Part 11

The destiny of all the English speaking democracies that have risen now from being British colonies to semi-independent states seems fairly clear. They will go on to nationhood; their links to Great Britain, continually less formal and legal and more and more strongly sympathetic, will be supplemented by their attraction toward America, due to affinity and a common character. All the mischief makers in the world cannot, I think, prevent the Dutch-English of South Africa, the English-French of Canada, the English-French of Australia, the English-Scotch of New Zealand, the Americans, this new emancipated Ireland and Britain, being drawn together at last by all their common habits of thought and speech, and even by the mellowed memories of their past conflicts, into a conscious brotherhood of independent but co-operative nations.

The day has come for the Irish to recognize that the future is of more value than the past. Even without any other states, this girdle of English speaking states about the globe could be of a great predominant association. Within this English speaking circle of peoples a whole series of experiments in separation, independent action, readjustment, co-operation and federation have been made in the last century and a half, and are still going on, of the utmost significance in the problem of human association.

No other series of communities have had such experiences. No other communities have so much to give mankind in these matters. The German coalescences have been marred by old methods of force, methods which have usually failed in the English cases. Spain and Latin America are at least half a century behind the English speaking world in the arts and experience of political co-operation.

But when we turn to India we turn to something absolutely outside the English speaking world girdle.

One of the many manifest faults of that most premature project the League of Nations was the fiction that brought in India as a self-governing nation, as if she were the same sort of thing as these self-governing Western states. It was indeed a most amazing assumption. India is not a nation, or anything like a nation. India is a confused variety of states, languages and races, and so far from being self-governing, her peoples are under an amount of political repression which is now perhaps greater there than anywhere else in the world.

Politically she is a profound mystery. We do not know what the political thoughts of these peoples are, nor indeed whether they have in the mass any political concepts at all parallel to those of the Western civilizations. The Indian representative at the Washington Conference, Mr. Srinivastra Sastri, is obviously a British nominee; he is not so much a representative as a specimen Indian gentleman. We do not know what national forces there are behind him, or indeed if there is any collective will behind him at all. But it would be hard to substitute for him anything very much more representative.

What constituency is there, what Electoral College, to send any one? India is not in fact so constituted as to send a real representative to a conference or an Association of Nations at the present time. She is a thing of a different kind, a different sort of human accumulation. She belongs to a different order of creature from the English speaking and European states and from Japan. She is as little fitted to deal on equal terms with them as a jungle deer, let us say, is to join a conference of the larger Cetacea in the North Polar seas.

India is far less able to play an effective and genuine part as a member of an Association of Nations even than China. She has no real democratic institutions and she may never develop them in forms familiar to European and American minds. We American and English are too apt to suppose that our own democratic methods, our voting and elections and debates and press campaigns and parliamentary methods, which have grown up through long ages to suit our peculiar idiosyncracies, are necessarily adaptable to all the world. In India they may prove altogether misfitting.

India, were she given freedom of self-government, under the stimulus of modern appliances and modern thought, would probably induce an entirely different series of institutions from those of Europe, institutions perhaps equally conducive to freedom and development but different in kind. And China also, with untrammelled initiatives, may invent methods of freedom and co-operation at once dissimilar and parallel to Western institutions.

But the mention of China brings us back to the possibility of applying the precedent of China to India. The discussions and perplexities of the last two or three years which have culminated in the Washington Conference have slowly worked out and made clear the possibility of a new method in Asia. This is the method of concerted abstinence and withdrawal, the idea of a binding agreement of all the nations interested in China and tempted to make aggressions upon China to come out of and to keep out of that country while it consolidated itself and develops upon its own lines.

This new method, which has had its first trial at the Washington Conference, is a complete reversal of the method of dealing with politically confused or impotent countries and regions adopted at Versailles. It is an altogether more civilized and more hopeful method.

Versailles and the League of Nations were ridden by the idea of mandates. All over the world where disorder or weakness reigned a single mandatory power was to go in, making vague promises of good behavior, to rule and exploit that country. It was the thinnest, cheapest camouflage for annexation; it was a hopeless attempt to continue the worst territory-seizing traditions of the nineteenth century while seeming to abandon them. It was Pecksniff imperialism. So we had the snatching of Syria, of Mesopotamia, and so forth. But any soundly constituted League or Association of Nations should render that sort of thing unnecessary and inexcusable.

The reason lying at the base of the British occupation of India, of the Japanese occupation of Corea, of the French in Indo-China, and so forth, is a perfectly sound reason so long as there is no Association of Nations, and it is an entirely worthless one when there is such an association—it is that some other power may otherwise come into the occupied and dominated country and use it for purposes of offense. The case of the British in India, that they have kept an imperial peace for all the peoples of that land, that they warded off the Afghan raiders who devastated India in the early eighteenth century and afterward the long arm of Russia, is a very good one indeed. The British have little cause to be ashamed of their past in India and many things to be proud of. But they have very good cause, indeed, for being ashamed of their disregard of any Indian future. They have sat tight and turned peace into paralysis. They have not educated enough or released enough. Always the excuse for suppression has been that fear of the rival.

Well, the whole purpose of an Association of Nations is to eliminate that fear of a rival and all that that fear entails in war possibilities.

The Asiatic “empires” over alien peoples, these “possessions” of other people’s lands and lives, have played their part in the world’s development. They have become tyrannies and exasperations and tawdry grounds for rivalry. A real Association of Nations can have no place for “possessions,” “mandates” or “subject peoples” within its scheme.

XXIV THE OTHER END OF PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE—THE SIEVE FOR GOOD INTENTIONS

Washington, Dec. 9.

I went to hear the President address Congress on its reassembling on Tuesday. He spoke to a joint session of the Senate and House of Representatives held, as is customary, in the chamber of Representatives because it is the larger of the two chambers.

Hitherto my observations have centred upon the Continental Building and the Pan-American Building, up by the White House, and they have concerned the good intentions and great projects that glow and expand like great iridescent bubbles about the conference that is going on in this region.

But the conference, whatever freedom it has to think and discuss, has no power to act. Until the Senate by a two-thirds majority has indorsed the recommendations of the President, the United States cannot be committed to any engagement with the outside world. This is a fact that needs to be written in large letters as a perpetual reminder in the editorial rooms and diplomatic offices of all those Europeans who write about or deal with the foreign relations of the United States. For the Constitution of the United States is as carelessly read over there as the Anglo-Japanese alliance has been read here, and it is as dangerously misconceived. Through that first disastrous year of the peace Europe imagined that the President was the owner rather than the leader of the United States.

It was with great interest and curiosity, therefore, that I went down to this assembly at the Capitol to see the President dealing with his Legislature. Here was the place not of suggestions but of decisions. What goes through here is accomplished and done—subject only to one thing, the recognition by the Supreme Court, if it is challenged, that the thing is constitutional.

I went down with—what shall I say?—some prejudiced expectations. The Americans resemble the English very closely in one particular—they abuse their own institutions continually. Prohibition and the police—but these are outside my scope! I have heard scarcely a good word for Congress since I landed here, and the Senate, by the unanimous testimony of the conversationalists of the United States, combines the ignoble with the diabolical in a peculiarly revolting mixture. Even individual Senators have admitted as much—with a sinister pride.

It is exactly how we talk about Parliament in London—though with more justice. But this sort of talk soaks into the innocent from abroad, and, though one takes none of it seriously, the whole of it produces an effect. I had the feeling that I was going to see a gathering of wreckers, a barrier, perhaps an insurmountable barrier, in the way to the realization of any dream of America taking her place as the leading power in the world, as the first embodiment of the New Thing in international affairs.

It puts all this sort of feeling right to see these two bodies in their proper home and to talk to these creatures of legend, the Representatives and the Senators. One perceives they are not a malignant sub-species of mankind; one discovers a concourse of men very interested about and unexpectedly open-minded upon foreign policy. They are critical but not hostile to the new projects and ideas. One realizes that Congress is not a blank barrier but a sieve, and probably a very necessary sieve, for the new international impulse in America.

The ceremonial of the gathering was simple and with the dignity of simplicity. The big galleries for visitors, which always impress the British observer by their size, were full of visitors after their kind, ladies predominating, and particularly full was the press gallery, which overhangs the Speaker and the Presidential chair. Some faint vestige of a sound religious upbringing had reminded me that the first are sometimes last and the last first; I had fallen into the tail of the procession of my fellow newspaper men from their special room to the House of Representatives, and so I found myself with the overflow of the journalists, not with everything under my chin but very conveniently seated on the floor of the House behind the Representatives, and feeling much more like a Congressman than I could otherwise have done.

Away to the right were the members of the Cabinet—the British visitor always has to remind himself that they cannot be either Representatives or Senators. Presently the ninety-odd Senators came in by the central door, two by two, and were distributed upon the seats in front of their hosts; the Representatives.

There was applause, and I saw Sir Auckland Geddes, with that large, bare smile of his, and the rest of the British delegation entering from behind the Chair, for the delegations had also been invited to come down from the unrealities of the conference and had been assigned the front row of seats. Other delegations followed and seated themselves. At last came a hush and the clapping of hands, and the President entered and went to his place, looking extremely like a headmaster coming in to address the school assembly at the beginning of the term. He is more like George Washington in appearance, I perceive, than any intervening President.

He read his address in that effective voice of his which seems to get everywhere without an effort. I listened attentively to every sentence of it, although I knew that upstairs there would be a printed copy of it for me as soon as the delivery was over. Yet, although I was listening closely, I also found I was thinking a great deal about this most potent gathering, for potent it is, which has been raised up now to a position of quite cardinal importance in human affairs.

President Harding is on what are nowadays for a President exceptionally good terms with Congress. He means to keep so. In his address he reiterated his point that even the full constitutional powers of the President are too great and that he has no intention to use them, much less to strain them. Nevertheless, or even in consequence of that, he is very manifestly the leader of his Legislature. The atmosphere was non-contentious. He was not like a party leader speaking to his supporters and the opposition. He was much more like America soliloquizing. His address was a statement of intentions.

I think the President feels that officially he is not so much the elect of America as the voice of America, and instead of wanting to make that voice say characteristic and epoch-making things, he tries to get as close as he can to the national thought and will. What President Harding says today America will do tomorrow. One human and amusing thing he did—he was careful to drag in that much-disputed word of his, “normalcy,” which he has resolved, apparently, shall oust out “normality” from current English.

And from the point of view of those who are concerned about the dark troubles of the world outside America it was, I think, a very hopeful address. It reinforced the impression I had already received of President Harding as of a man feeling his way carefully but steadily towards great ends. America’s growing recognition of her “inescapable relationship to world finance and trade” came early and his little lecture on the need to give and take in foreign trade was a lecture that is being repeated in every main street in America.

He spoke of Russia and returned to that topic. “We do not forget the tradition of Russian friendship” was a good sentence that some countries in Europe may well mark. The growing belief in America of the possibility of going into Russia through the agency of the American Relief Administration and of getting to dealing with the revived co-operative organizations of Russia is very notable. And though there was no mention of the Association of Nations as such, there were allusions to the “world hope centered upon this capital city” and to the universal desire for permanent peace.

And while I listened I was also thinking of all these men immediately before me, between four and five hundred men, including the ninety-six Senators, with whom rested the power of decision upon the role America will play in the world. I have met and talked now with a number of them, and particularly with quite a fair sample of the Senatorial body. And I think now that it is going to be a much better body for international purposes than my reading about it before I came to Washington has led me to suppose.

We hear too much in Europe of the rule of “jobs” and “interests” in Washington. No doubt that sort of thing goes on here, as in every Legislature, but it has to be borne in mind that it has very little bearing upon the international situation. It is not a matter affecting the world generally. I doubt if there is nearly as much business and financial intrigue in the lobbies of Washington as in the lobbies of Westminster; but, anyhow, what there is here is essentially a domestic question. Both Representatives and Senators approach international questions as comparatively free—if rather inexperienced—men.

Probably the only strong permanent force hitherto in international affairs here has been the anti-British vote, based on the Irish hate of Britain. If the Irish settlement weakens or abolishes that, Congress will deal with the world’s affairs without any perceptible bias at all. The average Senator is a prosperous, intelligent, American-thinking man, elected to the Senate upon political grounds that have no bearing whatever upon international affairs. He is an amateur in matters international.

A bitter political issue at home may make him do any old thing with international affairs, and that was the situation during the last years of President Wilson. Poor, war-battered Europe became a pawn in a constitutional struggle. But the Harding regime is to be one of co-operation with the Senate, and the dignity of the Senate is restored. This very various assembly of vigorous-minded Americans, for that and other reasons, is getting to grips now with international questions with all the freshness and vigor of good amateurs, with a detached disinterestedness, a growing sense of responsibility and the old peace-enforcing traditions of America strong in it.

If only it does not delay things too long; I doubt if those who desire to see the peace of the world organized and secure are likely to have any quarrel with the Senate of the United States. The worst evil I fear from the American Senate, now that I have seen something of it individually and collectively, is the impartial leisureliness of the detached in its dealings with international affairs.

The President finished his discourse and the stir of dispersal began. I had assisted at America reviewing her position in the world. I thought the occasion simple and fine and dignified. I found myself leaving the Capitol in a mood of quite unanticipated respect.

XXV AFRICA AND THE ASSOCIATION OF NATIONS

Washington, Dec. 9.

In a previous paper I wrote of certain “stifled voices” at Washington. There is yet another stifled voice here that I have heard, and to speak of it opens up another great group of questions that stand in the way to any effectual organization of world peace through an Association of Nations. Until we get some provisional decision about this set of issues the Association of Nations remains a project in the air.

This stifled voice of which I am now writing is the voice of the colored people. As a novelist—a novelist in my spare time—and as a man very curious by nature, about human reactions, the peculiar situations created by “color” in America have always appealed to me. I do not understand why American fiction does not treat of them more frequently. It is the educated, highly intelligent colored people who get my interest and sympathy. I cannot get up any race feeling about them.

I am particularly proud to have known Booker T. Washington and to know Mr. Dubois, and this time, in spite of a great pressure of engagements, I was able to spend two hours last Sunday listening to the proceedings of the Washington Correspondence Club, an organization which battles by letter and interview and appeal against the harsh exclusions from theatres, schools, meetings, restaurants, libraries and the like, that prevail here.

I will not discuss here the rights and wrongs of a bar that cuts off most of the intellectual necessities and conveniences of life from many people who would pass as refined and cultivated whites in any European country. I mention this gathering merely to note a very interesting topic upon which I was called to account thereat.

Once or twice in these papers—I do not know if the reader has noted it—I have mentioned the French training of Senegalese troops and the objection felt by other European peoples to their extensive employment in Europe. I was asked at the Correspondence Club whether the objections I had made to this were not “fostering race prejudice,” and some interesting exchanges followed.

I was inclined to argue that the importation of African negroes into Europe for military purposes was as objectionable as their importation to America for economic services, but some of my hosts, some of the younger men, did not see it in that light. They are warmed toward the French by the notable absence of racial exclusiveness in France, and they see the ideals of that epoch-making book, “La France Negre,” from an entirely different angle. Why not a black France as big or bigger than white France and a new people who have learned military discipline, military service and united action from Europe?

“Why not an African Napoleon presently?” said the young man, a little wanting, I thought, in that abject meekness which is the American ideal of colored behavior.

He was imagining, I suppose, something happening in Africa rather after the fashion of the emancipation of Hayti and of great African armies pushing their former rulers back to the sea. But Col. Taylor has recently suggested another possibility, namely, that of France finding herself in the grip of a black Pretorian Guard. It is a just, conceivable fancy—a Pretorian Guard, French-speaking and ultra-patriotic, keeping French Socialists and pacifists and Bolsheviks in their proper place.

I do not believe very much in either of these possibilities nor even in the third possibility of European powers fighting each other with black armies in Africa, but I do perceive that dreams of a world peace will remain very insubstantial dreams, indeed, until we can work out a scheme or at least general principles of action for the treatment of Africa between the Sahara and the Zambesi River, a scheme that will give some sort of a quietus to the jealousies and hostilities evoked by the economic and political exploitations of annexed and mandatory territories upon nationalist and competitive lines in this region of the earth.

For it seems to be the fact that tropical and sub-tropical Africa has another function in the world than to be the home of the great family of negro peoples. Africa is economically necessary to European civilization as the chief source of vegetable oils and fats and various other products of no great value to the native population. European civilization can scarcely get along without these natural resources of Africa.

Now here we are up against a problem entirely different from the problem that arises in the case of India, Indo-China and China, which is the problem of a politically powerless but essentially civilized population which can be trusted to modernize itself and come into line with the existing efficient powers if only it is protected from oppressive and disintegrating forces while it adjusts itself.

Africa is quite incapable of anything of the sort. Negro Africa is mainly still in a state of tribal barbarism; in the latter half of the nineteenth century its peoples were in a condition of deepening disorder and misery due to the spread of European diseases and to the raiding of the Arab and native adventurers who had obtained possession of modern firearms. The small village communities of tropical Africa were quite unable to stand up against the brigand enterprises of mere bands of ruffians armed with rifles.