Part 13

The next conferences that are indicated will gather in a mood of hopefulness and experience that will be the most precious legacy of the present conference. One that must follow very soon must deal with the economic rehabilitation of Europe. Here, it seems to me, America, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Russia at least must meet. And soon. In the Christmas mood, in the phase of relief that radiates from Washington and Ireland now, we must not let our elation blind us to the fact that, for all the light that breaks in upon us, we are not yet out of the woods. Millions are starving today, great masses of men degenerate physically and morally in unemployment, European industrialism crawls and staggers still.

We have laid the foundations of a new era, but the building has scarcely begun. And in addition to the world economic conference there is also need of another conference to face the still more difficult task of military disarmament and the re-examination of the factors of conflict in the Afro-European area. Personally, I want to see America in that conference also, because I do recognize that the freshness of mind, the deliberate diplomatic inexperience of America, is a factor of priceless value in these discussions. I would like to see that conference also held in an American atmosphere and before an American audience—if only for the sake of Europe. And if America can be interested in Kwangtung, I don’t see why America should not also be interested in Silesia, or Cilicia, or Senegal, or the Congo, which are all very much nearer.

The appetite for conferences, the belief in conferences, will grow with what it feeds upon. One sees these gatherings, with their accessory commissions, permanent secretariats and increasing world services, becoming a customary and necessary peace control of the earth.

And the peace control, growing in this natural fashion, will consist always and solely of the efficient and willing nations of the world. There will be no forced conclusions and no premature admission of incompetent and feeble peoples. The pedantry that would give every sovereign power, however little or rotten, a vote, a nice, saleable vote, in the management of the world’s affairs will play no part in this evolution.

The Association of Nations will be a growing brotherhood of strong and healthy and understanding peoples, bound only by a bond of self-denial and mutual restraint toward the weaker folk of the earth. The co-operation of the English speaking peoples, and particularly the American will for peace, must needs play a very conspicuous part in the crystallization of this Association, and so it is inevitable that a certain sort of international “expert” will be screaming that the world is threatened by an Anglo-American imperialism. It may be worth while to say a word or so to dispel this idea.

Let us bear in mind that the Washington Conference, whose results may be the cornerstone of the organized peace of the world, is a conference of withdrawal and abstinence, self-restraint and mutual restraint, with regard to China and the Pacific; its key idea is the cessation of aggressions upon weaker or less advantageously circumstanced people. If America and her kindred nations are most active in pressing for such results, it is not that they are moved by any thoughts of world predominance but by liberal ideas that are the monopoly of no race and people. It is their fortunate lot to have been most accessible to such ideas and to be able now to play the leading, most powerful part in establishing them in the world. But these ideas have a broader basis and claim a wider allegiance than merely that of the English speaking peoples.

Liberalism, the idea of great nations of free citizens held together by bonds of mutual confidence, roots very wide and deep in humanity. It derives from the great traditions of the Greek and Roman Republics and from the traditions of freedom of the Scandinavian and Teutonic peoples. The America of today did not grow from American seed. Let America bear that in mind. The American idea is the embodiment particularly of the liberal thought of England and France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. France cannot destroy the greatness of her past or the greatness of her future by a phase of momentary folly with her submarines and Senegalese, her Polish ally and all the rest of it.

All peoples have such lapses. A few years ago Britain was disgusting with her jingoistic imperialism. Let us forget our lapses and get back to our more enduring selves. Latin America, quite as much as English speaking America, belongs to that great tradition of Franco-British liberalism. Liberal Germany in 1848 and again today struggles to take its fitting place among the emancipated peoples, as Italy did half a century ago. These are the peoples who can best understand now and help now. They are all in our system of ideas; they can be brought together into one purpose.

It is natural and necessary that the peoples most saturated in that great tradition of European liberalism should be the first full members of the coming Association and should be prepared to lead the rest of the world toward the new order. All peoples are not equally prepared. It is not a question of ascendancy; it is a question of those who are able doing the task that they alone are prepared to perform.

When I think of an Association of Nations I think, therefore, of a sort of club or brotherhood, not of every state in the world but of the peoples who speak English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Japanese, as the big brotherhood of the world, with such states as Holland and Norway and Bohemia, and so forth, great in quality if not great in power and entirely sympathetic by training and tradition, associated with them in a great bond for two ends; for peace among themselves and for restraint and patience toward the rest of mankind. I think of such a brotherhood as the brain and backbone of the organized peace of the world, and I cannot see how it is possible to take in the other peoples of the world as helpers until they respond to the same ideals.

I think first of a recovered Russia and then of a unified and educated China and a freed and reconstructed India and of many other states which can claim to be of a civilized quality, such as Egypt, gradually winning their way from a non-participating to a participating level. The relationship of China to Japan in a developing Association of Nations will be something rather analogous to the relationship of a Territory to a State in the Constitution of the United States of America.

Unless there is a strong, well organized collective mentality in a nation or state, I do not see how there can be anything but a sham representation of it upon an Association of Nations, nor how it can be anything but a responsibility and weakness to such an Association.

And outside the system of participating states, and non-participating states, there are great regions of the earth—tropical Africa is the most typical case—which must necessarily have a sort of order imposed upon them from without and for which a joint control by interested associated nations is probably the best method of government at the present time.

That, I think, is the vision of the political future of mankind that is opening out before us; a great system of associated states, locked and interlocked together by fourfold and sixfold and tenfold treaties, open treaties, of peace and co-operation, ruling jointly the still barbaric regions of the earth and pledged to respect and to keep and at last to welcome to their own ranks the now politically enfeebled regions of old civilization. Such an Association must necessarily supersede the “empires” of the nineteenth century and put an end forever to the imperialistic idea. Of such an Association the fourfold treaty may be the foundation stone. And within the security of such an edifice of peace mankind will be able to go on to achievements such as we at present can scarcely imagine.

XXIX WHAT A STABLY ORGANIZED WORLD PEACE MEANS FOR MANKIND

I have now come to the last paper I shall write about the Washington Conference. I have tried to give the reader some idea of the nature of that gathering and a broad view of the issues involved. I have tried to prevent the sharp discussions of the foreground, the dramatic moments and eloquent passages, from blinding us to the dark and darkening background of Old World affairs. I have tried to show that even the horrors of war are not the whole or the main disaster which results from human disunion and disorder in the presence of increasing mechanical power. I have stressed the theme of economic and social dissolution. Necessarily, I have had to write much of dangers impending and miseries which gather and increase, and of hates, suspicions and failures to comprehend. And on the other hand, when one has turned to the possibilities and methods of escape from the present conflicts and apprehensions, necessarily one has been very largely in the thin and unattractive atmosphere of unrealized projects. I have written of the defects of the League of Nations scheme, its premature explicitness, its thinly theoretical and imitative forms, its frequent mere camouflage, as in the mandatory system, of existing wrongs, and I have brought into contrast with it this newer and I think more natural and hopeful project of successive Conferences, throwing off Committees, embodying their results in treaties and Standing Commissions, and growing at last not so much into a World Parliament, which I perceive more and more clearly is an improbable dream, as into a living, growing, organic network of World Government.

But now in conclusion I will ask the reader to turn his mind from this necessary discussion of political devices and administrative contrivances, these bleak inventions that may form the ladder of escape from the divisions and bitterness of the present time, and to join in an attempt to realize what the world may become if men do struggle through these tiresome and perplexing problems to a working solution, if our race really does get from these wearisome yet hopeful wranglings and dealings to an organized world peace, to a disarmed world, to a steady reduction of racial and national antipathies and distrusts, to a growing confidence in the permanence of peace and the prevalence of good will throughout our planet, to a comprehensive system of world controls of the common interests of mankind. Suppose that after these present darknesses of famine and almost universal insecurity, these confused and often conflicting efforts we are making; suppose that in ten, or twenty, or thirty years we shall begin to realize that the thing is, after all, getting done, that we are indeed pushing through, moving towards the light, that human affairs are on the up-grade again and on new and greater and safer lines; let us suppose that and then let us ask what sort of world it will be for our kind that we shall be moving towards?

Let us go back to one fundamental fact in the present break-up in human affairs. That break-up is not a result of debility; _it is a result of ill-regulated power_. It is important to bear that in mind. Disproportionate development of energy and overstrain are the immediate causes of our present troubles; the scale of modern economic enterprise has outgrown the little boundaries of the European States; science and invention have made war so monstrously destructive and disintegrative that victory is swallowed up in disaster; we are in a world of little nations wielding world-wide powers to the general destruction. And it follows that if, after all, we do struggle out of our old-fashioned and now altogether disastrous rivalries and hatreds before they destroy us, we shall still have all this science and power, which are things that seem now to increase by a sort of inner necessity, on our hands. So that getting through to an organized world peace does not mean simply avoiding death and destruction and getting back to “as you were.” It means getting hold of power by the right end instead of the wrong end and going right ahead. We are not struggling simply to escape, we are struggling for the opportunity to achieve.

Personally, I do not think I would have bothered to come to Washington or to interest myself in this peace business, and to work and blunder and feel incompetent and be worried and distressed here, if it meant working for just peace, flat, empty, simple peace. I do not see why the killing of a few score millions of human beings a few years before they would naturally and ingloriously die, or the smashing up of a lot of ordinary, rather ugly, rather uncomfortable towns, or, if it comes to that sort of thing, the complete depopulation of the earth, or the prospect of being killed myself presently by a bomb or a shot or a pestilence, should move me to any great exertions. Why bother to exchange suffering for flatness? The worst, least endurable of miseries is boredom. One must die somewhere; few deaths are as painful as a first-class toothache or as depressing as a severe fit of indigestion; you can suffer more on a comfortable death bed than on a battlefield; and meanwhile, there is a very good chance of sunshine and snatched happiness here or there. But what does stir me is my invincible belief that the life I lead and the human life about me are not anything like the good thing that could be and might be. I am not so much frightened and distressed by these wars and national clashes and all the rest of this silly flag-wagging, bragging, shoving business as bored and irritated by these things. I have had some vision of what science and education can do for life and I am haunted by the fine uses that might be made of men and of our splendid possibilities. I do not think of war as a tragic necessity but as a blood-stained mess. When I think of my Europe now, I do not feel like a weakling whose world has been invaded by stupendous and cruel powers; I feel like a man whose promising garden has been invaded by hogs. There is the pacificism of love, the pacificism of pity, the pacificism of commercialism, but also there is the pacificism of utter contempt. This is not a doomed world we live in or anything so tragically dignified; it is a world idiotically spoilt.

Do any of us fully realize the promise of that garden, the promise that can still be rescued from the trampling dullness of old animosities and rivalries which is wrecking it? Given unity of purpose throughout the world, given a surcease of mutual thwarting and destruction, do we realize what science has made possible now and here for mankind?

I shall not indulge in any imaginative anticipations of things still undiscovered in the scientific realm, I will only suppose that things already known and tested are systematically used all over the world, that the good knowledge we have already stored in our laboratories and libraries is really applied with some thoroughness and with some community of purpose to the needs and enlargement of life.

And first let us deal with the commoner material aspects of life in which there have been great changes and improvements in recent times and in which, therefore, it is easiest to imagine still further betterment, given only an assuagement of strife and blind struggle and a spreading out of generosity and the feeling of community from international to social affairs.

Take transport, that very fundamental social concern. It is ripe for great advances. There is all the labor needed in the world, all the skill and knowledge needed, and all the material needed, for these advances. There is everything needed but peace and the recognition of a common purpose. At present, there are railways only over a part of the inhabited world; there are vast areas of Asia and Africa and South America with no railway nor road communication at all and with enormous natural resources scarcely tapped, in consequence. Roads are as yet not nearly so widespread as railways, abundant good roads are founded indeed only in Western Europe and the better developed regions of the United States; there are a few good main roads in such countries as India, South Africa, and so forth. And in many parts of Europe now, and especially in Russia roads and railways are going out of use. Large parts of the world are still only to be reached by a specially equipped expedition; they are as inaccessible to ordinary travelling people as the other side of the moon. And if you will probe into the reasons why road and rail transport fails to develop and is even over wide areas undergoing degradation, you will come in nearly every case upon a political bar, a national or an imperial rivalry. These are the things that close half our world to us and may presently close most of the world to us. And consider even the railroads and roads we have; even those of America or Britain, how poor and uncomfortable they are in comparison with what we know they might be.

And then take housing. I have been motoring about a little in Maryland and Virginia and I am astounded at the many miserable wood houses I see, hovels rather than houses, the abodes very often of white men. I am astounded at the wretched fences about the ill-kept patches of cultivation and by the extreme illiteracy of many of the poorer folk, white as well as colored, with whom I have had a chance of talking. I have to remind myself that I am in what is now the greatest, richest, most powerful country in the world. But with this country now as with every country, army, navy, contentious service, war debt charges and the rest of the legacy of past wars consume the national revenue. America is not spending a tithe of what she ought to be spending upon schools, upon the maintenance of a housing standard and upon roads and transport. She improves in all these things, but at no great pace, because of the disunion of the world and the threat of war. England and France, which were once far ahead of her in these respects of housing, transport and popular education, are now on the whole declining, through the excessive fiscal burthens they are under to pay for the late war and prepare for fresh ones. But I ask you to think what would happen to a world from which that burthen of preparedness was lifted. The first result of that relief would be a diversion of the huge maintenance allowance of the war-God to just these starved and neglected things.

Stanch that waste throughout the earth, and the saved wealth and energy will begin at once to flow in the direction of better houses, towards a steady increase in the order and graciousness of our unkempt and slovenly countrysides, to making better roads throughout the globe, until the globe is accessible, and to a huge enrichment and invigoration of education.

How fair and lovely such countries as France and Germany and Italy might be today if the dark threat of war that keeps them so gaunt and poverty-struck could be lifted from them. Think of the abundant and various loveliness of France and the wit and charm of its varied peoples, now turned sour by the toil and trouble, the fears and bitter suspicions the threat of further war holds over them. Think of France, fearless and at last showing the world what France can do and be. And Italy at last Italy, and Japan, Japan. Think of the green hills of Virginia, covered with stately homes and cheerful houses. Think of a world in which travel is once more free and in which every country in absolute security has been able to resume its own peace-time development of its architecture, its music and all its arts in its own atmosphere upon the foundations of its own past. Because world unity does not mean uniformity; it means security to be different. It is war that forces all men into the same khaki and iron-clad moulds.

But all this recovery of the visible idiosyncracies of nations, all this confident activity and progressive enrichment which will inevitably ensue upon the diversion of human attention from war and death and conflict and mutual thwarting to peace and development, will be but the outer indication of much profounder changes. Relieved of our war burthens, it will be possible to take hold of education as educationists have been longing to do for many years.

They tell us now that every one could be educated up to sixteen or seventeen and that most people may be kept learning and growing mentally all their lives, that no country in the world has enough schools, or properly equipped schools, nor enough properly educated teachers in the schools we have. The supply of university resources is still more meager. There is hardly anyone alive who has not a sense of things that he could know but cannot attain and of powers he can never develop. The number of fully educated and properly nurtured people in the world, people who can be said to have come reasonably near to realizing their full birth possibilities, is almost infinitesimal. The rest of mankind are either physically or mentally stunted, or both. This insolvent, slovenly old world has begotten them, and starved them. Our lives, in strength, in realized capacity, in achievement and happiness are perhaps 20% or 30% of what they ought to be. But if only we could sweep aside these everlasting contentions, these hates and disputes that waste our earth, and get to work upon this educational proposition as a big business man gets to work upon a mineral deposit or the development of an invention, instead of a 20% result we might clamber to an 80% or a 90% result in educated efficiency. I ask you to go through the crowded streets of a town and note the many under-grown and ill-grown, the under-sized, the ill-behaved; to note the appeals to childish, prejudiced and misshapen minds in the shop windows, in the advertisements, in the newspaper headlines at the street corners, and then to try and think of what might be there even now in the place of that street and that crowd.

The wealth and energy were there to make schools and give physical and mental training to all these people, and they have gone to burst shells and smash up the work of men, the organizing power has been wasted upon barren disputes; the science was there and it has been cramped and misused; even the will was there, but it was not organized to effective application. And scarcely a man in the crowd who begets a child, or a woman who bears one, but will dream of its growing to something better than the thwarted hope it will become.

Have you ever examined an aeroplane or a submarine, and realized the thousand beautiful adjustments and devices that have produced its wonderful perfection? Have you ever looked at a street corner loafer and thought of the ten thousand opportunities that have been cast away of saving him from what he has become?