irruptions as the boundary dispute between Jugo-Slavia and Albania.

It was not only Mr. Hughes’ naval program that was seeing heavy weather; the Four Power Pact was in trouble. The President did not agree with the American delegation that the mainland of Japan was covered by the treaty. For my part I had never questioned that when this Four Power Pact talked about insular dominions as well as insular possessions it meant what it said, and that Nippon as well as Australia and New Zealand was included. Moreover, Mr. Hughes had repeatedly told the press that was the intention. There seems, however, to have been doubts in some minds, and when finally twelve days after the Pact itself was submitted and accepted by the full Conference, an insistent journalist presented Mr. Harding at his biweekly press meeting with a written question. (The President was now requiring all questions at these gatherings to be submitted in writing.) He remarked in his casual manner, “No, the Japan mainland is not included in the treaty.” To be sure he took it back that night in a public document, but here was food for the trouble makers—a disagreement in the cabinet! All of those who, while loudly declaring themselves advocates of peace, were doing their utmost to belittle the efforts of the responsible, to magnify differences in interpretation, to fan partisan jealousies, to read in intrigue and deceit and concealment where there was usually nothing worse than blundering or stupidity, declared with satisfaction or despair that the Conference was now surely wrecked. Joined to the cry of anguish that was rising over the failure to limit the submarine and auxiliary craft, the chorus was dismal enough.

Little by little, however, events shut off the pessimists. For instance, one of the “intrigues” that had been brought to light was that Japan and France had combined on the submarine issue, and were lining up in the Conference against England and America. But Japan destroyed that fine morsel, declaring formally that she felt it would be a misfortune if the Conference failed to come to an agreement on limitation; that she supported the original American proposal of November 12 in regard to auxiliary craft and hoped that agreement would be reached on that basis.

She followed this quieting information by an announcement that she did not consider it consistent with her dignity as one of the four powers to accept any special protection, and that she therefore asked that the Four Power treaty be amended so as to exclude her mainland.

Even the submarine became less threatening as the discussion went on. If it was not to be limited in number, it was in field of action—so far as a rule of war could limit. If auxiliary craft were to be built according to the “needs” of each nation, their tonnage was not to run over 10,000 tons each and their guns were to be but eight inch. Add this to the ratio in capital ships now fixed—5–5–3—1.75—1.75—and to a ten years’ naval holiday, and you had a solid something.

One grew philosophical again and reflected how childish it was to suppose that a Conference of this importance could be carried on without sharp differences of opinion, without those periods which we call “deadlocks,” without the flaring up at times of century-old feuds, such as that between Great Britain and France. All of these things, we told ourselves, were part of the problem of working out new understandings, and to overemphasize them or willfully to exploit them in order to increase ill will and obstruct a progress which was necessarily slow and difficult, was work fit only for the irresponsible and the malicious.

The naval program was certain of adoption. There were details still unsettled, but it seemed safe to assume that if the patience and good will of the delegates stood the strain, these details would be satisfactorily arranged; but, as from the start, the final success of the Conference depended upon removing the fears that England, Japan and the United States had of one another, of our securing reasonable assurance that our policies of the open door in China and of moral trusteeship for Russia and China were adopted. We had proposed a pact and it had been accepted; principles regarding China and they had been accepted; but this was by no means all of the Far Eastern problem. By Christmas we were at the heart of it—the hostile relations of China and Japan, and whether it was possible to help them to peacefully adjust these relations.