Part 2

It is a little difficult to reason respectfully against that sort of project. One is moved rather to add helpful suggestions in the same vein. As for example, that no hostilities shall be allowed to begin or continue except in the presence of a League of Nations referee, who shall be marked plainly on the chest and pants with the red cross of Geneva and who—for the convenience of aircraft—shall carry an open sunshade similarly adorned. He shall be furnished with a powerful whistle or hand trumpet audible above the noise of modern artillery, and military operations shall be at once arrested when this whistle is blown. Contravention of the rules laid down by the League of Nations shall be penalized according to the gravity of the offense, with penalties ranging from, let us say, an hour’s free bombardment of the offender’s position to the entire forces of the enemy being addressed very severely by the referee and ordered off the field.

In the event of either combatant winning the war, outright by illegitimate means, it might further be provided that such combatant should submit to a humiliating peace, just as if the war had been lost.

Unhappily war is not a game but the grimmest of realities, and no power on earth exists to prevent a nation which is fighting for existence against another nation from resorting to any expedient however unfair, cruel and barbarous to enforce victory or avert disaster. Success justifies every expedient in warfare, and you cannot prevent that being so. A nation, hoping to win and afterward make friends with its enemy or solicitous for the approval of some powerful neutral, may conceivably refrain from effective but objectionable expedients, but that is a voluntary and strategic restraint. The fact remains that war is an ultimate and illimitable thing; a war that can be controlled is a war that could have been stopped or prevented. If our race can really bar the use of poison gas it can bar the use of any kind of weapon. It is indeed easier to enforce peace altogether than any lesser limitation of war.

But it is argued that this much may be true nevertheless, that if the nations of the world will agree beforehand not to prepare for particular sorts of war or if they will agree to reduce their military and naval equipment to a minimum, that this will operate powerfully in preventing contraventions and in a phase of popular excitement arresting the rush toward war. The only objection to this admirable proposal is that no power which has desires or rights that can only be satisfied or defended, so far as it knows, by war, will ever enter into such a disarmament agreement in good faith.

Of course countries contemplating war and having no serious intention of disarming effectually will enter quite readily into conferences upon disarmament, but they will do so partly because of the excellent propaganda value of such a participation and mainly because of the chance it gives them of some restriction which will hamper a possible antagonist much more than it will hamper themselves. For instance, Japan would probably be very pleased to reduce her military expenditure to quite small figures if the United States reduced theirs to the same amount, because the cost per head of maintaining soldiers under arms is much less in Japan than in America; and she would be still more ready to restrict naval armament to ships with a radius of action of 2,000 miles or less because that would give her a free hand with China and the Philippines. That sort of haggling was going on between Britain and Germany at The Hague at intervals before the great war. Neither party believed in the peaceful intentions of the other nor regarded these negotiations as anything but strategic moves. And as things were in Europe it was difficult to regard them in any other way.

No, the limitation of armaments quite as much as the mitigation of warfare is impossible until war has been made impossible, and then the complete extinction of armaments follows without discussion; and war can only be made impossible when the powers of the world have done what the thirteen original States of American Union found they had to do after their independence was won, and that is set up a common law and rule over themselves. Such a project is a monstrously difficult one no doubt, and it flies in the face of great masses of patriotic cant and of natural prejudices and natural suspicion, but it is a thing that can be done. It is the only thing that can be done to avert the destruction of civilization through war and war preparation. Disarmament and the limitation of warfare without such a merging of sovereignty look, at the first glance, easier and more modest proposals, but they suffer from the fatal defect of absolute impracticability. They are things that cannot be made working realities. A world that could effectually disarm would be a world already at one, and disarmament would be of no importance whatever. Given stable international relations, the world would put aside its armaments as naturally as a man takes off his coat in winter on entering a warm house.

And as a previous article has pointed out, wars, preparations for war and the threat of war are only the more striking aspect of human disunion at the present time. The smashing up of the world’s currency system and the progressive paralysis of industry that follows on that is a much more immediate disaster. That is rushing upon us. This war talk between Japan and America may end as abruptly as the snarling of two dogs overtaken by a flood. There may not be another great war after all, because both in Japan and America social disruption may come first. Upon financial and economic questions the powers of the earth must get together very quickly now or perish; the signs get more imperative every day; and if they get together upon these common issues, then they will have little reason or excuse for not taking up the merely international issues at the same time.

There is a curious exaggeration of respect for patriotism and patriotic excesses in all these projects for disarmament and the mitigation of warfare. We have to “consider patriotic susceptibilities”; that is the stereotyped formula of objection to the plain necessity of overriding the present barbaric sovereignty of separate states by a world rule and a world law protecting the common interests of the common people of the world. In practice these “patriotic susceptibilities”; will often be found to resolve themselves into nothing more formidable than the conceit and self-importance of some foreign office official. In general they are little more than a snarling suspiciousness of foreign people. Most people are patriotically excitable, it is in our human nature, but that no more excuses this excessive deference to patriotism than it would excuse a complete tolerance of boozing and of filthy vices and drunken and lustful outrages because we are all more or less susceptible to thirst and desire. And while there is all this deference for the most ramshackle and impromptu of nationalisms there is a complete disregard of the influence and of the respect due to one of the greatest and most concentrated interests of our modern world, the finance, the science, the experts, the labor, often very specialized and highly skilled, of the armament and munitions and associated trades and industries.

So far as I can ascertain, the advocates of what I may call mere disarmament propose to scrap this mass of interests more or less completely, to put its tremendous array of factories, arsenals, dockyards and so forth out of action, to obliterate its wide-reaching net of financial relationships, to break up its carefully gathered staffs, and to pour all its labor, its trained engineers and sailors and gunners and so forth into the great flood of unemployment into which our civilization is already sinking. And they do not seem to grasp how subtle, various and effective the resistance of this great complex of capable human beings to any such treatment is likely to be. In my supply of League of Nations literature I find only two intimations of this real obstacle to the world common weal. One is a suggestion that there should be no private enterprise in the production of war material at all, and the other that armament concerns shall not own newspapers. As a Socialist I am charmed by the former proposal, which would in effect nationalize, among others, the iron and steel and chemical industries, but as a practical man I have to confess that the organization of no existing state is yet at the level of efficiency necessary if the transfer is to be a hopeful one, and so far as the newspaper restriction goes, it would surely pass the wit of man to devise rules that would prevent a great banking combination from controlling armament firms on the one hand while it financed newspapers on the other.

Yet the fact remains that this great complex of interests, round and about the armaments interest, is the most real of all the oppositions to a world federation. It supplies substance, direction and immediate rewards to the frothy emotions of patriotism; it rules by dividing us and it realizes that its existence in its present form is conditional upon the continuance of our suspicions and divisions. It does not positively want or seek war, but it wants a continuing expectation of and preparation for war. On the other hand its ruling intelligences must be coming to understand that in the end it cannot escape sharing in the economic and social smash down to which we are all now sliding so rapidly. It is too high a type of organization to be altogether blind and obdurate. It will not, of course, be represented officially at Washington for what it is, but in the form of pseudo-patriotic, naval, military and financial experts it will be better represented than any other side of human nature. One of the most interesting things to do at the conference will be to watch its activities.

How much can we common men ask for and hope for from this great power? Self extinction is too much—even if it were desirable. But it is reasonable to demand a deflection of its activities to meet the urgent needs of our present dangers. We do not want the extinction of this great body of business, metallurgical, chemical, engineering and disciplined activities, but we do want its rapid diversion from all too easily attained destructive ends to creative purposes now. A world peace scheme that does not open out an immediate prospect for the release of financial and engineering energy upon world-wide undertakings is a hopeless peace scheme. Enterprise must out. Were this world one federated state concerned about our common welfare there would be no overwhelming difficulty in canalizing all this force now spent upon armament in the direction of improved transport and communications generally into the making of great bridges, tunnels and the like, into the rebuilding of our cities upon better lines, into the irrigation and fertilization of the earth’s deserts and so forth. The way to world peace lies not in fighting and destroying the armament interests but in turning them to world service.

But to do such a thing requires a united financial and economic effort; it cannot be done nationally by little groups of patriots all scheming against one another. It must be big business for world interests, unencumbered by national frontiers, or it is impossible.

All these considerations you see converge on the conclusion that there is no solution of the problem of war, no possibility of a world recovery, no possibility of arresting the rapid disintegration of our civilization, except a Pax Mundi, a federated world control, sufficiently authoritative to keep any single nation in order and sufficiently coherent to express a world idea. We need an effective world “Association of Nations,” to use President Harding’s phrase, or we shall perish. And even in this fantastic dream of Mere Disarmament, of a world of little independent states, all sovereign, all competing against each other and all carrying on a mean financial and commercial warfare against each other to the common impoverishment, all standing in the way of any large modern-spirited handling of modern needs, yet all remaining magically disarmed and never making actual war on each other—even if this dream were possible, it is still utterly detestable—more detestable even than our present dangers and miseries. For if there are any things in life worse than pain, fear and destruction, they are boredom, pettiness and inanity, and such would be the quality of such a world. However much the diplomatists at Washington may seek to ignore the fact, may fence their discussion within narrowly phrased agenda, and rule this, that and the other vital aspect outside the scope of the conference, the fact remains that there is no way out, no way of escape for mankind from the monstrous miseries and far more monstrous dangers of the present time except an organized international co-operation, based upon a frank and bold resolve to turn men’s minds from ancient jealousies and animosities to the common aims and the common future of our race.

If the Washington Conference cannot rise to the level of that idea, then it were better that the Conference never gathered together.

III THE TRAIL OF VERSAILLES TWO GREAT POWERS ARE SILENT AND ABSENT

Washington, the guide books say, was planned by Major Pierre Charles L’Enfant in imitation of Versailles. If so, it has broken away from his intentions. I know Versailles pretty well, and I have gone about Washington looking vainly for anything more than the remotest resemblance. There is something European about Washington, I admit, an Italianate largeness, as though a Roman design has been given oxygen and limitless space. It is a capital in the expanded Latin style. It has none of the vertical uplift of a real American city. But Versailles!

Versailles was the home and embodiment of the old French Grand Monarchy and of a Foreign Policy that sought to dominate, Frenchify and “Versaillize” the world. A visit to Versailles is part of one’s world education, a visit to the rather faded, rather pretentious magnificence of its terraces, to that Hall of Mirrors, all plastered over with little oblongs of looking-glass, which was once considered so wonderful, to the stuffy, secretive royal apartments with their convenient back stairs, to the poor foolishness of the Queen’s toy village, the Little Trianon. A century and a half ago the people of France, wasted and worn by incessant wars of aggression, weary of a Government that was an intolerable burden to them and a nuisance to all Europe, went to Versailles in a passion and dragged French Policy out of Versailles for a time.

Unhappily it went back there.

In 1871, when Germany struck down the tawdry imperialism of Napoleon III (who was also for setting up Emperors in the New World) the Germans had the excessive bad taste to proclaim a New German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors. So that Versailles became more than ever the symbol of the age-long, dreary, pitiful quarrel of the French and Germans for the inheritance of “the Empire” that has gone on ever since the death of Charlemagne. There the glory of France had shone; there the glory of France had been eclipsed. I visited Versailles one autumnal day in 1912, and it was then a rather mouldy, disheartened, empty, picturesque show place, pervaded by memories of flounces, furbelows, wigs and red heels and also by the stronger, less pleasant flavor of that later Prussian triumph.

It was surely the least propitious place in the whole world for the making of a world peace in 1919. It was inevitable that there the Rhine frontier should loom larger than all Asia and that the German people should be kept waiting outside to learn what vindictive punishment victorious France designed for them.

The Peace of Versailles was not a settlement of the world, it was the crowning of the French revanche. And since Russia had always been below the horizon of Versailles it was as inevitable that the Russian people, who had saved France from utter defeat in 1914, who had given far more dead to the war than France and America put together, and who had collapsed at last, utterly exhausted by their stupendous war efforts, should be considered merely as the defaulting debtors of France. Their Government had incurred vast liabilities chiefly in preparation for this very war which had restored France to her former glorious ascendancy over Germany. And now a new, ungracious Government in Russia not only declared it could not pay up but refused to pretend that it had ever meant to perform this impossible feat. There could be no dealing with such a Government. The German people and the Russian people alike had no voice at Versailles, and the affairs of the world were settled with a majestic disregard of these outcast and fallen powers.

They were settled so magnificently and badly that now the Washington Conference, whatever limitations it may propose to set upon itself, has in effect to review and, if it can, mend or replace that appalling settlement. The Washington conference has practically to revise the verdicts of Versailles, in a fresher air and with a wider outlook.

I do not know how near future historians may come to saying that the Washington conference was planned in imitation of that Versailles conference, but it certainly does start out with one most unfortunate resemblance. There seems to be the same tacit assumption that it is possible to come to some permanent settlement of the world’s affairs with no representation of either the German or the Russian people at the conference. The Japanese, the Italians, the French, the Americans and the British, assisted by modest suggestions from such small sections of humanity as China and Spanish America, are sitting down to arrangements that will amount practically to a settlement of the world’s affairs, and they are doing so without consulting these two great peoples, and quite without their consent and assistance. This surely runs counter to the fundamental principle of both American and British political life—that is to say, the principle of government with the consent of the governed—and it is indeed an altogether deplorable intention. In some form these two great peoples will have to be associated with any permanent settlement, and it will be much more difficult to secure their assent to any arrangement arrived at without even their formal co-operation.

It is necessary to remind ourselves of certain elementary facts about Germany and Russia and their position in the world today. They are facts within the knowledge of all, and yet they seem to be astonishingly forgotten in very much of the discussion of the Washington conference.

First, let us recall certain points about Germany. The German people occupy the most central position in Europe; they exceed in numbers any other European people except the Russians; their educational level has been as high or higher than any other people in the world; they are, as a people, honest, industrious, and intelligent; upon their social and political well-being and economic prosperity the prosperity of Britain, Scandinavia, Russia, Italy—and in a lesser degree France—depends. It is impossible to destroy such a people, it is impossible to wipe them off the map, but it is possible to ruin them economically and socially. And if Germany is ruined most of Europe is ruined.

Germany has been overthrown in a great war and it will be well to recall here certain elementary facts about that war. Under a particularly aggressive and offensive imperialism system the Germans were plunged into conflict with most of the rest of the civilized world. But it was repeatedly declared by the British and by the Americans, if not by others of the combatants, that they fought not against the German people but against this German imperialism. The British war propaganda in particular did its utmost to saturate Germany with that assurance and to hold out the promise of generous treatment and a complete restoration of friendship _provided there was a German renunciation of imperialism and militarism_.

Germany, exhausted and beaten, surrendered in 1918 upon the strength of these promises and upon the similar promises implied in President Wilson’s Fourteen Points. The declared ends of the war had been achieved. The Kaiser bolted, and Germany repented of him publicly and unequivocally.

But the conference at Versailles treated these promises that had been made to Germany as mere “scraps of paper.” The peace imposed upon the young German republic was a punitive peace, exactly as punitive as though there were still a Kaiser in Berlin; it was a vindictive reversal of the Franco-German treaty of 1871 without a shred of recognition or tolerance for the chastened Germany that faced her conquerors. The Germans were dealt with as a race of moral monsters, though no one in his senses really believes they are very different, man for man, from English, French or American people; every German was held to be individually responsible for the war, though every Frenchman, Englishman and American knows that when one’s country fights one has to fight, and it is quite natural to fight for it whether it is in the right or not; and a sustained attack of oppressive occupations, dismemberment, and impossible demands was begun and still goes on upon the shattered German civilization—which is at least as vitally necessary to the world as the French. The British and French nationalist press openly confess that they do not intend to give Germany a chance of recovery. The European Allies have now been kicking the prostrate body of Germany for three years; in a little while they will be kicking a dead body; and since they are linked geographically to their victim almost as closely as the Siamese twins were linked together, they will share that victim’s decay.

It is high time that this barbaric insanity, this prolongation of the combat after surrender, should cease and that the best minds and wills of Germany and the very reasonable republican government she has set up for herself should be called into consultation. I could wish that Washington could so far rise above Versailles as presently to make that invitation. Sooner or later it will have to be made if the peace of the world is to be secured.

The absence of Russia from the Washington conference is an even graver weakness. People seem to have forgotten altogether how the Russians bore the brunt of the opening years of the great war. Their rapid offensive in 1914 saved Paris and saved the little British Army from a disastrous retreat to the sea. The debt of gratitude Britain and France owe to Russia’s “Unknown Warrior,” that poor unhonored hero and martyr, is incalculable. But for Russia Germany would probably have won the war outright before the end of 1916. It was the blood and suffering of the Russian people saved victory for the Allies; those incredible soldiers fought often without artillery support, without rifle ammunition, without boots or food, under conditions almost inconceivable to the well-supplied French and British and Americans of the western front. And their tale of killed and wounded exceeds enormously that of any other combatant. In 1917 Russia collapsed; she was bled white, and she remained collapsed in spite of the sedulous kicking of her allies to rouse her to further efforts. The intolerable Rasputin-Czarism went down in the disaster. After a phase of extreme disorder, and very largely because of the British hesitation to support the Kerensky Government by bold naval action in the Baltic, the hard, tyrannous, doctrinaire government of the Bolsheviki took control.