 Part 9 of Washington and the Riddle of Peace by H. G. Wells This LibreBox recording is in the public domain. THE FUTURE OF JAPAN Washington, November 18 If we adopt as our guiding principle that China is worthwhile, if we make up our minds and it seems to me that the American public at least is making up its mind, that China is to bring itself up to date and to reorganize itself as a great union of states under purely Chinese control, and that it is to be protected by mutual agreement among the powers from outside interference during the age of reorganization, then it is clear that all dreams of empire and China or any fragments of China on the part of any other power must cease. This building up of a united, peaceful China by the conscious, self-denying action of the chief powers of the world is evidently, under present conditions, the only sane policy before the powers assembled at Washington. But it is, unhappily, quite diametrically opposed to all traditions of competitive nationality. And I find a most extraordinary conflict going on in men's minds here in Washington between the manifest sanities of the world situation and those habits of thought and action in which we have all been bred. Competitive nationalism and the long-established competitive traditions of European diplomacy have gone far toward wrecking the world, and they may yet go far toward wrecking the Washington Conference. We have all got these traditions strong in us, every one of us. These traditions, these ideas of international intercourse as a sort of game to beat the other fellow, have as tough a vitality as the appetite of the wasp, which will go on eating greedily after its abdomen has been cut off. Indeed, some of the representatives of the powers at Washington seem still to be clinging to the ambition of finally devouring China, or large parts of China, a feast which they will not have the remotest prospect of digesting. If that sort of thing goes on, a continuation of war preparation, a renewal of war and the consummation of the social smash now in progress, is inevitable. Yet, on the face of that plain inevitable consequence, my diplomatic friends in Washington go on talking about such insane projects as that of seating Manchuria to Japan right down the Great Wall, of giving Japan practical possession of the minds of China, of giving compensation in the matter of Chinese railways to France, of getting this advantage or that for Great Britain, and so forth and so on. I remain permanently astounded before the Foreign Office officials. They have such excellent, brilliant minds, but alas, so highly specialized, so highly specialized, that at times one doubts whether they have, in the general sense of the word, any minds at all. In the face of the universal hopefulness for satisfactory results from the conference, I find myself full of doubts. The naval disarmament proposal of Secretary Hughes was obviously meant only as the opening proposition, the quite splendid opening proposition, of the conference. The second meeting, I felt, would find Mr. Balfour and Admiral Kato and Mr. Briand in eloquent sympathy, saying, Certainly, all this and more also we can do on the understanding that a stable, explicit, exhaustive, permanent Pacific agreement can be framed by this conference that will remove all causes of war, whatever. But the second meeting was disappointing. One nation after another agreed, as Mr. Balfour, that old parliamentary hand, put it. In principle, but. And now we are all playing four-handed chess, with reservations about dockyards, naval stations, cruisers, large submarines, and the like. We are all trying to put the effective disarmament on to the other fellow. Meanwhile, the nine powers are sitting in secret session on the Pacific question, and it is clear from the rumors that nine-handed chess is in progress there. Yet the fact, plain enough to anyone who is not lost in the game of diplomacy, is that this conference is an occasion for generosity and renunciation. There is no way out of the Pacific embryo except to disentangle China and form a self-denying ordinance of all the powers concerned to leave her alone while she reconstructs. I submit that even Japan, most intent of all the chess players, will do best to fall in line with such a plan. Would a world covenant to protect China from aggression, and to concede her the progressive abolition of extraterritorial privileges, and the same unlimited rights over her own railways and soil and revenue that are enjoyed by the Americans and Japanese over theirs, be any serious harm to Japan? Japan did not release Japan from her imitative career as a pseudo-Britain or a pseudo-Germany, and enable her to get on with her own proper business, which is to be, to the fullest, completest, and richest extent, Japan. For what, after all, is it that Japan wants? She wants safety, she declares, just as France wants safety. She wants safety to be Japan, just as France wants safety to be France, and England wants safety to be England. Then she makes these declarations with considerable justification. For three hundred years she believed she had that safety, and we must admit she was the least dangerous state in the whole world. For three hundred years Japan waged no foreign wars. She was a peaceful, self-contained hermit. It was American enterprise that dragged her out of her seclusion, and fear of Europe that drove her to the practices of modern imperialism. They are not natural Japanese practices. She fought China and grabbed Korea, because otherwise Russia would have held it like a pistol at her throat. She fought Russia, because otherwise Russia would have held Manchuria, and poured Arthur against her. She fought in the Great War to oust Germany from Shantung. She is now pursuing an entirely European policy in China, intriguing to get a free hand in Manchuria and eastern Siberia, scheming for concessions, privileges, and the creation of obedient puppet governments in a dismembered China, planning to divert the natural resources of China to her own use. Primarily, because she fears that otherwise these things will be done by rival powers, and she will be cut off from trade, from raw materials, and all prosperity, until at last, when she is sufficiently starved and enfeebled, she will be attacked and India-ized. These are reasonable, honorable fears. They oblige her to keep armed and aggressive. Hers is an offensive defensive. There is no other way of allaying her reasonable, just fears, except by a permanent binding association of world powers to put an end forever to the headlong scramble for Asia that began a century and a half ago in India between the French and English, to recognize, frankly, and to put upon record that that phase of history has closed, and to provide some effective means of restoration now, and the prevention of fresh aggressions in the future. No doubt there is a military caste in Japan loving war, and not even dreading modern war. We have to reckon with that. When we ask Japan to release China, we ask for something very much against Japanese habits of thought. Her dominant military note is due both to ancient traditions and recent experience. Japan had most of the fun and little of the bitterness of the great war, and her people may conceivably have a lighter attitude toward aggressive war than any European nation. But if the alternatives presented to her were on the one hand disarmament and a self-denying ordinance of the powers in relation to China, and on the other war against the other chief powers of the world, I doubt if the patriotism of even the most war-loving Japanese would now doubt balance his war lust. And I cannot imagine any other permanent settlement of the Pacific situation, except a self-denying ordinance to which Japan, America, and the European powers can ever possibly agree. Now, Japan, disarmed and pledged and self-restrained by treaties and associations against aggression on the mainland of Asia, would nevertheless reap enormous benefits from the liberation of China. Given just and reasonable treaties, she can do very well without armaments. Her geographical position would make her naturally and properly the first merchant and the first customer of a renaissance China. She would have the first bid for all the coal and ore and food-stuffs she needed. American goods and European goods would have to come past her over thousands of miles of sea. Chinese goods that didn't come to her would go elsewhere up a steep hill of freight-charges. It is a preposterous imagination that China would refuse to sell to her nearest and best customer. Moreover, Japan's artistic and literary culture, at once so distinctive and so sympathetic with that of China, would receive enormous stimulation, as it has done in the past, by a Chinese revival. Japan would be able to keep in the van of nations not by that headlong imitation and adoption of European devices into which circumstances have forced her hitherto, but by a natural and orderly development of her own idiosyncrasies in the face of the enhanced power that modern resources supply. An association of Japan with other nations to ensure uninterrupted development to China would ensure that to Japan also. It would be a mutual assurance of peace and security. But there is one set of facts, and one only, that militates against this idea of a Pacific and progressive Japan, a splendid leader in civilization amidst a brotherhood of nations, and that is this, that Japan is already overpopulated. She has to import not only food, but industrial raw material, and that her population increases now by the tremendous figure of half a million a year. That is the reality that gives substance to the aggressive imperialism of Japan. That is why she casts about for such regions of expansion as Eastern Siberia, a region not represented at the conference, and so beyond its purview, and that is why she covers some preferential control in Chinese metals and minerals and food. Were it not for this steady invasion of the world by hungry lives, the principle of Japan for the Japanese, China for the Chinese, England for the English, Eastern Siberia for its own people, would give us the simplest, most satisfactory principle for international peace. But Japan teams. Has any country a right to slop its population over and beyond its boundaries, or to claim trade and food because of its heedless self-congestion? Diplomacy is curiously mealy-mouthed about many things. I have made a British official here blush at the words of birth control. But it is a fact that this aggressive fecundity of peoples is something that can be changed and restrained within a country, and that this sort of modesty and innocence that leads to a morbid development of population and to great wars calls for intelligent discouragement in international relations. Japan has modernized itself in many respects, but its social organization, its family system, is a very ancient primitive one, involving an extreme domestication of women and a maximum of babies. While the sanitation and hygiene of Japan were still medieval, a sufficient proportion of these babies died soon and prevented any overpressure of population. But now that Japan has modernized itself in most respects, it needs to modernize itself in this respect also. I submit that the troubles arising from excessive fecundity within a country justify not an aggressive imperialism on the part of that country, but a sufficient amount of birth control within its proper boundaries. End of Part 9. Part 10 of Washington and the Riddle of Peace by H. G. Wells. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Security, the new and beautiful catch word. Washington, November 20. The new and really quite beautiful catch word that dominates the Washington Conference is security. The word was produced originally, I believe, in France. France wants nothing in the world now, but security. She had abandoned all dreams of conquest or glory, all aggressive economic intentions. She is the white lamb of international affairs, washed and redeemed by the Great War. Only she must be secure. Great Britain and Japan are in complete unison with France on this subject. Great Britain asks for nothing but a predominant fleet and naval arsenals in perfect going order. Mr. Balfour's eloquent speech at the second session of the conference made the necessity of this for security incontrovertible. Japan wants East Siberia, the special control of raw material in Manchuria, a grip upon China, because she is driven by the same passionate craving for peace and rest. We have had this explained to us very clearly here in Washington by representative Japanese. All these powers will accept every proposal Secretary Hughes makes, or is prepared to make, eloquently and sincerely, in principle. They then proceed to state their minimum requirements for that feeling of security, which is the goal of all peoples at the present time. When these requirements have been stated, it becomes plain that these states are not to be so much disarmed as stripped for action, with highly efficient instead of unwieldy and overwhelmingly expensive equipment. They do not so much propose to give up war as to bring it back by a gentlemanly agreement within the restricted possibilities of their austere bankruptcy. The French conception of security is particularly attractive. France stipulates, I gather, for a dominant army upon the continent of Europe, for a Germany retained permanently by agreement among the powers at the extremist pitch of wretchedness and feebleness. For an outcast Russia, or a series of alliances by which such countries as Poland will be militarized in the French interest rather than industrialized in their own. And France, in further pursuit of the idea of perfect peace for France, is training great masses of barbaric Senegalese for war with the view of using them to police white populations and sustain their millennium in Europe. They can have no other use now. If they return to Africa, these trained soldiers will accumulate as a new and interesting element in African life, until some black Napoleon arises to demand security for Africa. At present, France displays an astonishing confidence in the British. But no doubt, if her amazing peasants and her wonderful soil presently lead to partial recuperation, she will realize the need of bringing her now neglected fleet up to security standards also. And it is axiomatic, among the experts, that no power with a coastline is really secure unless it has a fleet, at least the double of any other fleet that can possibly operate upon that coast. These statements are not the facetious inventions of an irresponsible writer. They are fair samples of the sort of thing that the various deputations have brought with them to Washington. These are the things we talk of and are gradually talking out of sight. And if the Washington Conference served no other purpose at all in the world, it would have been quite worthwhile in order to get together all these totally incomparable conceptions of security, and by that approximation, to demonstrate their utter absurdity. Along the lines of either unregulated or regulated armament, there can be no security for any race or people. The only security for a modern state now is a binding and mutually satisfactory alliance with the power or powers that might otherwise attack. The only real security for France against a German revenge is a generous and complete understanding between the French and German republics so that they will have a mutual interest in each other's prosperity. Germany is naturally a rather bigger country than France, and nothing on earth can alter that. Other powers, or all the powers, may come into such a treaty as guarantors, but the essential thing for peace between France and Germany is peace made good and clear between them, a cessation of mutual injuries and hostile preparations. The only effectual security for the communications of the British Empire is the recognition by all mankind that this great system of English-speaking states round and round about the world is a good thing for all mankind and a resolute effort of these states to keep to that level. There is no other real security. This is not lofty idealism, it is common sense, and the idea of security by armament and by the enfeeblement of possible rivals is not a practical recognition of present limitations, but a feeble surrender to entirely vicious tendencies of the human mind. I believe that for a little while yet, Washington will continue its researches into the meaning of arm security, and that then it will turn its attention to the alternative idea with which the nimble French mind has also been playing, and that is security by treaty. The French have been disposed in the past to welcome an Anglo-American-French treaty to guarantee France against attack. The idea in that form is dead, but the possibility of far more comprehensive agreement, a loose-fitting but effectual association of all the nations of the world to keep the peace and arrange their differences by conference, is bound to recur again as the impossibility of disarmament without settlement becomes increasingly apparent. There drifts into my memory here a curious feast of security which occurred long ago in some eastern equivalent of Versailles. The great Abbasid family had suffered many things from the Omayyad caliphs, and at last it rose against them and overcame them and secured the leadership of Islam. The remnants of the Omayyad clan were summoned to witness and celebrate the new peace. But some of the Abbasids, inspired by quite modern ideas of security, had all the Omayyads massacred before the banquet began. A beautiful carpet was spread over the dead and dying, and the Abbasids feasted thereon. Here was security to satisfy the most exacting modern European ideals. Yet the Abbasids made little of their security. They never rose to the glory of the Omayyads. The drive and strength seemed to have gone out of Arab Islam. Their history, for all this security, is one of division, decline, decay. It takes all men to make a world. Let us get through with this feudal haggling for national advantages and securities, and let us get on to the organization of that brotherhood, which can alone save the world. End of Part 10. Part 11 of Washington and the Riddle of Peace by H.G. Wells. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. France in the Limelight. Washington, November 21. The first session of the Washington Conference featured, as the cinematographed people say, President Harding and Mr. Secretary Hughes. The second day was Mr. Balfour's day. This third, from which I have just come, was the session of Monsieur Briond. The four personalities contrast very strikingly. President Harding was a stately figure, making a very noble oration in the best American fashion. Mr. Hughes was hard, exact, clear-cut, very earnest and explicit. Mr. Balfour, slender and stooping, silver-haired and urbane, made his carefully worded impromptu speech with a care that left no ragged end to a sentence and no gap for applause. All three are taller and neater men than Monsieur Briond, whose mane of hair flows back from his face in Leonine style, whose mobile face and fluent gestures reinforce the stirring notes of his wonderful voice. His eloquence was so great that many congressmen in the gallery above, quite innocent of French, were moved to applause by the sheer grace and music of the performance. Eloquence could not save the day or the occasion. Monsieur Briond spoke to a gathering that was saturated with skepticism for the cause he had to plead. I watched the quiet, scrutinizing countenances of the six men he turned about to face as he spoke, root, lodge, and Hughes as immobile as judges, Balfour trying to look like a sympathetic ally in the face of a discourse that insultingly ignored Great Britain as a factor of the European situation. Lord Lee, both likely prostrate and judicial, Gettys, with that faintly smiling face of his, the mask of an unbeliever. The voice of the orator rose and fell, boomed at them, pleaded, sought to stir them, like seas breaking over rocks. Their still implacable faces, hardly or politely, retained the effect of listening to a special pleader, a special pleader doing his best, his foamy best, with an intolerably bad case. Monsieur Briond put before the conference no definite proposals at all. After Mr. Hughes, with that magnificent discourse of his, punctuated by, We Proposed to Scrap, Monsieur Briond was an anti-climax. France proposed to scrap nothing. France does not know how to scrap. She learns nothing and forgets nothing. It is her supreme misfortune. He explained the position of France in a melodious discourse of apologetics and excuses. The French contribution to the disarmament conference is that France has not the slightest intention of disarming. She is reducing her term of service with the colors from three years to two. In a Europe of untrained men, this is not disarmament, but economy. The great feature of Monsieur Briond's discourse was his pretense of the absolute unimportance of England in European affairs. France, for whom, as Mr. Balfour, in a few words of infinite gentleness, reminded Monsieur Briond, France, for whom the French Empire lost a million dead, very nearly as many men as France herself lost. France, to whose rescue from German attack came Britain, Russia, and presently Italy and America. France, Monsieur Briond declared, was alone in the world, friendless and terribly threatened by Germany and Russia. And on the nonsensical assumption of French isolation, Monsieur Briond unfolded a case that was either, I hesitate to consider which, and how shall I put that old alternative deficient in its estimate of reality, or else, just special pleading. The plain fact of the case is that France is maintaining a vast army in the face of a disarmed world, and she is preparing energetically for fresh war-like operations in Europe, and for war under sea against Great Britain. To excuse this line of action, Monsieur Briond unfolded a fabulous account of the German preparation for a renewal of hostilities. Every soldier in the small force of troops allowed to Germany is an officer or non-commissioned officer, so that practically the German army can expand at any moment two millions, and Germany is not morally disarmed because Ludendorff, Monsieur Briond quoted him at some length, is still writing and talking militant nonsense. Even Monsieur Briond has to admit that the present German government is honest and well-meaning, but it is a weak government. It is not the real thing. The real Germany is the Germany necessary for Mr. Briond's argument. And behind Germany is Russia. He conjured up a great phantom of Soviet Russia, which would have conquered all Europe, but for the French armies and Poland. That iniquitous attack of Poland upon Russia last May was, he assured his six quiet-eyed auditors and the rest of us, a violent invasion of Western civilization by Russia. There were those in Germany, he said in a voice, to make our flesh creep, who beckoned them on. The French have saved us from that. The French army, with its gallant Senegalese, was the peacemaker and guardian of all Europe. One listened incredulous. One waited still incredulous to hear it over again from the interpreter. Yes, we were confirmed. He really had said that. Poor, exhausted Russia, who saved Paris, desiring nothing but to be left alone, bled white, starving, invaded by a score of subsidized adventurers, invaded from Estonia, from Poland, from Japan, in Murmansk, in the Crimea, in the Ukraine, on the Volga, incessantly invaded. It is this Russia which has put France on the offensive defensive. One is reminded of the Navi who kicked his wife to death to protect himself from her violence. It is interesting to recall here that one of the Kaiser's favorite excuses for German armament, when it was Germany and not France, which aspired to dominate Europe, was his acute dread of the yellow peril. When he talked to the journalists in preparation for this display, Monsieur Breond excused France for wanting submarines in Quantité because, he said, she was liable to attack upon three coasts, but mature reflection omitted this aspect of the French case from Monsieur Breond's attention. It was too thick, even for an American audience, and even Mr. Balfour, with all his charming tenderness for a fellow statesman, could not well have avoided the plane question, from whom does France anticipate a sea attack? France is in about as much danger of an attack upon her three coasts as the United States of America is upon her Canadian frontier. Her ships are as safe upon the sea as a wayfarer on Fifth Avenue. If she builds submarines now, she builds them to attack British commerce, and for no other reason, whatever. All the ludendorfs and Soviets in the world do not justify a single submarine. Every submarine she launches is almost as direct a breach of the peace with Britain as though she were to start target practice at Dover Harbor across the Straits, and everyone in England will understand the aim of her action as clearly. As Monsieur Breond, in his discourse to the journalists, argued that the Empire of France was as far flung as that of Britain, her need to protect her communication was as great. This was in the face of Mr. Balfour's reminder that Britain can feed its people only for seven weeks if its overseas supplies are cut off. France can feed from her own soil all the year round. The argument was not good enough for a boy's debating society, and Monsieur Breond, who was prepared to scrap nothing else, was at least well advised to scrap that. I will confess that I am altogether perplexed by the behavior of France at the present time. I do not understand what she believes she is doing in Europe, and I do not understand her position in this conference. Why could she not have cooperated in this conference instead of making it a scene of special pleading? I have already said that the French here seem to be more foreign than any other people, and least in touch with the general feeling of the Assembly. They seem to have come here as national advocates, as special pleaders, without any of that passionate desire to lay the foundations of a world settlement that certainly animates nearly every other delegation. They do not seem to understand how people here regard either the conference or France. There is indeed a great and enduring enthusiasm for France in America. Marshall Foch has gone about in America as the greatest of heroes and the most popular figure. He has been overwhelmed by hospitality and smothered by every honor America could heap upon him. The French flag is far more in evidence than the British in both New York and Washington. This may easily give French visitors the idea that they are exceptional favorites here, and that France can count upon American backing in any quarrels she chooses to pick with the British or the Germans or the Russians. There could be no greater error. The enthusiasm for Foch is largely personal. He was the general of all the Allies. The enthusiasm for France is largely traditional, and it does not extend to the French nationals or the present day. America loves, as all liberal and intelligent men throughout the world must love, France the great liberator of men's minds, France of the great revolution, the France of art and light, France the beautiful and the gallant. It is hard to write bitterly of a country that can give the world an Anatole France, sane and smiling, or so brave and balanced a gentleman as the late Robert de Umer. But where is that France today? None of that France has come to the Washington conference, but only an impenitent apologist for three years of sins against the peace of the world, an apologist for national aggression and reckless greed disguised as discretion. Here in New York and Washington I find just the same steady change of opinion about France that is going on in London. I want to write it down as plainly as I can. I want to get it over to my friends in France because I have loved France greatly, and I do not think the French people realize what is going on among the English-speaking peoples. People here want to see Europe recuperating, and they are beginning to realize that the French obstacle to a recuperating Europe is the obstinate French resolve to dominate the continent, to revive and carry out the antiquated and impossible policy of Louis XIV, maintaining an ancient and intolerable quarrel, setting pole against German and brewing mischief everywhere in order to divide and rule, instead of entering frankly into a European brotherhood. Feeling about Germany and Austria is changing here, even more rapidly than in England, to pity and indignation. Feeling about Russia is drifting the same way. One detects these undercurrents in the minds of the most unlikely people. People are recalling the France of Napoleon III, that restless and mischievous France which came so near to a conflict with America in Mexico, and which kept Europe in a fever for a quarter of a century. It is an enormous loss to the Washington Conference. It is a misfortune to all the world that the great qualities of the French people, their clear-headedness, their powerful and yet practical imaginations, seem at present to be entirely subordinated to the merely rhetorical and emotional side of the French character. End of Part XI. Part XII OF WASHINGTON AND THE RIDDLE OF PIECE BY H. G. WELLS This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Thus far. Washington, November 22. How are we getting on in Washington? The general mood is hopefulness tempered by congestion, mental and physical, and by sheer fatigue. There is no rest in Washington, no cessation. Last winter I was a happy invalid at Almalfi. I sat in the Italian sunshine. The hours were vast globes of golden time. My mind and my soul were my own. Now I live to the tune of a telephone bell, and the little feverish American hours slip through my hot, dry hands before I can turn my thoughts around. I wish I could attend to everything. The conference has evolved two committees, one on disarmament and one on Pacific affairs, which meet behind closed doors so that one has three or four divergent reports of what has happened to what one should choose from. Delegates at all hours and in devious ways call together the press men to make more or less epic-making statements. There are particular conferences with representative businessmen of this country and educationists of that, and so forth. One is called upon by a multitude of well-informed people insistent upon this fact or that point of view. Delegates from South China, Albania, Czechoslovakia clamor for attention, and there is a terrible multitude of mere pesterers who want to do something, they know not what. The weather here is unusually warm and inclined to be cloudy, a bru-house atmosphere due entirely, one humorous declares, to the tremendous fermentation that is going on. The fermenting vat overflows with the press of all the world. All the world, we feel, is present in spirit at Washington. Three questions stand out as of importance and significance. The naval disarmament discussion, as one could have foretold, becomes a haggle for advantages. Each power seeks to disarm the other fellow. Great Britain detests the big raider submarine and wants none of it. It is America's only effective long range weapon. The clamor comes to us from across the ocean, from the French Senate, for unlimited submarines. These will be to attack Great Britain. There can be no other possible use for them. Perhaps the French Senate does not really want war with Britain, but this is the way to get it. Japan is asking for a seven to ten instead of a six to ten basis for herself. And so on. So long as unsettled differences remain, disarmament discussions are bound to degenerate in this fashion. Settlements and sincere disarmament are inseparably interwoven. The French, however, have led in an important pronouncement, promising evacuations and renunciations in the Chinese area on the part of France, provided Britain and Japan follow suit. Lord Riddle, on behalf of Britain, has followed suit. Britain is ready to relinquish everything with the justifiable exception of Hong Kong, the purely British creation. And Monsieur Brion has explained why France must have an awful army to overaw Europe, but that still leaves certain possibilities of military restraint open for consideration. We are still discussing whether we may not hope to see conscription banished from the earth. When such things swim up through the boiling activities of the Washington Vat, not merely as passing suggestions and happy ideas, but embodied in more or less concrete proposals, we cannot fail, however jaded we may feel, from also feeling hopeful. The conference has got only to its third session, and we already seem further from war in the Pacific and nearer security there than at any time in the last two years. And these intimations of success in this world discussion, of which Washington is the controlling nucleus, turn our minds naturally enough to the continuation and final outcome of this great initiative of President Hardings. The more fruitful the conference seems likely to be in agreements and understandings, the more evident is the necessity for something permanent arising out of it, to hold and maintain, in spirit and in fact, this accumulation of agreements and understandings. The Washington Conference, before it breaks up and disperses, must in some way lay an egg to reproduce itself. In some fashion, it must presently return. Because we have had to bear in mind that in the final and conclusive sense of the word, the conference can decide nothing. It has produced a fine and generous atmosphere about it. It will probably arrive at an effectual temporary solution of a large group of problems, but the power of final decision rests with governments and legislatures far away. The American proposals are only suggestive, and they have no value as a treaty unless they are accepted by the powers and until the American Senate has confirmed them by a two-thirds majority. Monsieur Breon may have wished to be generous and broad-minded here, but in Paris is this French Senate, inspired by a mad patriotism that would even now begin to arm France for an inevitable war with Britain. The French Senate has made a war-like gesture directly at England, has set its feet in a path that can end only in a supreme disaster for both France and England. And it did so, one guesses, in order to remind Monsieur Breon that if he dared to be reasonable, he dared to be pacific, if he acted for great France and mankind instead of at the dictates of nationalist France, he did so at his peril. He would have been accused of betraying his country. Conspe, Breon, they would have cried in their pretty way. So Monsieur Breon has played the patriot's role. In Tokyo and in London, it is an open secret that the same conflict goes on. The cables are busy with the struggle between reason and fierce patriotism. Every concession made by every country at Washington will go back to the homeland to be challenged as weakness, as want of patriotism, as treason. In America and Britain, the ugly side of this business has still to come, the outbreak of the patriotic fanatics, of the disappointed politicians who wanted to come here, of the wrecker journalists, the dealers in suspicion, the evil minds of a thousand types, and the lassitude that follows great expectations has also to be reckoned with. What Washington decides will not be the ultimate outcome. What the world will get at last in treaties ratified and things accomplished will be the mangled and tangled remains of the Washington decisions. For that reason it is imperative that the Washington Conference should meet again. Its work is not done until its decisions are realized. After it has sent over its reports to the governments and parliaments it will adjourn, but it must not cease. With perhaps rather fuller powers, with perhaps a wider or a different representation of the world, it must come again to a renewed invitation, to restore once more that atmosphere of international goodwill that has been created here, and to go over the attempts to realize, or the failures to realize, the settlement it has already worked out. And there will be many questions ripening then for a solution that it cannot deal with now. Much remains to be done by the Washington Conference. Most of its work, indeed, is still to be done. But enough has been demonstrated already here to convince any reasonable man that a new thing, a new instrument, a new organ, has come into human affairs and that it is a thing that the world needs and cannot do without again. This thing has to recur, has to grow, it has to become a recurrent world conference, and this being clear, it is time that public discussion, public opinion, direct itself to the problem of the renewal of this conference in order that before it disperses we may be assured that it will meet again. As a temporary transitory thing it will presently fade out of men's memories and imaginations, but as a thing going on in living, which has gone, but which, like the king and circuit, will come again to try the new issues that have arisen, and to try again the experiments that have fallen short of expectation, it may become the symbol and rallying point of all that vast amount of sane humanitarian feeling and all that devotion to mankind as a whole, and to peace and justice that has hitherto been formless and ineffectual in the world, for the need of such a banner. End of Part 12 Part 13 of Washington and the Riddle of Peace by H. G. Wells. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The larger question behind the conference. Washington, November 23. The Washington Conference, after its tremendous opening, seems now to be running into slack water. It has had its three great days, in which Secretary Hughes and Mr. Balfour and Mr. Brion have respectively played the leading parts. The broad lines of a possible naval reduction and a possible Chinese and Pacific settlement are shaping themselves in men's minds. Monsieur Brion has spoken and now departs. France will not disarm until she has had a binding treaty, which her former allies are not yet prepared to give her. She ignores the assurances of her proved allies and the experiences of the Great War. She goes in fear of desolate Russia and bankrupt Germany, and she is assailable on three coasts. So she retains her great armies and especially her colonial army. Monsieur Brion's departure has something of the effect of France shaking the dust from her feet and departing from the conference. France cannot step out of her share in the leadership of peace in this fashion. France has not finished with the conference yet. She will speak now at Washington with a voice perhaps less romantically impressive, but more practically helpful. She has explained the terrors of her position and the assembled delegates have said, there, there, to her, as politely and soothingly as possible. But nobody really believes in the terrors of her position. Mr. Hughes is a man of great tenacity of purpose, and his chief reply to Monsieur Brion's speech is to keep military disarmament upon the agenda. The third committee of five powers has been added to the two already in existence to deal with land disarmament, and it is doubtful if it can get very far unless it can bring in German and Russian representatives to reply to the alarmist charges of Monsieur Brion. With the formation of this third committee, the Washington conference would seem to have got as much before it as it is likely to handle. The Hughes impetus has done its work, and done its work well. The conference has followed his rigorous lead almost too rigorously. It has cut off a manageable part of the vast problem of world peace, and seems well on the way to manage it. That is exemplary, if limited. To manage a sample is to go some way toward demonstrating that the whole is manageable. A war on the Pacific has been averted, I think, at least for some years. But the more general problem of world peace as one whole, the problem of ending war for good still remains untouched, and it is well to bear in mind that that is so. It is impossible not to contrast this phase in the life of the Washington conference with the great propositions of the opening days, when President Harding was speaking at Arlington and in the Continental Building of making an end to offensive, and with that of defensive, war forever in the world. It is impossible to ignore this shrinkage of aim and to refrain from measuring the vast omissions. That prelude, one perceives, was the prelude to something greater than this present conference, and more from this conference must ensue from it. The haggling and adjustment that is now going on in the committee of five powers on naval limitation, and in the committee of nine powers on the Pacific settlement, I will not attempt to follow. It is a matter for the experts and diplomatists. The public is concerned, not with the methods of the wrangle, but with the general purport and practical outcome. We of the general public are incapable of judging upon the merits of battle-cruisers and the possible limits to the size of submarines. Our concern is to see such things grow rarer and rarer until they disappear. I will not apologize, therefore, for going outside the conference chamber for the matter of my next few papers. I will go back from Mr. Secretary Hughes and his proposals and their consequences to President Harding, and to the great expectations with which the conference assembled. These expectations looked not merely to an arrest of international competition on the Pacific, and to give threatened China a breathing time to bring itself up to modern conditions. They looked, frankly, toward the establishment of a world peace. But so far as Europe goes, whereas Monsieur Brion's speech reminded us, the nations are locked together in a state of extreme danger. The conference has as yet done nothing. It is quite possible to believe that it will do very little. It is doubtful that the peace of Europe can ever be dealt with effectually in Washington. The troubles of the European continent are an old, intricate story, and I believe the attitude described here to the American Center and West, the attitude of let Europe solve her own international problems and not bother them, is a thoroughly sound and wise one. America has neither the time and attention to spare nor the particular understandings needed to grasp the tangled difficulties of Europe. Such initiatives as those of President Wilson about Danzig and Fiume settle nothing and leave rankling sores. It is up to Europe to clear up and simplify before it comes into the world arena with America. It is just within the range of possibility, therefore, that some sort of European conference may arise out of the Washington gathering. Such a conference is becoming necessary. The divergence in spirit and aim of France and Britain that Washington has brought out is not a divergence to be smoothed over. Better it should flare now than smolder later. I have done my own small best to exacerbate it because I believe that a brisk quarrel and some plain speaking may clear the air for a better understanding. Europe needs ventilation. When France, Britain, Italy and Germany meet together to discuss their common interests, cut through their possible entanglements and get rid of their mutual suspicions and precautions with the frankness of this Washington gathering, with as open and free a discussion and as ample a public participation, European affairs will be on the mend. But there is another issue which America cannot keep out of, as she can keep out of the Franco-German British situation. And upon this second issue, the world looks to her for some sort of leadership. So far, the Washington conference has excluded any consideration of the economic and financial disorder of the world. But that consideration cannot be indefinitely delayed. It is becoming pressingly necessary. All the while, we are debating here about Japanese autocracy and ambitions and what we really mean by the open door. And whether we shall have 40,000 or 90,000 tons of submarines and so on, the economic dissolution of the world goes on. The immediate effect of partial disarmament, indeed, both in Britain and Japan, may be even to increase the economic difficulties of these countries by throwing considerable masses of skilled labor out of work. I propose in my next paper to discuss this process of economic and social dissolution which is now going on throughout the world beneath the surface of our formal international relations. It is the larger reality of the present world situation which the brighter, more dramatic incidents of the earlier sessions at Washington have for a time thrust out of our attention. End of Part 13 Part 14 of Washington and the Riddle of Peace by H. G. Wells This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Real Threat to Civilization Washington, November 25 In the opening paper of this series I said that Western civilization was undergoing a very rapid progress of disorganization, the process that was already nearly complete in Russia and that was spreading out to the whole world. It is a huge secular process demanding unprecedented collective action among the nations if it is to be arrested and I welcome the Washington conference as the most hopeful beginning of such concerted action. Now that the Washington conference has defined its scope and limitations and got down to a definite scheme of work, it will be well to return to this ampler question of the affairs. Now there are great numbers of people more particularly in America who still refuse to recognize this intermittent and variable process, which resumes and goes on again and rests steady for a time and then hurries which is taking all that we know as civilization in Europe toward a final destruction. The mere statement that this is going on they call pessimism and with a sort of genial hostility they oppose any attempt to consider the possibility of any action to turn back the evil process. I suppose they would call the note of a fire alarm or the toot of a motor horn pessimism until the thing hit them good and hard. It would have the same effect of a disagreeable warning and interruption to the even tenor of their ways. They argue that this alleged decadence is not going on or what is from a really practical point of view the same thing, that it is never going to reach them or anything that they really care for. The starvation of Russia down to an empty shell, the break-up of China, the retrogression of southeastern Europe to barbarism, the sinking of Constantinople to the level of a drunken brothel, the steadily approaching collapse of Germany, is nothing to these optimists. America and am I my brother's keeper? It is just a phase of misfortune over there and the people must get out of it as they can. Wait for the swing of the pendulum, the turn of the tide. Things will come right again over the heaps of dead. There have been such slumps before in those countries away over there, notoriously less favored by God as they are than America. It may be well therefore to go over this matter a little more fully and to give my grounds for supposing that there is a rot, a coming undone, going on in our system, that will not necessarily recover, that the movement isn't the swing of a pendulum, nor this ebb and ebb that will turn again, and further that this rotting process is bound to affect not merely Europe and Asia, but ultimately America. Now let us recapitulate in the most general terms what has happened and is happening at the present time to impoverish and disorganize the world. First, there has been a very great destruction of life through the war, especially in Europe. Mostly this has been the killing of young men who would otherwise have been the flour of the working mass of these countries at the present time. This in itself is a great loss of energy, but it is a recoverable loss. A new generation is already growing up to replace these millions of dead, and to efface the economic loss of this tragic and sorrowful destruction. Nor is the extraordinary waste of property, of energy and raw material, spent in mere destruction, an irreplaceable loss. Given toil, given courage, devastated areas can be restored. Fresh energies, found to replenish the countless millions and millions of foot-pounds of work, wasted upon explosives. Many beautiful things, buildings, works of art and the like have gone never to be gotten again, but their place may conceivably be taken by new efforts of creative, artistic energy, given toil, given confidence and hope. Far more serious, from the point of view of the future, than the destruction of either things or lives, are certain subtler destructions, because of that toil, that courage and hope and confidence which are essential to any sort of recuperation. And foremost is the fact of debt everywhere, but particularly in the European countries. All the billions worth of material that was smashed up and blown to pieces on the front had to be bought from its owners, and to secure it, every belligerent government had to incur debts. Lives cost little, but material much. The European combatants are overwhelmed with debts. Every European worker and toiler, every European businessman, is a debtor. Every European enterprise goes on under a crushing burden of taxation, because of these debts. An attempt has been made to shift this unendurable burden from the victors to the vanquished, but the vanquished mankind began to experiment with money and credit. The lot of the debtor was an intolerable one. He might become the slave of his creditor, he might be subjected to imprisonment and frightful punishments. But it was early discovered that it was not to the general advantage, it was not even to the advantage of the creditor, to drive the debtor to despair. Processes of bankruptcy were devised to clear him up, get what was possible from him, and then release him to a fresh start and hope. But we have not yet extended the same leniency to national bankruptcy, because national insolvencies have been rare. And so we have whole nations in Europe so loaded with debts and punitive charges that every worker, every businessman, will be under his share in this burden from the cradle to the grave. He will be a debt-surf to the foreign creditor and all his enterprises will be weighed and discouraged by this obligation. Debt is one immense and universal discouragement now throughout all Europe. But even that might not prevent the recovery of Europe. There is yet another and profound or evil in operation to prevent people getting to work to reconstruct their shattered economic life. That is the increasing failure of money to do business. Europe cannot get to work, cannot get things going again, because over a large part of the world the medium of exchange has become untrustworthy and unusable. That is the immediate thing that is destroying civilization in the old world. We have to remember that our whole economic order is based on money. We do not know any way of working a big business, a manufacturing, a large farm, except by money payments. Payments in kind, barter and the like, are ancient and clumsy expedience. You cannot imagine a great city like New York getting along with its industrial and business life on any such clumsy basis. Every modern city, London, Paris, Berlin, is built on a money basis and will collapse into utter ruin as Petersburg has already collapsed if money fails. But over a large and increasing areas of Europe money is now of such fluctuating value its purchasing power is so uncertain that men will neither work for it nor attempt to save it nor make any monetary bargains ahead. Such a thing has never occurred to anything like the same extent in all history and it is killing business enterprise altogether and throwing whole masses of working people out of employment. Europe without trustworthy money is as paralyzed as a brain without wholesome blood. She cannot act, she cannot move. Employment becomes impossible and production dies away. The towns move steadily toward the starvation that is overtaken Petersburg and the peasants and cultivators cease to grow anything except to satisfy their own needs. To go to market with produce except to barter is a mockery. The schools are not working. The hospitals, the public services. The teachers and doctors and officials cannot live upon their pay. They starve or go away. The state of affairs has been brought about by the reckless manufacture of paper money by nearly every European government. We can measure their recklessness roughly by comparing their pre-war and post-war exchanges. It is only now that we are beginning to realize the enormity of the disaster which this demoralization of money is bringing upon the world. We have weakened the link of cash payments which has hitherto held civilization together to the breaking point. As the link breaks the machine stops. The modern city will become a formless mob of unemployed men and the countryside will become a wilderness of food hoarding peasants and since the urban masses will have no food means of commanding it. We may expect the most violent perturbations before they are persuaded to accept their fate in a philosophical spirit. Revolutionary social outbreaks are not the result of plots. They are symptoms of social disease. They are not causes but effects. This is what I mean when I write of a breakdown of civilization. I mean the death of town life which cannot go on without money and the creation of organized communications. I mean a breakdown of the organizations for keeping the peace. I mean an end to organized education. I mean the smashing of this social order in which we live through the smashing of money which has already occurred to a large extent in Russia which is going on in many parts of Eastern Europe which seems likely to occur within a few months in Germany which may spread into Italy and France and so to Britain and even to the American continent and which can only be arrested by the most vigorous collection action to restore validity to money. Of which vigorous collective action there is in Washington at the present moment, no sign. End of Part 14 Part 15 of Washington and the Riddle of Peace by H. G. Wells This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The possible breakdown of civilization Washington November 26 In a previous paper I have set out the plain facts of the condition of Central and Eastern Europe. It is a breakup of the modern civilization system due to the smashing up of money without which organized town life, fact reproduction education and systematic communications are unworkable. If it goes on unchecked to its natural conclusion Central and Eastern Europe will follow Russia to a condition in which the towns will be dying or dead, empty and ruinous. The railroads passing out of use and in which few people will be left alive except uneducated and degenerating peasants and farmers, growing their own food and keeping a rough order among themselves in their own fashion. We are relieved with a return to barbarism over all these areas. They are going back to the conditions of rural Asia Minor or the Balkans. How far is this degeneration going to spread? Let us recognize at once that it needs spread no further. It is not an inevitable process. It could be arrested. It could be turned back and a rapid restoration of our shattered civilization could be set going right away if the leading powers of the world, sinking their own political ambitions for a time could meet frankly to work out a bankruptcy arrangement that would release the impoverished nations from debt and give them again a valid money, a stable money with a trustworthy exchange value that could be accepted with confidence and saved without deterioration. Upon that things could be set going again quite hopefully. Education has not so degenerated yet. Habits of work and trading and intercourse are still strong enough to make such a recovery possible. Except perhaps in Russia. Russia, for all we know, may have sunk in very deep. But if there is no vigorous world effort made soon, the trading class, the foreman class, the technically educated class, the professional class, the teachers and so forth will have been broken up and dispersed. These classes are comparatively easy to destroy, extremely hard to reconstruct. Modern civilization will really have been destroyed, if not for good, for a long period, over great areas if these classes go. And the process is at present still spreading rapidly. If it gets Germany, and it seems to be getting Germany, then Italy may follow. Italy is linked very closely to Germany economically financially. The death of Germany will chill the economic blood of Italy. Italy is passionately anxious to disarm on land and sea. But Italy cannot disarm while France maintains a great army and makes great naval preparations. France's refusal to disarm prevents Italy from disarming. The lira sways and sinks. Its value fluctuates not perhaps so widely as do Marx and Cronin, but much too widely for healthy industrial life and social security. And Italy is troubled by its restless nationalists of whooping, flag-waving crew of posturing adventurers without foresight or any genuine love of country. If nothing is done, I think I would give Germany about six months and north Italy two years before a revolutionary collapse occurs. And France? This newly rhetorical France which remains heavily armed while no man threatens which builds new ships to fight non-existent German armies and guards itself against the threats of long-dead German generals. One of Monsieur Brion's hair-raising quotations is to be found in the Encyclopedia Britannica and must be nearly twenty years stale. The Renaissance France which jostles against Italy and England and believes that it can humbug good and all while it does these things. Will it pull through amid the general disaster of Europe? Will it achieve its manifest ambition and remain dominant in Europe, the dominance of the last survivor, the cock upon the dung-hill of a general decay? I doubt it. Watch the Frank upon the exchange as the true meaning of the French search for security dawns upon the world. Watch the subscription to the next alone to pay for more submarines and more Senegalese. It may prove to be too difficult a feat, after all, for France to wreck the rest of Europe to destroy her commerce by destroying her customers and yet to save herself. When France begins to break, she may break very quickly. Under the surface of this exuberant French patriotism runs a deep tide of communism, raw and red and insanely radical. We talk of the Seine Graver France, the substantial France that is masked by the rhetoric of Monsieur Brion and the flag-waving French nationalists of a France generous enough to help a fallen foe and great enough to think of the welfare of mankind. I wish we could hear more of that Seine France and soon. I can see nothing but a war-like orator, empty and mischievous all Europe to destruction. I do not see that it is possible for a France of armaments and adventures to dance along the edge of the abyss without falling in. When we pass out of the continental to the Atlantic system and consider the case of Britain, we find a country with a stabler exchange and a tradition of social give-and-take stronger and deeper than that of any other country in Europe. But she is not a self-maintaining country. Her millions live very largely on overseas trade. She is helplessly dependent upon the prosperity of other countries, and particularly of Europe. The ebb of prosperity abroad means ebb for her at home. No other country feels so acutely the economic prostration of Germany. No other country suffers so greatly from the restless activities of France. She is struggling along now unprecedented masses of unemployed workers, and the state of affairs abroad offers no hope of any diminution of this burden. The housing of her great population has degenerated greatly since the war began. She cannot continue to feed clothes nor educate her people as she used to do unless the decay of continental Europe is arrested. I do not know what political form of expression a great distress might take. The tendency toward revolutionary violence is not very evident in the British temperament, but people who are slow to move are often slow to stop. The slow violence of the English might not find expression in revolution and might not expend itself internally. They might get resentful about France, and perhaps Germany might be feeling resentful about France, too. But I will confess that I cannot in acutely distressed Britain might or might not do. Yet it is plain to me that the shadow that lies so dark over Petrograd stretches as far as London. Such, compactly, is the condition of Europe today. I submit to the reader that it is a fair statement of facts in common knowledge. This is not the Europe of the diplomatists and publicists. It is the Europe of reality and the common man. This is a process of decline and fall going on under our eyes, swifter and more extensive, than the decline and fall of the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries. Its immediate cause is the destruction of the monetary system under the burden of war expenditure and war debts. And the only possible hope that it may be arrested lies in a prompt and vigorous world conference to put an end to war including even these French war expenditures that Monsieur Brion's admirers find so justifiable to extinguish debts and reinstate stable and trustworthy money in the world. There is no evidence yet that the Washington conference will take up this task or will even contemplate this task. I find myself in the troth of the waves today and less confident of the outcome, even the limited time. I am increasingly doubtful whether the conference will get as far in the direction of a stabilized Pacific as I hoped a few days ago. End of Part 15 Part 16 of Washington and the Riddle of Peace by H. G. Wells This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. What of America? Washington, November 28 In my next article I will report progress of the Washington conference. In this I will go on with my account in general terms of what is happening in the world. I have written of a progressive rapid dissolution of our civilized organization as the dominant fact of the present time. It is very hard indeed to keep it in one's mind, here in this city of plenty and lavish light, that anything of the sort is going on. It is amazing how they splash light about here. The capital shines all night like a full moon. An endless stream of light pours down the Washington obelisk. Light blinks and glitters and spins about and spills all over the city. I find it hard to realize the reality of the collapse here myself, and yet I have seen the streets of one great European city in full daylight as dead and empty as a skull. I have sought my destination in the chief thoroughfare of another European capital at night by means of a pocket-electric torch. I at least ought to keep these memories of desolation clear before me. I do not see how Americans who have never seen anything of the wrecked state of Eastern Europe and the shabbiness and privation of the center can be expected to feel and see the vision I find it so hard to keep vivid in my thoughts. Here is a country where money is still good. The ten dollar in my pocket assure me I can go down to the Treasury here and get gold for them whenever I think fit. I believe them so thoroughly that I do not even think fit. My intimations of the progressive dissolution over there must read like a gloomy fiction, and it is the hardest, most important fact in the world. Everywhere here there is festival. I go to splendid balls to glittering receptions. I am whirled off to a most barbeque, an ox in chains, roasts and drips over a wood fire. Think of that in Russia. Thanksgiving day was an inordinate feast. The portions of food they give you in hotels, clubs and restaurants are enormous by present European standards. One seems always to be eating little bits and throwing the rest away. Neither New York nor Washington shows a trace yet that I can see of the European shadow. There is much unemployment, but not enough to alarm people. Nothing of it has struck upon my perceptions, either here or in New York. In the midst of this gay prosperity comes a letter from my wife, describing how the police had to censor the bitter inscriptions upon the wreaths that were laid upon the London cenotaph on Armistice Day, and how the veterans of the Great War, who marched in the unemployed processions in London, metals. I am forced by these contrasts to the question. Suppose America patches up a fairly stable peace with Japan. Let's Japan accumulate in Manchuria, Siberia and finally China. Cuts her naval expenditure to nothing, and allows the rest of the world, including the old English speaking home, to slide and go over into the abyss apart from the moral loss will she suffer very greatly? That is a very interesting speculation. I think she may adjust herself to a self-contained system and, in a sense, pull through. It may involve some very severe stresses. At present she grows more food than she can eat or waste. She exports foodstuffs. The American farmer sells so much of his produce for export, not a very great percentage, but enough to form an important item in his Europe and Asia to impoverished and broken up to import foodstuffs that trade goes. The American farmer will have to sell to a shrunken demand. He will have either to shrink himself or undersell his fellow farmer. This will mean bad times for the American farmer as Europe sinks. Farmers will be unable to buy as freely as usual. Many agriculturists will be going out of business. Firms will be stressed by overproduction. American manufacturers are also to a very marked but not overwhelming extent. Exporters and much of their internal trade is to the farmers, whose purchasing power will be diminishing. Bad times for the industrial regions also will follow the European disaster. Perhaps even very bad times. New York and the eastern cities so far as the overseas traffic goes may suffer exceptionally. For them there may be less power of recovery, for with the fall of Europe into barbarism the center of American interests will shift to the interior. But after a series of crises, a lot of business failures and so on, I do not see why the United States, if there is no war with Japan, very little reduced from the large splendor of its present habits, should not still be getting along in a fashion. America is not tied up to the European system, to live and die with it, as France or Britain is tied. And there is a limit also to the areas of the old world, affected by the collapse of the cash and credit system in Europe. Outside the European sea coast towns, Asia Minor is not likely to go much lower than it is at present, though most of Europe sink to the level of the Balkans and Asia Minor. The dissolution of Asia Minor resulted from the great wars of the West and Persia. All that land was ruined country before the days of Islam. It has never recovered and Europe may never recover. Given an enfeebled Britain, there will probably be a collapse into conflict and discord throughout most of India. And China, unhelped, may continue in a state of confusion which is steadily destroying her ancient educated class and her ancient traditions without replacing them with the modernized educational organization. But here again upon the western Pacific there may be regions which need not go the whole way down to citylessness, illiteracy, and the peasant life. Japan is still solvent and energetic. The war has probably strained her very little more than it has strained America. And her participation in the world credit system is so recent that, like America, she may be able to draw herself and expand her rule and culture, unimpeded over the whole of Eastern Asia. She will be the more able to do this if a phase of disarmament gives her time to rest and consolidate before her expansion is resumed. A war between Japan and America would be a long and costly affair, and it would no doubt topple both powers into the same process of dissolution into which Europe now welters. But I am assuming that America takes no risk of such a war for the sake of China or such like remote cause, and that Japan is not eager for California. An America indifferent to the fall of Europe would probably not trouble herself seriously if presently Australia came under Japanese domination. It would not trouble until the Monroe doctrine was invaded, and it would get along very comfortably and happily. So far as material considerations go, therefore, there is not much force in an appeal to the ordinary plain man in America to interest himself, much less to exert himself, in the tangled troubles of Europe and Asia now. He can remain as proudly isolated as his father's. He can refuse help. He can avoid entangling alliances and rely on his own strength. He can weather the smash, insist on pressing any sparks of recovery out of the European debtor, and so far as he and his children, and possibly even his children's children are concerned, America can expect to go on living an extremely tolerable life. There will still be plenty of fords, plenty of food, movies, and other amusing inventions, seed time, harvest, and thanksgiving, no armament in very light taxation, and as high a percentage of moral, well-regulated lives as any community has ever shown upon this planet. Until that long-distance time, when the great Asiatic Empire of Japan turns its attention seriously to expansion in the New World, so far as present material considerations go. But I belong to one of the races that have populated America. I know the imagination of my own people and something of most of the peoples who have sent their best to this land. I have watched the people here and listened to them and read about them. There has been no degeneration here but progress and invigoration, and I will not believe that the American spirit distilled from all the best of Europe will tolerate this surrender of the future, this quite haggish abandonment of the leadership of mankind that continuing isolation implies. The American people has grown great unawares. It still does not realize its immense predominance now in wealth, in strength, in hope, happiness and unbroken courage among the children of men. The cream of all the white races did not come to this continent to reap and sow and eat and waste, smoke in its shirt sleeves and a rocking chair and let the great world from which its fathers came go hang. It did not come here for sluggish ease. It came here for liberty and to make the new beginning of a greater civilization upon our globe. The years of America's growth and training are coming to an end. The phase of world action has begun. All America is too smaller world for the American people. The world of their interest now is the whole round world. I have no doubt of the heart and enterprise of America if America understands. But does America understand the scale and urgency of the present situation? Is she prepared to act now? This decadence of Europe is urgent, urgent! So far this Washington conference has not touched more than the outer threads of the writhing international tangle that has to be dealt with if European civilization is to be saved. So far these economic and financial troubles which are already at a crisis of disaster in Europe have been treated as though they did not exist. But they are the very most the Atlantic, and with America, the rich creditor of all Europe and the holder of most of the gold in the world, lying enormous possibilities of salvation the political situation becomes more and more subordinated to the economic. If America is willing, America is able to reinstate Europe and turn back the decline and she is in so strong a position that she can make the effectual permanent disarmament of Europe in the primary condition of her assistance. If she have the clearness of mind to set aside the eloquent apologetics of that one power that is still militant, adventurous and malignant among the ruins, she can oblige the remnant of Europe to get together and settle differences by the sheer strength of her financial controls. She can demand a league to enforce peace and she can enforce it. Will she do that now that this occasion pass from her? Never to return. End of Part 16 Part 17 of Washington and Riddle of Peace by H. G. Wells This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Ebtide at Washington Washington, November 28 The League of Nations was the first American initiative toward an organized world peace. Its beginning, the world-wide enthusiasm evoked by its early promise, its struggle to exist, its abandonment by America, its blunders and omissions and the useful, incomplete body that now represents it at Geneva are the material of an immense conflicting literature. For a time, at least, the League is in the background. It has not kept hold of the popular imagination of the world. I will not touch here upon the mistakes and disputes, the possible arrogance, the possible jealousies, the inadvisable compromises, the unnecessary concessions that made the League a lesser thing than it promised to be. I will not discuss why so entirely American a project into which many nations came mainly to please America failed to retain the official support of the American government. The historian, or the novelist, may write, but not the journalist. The fact remains that the project was a project noble and hopeful in its beginnings, a very great thing, indeed, in human history, a dawn in the darkness of international conflict and competition, an adventure which threw a halo of greatness about the nation that produced it and about that splendid and yet so humanly limited man who has been chiefly identified by its greatness and its partial failure. It was, I insist, very largely an American idea, and only America, because of her freedom from the complex and bitter-spirited traditions of the European foreign offices, could have brought such a proposal into the arena of practical politics. The American nation is exceptionally free from ancient traditions of empire, ascendancy, expansion, glory, and the like. Haunted by a dream, an obstinate recurring dream of a whole world organized for peace, it comes back to that with a notable persistence. The League of Nations stands now, as it were, on the shelf, an experiment not wholly satisfactory, not wholly a failure, destined for searching reconsideration at no distant date. Meanwhile, the American mind with much freshness and boldness has produced this second experiment in a widely different direction, the first Washington Conference for the Limitation of Armaments. The League of Nations was too definite and cramped in its constitution, too wide in its powers. It was a premature super-state. One standard objection, and a very reasonable one, was that America might be outvoted by quite minor powers and be obliged to undertake for which it had no taste. The second experiment, therefore, has been tried, very properly, with the loosest of constitutions and the most severely defined and limited of aims. We are beginning to see that it, too, is an experiment, likely to be successful within its limits, but again, not wholly satisfactory. Instead of a world constitution, we have had a world conversation. That conversation has passed from the open sessions of the conference, to the two committees of five, upon the limitation of land and sea armaments and the Pacific Committee of Nine. In all these committees there are wide fluctuations of thought and temper. There are daily communications to the press from this committee or that, from this delegation or that, from a score of propagandas. It is really not worth the while of the ordinary citizen to follow these squabbles in flights and recriminations and excitements. Certain broad principles have been established. The ordinary citizen will be advised to hold firmly to these and see that he gets them carried through. And now there has been a decided ebb in the high spirit of the conference. These disputes about details have produced a considerable amount of fatigue. Attention is fatigued and the exploit of Monsieur Blan has for a time shattered and confused the general mentality. The American public was in a state of pure and simple enthusiasm for peace and disarmament and quite unprepared for the exploit of Monsieur Brion. Like all serious shocks it did not at first produce its full result. The mood was so amiable here so eager for cheering an emotional human brotherhood that when France, in the person Monsieur Brion, snapped her fingers at the mere idea of disarmament and quoted a twenty year old passage from a dead German field marshal to justify a vast army and an aggressive naval program in the face of an exhausted Europe, there was a touching disposition on the part of a considerable section of the American press to greet this display as in some way conducive to our millennial efforts. Only a few of us called a dismayed right away and declined to pretend that the irony and the restrained indignation of Mr. Balfour and Seigneur Chanzer were endorsements of Monsieur Brion's stupendous claim that France with her submarines and Senegalese might do as she pleased in Europe. The facts that the caustic and restrained utterances of these gentlemen could be so construed and that the London Daily Mail to break and mutilate my comments on the French attitude demonstrate beyond doubt the need there was for the utmost outspokenness in this matter. But the situation is now better realized. The air is already clearer for the outburst. France, we realize has to stop bullying Germany and threatening Italy. Europe can only be saved by the honest and unreserved cooperation of Italy, France and Britain for mutual aid and reassurance. The repercussions of the Franco-British class was immediately evident upon the other issues of the conference. The practical refusal of France to join in the generous renunciations of America and Britain the feeling of insecurity created in Western Europe weakened Britain in her ability to work with America on the Pacific for a secure China and for restraint upon the possible outcome of Japan. Britain cannot do that with a hostile neighbor behind her and an uncertain America at her side and the prospects of a free China and for an effective limitation of the Japanese naval strength were greatly imperiled. Japanese demands stiffened. Ten to six said America ten to seven answered Japan. The effect upon what I might call the Washington state of mind was depressing. The easy onrush of the opening days was checked. Here was hard work ahead, complications, the traditions and mental habits of two great European peoples were in conflict and had somewhat to be adjusted if we were to get on. The Anglo-French entente we discovered was in a very unsatisfactory state. It had suddenly to be sent to the wash and the washing had to be done in public and this happened in a phase of lassitude. In the ebb of the great enthusiasm all sorts of buried rocks and shoals became apparent again. Party politics reappeared and remained showing. I am an innocent child in American politics. I know that I make my artless remarks upon these things at considerable peril. But I gather from the self-betrails of one or two influential people that things are somewhat in this frame. The Democrats feel that they so far have been almost supernaturally good about the conference. They haven't said a word by way of criticism. They have hailed and helped and smiled and cheered. Still, if things should so turn out that a kind of insufficiency should appear and if people's minds should revert their upon toward the Democratic League of Nations idea, so much under a cloud at present it would be rather more than human not to feel a faint gleam of pleasure and, perhaps even, to give the gentlest of pushes to the process of disillusionment. And on the other hand there betrays itself now and then a slight nervous eagerness on the part of loyal rather than good Republicans to call anything that happens a success and to become indignant when, as in the case of the brion oration a spade is called a spade. And that childish indignified and dwindling tendency of certain American types to regard all foreign powers in general and Britain in particular as forever engaged in diabolical machinations against the peace and purity of American life is also increasingly evident. There is an open if incoherent press campaign against disarmament, against the British, against foreigners generally, against any troublesome thing you like. These are ebb tide phenomena. These are the limitations of our poor humanity under fatigue. Nonetheless matters have to be thrashed out and will be thrashed out. As I said in the beginning, it is hard to keep hold. And so it was high time that the president who embodies so much of the simplicity and strength of that real America in which I am a profound and obstinate believer should come back into the limelight from which he receded after delivering his great speech and leaving the chair on the opening day of the conference. In the indirect way customary with presidents here he has been making some very important pronouncements. My friend Mr. Michelson some days ago published a sketch of very important proposals that had already received wide support in the informal discussions that pervade Washington for partial rescinding of the ally subject to disarmament conditions to be considered by a second conference to be presently assembled. Following on this news the president has been talking for publication of a third experiment in the form of a second Washington conference to take up these issues. And he has also been talking of a third conference to confirm and go on with the disarmament arrangements, a conference at which Germany and the Spanish speaking powers if not Russia are apparently to have a voice. Such a periodic repetition of the conference would presently organize itself for a continuing life and so develop gradually and naturally into the association of nations we are all seeking. These are refreshing promises on these days of ebb. They show that the impulse that began so splendidly two weeks ago is not dead. That the tide rises toward world discussion and world organized peace will flow again presently wider and stronger than its previous flow. And meanwhile these frank discussions of attitude and detail must go on. They cannot be ignored. But at the same time they must not be magnified into incurable quarrels and insurmountable difficulties. They are unavoidable and necessary things but not the big things, the main things. While the tide is out our main projects are stranded in this estuary that leads perhaps to the ocean of peace must needs keel over and look askew. We must scrape our keels, call calyx and wait for the great waters to return. End of Part 17 Part 18 of Washington and the Riddle of Peace by H. G. Wells This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. America and entangling alliances. Washington, November 30 The power of the American impulse toward a world peace is undeniable. It has produced in succession the great dream of a league of nations and now this second great dream of a gradually developing association of nations arising out of a series of such conferences as this one. No other nation could have raised such hopes and no other political system has the freedom of action needed to give these projects the substance and dignity which the initiative of the head of the state involves. But if these projects are to carry through into the world of accomplished realities, if in a lifetime or so this glorious dream of a world peace going on as a world at peace must now inevitably do from achievement to achievement if that dream is to be realized certain peculiarities of the American people and the American situation have at no very distant date to be faced. All such gatherings and conferences as this are haunted by a peculiar foggy ghost called TACT which is constantly seeking to cover up and conceal and obliterate some vitally important but rather troublesome reality in the matter. TACT is apparently a modern survival of the ancient taboo. For example, a pleasant Indian gentleman sits among the British delegates at the conference. TACT demands that no one shall ever ask him or of him what do you conceive will be the place of India in that great world association half a century ahead. Will it still be a British appendix? And TACT becomes hysterical at the slightest whisper of the word Senegalese or any inquiry about the possible uses of the French submarine. And a third question hitherto veiled by TACT under the very thickest wrappings of fog to which, greatly daring, I propose to address myself now is how far is America really prepared to fix and adhere to any wide schemes for the permanent adjustment of the world's affairs that may be arrived at by this conference or its successors? The other day a friend of mine in New York made a profoundly wise remark to me. I have found, she said, that one can have nothing and do nothing without paying for it. If you do well or if you do ill, just the same you have to pay for it. If a mother wants to do her best by her children she must pay for it in giving up personal ambitions, dreams of writing or art throughout the best years of life. If a man wants to do his best in business or politics he must sacrifice dreams of travel and adventure and whatever America does with herself in the next few years she too must be prepared to pay. If she desires isolation, moral exaltation, irresponsibility and self-sufficiency, America for the Americans and never mind the consequences she must be prepared to witness the decline and fall of the white civilization in Europe and the consolidation of a profoundly alien system across the Pacific. If on the other hand she now takes up this task for which she seems so inclined as the leader and helper of white civilization, the task of organizing the permanent piece of the world upon the lines of the system of civilization to which she belongs, then for that nobler role also there is a price to be paid. She has to assume not only the dignity but the responsibilities of leadership. She has not merely to express noble sentiments but to lay hold upon the difficulties and intricacies of the problem before her. She has not merely to criticize but to consider and sympathize and help. Then she has to make decisions and abide by them. When America really makes decisions she abides by them vigorously. The Monroe Doctrine was such a decision. It has saved South America for South Americans. It has saved Europe from a ruinous scramble for the Spanish inheritance. It was the first great feat of Americanism in world politics. The exponents of tact will, I know, be outraged by the reminder that for a long time tacit approval of Britain and the existence of the British fleet provided a support and shield to the Monroe Doctrine and also by the further reminder that the one serious attack upon it was made by Napoleon III during the American Civil War, at which time, I admit, the attitude of Great Britain to the dis United States was also far from impeccable. But help or assailed the Monroe Doctrine held good. The Washington Conference has developed a position with regard to the Pacific that calls for an American decision of equal vigor. It is as plain as daylight that Japanese liberal tendencies can be supported and the aggressive ambitions of Japanese imperialism can be restrained. That China can be saved for the Chinese and eastern Siberia from foreign conquest. Provided America places herself unequivocally side by side with Great Britain and France in framing and maintaining a definite system of guarantees and prohibitions in eastern Asia. The Anglo-Japanese agreement could be ended in favor of such a new peace pact and an enormous step forward toward world peace be made. It would mark an epic in world statecraft. But this means an agreement of the nature of a treaty, a mere presidential declaration which means some later president might set aside or some candid Senate reverse is not enough. If the reader will study the position of Australia and of the British commitments in eastern Asia he will see why it is not enough. Britain is not strong enough to risk being left alone as the chivalrous protector of a weak if renaissance China. She has her own people in Australia to consider. And besides Britain alone as the protector of China after all that has happened in the past it is moral as well as material help in sustaining the new understanding that the British will require. The plain fact of the Pacific situation is that there are only three courses before the world either unchallenged Japanese domination in eastern Asia from now on or a war to prevent it soon or an alliance of America, Britain and Japan with whatever government China may develop and with the other powers concerned though perhaps less urgently concerned an alliance of all these for mutual restraint and mutual protection. And it is an equally plain fact though tact cries hush at the words that the tradition of America for a hundred years a tradition which was sustained in her refusal to come into the League of Nations has been against any such alliance. George Washington's advice to his countrymen to avoid permanent alliances for the balance of power and such like ends and Jefferson's reiterated counsel to his countrymen to avoid entangling alliances have been interpreted too long as injunctions to avoid any alliances whatever entangling or disentangling. The habit of avoiding association in balance of power schemes and the like has broadened out into a general habit of association but alliances which are not aimed at a common enemy but only at a common end were not I submit within the intention of George Washington. At any rate I do not see how the disarmament proposals of Mr. Secretary Hughes can possibly be accepted without a pacific settlement nor how that settlement can be sustained except by some sort of alliance meeting periodically in conference to apply or adapt the settlement to such particular issues as may arise. If America is not prepared to go as far as that then I do not understand the enthusiasm of America for the Washington Conference. I do not understand the mentality that can contemplate world disarmament without at least that much provision for the prevention of future conflicts. And similarly I do not see how any effectual disarmament is possible in Europe or how any dealing with the economic and financial situation there can be possible unless America is prepared to bind itself in an alliance of mutual protection and accommodation with at least France, Germany, Britain and Italy to sustain a similar series of conferences and adjustments. At the back of the French refusal to disarm there is a suppressed demand for a protective alliance. That is an entirely reasonable demand. The form of this alliance that the French have demanded hitherto is an entangling alliance an alliance of America and Britain and France against, at least, Germany and Russia. The necessary alliance to which France and Britain will presently assent and which America will come to recognize as the only way to its peacemaking aims will be against no one. This is an alliance of an entirely beneficial character an alliance not to entangle but to release. The disposition of the European delegations and of the British and foreign writers at Washington to treat the idea of America making treaties of alliance as outside the range of possibility as indeed an idea taboo seems to me a profoundly mistaken one. It is tacked in its extremist form. I have heard talk of the immense inertia of political dogmas held for a hundred years. For immense inertia I would rather write expiring impulse. The policy of non-interference in affairs outside America was an excellent thing, no doubt, for a young republic in the self-protective state. It is a policy entirely unworthy of a republic which has now become the predominant state in the world. End of Part 18