 Part 1 of Washington and the Riddle of Peace. Recording by Lee Smalley. Washington and the Riddle of Peace by H. G. Wells. Introduction These twenty-nine papers do not profess to be a record or description of the Washington Conference. They give merely the impressions and fluctuating ideas of one visitor to that conference. They show the reaction of that gathering upon a mind keenly set upon the idea of an organized world peace. They record phases of enthusiasm, hope, doubt, depression and irritation. They have scarcely been touched, except to correct a word or a phrase here or there. They are dated. In all essentials, they are the articles just as they appeared in the New York world, the Chicago Tribune, and the other American and European papers that first gave them publicity. It is due to the enterprise and driving energy of the New York world, be it noted, that they were ever written at all. But in spite of the daily change and renewal of mood and attitude, inevitable under the circumstances, they do tell a consecutive story. They tell of the growth and elaboration of a conviction of how things can be done, and of how they need to be done, if our civilization is indeed to be rescued from the dangers that encompass it and set again upon the path of progress. They record, and in a very friendly and appreciative spirit, the birth and unfolding of the association of nations idea, the harding idea of world pacification. They note some of the peculiar circumstances of that birth, and they study the chief difficulties on its way to realization. It is, the writer believes, the most practical and hopeful method of attacking this riddle of the Sphinx that has hitherto been proposed. H. G. Wells The immensity of the issue and the triviality of men. Washington, November 7, 1921 The conference, nominally for the limitation of armaments, that now gathers at Washington, may become a cardinal event in the history of mankind. It may mark a turning point in human affairs, or it may go on record as one of the last failures to stave off the disasters and destruction that gather about our race. In August 1914 an age of insecure progress and accumulation came to an end. When at last on the most momentous summer night in history, the long preparations of militarism burst their bounds and the little Belgian village went up in flames. Men said, This is a catastrophe. But they found it hard to anticipate the nature of the catastrophe. They thought for the most part of the wounds and killing and burning of war, and imagined that when at last the war was over we should count our losses and go on again, much as we did before 1914. As well might a little shopkeeper murder his wife in the night and expect to carry on business as usual in the morning. Business as usual. That was the catch word in Britain in 1914. Of all the catch words of the world it carries now the heaviest charge of irony. The catastrophe of 1914 is still going on. It does not end. It increases and spreads. This winter more people will suffer dreadful things and more people will die untimely through the clash of 1914, then suffered and died in the first year of the war. It is true that the social collapse of Russia in 1917, and the exhaustion of food and munitions in Central Europe in 1918, produced a sort of degradation and enfeeblement of the combatant efforts of our race, and that a futile conference at Versailles settled nothing, with an air of settling everything, but there was no more an end to disaster than it would be if a man who was standing up and receiving horrible wounds were to fall down and writhe and bleed in the dust. It would be merely a new phase of disaster. Since 1919 this world has not so much healed its wounds as realized its injuries. Chief among these injuries is the progressive economic breakdown, the magnitude of which we are only beginning to apprehend. The breakdown is a real decay that spreads and spreads. In a time of universal shortage there is an increasing paralysis in production, and there is a paralysis of production because the monetary system of the world which was sustained by the honest cooperation of governments is breaking down. The fluctuations in the real value of money become greater and greater, and they shake and shatter the entire fabric of social cooperation. Our civilization is, materially, a cash and credit system, dependent on men's confidence in the value of money. But now money fails us and cheats us. We work for wages and they give us uncertain paper. No one now dare make contracts ahead. No one can fix up a stable wages agreement. No one knows what $100 or francs or pounds will mean in two years' time. What is the good of saving? What is the good of foresight? Business and employment become impossible. Unless money can be steadied and restored, our economic and social life will go on disintegrating, and it can be restored only by a world effort. But such a world effort, to restore business and prosperity, is only possible between governments sincerely at peace, and because of the failure of Versailles there is no such sincere peace. Everywhere the governments, and notably Japan and France, arm. Amidst the steady disintegration of the present system of things, they prepare for fresh wars, wars that can have only one end, an extension of the famine and social collapse, that have already engulfed Russia to the rest of the world. In Russia, in Austria, in many parts of Germany, this social decay is visible in actual ruins, in broken down railways and such like machinery falling out of use. But even in Western Europe, in France and England, there is a shabbiness, there is a decline visible to anyone with a keen memory. The other day my friend, Mr. Charlie Chaplin, brought his keen observant eyes back to London after an absence of ten years. People are not laughing and careless here as they used to be, he told me. It isn't the London I remember. They are anxious, something hangs over them. Coming as I do from Europe to America, I am amazed at the apparent buoyancy and abundance of New York. The place seems to possess an inexhaustible vitality. But this towering, thundering, congested city, with such a torrent of traffic and such a concourse of people, as I have never seen before, is, after all, the European door of America. It draws this superabundant and astounding life from trade, from a trade whose roots are dying. When one looks at New York, its assurance is amazing. When one reflects, we realize its tremendous peril. It is going on, as London is going on, by accumulated inertia. With the possible exception of London, the position of New York seems to me the most perilous of that of any city in the world. What is to happen to this immense crowd of people if the trade that feeds it ebbs? As assuredly it will ebb, unless the decline of European money and business can be arrested. Unless, that is, the world problem of trade and credit can be grappled with as a world affair. The world's economic life, its civilization, embodied in its great towns, is disintegrating and collapsing through the strains of the modern war threat and of the disunited control of modern affairs. This, in general terms, is the situation of mankind today. This is the situation, the tremendous and crucial situation that President Harding, the head and spokesman of what is now the most powerful and influential state in the world, has called representatives from most of the states in the world to Washington to discuss. Whatever little modifications and limitations the small cunning of diplomatists may impose upon the terms of reference of the conference, the plain common sense of mankind will insist that its essential inquiry is, what are we to do, if anything can possibly be done, to arrest and reverse the slide towards continuing war preparation and war and final social collapse? And you would imagine that this momentous conference would gather in a mood of exalted responsibility, with every conceivable help and every conceivable preparation, to grasp the enormous issues involved. Let us dismiss any such delusion from our minds. Let us face a reality too often ignored in the dignified discussion of such business as this Washington conference, and that is this, that the human mind takes hold of such very big questions as the common peace of the earth and the general security of mankind, with very great reluctance, and that it leaves go with extreme alacrity. We are all naturally trivial creatures. We do not live from year to year, we live from day to day. Our minds naturally take short views and are distracted by little immediate issues. We forget with astonishing facility. And this is as true of the high political persons who will gather at Washington, as it is of any overworked clerk who will read about the conference in a streetcar or on the way home to supper and bed. These big questions affect everybody, and also they are too big for anybody. A great intellectual and moral effect is required if they are to be dealt with in any effectual manner. I find the best illustration of this incurable drift toward triviality in myself. In the world of science the microscope helps the telescope, and the infinitely little illuminates the infinitely great. Let me put myself under the lens. Exhibit one. If any one has reason to focus the whole of his mental being upon this Washington conference, it is I. It is my job to attend to it and to think of it and of nothing else. Whatever I write about it, wise or foolish, will be conspicuously published in a great number of newspapers, and will do much to make or mar my reputation. Intellectually I am convinced of the supreme possibilities of the occasion. It may make or mar mankind. The smallest and the greatest of motives march together, therefore my self-love and my care of mankind, and the occasion touches all my future happiness. If this downward drift toward disorder and war is not arrested, in a few years' time it will certainly catch my sons and probably mutilate or kill them, and my wife and I, instead of spending our declining years in comfort, will be involved in the general wretchedness and possibly perish in some quite miserable fashion, as thousands of just our sort of family have already perished in Austria and Russia. This is indeed the outlook for most of us if these efforts to secure permanent peace, which are now being concentrated at Washington, fail. Here surely are reasons enough, from the most generous to the most selfish, for putting my whole being with the utmost concentration into this business. You might imagine I think nothing but conference. Do nothing but work upon the conference. Well, I find I don't. Before such evils as now advance upon humanity, man's imagination seems scarcely more adequate than that of the park deer I have seen feeding contentedly beside the body of a shot companion. I am, when I recall my behavior in the last few weeks, astonished at my own levity. I have been immensely interested by the voyage across the Atlantic. I have been tremendously amused by the dissertations of a number of fellow travelers upon a little affair of prohibition. I have been looking up old friends and comparing the New York City of today with the New York City of fifteen years ago. I spent an afternoon loitering along Fifth Avenue, childishly pleased by the shops and the crowd. I find myself tempted to evade luncheon, where I shall hear a serious discussion of the Pacific question, because I want to explore the mysteries of a chop suey without outside assistance. Yet no one knows better than I do that this very attractive, glitteringly attractive, thundering, towering city is in the utmost danger. Within a very few years the same chill wind of economic disaster that has wrecked Petersburg and brought death to Vienna and Warsaw may be rusting and tarnishing all this glistening, bristling vitality. In a little while within my lifetime New York City may stand even more gaunt, ruinous, empty, and haunted than that stricken and terrible ruin Petersburg. My mind was inadequate against the confident reality of a warm October afternoon, against bright clothes and endless automobiles, against the universal suggestion that everything would shine on forever. And my mind is something worse than thus inadequate. I find it as deliberately evasive. It tries to run away from the task I have set it. I find my mind, at the slightest pretext, slipping off from this difficult tangle of problems through which the Washington Conference has to make its way. For instance, I have got it into my head that I shall owe it to myself to take a holiday after the Conference and two beautiful words have taken possession of my mind, Florida and the Everglades. A vision of exploration amidst these wonderful sun-soaked swamps haunts me. I consult a guidebook for information about Washington and the procedure of Congress, and I discover myself reading about Miami or Indian River. So it is we are made. A good half of those who read this and who have been pulling themselves together to think about the hard tasks and heavy dangers of international affairs will brighten up at this mention of a holiday in the Everglades, either because they have been there or because they would like to go. They will want to offer experiences and suggestions and recommend hotels and guides. And apart from this triviality of the attention, this pathetic disposition to get as directly as possible to the nearest agreeable thoughts which I am certain every statesman and politician at the Conference shares in some measure with the reader and myself, we are also encumbered, every one of us, with prejudices and preposessions. There is patriotism, the passion that makes us see human affairs as a competitive game instead of a common interest, a game in which our side, by fair means or foul, has to get the better, inordinately, of the rest of mankind. For my own part, though I care very little for the British Empire, which I think a temporary, patched-up thing, I have a passionate pride in being of the breed that produced such men as Shakespeare, Milton, Bacon, Cromwell, Newton, Washington, Darwin, Nelson, and Lincoln. And I love the peculiar humor and kind temper of an English crowd and the soft beauty of an English countryside with a strong, possessive passion. I find it hard to think that other peoples matter quite as much as the English. I want to serve the English and to justify the English. Intellectually, I know better, but no man's intelligence is continually dominant. Fatigue him or surprise him, and habits and emotions take control. And not only that I have this bias which will always tend to make me run crooked in favor of my own people, but also I come to Washington with deep, irrational hostilities. For example, political events have exasperated me with the present Polish government. It is an unhappy thing that Poland should rise from being the unwilling slave of German and Russian reaction to becoming the willing tool of French reaction. But that is no reason why one should drift into a dislike of Poland and all things Polish, and because Poland is so ill-advised as to grab more than she is entitled to, that one should be disposed to give her less than she is entitled to. Yet I do find a drift in that direction. And prejudice soon breaks away into downright quarrelsomeness. It is amusing or distressing, as you will, to find how easily I, as a professional peacemaker, can be tempted into a belligerent attitude. Of course, I say, ruffled by some argument, if Japan chooses to be unreasonable. I make no apologies for this autobiographical tone. It is easier and less contentious to dissect one's self than to set to work on anyone else for anatomical ends. This is exhibit number one. We are all like this. There are no demigods or supermen in our world, superior to such trivialities, limitations, prejudices, and patriotisms. We have all got them, as we have all got livers. Every soul that gathers in Washington will have something of that disposition to get away to the immediately pleasant, will be disposed to take a personal advantage, will have a bias for race and country, will have imperfectly suppressed racial and national animosities, will be mentally hurried and crowded. That mental hurrying and crowding has to be insisted upon. This will be a great time for Washington, no doubt, to have a very gay and exciting time. It becomes the focus of the world's affairs. All sorts of interesting people are heading for Washington, bright-eyed and expectant. There will be lunches, dinners, receptions, and such like social occasions, in great abundance, dramatic and encounters, flirtations, scandals, jealousies, and quarrels. Quiet thought, reconsideration. Will Washington afford any hole or cover for such things? A most distracting time it will be, and it will be extraordinarily difficult to keep its real significance in mind. So let us repeat here its real significance. The Great War has struck a blow at the very foundations of our civilization. It has shattered the monetary system, which is the medium of all our economic life. A rotting down of civilization is spreading now very rapidly, and nothing is being done to arrest it. Production stagnates and dwindles. This can only be restored by the frank collective action of the chief powers of the world. At present the chief powers of the world show no signs of the collective action demanded. They are still obsessed by old-fashioned ideas of national sovereignty and national competition, and though all verge on bankruptcy, they maintain and develop fresh armies and fleets. That is to say, they are in the preparatory stage of another war. So long as this divided and threatening state of affairs continues, there can be no stability, no real general recovery. Shortages will increase, famine will spread, towns, cities, communications will decay. Increasing masses of starving unemployed will resort to more and more desperate and violent protests until they assume a quasi-revolutionary character. Education will ebb, and social security dwindle and fade into anarchy. Civilization, as we know it, will go under, and a new dark age begin. And this fate is not threatening civilization, it is happening to civilization before our eyes. The ship of civilization is not going to sink in five years' time or in fifty years' time. It is sinking now. Russia is under the waterline. She has ceased to produce. She starves. Large areas of Eastern Europe and Asia sink toward the same level. The industrial areas of Germany face a parallel grim decline. The winter will be the worst on record for British labor. The pulse of American business weakens. To face which situation in the world's affairs, this crowd of hastily compiled representatives and their associates, dependents and satellites, now gathers at Washington. They are all, from President Harding down to the rawest stenographer girl, human beings. That is to say, they are all inattentive, moody, trivial, selfish, evasive, patriotic, prejudiced creatures, unable to be intelligently selfish even, for more than a year or so ahead, after the nature of our exhibit number one. Everyone has some sort of blinding personal interest to distort the realities that he has to face. Politicians have to think of their personal prestige and their party associations. Naval and military experts have to think of their careers. One may argue it is as good a gathering as our present circumstances permit. Probably there is some goodwill for all mankind in everyone who comes. Probably not one is altogether blind to the tremendous disaster that towers over us, but all are forgetful. And yet this Washington conference may prove to be the nearest approach the human will and intelligence has yet made to a resolute grapple against fate upon this planet. We cannot make ourselves wiser than we are, but in this phase of universal danger we can at least school ourselves to the resolve to be charitable and frank with one another to the best of our ability to be forgiving debtors willing to retreat from hasty and impossible assumptions, seeking patience in hearing and generosity in action. High aims and personal humility may yet save mankind. End of Part 1 Part 2 of Washington and the Riddle of Peace by H. G. Wells. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Armaments the Futility of Mere Limitation Washington November 8. It would seem that the peculiar circumstances of its meeting demand that the Washington conference should begin with a foregone futility, the discussion of the limitation of armaments and of the restrictions of warfare in certain directions, while nations are still to remain sovereign and free to make war, and while there exists no final and conclusive court of decision for international disputes except warfare. A number of people do really seem to believe that we can go on with all the various states of the earth, still as sovereign and independent of each other, as wild beasts in a jungle, with no common rule and no common law, and yet that we can contrive it that they will agree to make war only in a mild and mitigated fashion, after due notice, and according to an approved set of regulations. Such ideas are quite seriously entertained, and they are futile and dangerous ideas. A committee of the London League of Nations Union, for example, has been debating with the utmost gravity whether the use of poison gas and the sinking of neutral ships to enforce a blockade should be permitted, and whether all modern developments in warfare should not be abolished. The feasibility of preventing secret preparations and the advantages of surprise were also considered. It is as if warfare was a game. It is a little difficult to reason respectfully against that sort of project. One is moved rather to add helpful suggestions in the same vein. As, for example, that no hostilities shall be allowed to begin or continue except in the presence of a League of Nations referee, who shall be marked plainly on the chest and pants with the red cross of Geneva, and who, for the convenience of aircraft, shall carry an open sunshade similarly adorned. He shall be furnished with a powerful whistle, or hand trumpet, audible above the noise of modern artillery, and military operations shall be at once arrested when this whistle is blown. Contravention of the rules laid down by the League of Nations shall be penalized according to the gravity of the offence, with penalties ranging from, let us say, an hour's free bombardment of the offender's position to the entire forces of the enemy being addressed very severely by the referee and ordered off the field. In the event of either combatant winning the war outright by illegitimate means it might further be provided that such combatant should submit to a humiliating peace just as if the war had been lost. Unhappily war is not a game but the grimest of realities, and no power on earth exists to prevent a nation which is fighting for existence against another nation from resorting to any expedient however unfair, cruel and barbarous, to enforce victory or avert disaster. Success justifies every expedient in warfare, and you cannot prevent that being so. A nation, hoping to win and afterward make friends with its enemy or a solicitous of the approval of some powerful neutral, may conceivably refrain from effective but objectionable expedience, but that is a voluntary and strategic restraint. The fact remains that war is an ultimate and illimitable thing. A war that can be controlled is a war that could have been stopped or prevented. If our race can really bar the use of poison gas it can bar the use of any kind of weapon. It is indeed easier to enforce peace altogether than any lesser limitation of war. But it is argued that this much may be true nevertheless, that if the nations of the world will agree beforehand and not to prepare for particular sorts of war, or if they will agree to reduce their military and naval equipment to a minimum, that this will operate powerfully in preventing contraventions and in a phase of popular excitement arresting the rush toward war. The only objection to this admirable proposal is that no power which has desires or rights that can only be satisfied or defended, so far as it knows, by war, will ever enter into such a disarmament agreement in good faith. Of course countries contemplating war and having no serious intention of disarming effectually will enter quite readily into conferences upon disarmament, but they will do so partly because of the excellent propaganda value of such a participation, and mainly because of the chance it gives them of some restriction which will hamper a possible antagonist much more than it will hamper themselves. For instance, Japan would probably be very pleased to reduce her military expenditure to quite small figures if the United States reduced theirs to the same amount, because the cost per head of maintaining soldiers under arms is much less in Japan than in America, and she would be still more ready to restrict naval armament to ships with a radius of action of 2,000 miles or less because that would give her a free hand with China and the Philippines. That sort of haggling was going on between Britain and Germany at the Hague at intervals before the Great War. Neither party believed in the peaceful intentions of the other, nor regarded these negotiations as anything but strategic moves, and as things were in Europe it was difficult to regard them in any other way. No, the limitation of armaments quite as much as the mitigation of warfare is impossible until war has been made impossible, and then the complete extinction of armaments follows without discussion, and war can only be made impossible when the powers of the world have done what the thirteen original states of American Union found they had to do after their independence was won, and that is set up a common law and rule over themselves. Such a project is a monstrously difficult one no doubt, and it flies in the face of great masses of patriotic cant and of natural prejudices and natural suspicion, but it is a thing that can be done. It is the only thing that can be done to avert the destruction of civilization through war and war preparation. Disarmament and the limitation of warfare without such emerging of sovereignty look, at the first glance, easier and more modest proposals, but they suffer from the fatal defect of absolute impracticability. They are things that cannot be made working realities. A world that could effectually disarm would be a world already at one, and disarmament would be of no importance whatever. Given stable international relations, the world would put aside its armaments as naturally as a man takes off his coat in winter on entering a warm house. And, as a previous article has pointed out, wars, preparations for war, and the threat of war, are only the more striking aspect of human disunion at the present time. The smashing up of the world's currency system and the progressive paralysis of industry that follows on that is a much more immediate disaster. That is rushing upon us. This war talk between Japan and America may end as abruptly as the snarling of two dogs overtaken by a flood. There may not be another great war, after all, because both in Japan and America social disruption may come first. Upon financial and economic questions, the powers of the earth must get together very quickly now, or perish. The signs get more imperative every day, and if they get together upon these common issues, then they will have little reason or excuse for not taking up the merely international issues at the same time. There is a curious exaggeration of respect for patriotism and patriotic excesses in all these projects for disarmament and the mitigation of warfare. We have to consider patriotic susceptibilities. That is the stereotype formula of objection to the plain necessity of overriding the present barbaric sovereignty of separate states by a world rule and a world law protecting the common interests of the common people of the world. In practice, these patriotic susceptibilities will often be found to resolve themselves into nothing more formidable than the conceit and self-importance of some foreign office official. In general, they are little more than a snarling suspiciousness of foreign people. Most people are patriotically excitable. It is in our human nature, but that no more excuses this excessive deference to patriotism than it would excuse a complete tolerance of boozing and of filthy vices and drunken and lustful outrages, because we are all more or less susceptible to thirst and desire. And while there is all this deference for the most ramshackle and impromptu of nationalisms, there is a complete disregard of the influence and of the respect due to one of the greatest and most concentrated interests of our modern world, the finance, the science, the experts, the labor, often very specialized and highly skilled, of the armament and munitions and associated trades and industries. So far as I can ascertain, the advocates of what I may call mere disarmament propose to scrap this mass of interests more or less completely, to put its tremendous array of factories, arsenals, dockyards, and so forth, out of action, to obliterate its wide-reaching net of financial relationships, to break up its carefully gathered staffs, and to pour all its labor, its trained engineers and sailors and gunners, and so forth, into the great flood of unemployment into which our civilization is already sinking. And they do not seem to grasp how subtle, various, and effective the resistance of this great complex of capable human beings to any such treatment is likely to be. In my supply of League of Nations literature, I find only two intimations of this real obstacle to the world common wheel. One is a suggestion that there should be no private enterprise in the production of war material at all, and the other that armament concerns shall not own newspapers. As a socialist, I am charmed by the former proposal, which would in effect nationalize, among others, the iron and steel and chemical industries. But as a practical man, I have to confess that the organization of no existing state is yet at the level of efficiency necessary if the transfer is to be a hopeful one. And so far as the newspaper restriction goes, it would surely pass the wit of man to devise rules that would prevent a great banking combination from controlling armament firms on the one hand, while it financed newspapers on the other. Yet the fact remains that this great complex of interests, round and about the armament's interest, is the most real of all the oppositions to a world federation. It supplies substance, direction, and immediate rewards to the frothy emotions of patriotism. It rules by dividing us, and it realizes that its existence in its present form is conditional upon the continuance of our suspicions and divisions. It does not positively want or seek war, but it wants a continuing expectation of and preparation for war. On the other hand, its ruling intelligences must be coming to understand that in the end it cannot escape sharing in the economic and social smashdown to which we are all now sliding so rapidly. It is too high a type of organization to be altogether blind and obdurate. It will not, of course, be represented officially at Washington for what it is, but in the form of pseudo-patriotic, naval, military, and financial experts it will be better represented than any other side of human nature. One of the most interesting things to do at the conference will be to watch its activities. How much can we common men ask for and hope for from this great power? Self-extinction is too much, even if it were desirable, but it is reasonable to demand a deflection of its activities to meet the urgent needs of our present dangers. We do not want the extinction of this great body of business, metallurgical, chemical, engineering, and disciplined activities, but we do want its rapid diversion from all too easily attained destructive ends to creative purposes now. A world peace scheme that does not open out an immediate prospect for the release of financial and engineering energy upon worldwide undertakings is a hopeless peace scheme. Enterprise must out. Were this world one federated state concerned about our common welfare, there would be no overwhelming difficulty in canalizing all this force, now spent upon armament in the direction of improving transport and communications generally, into the making of great bridges, tunnels, and the like, into the rebuilding of our cities upon better lines, into the irrigation and fertilization of the earth's deserts, and so forth. The way to world peace lies not in fighting and destroying the armament interests, but in turning them to world service. But to do such a thing requires a united financial and economic effort. It cannot be done nationally by little groups of patriots, all scheming against one another. It must be big business for world interests, unencumbered by national frontiers, or it is impossible. All these considerations you see converge on the conclusion that there is no solution of the problem of war, no possibility of a world recovery, no possibility of arresting the rapid disintegration of our civilization, except a pox mundi, a federated world control, sufficiently authoritative, to keep any single nation in order, and sufficiently coherent to express a world idea. We need an effective world association of nations, to use President Harding's phrase, or we shall perish. And even in this fantastic dream of mere disarmament, of a world of little independent states, all sovereign, all competing against each other, and all carrying on a mean financial and commercial warfare against each other, to the common impoverishment, all standing in the way of any large modern spirited handling of modern needs, yet all remaining magically disarmed, and never making actual war on each other, even if this dream were possible, it is still utterly detestable, more detestable even, than our present dangers and miseries. For if there are any things in life worse than pain, fear, and destruction, they are boredom, pettiness, and inanity, and such would be the quality of such a world. However much the diplomatists at Washington may seek to ignore the fact, may fence their discussion with narrowly phrased agenda, and rule this, that, and the other, vital aspect outside the scope of the conference, the fact remains that there is no way out, no way of escape for mankind from the monstrous miseries and far more monstrous dangers of the present time, except an organized international cooperation, based upon a frank and bold resolve to turn men's minds from ancient jealousies and animosities to the common aims and the common future of our race. If the Washington Conference cannot rise to the level of that idea, then it were better that the conference never gathered together. End of Part 2 Part 3 of Washington and the Riddle of Peace by H. G. Wells. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Trail of Versailles. Two great powers are silent and absent. Washington, the guidebook say, was planned by Major Pierre-Jean Lafond in imitation of Versailles. If so, it has broken away from his intentions. I know Versailles pretty well, and I have gone about Washington looking vainly for anything more than the remotest resemblance. There is something European about Washington, I admit, an Italianate largeness, as though a Roman design has been given oxygen and limitless space. It is a capital in the expanded Latin style. It has none of the vertical uplift of a real American city. But Versailles! Versailles was the home and embodiment of the old French grand monarchy, and of a foreign policy that sought to dominate, Frenchify, and Versailles' eyes, the world. A visit to Versailles is part of one's world education, a visit to the rather faded, rather pretentious magnificence of its terraces, to that hall of mirrors, all plastered over with little oblongs of looking-glass, which was once considered so wonderful to the stuffy, secretive royal apartments with their convenient back stairs, to the poor foolishness of the Queen's toy village, the Little Trianon. A century and a half ago, the people of France wasted and worn by incessant wars of aggression, weary of a government that was an intolerable burden to them, and a nuisance to all Europe, went to Versailles in a passion, and dragged French policy out of Versailles for a time. Unhappily it went back there. In 1871, when Germany struck down the tawdry imperialism of Napoleon III, who was also for setting up emperors in the New World, the Germans had the excessive bad taste to proclaim a new German empire in the hall of mirrors, so that Versailles became more than ever the symbol of the age-long, dreary, pitiful quarrel of the French and Germans for the inheritance of the empire that has gone on ever since the death of Charlemagne. There the glory of France had shown. There the glory of France had been eclipsed. I visited Versailles one autumnal day in 1912, and it was then a rather moldy, disheartened, empty, picturesque show-place, pervaded by memories of flounces, furbillows, wigs, and red heels, and also by the stronger, less pleasant flavor of that later Prussian triumph. It was surely the least propitious place in the whole world for the making of a world-piece in 1919. It was inevitable that there the Rhine frontier should loom larger than all Asia, and that the German people should be kept waiting outside to learn what vindictive punishment victorious France designed for them. The peace of Versailles was not a settlement of the world, it was the crowning of the French revanche, and since Russia had always been below the horizon of Versailles it was as inevitable that the Russian people, who had saved France from utter defeat in 1914, who had given far more dead to the war than France and America put together, and who had collapsed at last, utterly exhausted by their stupendous war efforts, should be considered merely as the defaulting debtors of France. Their government had incurred vast liabilities, chiefly in preparation for this very war, which had restored France to her former glorious ascendancy over Germany. And now a new, ungracious government in Russia, not only declared it could not pay up, but refused to pretend that it had ever meant to perform this impossible feat. There could be no dealing with such a government. The German people and the Russian people alike had no voice at Versailles, and the affairs of the world were settled with a majestic disregard of these outcast and fallen powers. They were settled so magnificently and badly that now the Washington Conference, whatever limitations it may propose to set upon itself, has in effect to review and, if it can, mend or replace that appalling settlement. The Washington Conference has practically to revise the verdicts of Versailles in a fresher air and with a wider outlook. I do not know how near future historians may come to saying that the Washington Conference was planned in imitation of that Versailles Conference, but it certainly does start out with one most unfortunate resemblance. There seems to be the same tacit assumption that it is possible to come to some permanent settlement of the world's affairs with no representation of either the German or the Russian people at the Conference. The Japanese, the Italians, the French, the Americans and the British, assisted by modest suggestions from such small sections of humanity as China and Spanish America, are sitting down to arrangements that will amount practically to a settlement of the world's affairs, and they are doing so without consulting these two great peoples, and quite without their consent and assistance. This surely runs counter to the fundamental principles of both American and British political life, that is to say, the principle of government with the consent of the governed, and it is indeed an altogether deplorable intention. In some form these two great peoples will have to be associated with any permanent settlement, and it will be much more difficult to secure their assent to any arrangement arrived at without even their formal cooperation. It is necessary to remind ourselves of certain elementary facts about Germany and Russia and their position in the world today. They are facts within the knowledge of all, and yet they seem to be astonishingly forgotten in very much of the discussion of the Washington Conference. First, let us recall certain points about Germany. The German people occupy the most central position in Europe. They exceed in numbers any other European people except the Russians. Their educational level has been as high or higher than any other people in the world. They are, as a people, honest, industrious, and intelligent. Upon their social and political well-being and economic prosperity, the prosperity of Britain, Scandinavia, Russia, Italy, and, in a lesser degree, France, depends. It is impossible to destroy such a people. It is impossible to wipe them off the map. But it is possible to ruin them economically and socially. And if Germany is ruined, most of Europe is ruined. Germany has been overthrown in a great war, and it will be well to recall here certain elementary facts about that war. Under a particularly aggressive and offensive imperialism system, the Germans were plunged into conflict with most of the rest of the civilized world. But it was repeatedly declared by the British and by the Americans, if not by others of the combatants, that they fought not against the German people, but against this German imperialism. The British war propaganda in particular did its utmost to saturate Germany with that assurance, and to hold out the promise of generous treatment and a complete restoration of friendship, provided there was a German renunciation of imperialism and militarism. Germany, exhausted and beaten, surrendered in 1918 upon the strength of these promises, and upon the similar promises implied in President Wilson's Fourteen Points. The declared ends of the war had been achieved, the Kaiser bolted, and Germany repented of him publicly and unequivocally. But the conference at Versailles treated these promises that had been made to Germany as mere scraps of paper. The peace imposed upon the young German Republic was a punitive peace, exactly as punitive as though there were still a Kaiser in Berlin. It was a vindictive reversal of the Franco-German Treaty of 1871, without a shred of recognition or tolerance for the chastened Germany that faced her conquerors. The Germans were dealt with as a race of moral monsters, though no one in his senses really believes they are very different man for man from English, French or American people. Every German was held to be individually responsible for the war, though every Frenchman, Englishman and American knows that when one's country fights one has to fight, and it is quite natural to fight for it whether it is in the right or not, and a sustained attack of oppressive occupations, dismemberment and impossible demands was begun and still goes on upon the shattered German civilization, which is at least as vitally necessary to the world as the French. The British and French Nationalist Press openly confess that they do not intend to give Germany a chance of recovery. The European Allies have now been kicking the prostrate body of Germany for three years, and a little while they will be kicking a dead body, and since they are linked geographically to their victim almost as closely as the Siamese twins were linked together, they will share that victim's decay. It is high time that this barbaric insanity, this prolongation of the combat after surrender, should cease, and that the best minds and wills of Germany and the very reasonable republican government she has set up for herself should be called into consultation. I could wish that Washington could so far rise above Versailles as presently to make that invitation. Sooner or later it will have to be made if the peace of the world is to be secured. The absence of Russia from the Washington Conference is an even graver weakness. People seem to have forgotten altogether how the Russians bore the brunt of the opening years of the Great War. Their rapid offensive in 1914 saved Paris, and saved the little British army from a disastrous retreat to the sea. The debt of gratitude Britain and France owe to Russia's unknown warrior, that poor unhonored hero and martyr is incalculable. But for Russia, Germany would probably have won the war outright before the end of 1916. It was the blood and suffering of the Russian people saved victory for the Allies. Those incredible soldiers fought often without artillery support, without rifle ammunition, without boots or food, under conditions almost inconceivable to the well-supplied French and British and Americans of the Western Front, and their tale of killed and wounded exceeds enormously that of any other combatant. In 1917 Russia collapsed. She was bled white, and she remained collapsed in spite of the sedulous kicking of her allies to rouse her to further efforts. The intolerable Rasputin-Zarism went down in the disaster. After a phase of extreme disorder, and very largely because of the British hesitation to support the Kerensky Government by bold naval action in the Baltic, the hard, tyrannous Doctrinaire Government of the Bolsheviki took control. That Government is a bad Government. Its faults are indeed of a different order, but on the whole I will admit it is almost as bad as the former Tsarist Government it superseded. Yet let us remember certain plain facts about it. It has remained in power to this day because it is a Russian-speaking Government standing for a whole and undivided Russia, and the Russian people support it because it has defended Russia against the subsidized raiders of France and Britain, against the Poles and against the Estonians and against the Japanese and against every sort of outside interference with their prostrate country. They prefer fanatics to foreigners and Bolsheviks to brigands. Frenchmen or Americans in the same horrible position would probably make the same choice. The Entente, the Poles, a miscellany of adventurers have given the Russians no breathing time to deal with their own Government in their own fashion. And now, caught by the misadventure of an unprecedented drought, millions of Russians in the regions disorganized by Kolchak, Dinikini, and Wrangel are starving to death, while Canada and America have wheat and corn to burn. There is even food to spare in some parts of Russia, but no adequate means of getting it to the starving provinces without outside assistance. And the Western world is letting these Russian millions starve because of the argumentative obstinacy of the Moscow Government, which hesitated for a time to acknowledge debts incurred by Russia, very largely for the military preparations which saved Europe, debts it is now inconceivable that Russia can ever under any circumstances pay, because of the pitiless resentment of the creditors of Russia. Yet the suffering of Russia cannot help the Western moneylender, they merely give him his revenge. But even if some millions of Russian men, women, and children die this winter and are added to the count of those who have already perished through the war, the war that saved Paris from Berlin, it does not follow that Russia will die. Peoples are not killed in this fashion. These distresses will not alter the fact that the Russians are the most numerous people in Europe, and a people of unexampled gifts and tenacity. Their magnificent resistance to outside interference, since 1914, and their toleration of the Bolshevik Government, when division would have been as fatal to them as it has been in China, is a proof of their solidarity and instinctive political wisdom. There are as many Russians as there are people in the United States of America, and they occupy an area as great and far richer in undeveloped resources. In spite of the monstrous czarist government, which treated elementary education as an offense against the state, the prose literature, the drama, the music, the pictorial art, even the science of the Russians during the last hundred years, all this compares favorably with that of the United States. These Russians are indeed one of the very greatest of people, and they have survived tragic circumstances that might well have destroyed any other race, and Washington, I gather, proposes to settle the peace of Europe, Asia, and the Pacific, without them. There is, I know, a very strong case to excuse Washington from sending an invitation to the existing Russian government. I would be the last person in the world to minimize the difficulties the Bolshevik Government puts in the way of any fair dealings with the Western powers. It is bound by its Communist theory not to recognize them fairly, and to make gestures of preparation for their overthrow. In addition to its general theoretical obduracy, Moscow is also afflicted with a particularly obdurate, pedantic, argumentative, and disastrous foreign minister, Chicharin. But practical necessity knows no theories, and the Bolshevik Government, if only it can save its face, is now extraordinarily anxious for recognition from and dealings with the Western Governments. I do not see why the Western Governments, having regard to the needs of Russia, should try to outdo the Bolsheviks in obstinacy, pedantry, and cruelty, nor why they should not make an honest attempt to get along with the de facto government until it develops naturally into something else. For such a development only a rough working piece is wanted. Given that, and a release from impossible debts, Russia, relieved forever from the black curse of Tsarism, will go right on to become a land of restored cultivation, of resuscitated mines and presently of reawakened towns, the democratic land of common people, more like the free, poor, farming, prospecting, and developing United States of 1840, than anything else in history. So long as Russia suffers the Bolshevik Government, I think Washington ought to suffer it. But perhaps, in that opinion, I go beyond the possibilities of the case. Then I suggest that at least Washington ought to set up some well-informed lawyer, some bureau, to play the part of the Russian Advocate at the conference. If Russia is not to be allowed to vote in the decision of things, let her at least be heard. Consider what the future must hold for these great people, and mark the amazing folly of the insults and evils we heap upon their land. Look it up in an atlas or encyclopedia. Measure what it is we ignore. In a score of years Russia may be a renaissance land as vigorous as the United States in 1840. In a century she may be as great and powerful and civilized as any state on earth. For such powers as France and Britain and Japan to sit in counsel upon the fate of the world without her is as if in the dark years of 1863 and 1864 they had sat in counsel upon the future of America without the United States. Indeed, something of the sort did happen in those dark years. France, I recall, sent troops and munitions into Mexico, as recently she has sent them into Poland and South Russia. And somewhere in the world there is a grave, the grave of a white hope, a reactionary puppet who was to have restored Mexico to the European system, the friend of the Emperor Napoleon III, the Emperor Maximilian. When I was a small boy learning the rudiments of geography, the earth was presented to me in two hemispheres, the old world and the new. Not once or twice only has America vindicated her right to that title. Will Washington confirm that great tradition and open a way of escape now from the tangled narrowness of Versailles? Are Germany and Russia to perish amid the incurable quarrels of the old world, or find their salvation in the new? End of Part 3. Part 4 of Washington and the Riddle of Peace by H. G. Wells. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Unknown Soldier of the Great War. Washington, November 11. Britain, France, Italy, and now the people of the United States, have honored and buried the bodies of certain unknown soldiers, each according to their national traditions and circumstances. Canada, I hear, is to follow suit. So the world expresses its sense that in the Great War the only hero was the common man. Poor Hans and poor Ivan lie rotting yet under the soil of a hundred battlefields, bones and decay, rags of soiled uniform and fragments of accoutrements, still waiting for monuments and speeches. Yet they too were mother's sons, kept step, obeyed orders, when singing into battle, and knew the strange intoxication of soldierly fellowship and the sense of devotion to something much greater than themselves. In Arlington Cemetery, soldiers of the Confederate South lie honored equally with the Federal dead, the right or wrong of their cause altogether forgotten, and only their sacrifice remembered. A time will come when we shall cease to visit the crimes and blunders and misfortunes of their governments, upon the common soldiers and poor folk of Germany and Russia, when our bitterness will die out, and we shall mourn them as we mourn our own, as souls who gave their lives and suffered greatly in one universal misfortune. A time will come when these vast personifications of conflict, the unknown British soldier, the unknown American soldier, the unknown French soldier, etc., will merge into the thought of a still greater personality, the embodiment of twenty million separate bodies and of many million broken lives, the unknown soldier of the great war. It would be possible, I suppose, to work out many things concerning him. We could probably find out his age and his height and his weight, and such like particulars very nearly. We could average figures and estimates that would fix such matters within a very narrow range of uncertainty. In race and complexion, I suppose he would be mainly North European. North Russian, German, Frankish, North Italian, British and American elements would all have the same trend toward a tallish, fairish, possibly blue-eyed type. But also there would be a strong Mediterranean streak in him, Indian and Turkish elements, a fraction of Mongolian, and an infusion of African blood, brought in not only through the American colored troops, but by the free use by the French of their Senegalese. None of these factors would be strong enough to prevent his being mainly northern and much the same mixture altogether as the American citizen of 1950 is likely to be. He would be a white man with a touch of Asian and a touch of color. And he would be young, I should guess about twenty-one or twenty-two, still boyish, probably unmarried rather than married, with a father and mother alive and with the memories and imaginations of the home he was born in, still fresh and vivid in his mind when he died. We could even, I suppose, figure in general terms how he died. He was struck in daylight amid the strange noises and confusion of a modern battlefield, by something out of the unknown, bullet, shell fragment or the like. At the moment he had been just a little scared, everyone is a little scared on a battlefield, but much more excited than scared and trying hard to remember his training and do his job properly. When he was hit he was not so much hurt at first as astonished. I should guess that the first sensation of a man hard hit on a battlefield is not so much pain as an immense chagrin. I suppose it would be possible to go on and work out how long it was before he died after he was hit, how long he suffered and wondered, how long he lay before his ghost fell in with that immense still muster in the shades, those millions of his kind who had no longer country to serve nor years of life before them, who had been cut off as he had been cut off suddenly from sights and sounds and hopes and passions, but rather let us think of the motives and feelings that had brought him in so gallant and cheerful a frame of mind to this complete sacrifice. What did the unknown soldier of the Great War think he was doing when he died? What did we, we people who got him into the Great War and who are still in possession of this world of his, what did we persuade him to think he was doing and what is the obligation we have incurred to him to atone for his death, for the life and sunlight he will know no more? He was still too young a man to have his motives very clear. To conceive what moved him and what he desired is a difficult and disputable task. M. George Noblemare, at a recent meeting of the League of Nations Assembly, declared that he had heard French lads whisper, Vive la France, and die. He suggested that German boys may have died saying, Colonel, say to my mother, Vive la Le Main, possibly. But the French are trained harder in patriotism than any other people. I doubt it was the common mood. It was certainly not the common mood among the British. I cannot imagine many English boys using their last breath to say, Rule Britannia, or King George for Merry England. Some of our young men swore out of vexation and fretted. Some, and it was not always the youngest, became childish again, and cried touchingly for their mothers. Many maintained the ironical flippancy of our people to the end. Many died in the vein of a young minor from Durham, with whom I talked one morning in the trenches near Martin-Puisch, trenches which had been badly strafed overnight. War, he said, was a beastly job, but we've got to clean this up. That is the spirit of the lifeboat man, or fireman. That is the great spirit. I believe that was far nearer to the true mind of the unknown soldier than any tinpot vivaing of any flag nation or empire, whatever. I believe that when we generalize the motives that took the youth who died in the Great War out of the light of life, and took him out at precisely the age when life is most desirable, we shall find that the dominating purpose was certainly no narrow devotion to the glory or expansion of any particular country, but a wide-spirited hostility to wrong and oppression. That is clearly shown by the nature of the appeals that were made in every country to sustain the spirit of its soldiers. If national glory and patriotism had been the ruling motive of these young men, then manifestly their propaganda would have concerned themselves, mainly with national honor and flag idolatry. But they did not do so. Nowadays, flags fly better on parades and stoop fronts than on battlefields. The war propagandas dwelt steadily and insistently upon the wickedness and unrighteousness of the enemy, upon the dangers of being overwhelmed by foreign tyranny, and particularly upon the fact that the enemy had planned and made the war. These boys fought best on that, everywhere. So far as the common men in every belligerent country went, therefore, the Great War was a war against wrong, against force, against war itself. Whatever it was in the thoughts of the diplomatists, it was that in the minds of the boys who died. In the minds of these young and generous millions who are personified in the unknown soldier of the Great War, in the minds of the Germans and Russians who fought so stoutly, quite as much as the Americans, British, French, or Italians, the war was a war to end war. And that marks our obligation. Every speech that is made beside the graves of these unknown soldiers, who lie now in the comradeship of youthful death, every speech which exalts patriotism above peace, which hints at reparations and revenges, which cries for mean alliances to sustain the traditions of the conflict, which exalts national security over the common welfare, which wags the glorious flag of this nation or that, in the face of the universal courage and tragedy of mankind, is an insult and an outrage upon the dead youth who lies below. He sought justice and law in the world as he conceived these things, and whoever approaches his resting place unprepared to serve the establishment of a world law and world justice, breathing the vulgar camps and catchwords of a patriotism outworn and of conflicts that he died to end, commits a monstrous sacrilege, and sins against all mankind. November 11 I am writing this just after my return from the funeral in the National Cemetery of the American Unknown Soldier at Arlington, a very stately and moving ceremony under the bright blue sky and the cold, keen air of a Virginia November day. The body had been lying in state at the Capitol, and it was carried through Washington to the cemetery at the head of a great procession in which the Supreme Court, the Cabinet, senators, members of the House of Representatives, war veterans, and a multitude of societies marched on foot, a march of nearly two hours and a half duration. Much of this gathering was of the substance of all such processions, but one or two of the contingents were rich with association and suggestion. There were fifty or sixty, I should guess, very old men, bent, white-headed, one with a conspicuous long white beard, veterans of a civil war that was fought out to an end before I was born. They came close to a contingent of men who had been specially decorated in the Great War, erect and eager, still on the better side of the prime of life. These older men had fought in a great fight against a division, a separation that today, thanks to their sacrifice, has become inconceivable. They had fought to seal the Federal Union of what were else warring states. The young men who marched before them had fought in a war upon the greater stage of the whole world. Someday the tale of those abundant heroes will have shrunken to the dimensions of that little band of pathetic and glorious old men. Will they live to as complete an assurance that their cause also has been one forever, the newer veterans of the greater Union that has yet to come? There were many points of contrast between the ceremony I have just witnessed in the graceful marble amphitheater in the beautiful Virginia open country and the burials that have taken place in the very hearts of London, Paris and Rome. In the face of a common identity of idea they mark an essential difference in the nature of the occasion. Thursday I went to see the people who were filing past the flag-covered coffin. It was a crowd fairly representative, I thought, of the Washington population as one sees it on the streets. All classes were represented, but chiefly it consisted of that well-dressed, healthy-looking middle-class sort of people who predominate in the streets of most American cities. They came to honor a national hero, the personification of American courage and loyalty. Few, I think, were actual mourners of a dead soldier. The couples and groups of people I saw hurrying up the sloping paths to the entrance of the capital, filing up the steps to the rotunda or dispersing on the other side, were characterized by a sort of bright eagerness and approval. They contrasted very strongly with my memory of the great column of still and mournful people under the dark London sky, eight deep, stretching all up Whitehall and down Northumberland Avenue, and along the embankment for a great distance, the column which moved on slowly, step by step, and which faded away at night to be replaced by fresh mourners on the morrow, to do honor to the unknown warrior in London. That crowd, with its wreaths and flowers, represented the families, the lovers, the sisters and friends of perhaps a quarter of a million of dead men from London and the south and center of England. The massed, mute tragedy of its loss was overwhelming. It reduced all the ceremony that had gathered it to comparative unimportance. But the remote distances of America forbade any such concentration of sorrow. There may have been the relations and friends of perhaps a thousand men upon the scene at Arlington. The loss to the District of Columbia itself was less than six hundred killed. A group of wounded men in the amphitheater struck the most intimate note. The rest of the gathering at Arlington shared a less personal grief. They were sympathizers rather than sufferers. Because of this emotional difference, the Arlington ceremony presented itself primarily as a ceremony. For most there it was a holiday, a fine and noble holiday, but a holiday. By it America did not so much mourn the tragedy of war as seek to arouse itself to that tragedy. Everywhere the stars and stripes, the most decorative and exhilarating of national flags, waved and fluttered, and an irresistible expression of America's private life and buoyant well-being, mingled in the proceedings. For most of the gathering that coffin under the great flag held nothing they had ever touched personally. It was not America's lost treasure of youth, but rather a warning of the fate that may yet overtake the youth of America if war is not to end. At Arlington, throughout the length and breadth of America, when for two minutes at midday all work and movement stopped and America stood still, an innumerable host of fathers and mothers and wives and friends could whisper thanks to God in their hearts that their sons and their beloved remained alive. And I suppose it is largely because America is still so much less war-stricken than any of the other belligerents of the great war that so much more powerful a sense of will was apparent in all these proceedings. The burial of the unknown soldier in America was not a thing in itself as it was in London and Paris or Rome. It was a solemn prelude to action, the action of the great conference, which is to seek peace and enduring peace for all mankind. This note was struck even in the chaplain's opening invocation. He said, Facing the events of the morrow, when from the workbench of the world there will be taken an unusual task, we ask that thou wilt accord exceptional judgment, foresight and tactfulness of approach, to those who seek to bring about a better understanding among men and nations to the end that discord, which provokes war, may disappear and that there may be world tranquillity, and the very fine oration of President Harding following closely upon this line. I saw the President for the first time at Arlington. He is a very big, fine-looking man, and his voice is a wonderful instrument. He spoke slowly and very distinctly, his gestures admirably controlled. He is, how can I say it, more statuesque than any of the American presidents of recent times, but without a trace in his movements or appearance of posturing or vanity. Men say he is a sincerely modest man, determined to do the best that is in him, and at once appalled and inspired by the world's situation in which he finds himself among the most prominent figures. Not only in its main circumstances, but in many of its incidences the position of the President of the United States appalling. The President stood in the apse to the right of the unknown soldier, and to the other side of him was a black box upon a stand, a box perhaps two feet by one. This was the receiver that was to carry his voice, intensely amplified, to still greater gatherings in New York, in San Francisco, and over the whole United States. Never was human utterance so magnified. Every syllable, every slip was recorded. He slipped once at an antithesis and was obliged to repeat. From the Atlantic to the Pacific that slip was noted. I have heard much detraction of the President, both before I came to America, and since I have been here. But here I have found also a growing and spreading belief in him. And this address of his, rhetorical though it was, in a simple and popular American way, was nevertheless a very dignified address, and one inspired by a spirit that is undeniably great. Here is a fine saying. His patriotism was none less if he craved more than triumph of country. Rather, it was greater if he hoped for a victory for all humankind. Indeed, I revere that citizen whose confidence in the righteousness of his country inspired belief that its triumph is the victory of humanity. This American soldier went forth to battle with no hatred for any people in the world, but hating war and hating the purpose of every war for conquest. We are to seek the rule under which reason and righteousness shall prevail. There is to be the commanding voice of a conscious civilization against armed warfare, a new and lasting era of peace on earth. And with a fine instinct for effect, the President ended his oration with the Lord's Prayer, with its appeal for one universal law for mankind. Thy kingdom come on earth. Every other gossip tells you that President Harding comes from Main Street and repeats the story of Mrs. Harding saying, We're just folk. If President Harding is a fair sample of Main Street, Sinclair Lewis has not told us the full story, and Main Street is destined to save the world. It was difficult at first to imagine the conference as anything more than an admirably well managed social occasion. Continental Hall is a quite charming building, not too big for intimacy, not too small for a sufficient gathering of people. The chief members of the delegations had still to assemble. They were to sit at the green bays covered tables in the body of the hall. About this central arena sat the mass detaches, and under the galleries the press representatives. In the boxes clustered the ladies of the diplomatic world. Members of the House of Representatives, the Senators, their friends, and a sprinkling of privileged people occupied the big galleries above. There was a great chatter of conversation when I entered. Everybody was greeting friends, flitting from group to group. It was one of those gatherings where everybody seemed to know everybody. Socially it was extraordinarily like a very smart first night in a prominent London theatre. Last time I came to America, I found myself saying, I brought a silk hat and morning coat, and never wore them once. Now everybody seems to be wearing a morning coat and a silk hat. It was the sort of occasion one dresses for, and that was the tone of the conversation. It was difficult to believe that this gathering could be the beginning of anything of supreme historical importance. Came a slight hush in the conversation. The delegates appeared, all with tremendously familiar faces taken out of the illustrated papers. They disposed themselves in their seats in leisurely fashion. One seat remained vacant for a time, the seat of the President. Then appeared President Harding, and there was a great clapping of hands. It became more and more like a first night. Then a hushing of enthusiasm and silence. And he spoke. It was a fine speech, less ornate and more direct than the Arlington oration, and the galleries above, behaving more and more like a first night audience, interrupted with rounds of applause whenever there were definite allusions to disarmament. He finished and declared the conference open and departed. Mr. Balfour followed, echoing the President's sentiments in a few well-chosen words, and proposing Secretary Hughes for the Chairman of the Conference. The hall became aware of a check in the onward flow of the proceedings. An interpreter got up and repeated Mr. Balfour's speech in French for the benefit of the French delegation. He had made a shorthand note, as Mr. Balfour spoke. This, we learned, was to be the procedure throughout the conference. Every speech, question, and interruption was to be dealt with in this interlinear manner. Fortunately, it was not necessary to do this in the case of the President's address, nor was it necessary in the case of the address of Secretary Hughes, which was now impending because these had already been printed and distributed, and a translation made of them. Their linguistic isolation is likely to prove unfortunate for the French. The Belgian, the Dutch, the Chinese, Japanese, and Portuguese delegations all speak in English, and listen to the English speeches. Consequently, the French are in a position in which they seem to be the most foreign people present. This must be disconcerting to them now. It will be much more disconcerting if, at a later stage, German delegates speaking English should appear upon some extension or side committee of the conference. But I do not see how it can be avoided. The French are a little out of touch in the conference because of this. They must be much more out of touch with the incessant conversation in clubs and at dinner tables and everywhere in Washington, which makes the atmosphere in which the conference is working. This, however, is a note, by the way. Secretary Hughes took the chair and delivered his address. It was a very carefully arranged surprise, and its effect was really dramatic. It jumped the conference abruptly from the fine generalizations that had hitherto engaged it to immediately practical things. Secretary Hughes sketched out what was evidently a carefully worked-out scheme, the most explicit scheme, for the complete cessation of naval armament competition. America wanted at the very outset, he said, to convince the world that she meant business in the conference, and so she had taken this unexpected step of putting immediate practical proposals upon the table. She would scrap completely all the ships she had still under construction, and all her older ships, and she would discontinue all naval construction for 10 years if Britain and Japan would do the same. She proposed that the naval strength of the three powers concerned should remain for 10 years in the ratio of Britain 22, America 18, and Japan 10. In other words, she proposed so to fix things that no two of these three powers can wage a conclusive naval war against each other, but with America and Britain in a position to do so jointly against Japan, and with Japan at a great disadvantage against America, even if she were to risk an inconclusive war with America on the chance of Britain's not coming in. And having unfolded the scheme, Secretary Hughes concluded, We were a little stunned. We had expected the opening meeting to be preliminary, to stick to generalities. After Secretary Hughes had finished, there was a feeling that we wanted to go away and think. But the members of the House of Representatives were enjoying an unwanted sense of being in the gallery, quite irresponsibly in the gallery, with somebody else upon the floor. They burst in upon our statesmen like thoughts below with cries for The atmosphere of Friendly Festival was re-established. Monsieur Briand spoke eloquently, saying nothing whatever about the proposals of Secretary Hughes, and sat down, and his still quite abstract praises of peace were translated into English. Japan shouted the members of the House of Representatives, a theatre gallery now in full cry. Japan spoke in English, and its sentiments were translated into French for the benefit of the foreigners. Japan expressed admirable sentiments and said nothing whatever about the proposals of Secretary Hughes. Thereafter it would have been discourteous not to call for something from Italy, China, Belgium, Holland, and Portugal. They all spoke in English, even Belgium spoke in English, and what they said was translated into French. Nobody said anything whatever about the proposals of Secretary Hughes. The gallery applauded each speech heartily, and the atmosphere of a first night was completely restored. We dispersed to luncheons and tea parties and to talk before we wrote about it. And as we tried to get it into focus in our minds, it became clear that much more than a ceremonial opening of the conference had occurred. Secretary Hughes had made proposals that challenged the whole situation in the Pacific. For if Japan accepts them, I do not see how they could be otherwise than acceptable to the British. It puts Japan to so definite and permanent a disadvantage that it amounts to an abandonment on the part of Japan of the idea of fighting a war on the Pacific except as the last desperate defensive resort under the pressure of an unavoidable attack. And Japan can abandon that idea only if she can see her way clearly without a war to all that she believes to be vitally necessary to her. It is possible to say that Secretary Hughes had narrowed down the work of the conference by this sudden focusing of attention upon naval warfare and Japan. But I do not think that is the case. The challenge he has made cannot be taken up until a number of associated issues are settled. Certainly his proposals have precipitated the work of the conference from the clouds and beautiful generalities to the earth and very concrete realities. You accept these proposals, America says in effect. If not, why not? Japan must accept or reply so and so. So from armaments we shall get to the aims behind armaments. For no battleship is launched except against a specific antagonist and for a specific end and in the matter of aims also the conference will presently have to consider what each power must scrap for the common good and what it may be permitted to keep for its own satisfaction. Since Secretary Hughes made it clear that the conference is to approach the inevitable general discussion of world peace by way of the sea and the Pacific since for a time France and Europe generally will sit somewhat out of the limelight it will be well perhaps if in my next article I discuss a few elementary considerations about Japan. End of part six. Part seven of Washington and the Riddle of Peace by H. G. Wells. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. What is Japan? Washington November 15. Of all the national delegations assembled here in Washington the most acutely scrutinized the most discussed and probably the least understood is the Japanese. The limelight gravitates toward it moved one feels not so much by an extreme respect as by an inordinate curiosity. Of only one other people I write as a spectator from overseas does one feel the same sense of the possibility of dramatically unexpected things and that is the Americans. The Japanese we feel we have not found out and the Americans we feel have not found out themselves. Already the Americans have sprung one great surprise upon the conference. Britain France Italy and the other powers in attendance are comparatively calculable so far as their representation goes but Japan is different. It is not built upon the same lines it follows different laws. I went on Sunday night to the press reception at the Japanese headquarters. The ambassador is a buoyant man of the world speaking excellent English and thoroughly acclimatized to an American press gathering. But many of the Japanese faces about him set my imagination busy putting them back into the voluminous robes and the sashes holding the double swords with which I had first met them long ago in Japanese prints and which would have become them so much better. Admiral Kato spoke in Japanese and Prince Tokugawa in English. They welcomed the Hughes proposals with warm generalities and hopes for peace as we all hope for peace within sufficient particulars. I got no conversation with any Japanese. They were not talking to us. They did not want to talk. It was a reception of hardy politeness and no exchanges. I found myself falling back upon an earlier impression. Some weeks ago I had a very illuminating talk in my garden at home with two Japanese visitors, Mr. Mashiko and Mr. Nagushi, who had come to discuss various educational ideas with me. And they told me things that seemed to me to be fundamentally important in this question. We build up our children, said Mr. Mashiko, upon a diametrically different plan from yours. We turn them the other way round. Obedience and devotion are our leading thoughts. All our sentiment, all our stories and poetry, the traditions of centuries teach loyalty, blind, unquestioning loyalty, of wife to husband, of man to his lord, of everyone to the monarch. The loyalty is religious. So far as political and social questions go, it is fundamental. But your training cultivates independence, free thought, the unsparing criticism of superiors, institutions, relationships. Perhaps it is better in the end and more invigorating, but it seems to us wild and dangerous. We begin to have a sort of public opinion, but it is still diffident and timid. An American and an Englishman, he said, cared for his country because he believed it belonged to him. A Japanese cared for his country because he believed he belonged to it. One could not pass from one habit of mind to the other, he thought, without grave risks and dangers. It is easier to destroy obedience than to create responsibility. I was reminded of that conversation the other day by a remark made by a fellow journalist on the train to Washington. A Chinese will tell you what he thinks, like an American, but a Japanese always feels he is an agent, even if he isn't an accredited one. Now this is very interesting and probably a very fundamental comparison. This difference in spirit will make the Japanese people a very different instrument from the American and English or French people. It will make the Japanese government a different thing from the governments it will be meeting in Washington. A people built up on obedience can be held and wielded as no modern democratic people can be held and wielded. It is different and kind. Unless this point is kept in mind, there are certain to be great and possibly dangerous misunderstandings in the Washington discussions. There have possibly been very dangerous misunderstandings already, of the European powers by the Japanese. The Japanese are likely to think the Atlantic governments are more free to decide than they really are, and what they say is more conclusive than it really is, and the Atlantic peoples are likely to think too much of the appearance of a liberal public opinion in Japan, and to imagine that a Japanese government may be thrown out, and its policy changed much more easily than is the case. But indeed Japan is a government, a military government, holding its people in its hand like a staff or a weapon, while America and France and Britain are people operating the governments, more or less imperfectly. In no relationship is confusion upon this point more probable and more dangerous than between Japan and Britain or France at the present time, and in no connection is there greater need of perfectly plain statement. Seeing that Britain is still a monarchy with many aristocratic forms, it is fatally easy for a Japanese statesman to fall into the belief that the British government is as completely in control, and its officials as able to bind or loose as the Japanese government and officials, and because of this belief to trust to the private assurance and general attitude of personages in high places far more than they are justified in doing. The British democracy is very like the American democracy in its ability to keep watching what is happening overseas. It is preoccupied by domestic questions and things that are near to it. You cannot expect a Wiltshire farmer or Lancashire cotton spinner to keep up day by day with the concession hunting game in Persia or South China. But if that game of concession hunting piles up to sufficiently serious consequences, these democracies are likely to wake up in a manner quite outside the Japanese range of possibilities, and to a large extent the same is true of France. It is the blessed privilege of an irresponsible journalist to say things that no diplomatist could ever say, and upon the relations of Japan, America, and England, there are certain truths that seem to need saying very plainly at the present time. But though I am an irresponsible journalist, it is also to be noted that I am a very English Englishman and that I know the way of thinking of my people. The British people have been sleeping happily upon the belief that war with America is impossible, and for them it is impossible. In this matter the British have a special and extraordinary instinct. They will not fight the United States of America. I will not go into the peculiar feelings that produce this disposition. They are feelings great numbers of Americans do not understand, and have indeed taken great pains not to understand. But to the common British, fighting Americans would have much the same relation to fighting other peoples that cannibalism would have to eating meat. I hear a certain type of American over here, slowly and heavily debating the Hughes proposals on the assumption that there may be a war of America against Britain and Japan. Such an assumption is, if I may be permitted the word, idiotic. As a people, the British have not been thinking very much about the Pacific question. They have been preoccupied by Ireland and their own economic troubles. But if that question presently moves toward a level of intensity, where war is possible, let there be no mistake about it in Japan. The ordinary English will be thinking with the Americans. They will read much the same stuff, because they have the same language, and think in the same way, because they have kindred habits of thought. It will not matter then what assurances and sentiments the Japanese may have had for official personages in Great Britain. For we are dealing here, not with a matter of agreements, but with a kind of moral gravitation. If there is a conflict, the British masses will want to come in on the American side. And if it seems likely to be in the least an inconclusive conflict, they will certainly come in. If the rulers of the Japanese dream that any other combination is possible in the Pacific, they are under as dangerous a delusion as ever lured a great nation to disaster. But there are many signs that if ever the ruling people of Japan entertained this delusion, they are being disillusionized, and that they begin to realize that a war with America in the Pacific will mean a war with America, Britain, and possibly, to judge from the recent astonishing remark by that able writer Pertinaxe, France. France may use her influence at Washington on behalf of Japan in certain matters, but that is all Japan will get from France. The Japanese, I believe, now fully realize this, and the trend of recent Japanese utterances is all in the direction of discussion and the disavowal of any belligerent dreams. Yet Japan continues to arm, and though she now disavows war as her method, she sits very proudly and stiffly in her weapons at the parley. She may have limited and restrained her dreams, but there is still some minimum in her mind beyond which she will not retreat without a struggle. What is that minimum which will satisfy her without war? Will it satisfy her for good? Will it seem so permanently satisfactory to her that she will be willing not only to set aside the thought of and preparation for an immediate war, but what is of far more importance enter into such a binding agreement for her future international relationships as will enable her to beat the swords of her samurai into plowshares for good and all. Is Japan peculiarly an obstacle to the practical if informal federation of the world to which we all hope that things are moving? When I try to frame a hopeful answer to that question, it occurs to me with added force that Japan is not a people trying to express itself through a government as we Atlantic peoples are, but a government, a small ruling class, in effective possession of an obedience-loving people. And I remember that that small ruling class has a long tradition of romantic and chivalrous swordsmanship. Is that ruling class going to keep its power and is it going to preserve its tradition? No one would be more urgent than I for the complete disarmament of the entire world, but no one could be more convinced of the unwisdom of disarmament by America or any other power, while any single country in the world maintains a spirit that must lead at last to a resumption of warfare. To disarm in such a situation is to leave the trouble to accumulate upon our grandchildren. To patch up a temporary peace based on the permitted expansion of such a power is simply to prepare for an expanded war in the future. But is that Japanese ruling class resolved at any cost even at the cost of another world war and at the risk of destroying Japan to hold on to its present power and to adhere rigidly to its tradition? In the last hundred years, Japan, because of her aristocracy and because of her general obedience, has achieved feats of adaptation to new conditions that are unparalleled in history. As we have noted, there have recently been indications of further changes in the spirit of Japan. She is said to be pressing forward with the education of the common people and the liberation of thought and discussion. In the long run, what is happening in the schools of Japan is of more importance to mankind than what is happening in her dockyards. But at present, we do not know what is happening in the schools of Japan. One hears much of New Japan and liberal Japan, and there is even an unofficial representative of the Japanese opposition in Washington. But so far as we can judge at this distance, we must be guided by the policy and methods of the Japanese government. Before we can judge these, we must consider the nature of the field in which they seem to clash most with American ideas and with American and European interests, namely, China and Eastern Asia generally. In my next paper, I will ask, What is China? And consider the nature of the needs and claims of Japan in regard to China and the prohibitions and the renunciations the Western powers want to impose upon her. For it is on account of these restrictions and prohibitions that Japan has been building her battleships. Her fighting fleet is to secure her a free hand in China and Siberia. It can have no other purpose. And I shall take up the question whether the prohibitions and renunciations we want to force upon Japan are not prohibitions and restrictions that we are bound in fairness to impose equally upon all powers concerned with China and the Far East. If the other powers are not prepared for extreme general retractions and renunciation in China, if they want to bar Japan from aggressive practices and exclusive advantages that other powers retain, if we cling to any sort of racial distinction in these matters, then I shall submit we are asking impossible things from Japan and we are forcing her toward what must be indeed a very desperate gamble for her, a refusal to enter into this proposed disarmament agreement, and that means war. End of Part 7 Part 8 of Washington and the Riddle of Peace by H. G. Wells This Libra Box recording is in the public domain. China in the Background Washington, November 16 The Chinese propaganda in America and Western Europe seems on the whole to be conducted more efficiently than the Japanese, and the Chinese student, it seems to me, gets into closer touch with the educated American and European, because his is a democratic and not an aristocratic habit of mind. He has an intensely western sense of public opinion. The masses of China may be destitute, ignorant, and disordered, but in their mental habits they are modern and not medieval, in the same sense that the Japanese are medieval and not modern. The Chinese seem to get on with their western social equivalents better than any of the Asiatic people, and increasing multitudes of Chinese are learning English today. It is the second language in China. Now, if Japan is the figure in the limelight at Washington today, China is the giant in the background and scene of the present Pacific drama. We have had so much in the papers lately about these two countries, we have been treated to such a feast of particulars about them, that most of us have long since forgotten very thoroughly the broad facts of the case, and it will be refreshing to recall them here and now. Let us remind ourselves that China is a country with a population amounting at the lowest estimate to between twice and three times the population of the United States or of France and England put together. This population has the longest unbroken tradition of peaceful industry in the world. It is essentially civilized, it respects learning and civility profoundly, but common literature and ancient traditions keep its people one. In the past China has been divided again and again always to reunite, but it has become old-fashioned, dangerously old-fashioned, perhaps by reason of its very stability. It has lagged behind most of the world in the development of its transport and economic possibilities. In mineral deposits and other natural resources, and in the industrial capability of its sturdy and intelligent population, it has more undeveloped wealth than any other single people in the world. It is only in the last century or so that China has lagged behind. Only a few centuries ago, China was as civilized as Europe and politically more stable. In a century or so she may be again the most civilized and intelligent power in the world, flourishing in fellowship and perfect understanding with the great states of America and Europe. She may be, if she is not torn to pieces, and kept in a state of enfeeblement and disorder by the hostile action of external powers. But at present, China is in a state of political impotence. Hermann Chu imperialism has proved itself to be hopelessly inefficient, and China is now struggling to reconstruct upon modern Republican lines, obviously suggested by the American example. A few decades ago, Japan astonished the world by Europeanizing herself upon Prussian lines. China now, under far less favorable conditions and with a vaster country and a less disciplined people, is struggling to Americanize herself. But it is no easy task to make over a people at one stride from a medieval autocracy to a modern democracy. It is far easier to Prussianize than to Americanize, for in the one case you have only to train an official class and in the other you must educate a whole people. China is torn by dissensions. The South jars with the North. She has two or more governments, each claiming to be the Chinese government, and whole provinces have fallen under the sway of military adventurers. It is a distressing spectacle, but it was probably an inevitable phase in the development of new China. Before we fall prey to anti-Chinese propaganda, it is well to recall how long it has always taken to build up the necessary understandings and habits of association upon which a new political system rests. France, for example, was a land of revolutions and political instability for nearly a century after the Great Revolution. America wrangled feebly and dangerously for several years after the War of Independence, before she established her federal government. She only cemented her union after colossal struggle. She was not really and securely one until a century had elapsed. During these long decades of probation, foreign observers preached endlessly about the fickleness of the French and the political inefficiency of the Americans and foretold the certainty of a breakup of the United States, just as today they sneered young China and foretold the political disintegration of the Chinese. And we have to bear in mind that the forces of reorganization and renewal in China struggle against peculiar difficulties and interferences quite outside the happier experiences of France and America. In particular, they struggle against an intolerable and paralyzing amount of foreign interference. The brilliant series of adventures and accidents by which a London trading company added the Empire of Great Mogul as a picturesque but incongruously big jewel to the British crown said an extraordinarily bad precedent in Asiatic affairs. It obsessed European political thought with the impossible dream of carving up all Asia into similar domains. The Moguls Empire was itself an empire of conquest in a land saturated by ideas of caste, and this gave all these European adventurers the attitude of high caste men benevolently consuming inferior races. In that spirit, Europe, with Japan coming in presently as a hopeful student of European methods, had been trying to cook, carve up, and fight for the portions of China for nearly a century, treating these wonderful people as an inferior race. The very worst that can be said about Japan with regard to China is that she has been too vigorously European. Consider how it would have been with the United States in the years of discord that led up to the Civil War if these difficulties had been complicated by three such embarrassments as these. First, that most foreigners, except now the Germans and Austrians, are outside the reach of the native courts. That their disputes with Chinese go before special foreign courts. That they are specially favoured in regard to property and shipping. Secondly, that the Chinese government is restricted from raising revenue by any tariff above a flat rate of five percent, and that they are also strictly restricted to two and a half percent in the interior dues upon foreign, but not Chinese, trade. So that they are in fact unable to raise enough revenue to maintain an efficient government. And thirdly, that nearly all the Chinese railways, and as every American knows, transport is the very life of a modern state, are in the grip of this foreign country or that. These are the open and manifest inconveniences of the situation, but behind these more open aspects, there is a vast tangle of intervention between Chinaman and Chinese affairs, schemes for further exploitation, financial entanglements, vast concession plans, and projects for spheres of influence for this aggressive foreign nation or that. And this foreign influence is not the influence of one foreign power pursuing a single and consistent policy, but a number of competing powers, all pursuing different ends and pulling things this way and that. How could any country reconstruct itself while it was entangled in such a net of interference? No people on earth could do such a thing. The plain fact is, that if China is to reconstruct herself, that net has to be cut away. It is not enough to warn Japan out of China, or to say, open door for China. The open door is good for the ventilation of that great apartment, but what is also needed is a clearing out of the encumbrance inside. These encumbrances are not primarily Japanese. The five great powers sit at a green table in the form of a horseshoe in the conference, and the four lesser powers are at a straight table like the armature of a horseshoe magnet. At the left-hand corner, next to the Japanese, are the three Chinese representatives. I gather they will be allowed to say Shantung at the conference, in moderation, but not Tibet or Tonkin, nor the East China, or indeed any railway. I doubt if either Mr. Balfour or Mr. Briand will nerve himself to say these forbidden words, but an irresponsible journalist may write them. If there is to be real end to war and disarmament, there has to be release of China to free Chinese control, and that means a self-denying ordinance from all the great powers. It will be an easy one for America and Italy to accept, but it will be a difficult sacrifice indeed for those two hoary leaders in the breakup of China, Great Britain, and France. Neither country has a bad heart, but long ago in the East they acquired some very bad habits. This is a time when bad habits lead very quickly to disaster. The real test of the quality of the conference will appear when some issue arises which involves an assertion or denial of the principle of unhand and keep your hands off China. If the Chinese are worthwhile, the conference has to establish that principle. It cannot be gracefully advanced by America, because America has so little to relinquish. It can be established at the initiative of either Britain or France. It seems plain to me that official America is waiting for some move in this direction from either or both of these powers. If that principle of a free China is established at the Washington Conference, the way will have been opened in the not very remote future to a healthy and vigorous United States of China, a great modern, Pacific and progressive power. And when I write China, I mean what any sensible man means when he writes China. I mean all those parts of Asia in which the Chinese people and the Chinese culture prevail. I include at least South Manchuria, which is as surely Chinese as Texas is American, and which can no more be given to any other power without the consent of China than my overcoat can be given by one passer by to another. The plain alternative to a released and renaissance China is the cutting up of China among the aggressive powers to the tune of that popular American air, the open door, the demoralization and disintegration of the Chinese, international elbowing, competition quarrels among the powers who have shared China, and at last the next great war, which it will be just as easy for America to keep out of as the great war of 1914-1918.