Chapter 8

Albania was represented by an old friend of mine, the venerable Turkhan Pasha, who had been in diplomacy ever since the Congress of Berlin in the 'seventies of last century, and who looked like a modernized Nestor. I made his acquaintance many years ago, when he was Ambassador of Turkey in St. Petersburg. He was then a favorite everywhere in the Russian capital as a conscientious Ambassador, a charming talker, and a professional peace-maker, who wished well to everybody. The Young Turks having recalled him from St. Petersburg, he soon afterward became Grand Vizier to the Mbret of Albania. Far resonant events removed the Mbret from the throne, Turkhan Pasha from the Vizierate, and Albania from the society of nations, and I next found my friend in Switzerland ill in health, eating the bitter bread of exile, temporarily isolated from the world of politics and waiting for something to turn up. A few years more gave the Allies an unexpectedly complete victory and brought back Turkhan Pasha to the outskirts of diplomacy and politics. He suddenly made his appearance at the Paris Conference as the representative of Albania and the friend of Italy.

Another Albanian friend of mine, Essad Pasha, whose plans for the regeneration of his country differed widely from those of Turkhan, was for a long while detained in Saloniki. By dint of solicitations and protests, he at last obtained permission to repair to Paris and lay his views before the Conference, where he had a curious interview with Mr. Wilson. The President, having received from Albanians in the United States many unsolicited judgments on the character and antecedents of Essad Pasha, had little faith in his fitness to introduce and popularize democratic institutions in Albania. And he unburdened himself of these doubts to friends, who diffused the news. The Pasha asked for an audience, and by dint of patience and perseverance his prayer was heard. Five minutes before the appointed hour he was at the President's house, accompanied by his interpreter, a young Albanian named Stavro, who converses freely in French, Greek, and Turkish, besides his native language. But while in the antechamber Essad, remembering that the American President speaks nothing but pure English, suggested that Stavro should drive over to the Hôtel Crillon for an interpreter to translate from French. Thereupon one of the secretaries stopped him, saying: "Although he cannot speak French, the President understands it, so that a second interpreter will be unnecessary." Essad then addressed Mr. Wilson in Albanian, Stavro translated his words into French, and the President listened in silence. It was the impression of those in the room that, at any rate, Mr. Wilson understood and appreciated the gist of the Pasha's sharp criticism of Italy's behavior. But, to be on the safe side, the President requested his visitor to set down on paper at his leisure everything he had said and to send it to him.

PRESIDENT WILSON

President Wilson, before assuming the redoubtable rôle of world arbiter, was hardly more than a name in Europe, and it was not a synonym for statecraft. His ethical objections to the rule of Huerta in Mexico, his attempt to engraft democratic principles there, and the anarchy that came of it were matters of history. But the President of the nation to whose unbounded generosity and altruism the world owes a debt of gratitude that can only be acknowledged, not repaid, deservedly enjoyed a superlative measure of respect from his foreign colleagues, and the author of the project which was to link all nations together by ties of moral kinship was literally idolized by the masses. Never has it fallen to my lot to see any mortal so enthusiastically, so spontaneously welcomed by the dejected peoples of the universe. His most casual utterances were caught up as oracles. He occupied a height so far aloft that the vicissitudes of everyday life and the contingencies of politics seemingly could not touch him. He was given credit for a rare degree of selflessness in his conceptions and actions and for a balance of judgment which no storms of passion could upset. So far as one could judge by innumerable symptoms, President Wilson was confronted with an opportunity for good incomparably vaster than had ever before been within the reach of man.

Soon after the opening of the Conference the shadowy outlines of his portrait began to fill in, slowly at first, and before three months had passed the general public beheld it fairly complete, with many of its natural lights and shades. The quality of an active politician is never more clearly brought out than when, raised to an eminent place, he is set an arduous feat in sight of the multitude. Mr. Wilson's task was manifestly congenial to him, for it was deliberately chosen by himself, and it comprised the most tremendous problems ever tackled by man born of woman. The means by which he set to work to solve them were startlingly simple: the regeneration of the human race was to be compassed by means of magisterial edicts secretly drafted and sternly imposed on the interested peoples, together with a new and not wholly appropriate nomenclature.

In his own country, where he has bitter adversaries as well as devoted friends, Mr. Wilson was regarded by many as a composite being made up of preacher, teacher, and politician. To these diverse elements they refer the fervor and unction, the dogmatic tone, and the practised shrewdness that marked his words and acts. Independent American opinion doubted his qualifications to be a leader. As a politician, they said, he had always followed the crowd. He had swum with the tide of public sentiment in cardinal matters, instead of stemming or canalizing and guiding it. Deficient in courageous initiative, he had contented himself with merely executive functions. No new idea, no fresh policy, was associated with his name. His singular attitude on the Mexican imbroglio had provoked the sharp criticism even of friends and the condemnation of political opponents. His utterances during the first stages of the World War, such as the statement that the American people were too proud to fight and had no concern with the causes and objects of the war,[55] when contrasted with the opposite views which he propounded later on, were ascribed to quick political evolution--but were not taken as symptoms of a settled mind. He seemed a pacifist when his pride revolted at the idea of settling any intelligible question by an appeal to violence, and a semi-militarist when, having in his own opinion created a perfectly safe and bloodless peace guarantee in the shape of the League of Nations, he agreed to safeguard it by a military compact which sapped its foundation. He owed his re-election for a second term partly, it was alleged, to the belief that during the first he had kept his country out of the war despite the endeavors of some of its eminent leaders to bring it in; yet when firmly seated in the saddle, he followed the leaders whom he had theretofore with-stood and obliged the nation to fight.

As chief of the great country, his domestic critics add, which had just turned victory's scale in favor of the Allies, Mr. Wilson saw a superb opportunity to hitch his wagon to a star, and now for the first time he made a determined bid for the leadership of the world. Here the idealist showed himself at his best. But by the way of preparation he asked the nation at the elections to refuse their votes to his political opponents, despite the fact that they were loyally supporting his policy, and to return only men of his own party, and in order to silence their misgivings he declared that to elect Republican Senators would be to repudiate the administration of the President of the United States at a critical conjuncture. This was urged against him as the inexpiable sin. The electors, however, sent his political opponents to the Senate, whereupon the President organized his historic visit to Europe. It might have become a turning-point in the world's history had he transformed his authority and prestige into the driving-power requisite to embody his beneficent scheme. But he wasted the opportunity for lack of moral courage. Thus far American criticism. But the peoples of Europe ignored the estimates of the President made by his fellow-countrymen, who, as such, may be forgiven for failing to appreciate his apostleship, or set the full value on his humanitarian strivings. The war-weary masses judged him not by what he had achieved or attempted in the past, but by what he proposed to do in the future. And measured by this standard, his spiritual statue grew to legendary proportions.

Europe, when the President touched its shores, was as clay ready for the creative potter. Never before were the nations so eager to follow a Moses who would take them to the long-promised land where wars are prohibited and blockades unknown. And to their thinking he was that great leader. In France men bowed down before him with awe and affection. Labor leaders in Paris told me that they shed tears of joy in his presence, and that their comrades would go through fire and water to help him to realize his noble schemes.[56] To the working classes in Italy his name was a heavenly clarion at the sound of which the earth would be renewed. The Germans regarded him and his humane doctrine as their sheet-anchor of safety. The fearless Herr Muehlon said, "If President Wilson were to address the Germans, and pronounce a severe sentence upon them, they would accept it with resignation and without a murmur and set to work at once." In German-Austria his fame was that of a savior, and the mere mention of his name brought balm to the suffering and surcease of sorrow to the afflicted. A touching instance of this which occurred in the Austrian capital, when narrated to the President, moved him to tears. There were some five or six thousand Austrian children in the hospitals at Vienna who, as Christmas was drawing near, were sorely in need of medicaments and much else. The head of the American Red Cross took up their case and persuaded the Americans in France to send two million dollars' worth of medicaments to Vienna. These were duly despatched, and had got as far as Berne, when the French authorities, having got wind of the matter, protested against this premature assistance to infant enemies on grounds which the other Allies had to recognize as technically tenable, and the medicaments were ordered back to France from Berne. Thereupon Doctor Ferries, of the International Red Cross, became wild with indignation and laid the matter before the Swiss government, which undertook to send some medicaments to the children, while the Americans were endeavoring to move the French to allow at least some of the remedies to go through. The children in the hospitals, when told that they must wait, were bright and hopeful. "It will be all right," some of them exclaimed. "Wilson is coming soon, and he will bring us everything."

Thus Mr. Wilson had become a transcendental hero to the European proletarians, who in their homely way adjusted his mental and moral attributes to their own ideal of the latter-day Messiah. His legendary figure, half saint, half revolutionist, emerged from the transparent haze of faith, yearning, and ignorance, as in some ecstatic vision. In spite of his recorded acts and utterances the mythopeic faculty of the peoples had given itself free scope and created a messianic democrat destined to free the lower orders, as they were called, in each state from the shackles of capitalism, legalized thraldom, and crushing taxation, and each nation from sanguinary warfare. Truly, no human being since the dawn of history has ever yet been favored with such a superb opportunity. Mr. Wilson might have made a gallant effort to lift society out of the deep grooves into which it had sunk, and dislodge the secular obstacles to the enfranchisement and transfiguration of the human race. At the lowest it was open to him to become the center of a countless multitude, the heart of their hearts, the incarnation of their noblest thought, on condition that he scorned the prudential motives of politicians, burst through the barriers of the old order, and deployed all his energies and his full will-power in the struggle against sordid interests and dense prejudice. But he was cowed by obstacles which his will lacked the strength to surmount, and instead of receiving his promptings from the everlasting ideals of mankind and the inspiriting audacities of his own highest nature and appealing to the peoples against their rulers, he felt constrained in the very interest of his cause to haggle and barter with the Scribes and the Pharisees, and ended by recording a pitiful answer to the most momentous problems couched in the impoverished phraseology of a political party.

Many of his political friends had advised the President not to visit Europe lest the vast prestige and influence which he wielded from a distance should dwindle unutilized on close contact with the realists' crowd. Even the war-god Mars, when he descended into the ranks of the combatants on the Trojan side, was wounded by a Greek, and, screaming with pain, scurried back to Olympus with paling halo. But Mr. Wilson decided to preside and to direct the fashioning of his project, and to give Europe the benefit of his advice. He explained to Congress that he had expressed the ideals of the country for which its soldiers had consciously fought, had had them accepted "as the substance of their own thoughts and purpose" by the statesmen of the associated governments, and now, he concluded: "I owe it to them to see to it, in so far as in me lies, that no false or mistaken interpretation is put upon them, and no possible effort omitted to realize them. It is now my duty to play my full part in making good what they offered their lives and blood to obtain. I can think of no call to service which could transcend this."[57] No intention could well be more praiseworthy.

Soon after the _George Washington_, flying the presidential flag, had steamed out of the Bay on her way to Europe, the United Press received from its correspondent on board, who was attached to Mr. Wilson's person, a message which invigorated the hopes of the world and evoked warm outpourings of the seared soul of suffering man in gratitude toward the bringer of balm. It began thus: "The President sails for Europe to uphold American ideals, and literally to fight for his Fourteen Points. The President, at the Peace Table, will insist on the freedom of the seas and a general disarmament.... The seas, he holds, ought to be guarded by the whole world."

Since then the world knows what to think of the literal fighting at the Peace Table. The freedom of the seas was never as much as alluded to at the Peace Table, for the announcement of Mr. Wilson's militant championship brought him a wireless message from London to the effect that that proposal, at all events, must be struck out of his program if he wished to do business with Britain. And without a fight or a remonstrance the President struck it out. The Fourteen Points were not discussed at the Conference.[58] One may deplore, but one cannot misunderstand, what happened. Mr. Wilson, too, had his own fixed aim to attain: intent on associating his name with a grandiose humanitarian monument, he was resolved not to return to his country without some sort of a covenant of the new international life. He could not afford to go home empty-handed. Therein lay his weakness and the source of his failure. For whenever his attitude toward the Great Powers was taken to mean, "Unless you give me my Covenant, you cannot have your Treaty," the retort was ready: "Without our Treaty there will be no Covenant."

Like Dejoces, the first king of the Medes, who, having built his palace at Ecbatana, surrounded it with seven walls and permanently withdrew his person from the gaze of his subjects, Mr. Wilson in Paris admitted to his presence only the authorized spokesmen of states and causes, and not all of these. He declined to receive persons who thought they had a claim to see him, and he received others who were believed to have none. During his sojourn in Paris he took many important Russian affairs in hand after having publicly stated that no peace could be stable so long as Russia was torn by internal strife. And as familiarity with Russian conditions was not one of his accomplishments, he presumably needed advice and help from those acquainted with them. Now a large number of Russians, representing all political parties and four governments, were in Paris waiting to be consulted. But between January and May not one of them was ever asked for information or counsel. Nay, more, those who respectfully solicited an audience were told to wait. In the meanwhile men unacquainted with the country and people were sent by Mr. Wilson to report on the situation, and to begin by obtaining the terms of an acceptable treaty from the Bolshevik government.

The first plenipotentiary of one of the principal lesser states was for months refused an audience, to the delight of his political adversaries, who made the most of the circumstance at home. An eminent diplomatist who possessed considerable claims to be vouchsafed an interview was put off from week to week, until at last, by dint of perseverance, as it seemed to him, the President consented to see him. The diplomatist, pleased at his success, informed a friend that the following Wednesday would be the memorable day. "But are you not aware," asked the friend, "that on that day the President will be on the high seas on his way back to the United States?" He was not aware of it. But when he learned that the audience had been deliberately fixed for a day when Mr. Wilson would no longer be in France he felt aggrieved.

In Italy the President's progress was a veritable triumph. Emperors and kings had roused no such enthusiasm. One might fancy him a deity unexpectedly discovered under the outward appearance of a mortal and now being honored as the god that he was by ecstatic worshipers. Everything he did was well done, everything he said was nobly conceived and worthy of being treasured up. In these dispositions a few brief months wrought a vast difference.

In this respect an instructive comparison might be made between Tsar Alexander I at the Vienna Congress and the President of the United States at the Conference of Paris. The Russian monarch arrived in the Austrian capital with the halo of a Moses focusing the hopes of all the peoples of Europe. His reputation for probity, public spirit, and lofty aspirations had won for him the good-will and the anticipatory blessings of war-weary nations. He, too, was a mystic, believed firmly in occult influences, so firmly indeed that he accepted the fitful guidance of an ecstatic lady whose intuition was supposed to transcend the sagacity of professional statesmen. And yet the Holy Alliance was the supreme outcome of his endeavors, as the League of Nations was that of Mr. Wilson's. In lieu of universal peace all eastern Europe was still warring and revolting in September and the general outlook was disquieting. The disheartening effect of the contrast between the promise and the achievement of the American statesman was felt throughout the world. But Mr. Wilson has the solace to know that people hardly ever reach their goal--though they sometimes advance fairly near to it. They either die on the way or else it changes or they do.

It was doubtless a noble ambition that moved the Prime Ministers of the Great Powers and the chief of the North American Republic to give their own service to the Conference as heads of their respective missions. For they considered themselves to be the best equipped for the purpose, and they were certainly free from such prejudices as professional traditions and a confusing knowledge of details might be supposed to engender. But in almost every respect it was a grievous mistake and the source of others still more grievous. True, in his own particular sphere each of them had achieved what is nowadays termed greatness. As a war leader Mr. Lloyd George had been hastily classed with Marlborough and Chatham, M. Clemenceau compared to Danton, and Mr. Wilson set apart in a category to himself. But without questioning these journalistic certificates of fame one must admit that all three plenipotentiaries were essentially politicians, old parliamentary hands, and therefore expedient-mongers whose highest qualifications for their own profession were drawbacks which unfitted them for their self-assumed mission. Of the concrete world which they set about reforming their knowledge was amazingly vague. "Frogs in the pond," says the Japanese proverb, "know naught of the ocean." There was, of course, nothing blameworthy in their unacquaintanceship with the issues, but only in the offhandedness with which they belittled its consequences. Had they been conversant with the subject or gifted with deeper insight, many of the things which seemed particularly clear to them would have struck them as sheer inexplicable, and among these perhaps their own leadership of the world-parliament.

What they lacked, however, might in some perceptible degree have been supplied by enlisting as their helpers men more happily endowed than themselves. But they deliberately chose mediocrities. It is a mark of genial spirits that they are well served, but the plenipotentiaries of the Conference were not characterized by it. Away in the background some of them had familiars or casual prompters to whose counsels they were wont to listen, but many of the adjoints who moved in the limelight of the world-stage were gritless and pithless.

As the heads of the principal governments implicitly claimed to be the authorized spokesmen of the human race and endowed with unlimited powers, it is worth noting that this claim was boldly challenged by the peoples' organs in the press. Nearly all the journals read by the masses objected from the first to the dictatorship of the group of Premiers, Mr. Wilson being excepted. "The modern parasite," wrote a respectable democratic newspaper,[59] "is the politician. Of all the privileged beings who have ever governed us he is the worst. In that, however, there is nothing surprising ... he is not only amoral, but incompetent by definition. And it is this empty-headed individual who is intrusted with the task of settling problems with the very rudiments of which he is unacquainted." Another French journal[60] wrote: "In truth it is a misfortune that the leaders of the Conference are Cabinet chiefs, for each of them is obsessed by the carking cares of his domestic policy. Besides, the Paris Conference takes on the likeness of a lyrical drama in which there are only tenors. Now would even the most beautiful work in the world survive this excess of beauties?"