The Inside Story of the Peace Conference Part 28

A parliament of peoples, then, is the only organ that can impart viability to a society of nations worthy of the name. By joining the Covenant with the Peace Treaty, and turning the former into an instrument for the execution of the latter, thus subordinating the ideal to the egotistical, Mr. Wilson deprived his plan of its sole justification, and for the time being buried it. The philosopher Lichtenberg[339] wrote, "One man brings forth a thought, another holds it over the baptismal font, the third begets offspring with it, the fourth stands at its deathbed, and the fifth buries it." Mr. Wilson has discharged the functions of gravedigger to the idea of a pacific society of nations, just as Lenin has done to the system of Marxism, the only difference being that Marxism is as dead as a door-nail, whereas the society of nations may rise again.

It was open, then, to the three princ.i.p.al delegates to insure the peace of the world by moral means or by force. Having eschewed the former by adopting the doctrines of Monroe, abandoning the freedom of the seas, and by according to France strategic frontiers and other privileges of the militarist order, they might have enlarged and systematized these concessions to expediency and forged an alliance of the three states or of two, and undertaken to keep peace on the planet against all marplots.

I wrote at the time: "The delegates are becoming conscious of the existence of a ready-made league of nations in the shape of the Anglo-Saxon states, which, together with France, might hinder wars, promote good-fellowship, remold human destinies; and they are delighted thus to possess solid foundations on which a n.o.ble edifice can be raised in the fullness of time. Tribunals will be created, with full powers to adjudge disputes; facilities will be accorded to litigious states, and even an obligation will be imposed to invoke their arbitration. And the sum total of these reforms will be known to contemporary annals as an inchoate League of Nations. The delegates are already modestly disavowing the intention of realizing the ideal in all its parts. That must be left to coming generations; but what with the exhaustion of the peoples, their aversion from warfare, and the material obstacles to the renewal of hostilities in the near future, it is calculated that the peace will not soon be violated. Whether more salient results will be attained or attempted by the Conference n.o.body can foretell."[340]

This expedient, even had it been deliberately conceived and skilfully wrought out, would not have been an adequate solution of the world's difficulties, nor would it have commended itself to all the states concerned. But it would at least have been a temporary makeshift capable of being trans.m.u.ted under favorable circ.u.mstances into something less material and more durable. But the amateur world-reformers could not make up their minds to choose either alternative. And the result is one of the most lamentable failures recorded in human history.

I placed my own opinion on record at the time as frankly as the censorship which still existed for me would permit. I wrote: "What every delegate with sound political instinct will ask himself is, whether the League of Nations will eliminate wars in future, and, if not, he will feel conscientiously bound to adopt other relatively sure means of providing against them, and these consist of alliances, strategic frontiers, and the permanent disablement of the potential enemy. On one or other of these alternative lines the resettlement must be devised. To combine them would be ruinous. Now of what practical use is a league of nations devoid of supernational forces and faced by a numerous, virile, and united race, smarting under a sense of injustice, thirsting for the opportunities for development denied to it, but granted to nations which it despises as inferior? Would a league of nations combine militarily against the gradual encroachments or sudden aggression of that Power against its weaker neighbors? n.o.body is authorized to answer this question affirmatively. To-day the Powers cannot agree to intervene against Bolshevism, which they deem a scourge of the world, nor can they agree to tolerate it.

"In these circ.u.mstances, what compelling motives can be laid before those delegates who are asked to dispense with strategic frontiers and rely upon a league of nations for their defense? Take France's outlook.

Peace once concluded, she will be confronted with a secular enemy who numbers some seventy millions to her forty-five millions. In ten years the disproportion will be still greater. Discontented Russia is almost certain to be taken in hand by Germany, befriended, reorganized, exploited, and enlisted as an ally."[341]

Conscious of these reefs and shoals, the French government, which was at first contemptuous of the Wilsonian scheme, discerned the use it might be put to as a military safeguard, and sought to convert it into that.

"The French," wrote a Francophil English journal published in Paris, "would like the League to maintain what may be called a permanent military general staff. The duties of this organization would be to keep a hawklike eye on the misdemeanors, actual or threatened, of any state or group of states, and to be empowered with authority to call into instant action a great international military force for the frustration or suppression of such aggression. The French have frankly in mind the possibility that an unrepentant and unregenerate Germany is the most likely menace not only to the security of France, but to the peace of the world in general."[342]

And other states cherished a.n.a.logous hopes. The spirit of right and justice was to be evoked like the spirit that served Aladdin, and to be compelled to enter the service of nationalism and militarism, and accomplish the task of armies.

The paramount Powers prescribed the sacrifices of sovereignty which membership of the League necessitated, and forthwith dispensed themselves from making them. The United States government maintained its Monroe Doctrine for America--nay, it went farther and identified its interests with the Hay doctrine for the Far East.[343] It decided to construct a powerful navy for the defense of these political a.s.sets, and to give the youth of the country a semi-military training.[344] Defense presupposes attack. War, therefore, is not excluded--nay, it is admitted by the world-reformers, and preparations for it are indispensable.

Equally so are the burdens of taxation. But if liberty of defense be one of the rights of two or three Powers, by what law is it confined to them and denied to the others? Why should the other communities be constrained to remain open to attack? Surely they, too, deserve to live and thrive, and make the most of their opportunities. Now if in lieu of a misnamed League of Nations we had an Anglo-Saxon board for the better government of the world, these unequal weights and measures would be intelligible on the principle that special obligations and responsibilities warrant exceptional rights. But no such plea can be advanced under an arrangement professing to be a society of free nations. All that can with truth be said is what M. Clemenceau told the delegates of the lesser states at the opening of the Conference--that the three great belligerents represent twelve million soldiers and that their supreme authority derives from that. The role of the other peoples is to listen to the behests of their guardians, and to accept and execute them without murmur. Might is still a source of right.

It is fair to say that the disclosure of the true base of the new ordering, as blurted out by M. Clemenceau at that historic meeting, caused little surprise among the initiated. For there was no reason to a.s.sume that he, or, indeed, the bulk of the continental statesmen, were converts to a doctrine of which its own apostle accepted only those fragments which commended themselves to his country or his party. Had not the French Premier scoffed at the League in public as in private?

Had he not said in the Chamber: "I do not believe that the Society of Nations const.i.tutes the necessary conclusion of the present war. I will give you one of my reasons. It is this: if to-morrow you were to propose to me that Germany should enter into this society I would not consent."[345]

"I am certain," wrote one of the ablest and most ardent champions of the League in France, Senator d'Estournelles de Constant--"I am certain that he [M. Clemenceau] made an effort against himself, against his entire past, against his whole life, against all his convictions, to serve the Society of Nations. And his Minister of Foreign Affairs followed him."[346] Exactly. And as with M. Clemenceau, so it was with the majority of European statesmen; most of them made strenuous and, one may add, successful efforts against their convictions. And the result was inevitable.

"The governments," we read in the organ of syndicalists, who had supported Mr. Wilson as long as they believed him determined to redeem his promises--"the governments have acquiesced in the Fourteen Points.... Hypocrisy. Each one cherished mental reservations. Virtue was exalted and vice practised. The poltroon eulogized heroism; the imperialist lauded the spirit of justice. For the past month we have been picking up ideas about the worth of the adhesions to the Fourteen Points, and never before has a more sinister or a more odious comedy been played. Territorial demands have been heaved one upon the other; contempt of the rights of peoples--the only right that we can recognize--has been expressed in striking terms; the last restraints have vanished; the masks have fallen."[347]

From every country in Europe the same judgment came pitched in varying keys. The Italian press condemned the proceedings of the Conference in language to the full as strong as that of the German or Austrian journals. The _Stampa_ affirmed that those who, like Bissolati, were in the beginning for placing their trust in one of the two coteries at the Conference were guilty of a fatal mistake. "The mistake lay in their belief in the ideal strivings of one of the parties, and in the horror with which the cupidity of the others was contemplated, whereas both of them were fighting for ... their interests.... In verity France was no less militarist or absolutist than Germany, nor was England less avid than either. And the proof is enshrined in the peace treaties which have masked the results of their respective victories. _Versailles is a Brest-Litovsk_, aggravated in the same proportion as the victory of the Entente over Germany, is more complete than was that of Germany over Russia. Cupidity does not alter its character, even when it seeks to conceal itself under a Phrugian cap rather than wear a helmet."[348]

M. Clemenceau's opening utterance about the twelve million men, and the unlimited right which such formidable armies confer on their possessors to sit in judgment on the tribes and peoples of the planet, was the true keynote to the Conference. After that the leading statesmen trimmed their ship, touched the rudder, and sailed toward downright absolutism.

The effect of such utterances and acts on the minds of the peoples are distinctly mischievous. For they tend to obliterate the sense of public right, which is the main foundation of international intercourse among progressive nations.

And already it had been shaken and weakened by the campaigns of the past fifty years, and in particular by the last war. In the relations of nation to nation there were certain principles--derivatives of ethics diluted with maxims of expediency--which kept the various governments from too flagrant breaches of faith. These checks were the only subst.i.tute for morality in politics. Their highest power was connoted by the word Europeanism, which stood for a supposed feeling of solidarity among all the peoples of the old Continent, and for a certain respect for the treaties on which the state-system reposed. But it existed mainly among defeated nations when apprehensive of being isolated or chastised by their victors. None the less, the idea marked a certain advance toward an ethical bond of union.

Now this embryonic sense, together with respect for the binding force of a nation's plighted troth, were numbered by the demoralizing influence of the wars of the last fifty years. And one of the first and peremptory needs of the world was their restoration. This could be effected only by bringing the peoples, not merely of Europe, but of the world, more closely together, by engrafting on them a feeling of close solidarity, and impressing them with the necessity of making common cause in the one struggle worth their while waging--resistance to the forces that militate against human welfare and progress. The feeling was widespread that the way to effect this was by some form of internationalism, by the broadening, deepening, and quickening all that was implied by Europeanism, by co-ordinating the collective energies of all progressive peoples, and causing them to converge toward a common and worthy goal.

For the working cla.s.ses this conception in a restricted form had long possessed a commanding attraction. What they aimed at, however, was no more than the catholicity of labor. They fancied that after the pa.s.sage of the tidal wave of destructiveness the ground was cleared of most of the obstacles which had enc.u.mbered it, and that the forward advance might begin forthwith.

What they failed to take sufficiently into account was the _vis inertiae_, the survival of the old spirit among the ruling orders whose members continued to live and move in the atmosphere of use and wont, and the spirit of hate and bitterness infused into all the political cla.s.ses, to dispel which was a herculean task. It was exclusively to the leaders of those cla.s.ses that Mr. Wilson confided the realization of the abstract idea of a society of nations, which he may at first have pictured to himself as a vast family conscious of common interests, bent on moral and material self-betterment, and willing to eschew such partial advantages as might hinder or r.e.t.a.r.d the general progress. But, judging by his att.i.tude and his action, he had no real acquaintance with the materials out of which it must be fashioned, no notion of the difficulties to be met, and no staying power to encounter and surmount them. And his first move entailed the failure of the scheme.

As a matter of fact, Mr. Wilson came to the Conference with a home-made charter for the Society of Nations, which, according to the evidence of Mr. Lansing, "was never pressed." The State Secretary added that "the present league Covenant is superior to the American plan." And as for the Fourteen Points, "They were not even discussed at the Conference."[349] Suspecting as much, I wrote at the time:[350] "The President has pinned himself down to no concrete scheme whatever. His method is electric, choosing what is helpful and beneficent in the projects of others, and endeavoring to obtain from the dissentients a renunciation of ideas belonging to the old national currents and adherence to the doctrines he deems salutary. It is, however, already clear that the highest ideal now attainable is not a league of nations as the ma.s.ses understand it, which will abolish wars and likewise put an end to the costly preparations for them, but only a coalition of victorious nations, which may hope, by dint of economic inducements and deterrents, to draw the enemy peoples into its camp in the not too distant future. This result would fall very short of the expectations aroused by the far-resonant promises made at the outset; but even it will be unattainable without an international compact binding all the members of the coalition to make war simultaneously upon the nation or group of nations which ventures to break the peace. I am disposed to believe that nothing less than such an express covenant will be regarded by the continental Powers of the Entente as an adequate subst.i.tute for certain territorial readjustments which they otherwise consider essential to secure them from sudden attack.

"Whether such a condition would prevent future wars is a question that only experience can answer. Personally, I am profoundly convinced, with Mr. Taft, that a genuine league of nations must have teeth in the guise of supernational, not international, forces. In these remarks I make abstraction from the larger question which wholly absorbs this--namely, whether the ma.s.ses for whose behoof the lavish expenditure of time, energy, and ingenuity is undertaken, will accept a coalition of victorious governments against unregenerate peoples as a subst.i.tute for the Society of Nations as at first conceived."

The supposed object of the League was the subst.i.tution of right for force, by debarring each individual state from employing violence against any of the others, and by the use of arbitration as a means of settling disputes. This entails the suppression of the right to declare war and to prepare for it, and, as a corollary, a system of deterrents to hinder, and of penalties to punish rebellion on the part of a community. That in those cases where the law is set at naught efficacious means should be available to enforce it will hardly be denied; but whether economic pressure would suffice in all cases is doubtful. To me it seems that without a supernational army, under the direct orders of the League, it might under conceivable circ.u.mstances become impossible to uphold the decisions of the tribunal, and that, on the other hand, the coexistence of such a military force with national armaments would condemn the undertaking to failure.

An a.n.a.lysis of the Covenant lies beyond the limits of my task, but it may not be amiss to point out a few of its inherent defects. One of the princ.i.p.al organs of the League will be the a.s.sembly and the Council. The former, a very numerous and mainly political body, will necessarily be out of touch with the peoples, their needs and their aspirations. It will meet at most three or four times a year. And its members alone will be invested with all the power, which they will be chary of delegating.

On the other hand, the Council, consisting at first of nine members, will meet at least once a year. The members of both bodies will presumably be appointed by the governments,[351] who will certainly not renounce their sovereignty in a matter that concerns them so closely.

Such a system may be wise and conducive to the highest aims, but it can hardly be termed democratic. The military Powers who command twelve million soldiers will possess a majority in the Council.[352] The Secretariat alone will be permanent, and will naturally be appointed by the Great Powers.

Instead of abolishing war, the Conference described its abolition as beyond the power of man to compa.s.s. Disarmament, which was to have been one of its main achievements, is eliminated from the Covenant. As the war that was to have been the last will admittedly be followed by others, the delegates of the Great Powers worked conscientiously, as behooved patriotic statesmen, to obtain in advance all possible advantages for their respective countries by way of preparing for it.

The new order, which in theory reposes upon right, justice, and moral fellowship, in reality depends upon powerful armies and navies. France must remain under arms, seeing that she has to keep watch on the Rhine.

Britain and the United States are to go on building warships and aircraft, besides training their youth for the coming Armageddon. The article of the Covenant which lays it down that "the members of the League recognize that the maintenance of peace requires the reduction of national armaments to the lowest point consistent with national safety,"[353] is, to use a Russian simile, written on water with a fork.

Britain, France, and the United States are already agreed that they will combine to repel unprovoked aggression on the part of Germany. That evidently signifies that they will hold themselves in readiness to fight, and will therefore make due preparation. This arrangement is a subst.i.tute for a supernational army, as though prevention were not better than cure; that it will prove efficacious in the long run very few believe. One clear-visioned Frenchman writes: "The inefficacy of the organization aimed at by the Conference constrains France to live in continual and increasing insecurity, owing to the falling off of her population."[354] He adds: "It follows from this abortive expedient--if it is to remain definitive--that each member-state must protect itself, or come to terms with the more powerful ones, as in the past.

Consequently we are in presence of the maintenance of militarism and the regime of armaments."[355] This writer goes farther and accuses Mr.

Wilson of having played into the hands of Britain. "President Wilson,"

he affirms, "has more or less sacrificed to the English government the society of nations and the question of armaments, that of the colonies and that of the freedom of the seas...."[356] This, however, is an over-statement. It was not for the sake of Britain that the American statesman gave up so much; it was for the sake of saving something of the Covenant. It was in the spirit of Sir Boyle Roche, whose attachment to the British Const.i.tution was such that, to save a part of it, he was willing to sacrifice the whole.

The arbitration of disputes is provided for by one of the articles of the Covenant;[357] but the parties may go to war three months later with a clear conscience and an appeal to right, justice, self-determination, and the usual abstract nouns.

In a word, the directors of the Conference disciplined their political intelligence on lines of self-hypnotization, along which common sense finds it impossible to follow them. There were also among the delegates men who thought and spoke in terms of reason and logic, but their voices evoked no echo. One of them summed up his criticism somewhat as follows:

"During the war our professions of democratic principles were far resonant and emphatic. We were fighting for the nations of the world, especially for those who could not successfully fight for themselves.

All the peoples, great and small, were exhorted to make the most painful sacrifices to enable their respective governments to conquer the enemy.

Victory unexpectedly smiled on us, and the peoples asked that those promises should be made good. Naturally, expectations ran high. What has happened? The governments now answer in effect: 'We will promote your interests, but without your co-operation or a.s.sent. We will make the necessary arrangements in secret behind closed doors. The machinery we are devising will be a state machinery, not a popular one. All that we ask of you is implicit trust. You complain of our action in the past.

You have good cause. You say that the same men are about to determine your future. Again you are right. But when you affirm that we are sure to make the like mistakes, you are wrong, and we ask you to take our word for it. You complain that we are politicians who feel the weight of certain commitments and the fetters of obsolete traditions from which we cannot free ourselves; that we are mainly concerned to protect and further the interests of our respective countries, and that it is inconceivable we should devise an organization which looks above and beyond those interests. We ask you, are you willing, then, to abandon the heritage of our fathers to the foreigner?'

"That the downtrodden peoples in Austria and Germany have been emanc.i.p.ated is a moral triumph. But why has the beneficent principle that is said to have inspired the deed been restricted in its application? Why has the experiment been tried only in the enemies'

countries? Or are things quite in order everywhere else? Is there no injustice in other quarters of the globe? Are there no complaints? If there be, why are they ignored? Is it because all acts of oppression are to be perpetuated which do not take place in the enemy's land? What about Ireland and about a dozen other countries and peoples? Are they skeletons not to be touched?

"By debarring the ma.s.ses from partic.i.p.ation in a grandiose scheme, the success of which depends upon their a.s.sent, the governments are indirectly but surely encouraging secret combined opposition, and in some cases Bolshevism. The ma.s.ses resent being treated as children after having been appealed to as arbiters and rescuers. For four and a half years it was they who bore the brunt of the war, they who sacrificed their sons and their substance. In the future it is they to whom the states will look for the further sacrifices in blood and treasure which will be necessary in the struggles which they evidently antic.i.p.ate.

Well, some of them refuse these sacrifices in advance. They challenge the right of the governments to retain the power of making war and peace. That power they are working to get into their own hands and to wield in their own way, or at any rate to have a say in its exercise.

And in order to secure it, some sections of the peoples are making common cause with the socialist revolutionaries, while others have gone the length of Bolshevism. And that is a serious danger. The agitation now going on among the people, therefore, starts with a grievance. The ma.s.ses have many other grievances besides the one just sketched--the survivals of the feudal age, the privileges of cla.s.s, the inequality of opportunity. And the kernel formed by these is the element of truth and equity which imparts force to all those underground movements, and enables them to subsist and extend. Error is never dangerous by itself; it is only when it has an admixture of truth that it becomes powerful for evil. And it seems a thousand pities that the governments, whose own interests are at stake, as well as those of the communities they govern, should go out of their way to provide an explosive element for Bolshevism and its less sinister variants."

The League was treated as a living organism before it existed. All the problems which the Supreme Councilors found insoluble were reserved for its judgment. Arduous functions were allotted to it before it had organs to discharge them. Formidable tasks were imposed upon it before the means of achieving them were devised. It is an inst.i.tution so elusive and elastic that the French regard it as capable of being used as a handy instrument for coercing the Teutons, who, in turn, look upon it as a means of recovering their place in the world; the j.a.panese hope it may become a bridge leading to racial equality, and the governments which devised it are bent on employing it as a lever for their own politico-economic aims, which they identify with the progress of the human race. How the peoples look upon it the future will show.

On the Monroe Doctrine in connection with the League of Nations the less said the soonest mended. But one cannot well say less than this: that any real society of peoples such as Mr. Wilson first conceived and advocated is as incompatible with "regional understandings like the Monroe Doctrine" as are the maintenance of national armaments and the bartering of populations. It is immaterial whether one concludes that a Society of Nations is therefore impossible in the present conjuncture or that all those survivals of the old state system are obsolescent and should be abolished. The two are unquestionably irreconcilable.

It would be a mistake to infer from the unanimity with which Mr.

Wilson's Covenant was finally accepted that it expressed the delegates'

genuine conceptions or sentiments. Mr. Bullitt, one of the expert advisers to the American Peace Delegation, testified before the Senate committee in Washington that State-Secretary Lansing remarked to him: "I consider the League of Nations at present as entirely useless. The Great Powers have simply gone ahead and arranged the world to suit themselves.

England and France, in particular, have gotten out of the Treaty everything they wanted. The League of Nations can do nothing to alter any unjust clauses of the Treaty except by the unanimous consent of the League members. The Great Powers will never consent to changes in the interests of weaker peoples."[358]

This opinion which Mr. Bullitt ascribed to Mr. Lansing was, to my knowledge, that of a large number of the representatives of the nations at the Conference. Among them all I have met very few who had a good word to say of the scheme, and of the few one had helped to formulate it, another had a.s.sisted him. And the unfavorable judgments of the remainder were delivered after the Covenant was signed.

One of those leaders, in conversation with several other delegates and myself, exclaimed one day: "The League of Nations indeed! It is an absurdity. Who among thinking men believes in its reality?" "I do,"

answered his neighbor; "but, like the devils, I believe and tremble. I hold that it is a corrosive poison which destroys much that is good and will further much that is bad." A statesman who was not a delegate demurred. "In my opinion," he said, "it is a response to a demand put forward by the peoples of the globe, and because of this origin something good will ultimately come of it. Unquestionably it is very defective, but in time it may be--nay, must be--changed for the better."

The first speaker replied: "If you imagine that the League will help continental peoples, you are, I am convinced, mistaken. It took the United States three years to go to the help of Britain and France. How long do you suppose it will take her to mobilize and despatch troops to succor Poland, Rumania, or Czechoslovakia? I am acquainted with British colonial public opinion and sentiment--too often misunderstood by foreigners--and I can tell you that they are misconstrued by those who fancy that they would determine action of that kind. If England tells the colonies that she needs their help, they will come, because their people are flesh of her flesh and blood of her blood, and also because they depend for their defense upon her navy, and if she were to go under they would go under, too. But the continental nations have no such claims upon the British colonies, which would not be in a hurry to make sacrifices in order to satisfy their appet.i.tes or their pa.s.sions."

The second speaker then said: "It is possible, but nowise certain, that the future League may help to settle these disputes which professional diplomatists would have arranged, and in the old way, but it will not affect those others which are the real causes of wars. If a nation believes it can further its vital interest by breaking the peace, the League cannot stop it. How could it? It lacks the means. There will be no army ready. It would have to create one. Even now, when such an army, powerful and victorious, is in the field, the League--for the Supreme Council is that and more--cannot get its orders obeyed. How then will its behest be treated when it has no troops at its beck and call? It is redrawing the map of central and eastern Europe, and is very satisfied with its work. But, as we know, the peoples of those countries look upon its map as a sheet of paper covered with lines and blotches of color to which no reality corresponds."

The const.i.tution of the League was termed by Mr. Wilson a Covenant, a word redolent of biblical and puritanical times, which accorded well with the motives that decided him to prefer Geneva to Brussels as the seat of the League, and to adopt other measures of a supposed political character. The first draft of this doc.u.ment was, as we saw, completed in the incredibly short s.p.a.ce of some thirty hours, so as to enable the President to take it with him to Washington. As the Ententophil _Echo de Paris_ remarked, "By a fixed date the merchandise has to be consigned on board the _George Washington_."[359]

The discussions that took place after the President's return from the United States were animated, interesting, and symptomatic. In April the commission had several sittings, at which various amendments and alterations were proposed, some of which would cut deep into international relations, while others were of slight moment and gave rise to amusing sallies. One day the proposal was mooted that each member-state should be free to secede on giving two years' notice. M.