IV
Whether or not electors, who are amateurs in politics, deserve the government which they get, at least they get the government for which they have asked; however disagreeable, this is a necessary part of their political education, and they might be left, philosophically enough, to reap the wild oats that they have sown if the harvest of disaster were confined to their own country and to their own generation. Unhappily, the results of the mad election are more far-reaching: not only is there no guarantee of peace at the end of an unparalleled war, but bad blood has been created between the three powers which, in the absence of an effective league of nations, are responsible for even the temporary peace of the world.
The German army, it is sometimes forgotten, ceased fire on accepting the fourteen points promulgated by President Wilson. Before the British would consent to an armistice, they reserved liberty to alter certain naval provisions; otherwise it was reasonably well understood that the American formula bound President Wilson's associates and limited their utmost demand. At the Versailles conference, as Mr. Maynard Keynes and Mr. Lansing have shewn, the President was outwitted and overruled by M. Clemenceau, who stood for a second Brest-Litovsk peace, and by Mr. Lloyd George, who stood for everything in turn and nothing long. A cynic observed of the completed treaty: "Gentlemen, in this document we are sowing the seeds of a great and durable war"; whatever else may be said of it, no one could easily trace even a faint resemblance to the settlement outlined in the fourteen points. It was impossible for the British representatives to keep faith at the same time with the president and with their electors; the French prime minister was more in sympathy with the blatant materialism of England than with the intangible idealism of America; and before long Mr. Wilson was first deserted and then overborne.
Though he has since been repudiated by his own people, the divergence of opinion at Versailles has grown into a wide and dangerous antagonism between the peoples of Great Britain and of America; each feels that it has been betrayed by the other; and, so long as the antagonism lasts, there can be no cooperation between the two in world-politics. The ill-feeling is more than the critical and petulant jealousy which breaks out among allies at the end of every war: any one might have foretold that France would impute to Great Britain a niggardly expenditure of men and that Great Britain would resent the price charged by France for the privilege of using her railways, occupying her trenches and finally driving the invaders from her soil; Great Britain and France have agreed privately that Italy has received more in proportion to her sacrifices than any of the allies, that America and Japan have feathered their nests and that the very name of Russia is anathema; and America murmurs that, instead of thanking her for coming to their rescue, the western powers of the old world only calculated how much of their burden in money and casualties could be transferred to the shoulders of the newcomer. There was the same carping after the Napoleonic wars and after the wars of Marlborough.
Between America and Great Britain the antagonism is deeper-seated because each has lost confidence in the good faith of the other. Who, cries the one, could trust a nation which threw over its own representative and shirked its share in the labour of policing the world? Who, cries the other, could trust a nation which broke faith from the beginning of the war, when it used the plight of Belgium as an excuse for imperial expansion, until the end, when it used the American armistice-terms as an excuse for disarming and despoiling Germany? When once the recriminations begin, every old cause of difference is dragged in to support one or other side; and the vision of a lasting union between the two greatest English-speaking peoples fades from sight and even from imagination. This is the price which the English have to pay—the price which they have also made others pay—for the dishonest election of 1918.
As no protest was heard while the election raged, so, while the peace conference was sitting, the only protest against its activities came in occasional blustering telegrams from self-important members of parliament who conceived themselves to be responsible for keeping the prime minister up to the mark. The great, unpolitical mass of the English people was addressing itself to the new upheaval of demobilisation, to the prospect of hard-won idleness and, more remotely, to the problems of reconstruction; the professional politicians were more concerned with personalities than with principles; and the centre of gravity shifted in 1919 to Paris. Of the great restless army of women who believe that they influence domestic and foreign policy all who could secure a passport and a ticket hurried abroad, there to compete with the cosmopolitan army whose life is an imperceptible gliding from Ritz to Ritz in waiting with loaded dinner-tables on the fringe of the conference. One staked out a claim on one hotel and statesman, another on another; London, on their return, was filled with stories of their protégés and listened patiently to what Colonel House or "Clemmy" had said to each and, less patiently, to what each had said to Mr. Balfour or to President Wilson; all who remembered how the Germans had striven to divide the allies during the war kept a vague look-out for attempts to sow dissension between them in the making of peace and were vaguely comforted by each new proof of solidarity among the high contracting parties. In questions of detail it was agreed that there must be differences of opinion; but, so long as a rupture was avoided, the principles of peace were left to take care of themselves. President Wilson might indeed, with a Disraelian gesture, order his ship to get up steam; but, as he remained at the last moment to see one or two more of his cardinal points rejected by the British and the French, it was assumed that they were impracticable. The treaty was signed on July 19th, and it was not until Mr. Maynard Keynes' Economic Consequences of the Peace had been digested that the political army and the camp-followers ceased gossiping about the personalities of the conference and turned their attention to the settlement.
They then discovered that their representatives had imposed on Germany terms which could not be fulfilled and which the fourteen points gave them no right to impose; the league of nations was left as a nebulous aspiration; and the pacific future of the world was based on the twin hope that the central powers were now bled too white ever again to rear an aggressive head and that, if they did, the association of Great Britain, France and America would endure to beat it once more into the dust. To the old-fashioned system of secret diplomacy, of defensive and offensive alliances, of competition in armaments, of exploitation and intrigue and of "preventive wars"—the system which had given birth to the greatest war in history—the wisdom of the Versailles conference could offer no alternative; the one new idea which it contributed to international politics was that of sharing with America the privilege of suffering again in the future from a system which had lately brought the whole world to the brink of ruin and dissolution.
This privilege the people of the United States declined; and Europe in 1919 differed chiefly from Europe in 1914 by the eclipse of Russia on the one side and of Austro-Hungary on the other. The old system and the old spirit have remained. It does not lie in the mouth of those who threw overboard the fourteen points to reproach those who repudiated the covenant and mandates of the league of nations. President Wilson pretended to more power than he possessed, and his political opponents took their revenge by disowning him; Mr. Lloyd George carried out, so far as he was able, the policy of spoliation and punishment which he had promised to the electors as the price of their support in the election that gave him his revenge on his political opponents.
So the needless, mad war, fed year after year with the life-blood of an entire generation, came to an end in a hopeless, mad peace. If those who cried loudest in their frenzy of greed and revenge got the peace which they deserved, it was not the peace for which one man, turning his back on the splendid promise of youth, had gone forth to die.