CHAPTER XX
THE FOUNDATIONS OF PEACE
Destruction is easier and more rapid than construction, and it needs a wiser man and a longer labour to make peace than war. War begins with the first blow, but peace is not made when the fighting stops; and months were to pass in the troubled twilight between the two, with millions of men under arms, with budgets more suggestive of war than peace and men's thoughts more attuned to a contentious past than prepared for a peaceful future. The first act of the British Government was, indeed, to transfer hostilities from its foes abroad to those at home, and to rout its domestic enemies at a general election. The Parliament elected in 1910 had, after limiting its existence to five years, extended it during the war to eight; and the argument for an election and a fresh mandate for the Peace Conference would have been irresistible had any Ally followed our example, had the Government during the contest given any indication of the terms of peace it contemplated, and had the British delegates not been hampered rather than helped by the foolish concessions which ministers made to popular clamour for the Kaiser's execution and for Germany's payment of the total cost of the war. There could, indeed, be little discussion on the platform, because on principles all parties were substantially agreed, and details were matters for the Conference; and the election was fought to defeat opposition, not to the Government's policy, but to its personnel. In this the Coalition was triumphantly successful: three-quarters of the new members had accepted its coupon, and of the remainder the largest party consisted of seventy Sinn Feiners who were in prison or at least pledged not to attend the House. The Labour group returned some fifty strong, but Mr. Asquith's followers were reduced to thirty. This result was, however, a triumph of political strategy manipulating a very transient emotion, the evanescence of which was shown in a series of bye-elections before the Conference reached its critical points. It was well for British influence in the councils of the Allies that it did not depend upon the vagaries of popular votes, and it would have been well for the repute of British statesmen if they had not had the occasion or the temptation to indulge in the hectic misrepresentation and profligate promises of which their electioneering speeches were full.
The weight which the various Allies exerted at the Conference depended upon the services they had rendered to the common cause and the force they had at their disposal. At the conclusion of the armistice the British Empire, in addition to its overwhelming naval preponderance, had over half a million men in arms more than any other belligerent. Its total military forces, including Dominion and Indian troops and garrisons abroad, amounted to 5,680,247 men; France had 5,075,000; the United States, 3,707,000; Italy, 3,420,000; Germany about 4,500,000; Austria, 2,230,000; while Bulgaria had had at the end of September half a million, and Turkey at the end of October some 400,000. Great Britain and France had also been fighting since the beginning of the war, while Italy had joined in May 1915, and the United States in April 1917. On the other hand, all the European Powers had reached, if not passed, their meridian of strength, whereas the United States could with a corresponding effort raise her forces to over ten millions. Potentially she was the most powerful of the associated nations, and only the existence of the British fleet brought any rival up to anything like equality. Together the United States and the British Empire were irresistible; and so long as they were agreed, any concessions they might make to others would be due, not to fear, but to their sense of justice, desire for peace, and consideration for the susceptibilities of others. The responsibility for the issue of the Conference rested therefore upon them to a very special degree; and in spite of unspeakably foolish and ignorant chatter in reactionary quarters, it was an inestimable advantage that the British Empire could look to the United States and President Wilson to bear most of the odium of insisting upon sound principles and telling unpalatable truths. America was in the better position to play the part of the candid friend, because she had no territorial ambitions to serve and no axe to grind save that of peaceful competition in the arts of industry and commerce; and if European allies occasionally grumbled at American interference, the reply was obvious that they should have won the war without waiting for or depending on American intervention.
In spite of a somewhat weak pretence to public diplomacy, the secret history of the Conference is not likely to be known to this generation; but its decisions were promptly published, and the attitude of the various Powers to the principal problems with which they had to deal was easily discerned. President Wilson had made a personal survey of the ground by a visit to Europe, unprecedented in the history of the Presidential office, in December, before the Conference opened at Versailles on 18 January 1919. It was largely owing to his presence and prestige that in the forefront of the programme and performance of the Conference stood a plan for an international organization for the future avoidance of war, settlement of disputes, and regulation of labour conditions. The idea of a League of Nations had made rapid progress as the war increased in extent, intensity, and horror. At Christmas 1917 the British Government, at the instigation of Lord Robert Cecil and General Smuts, had appointed a committee to explore the subject, and it had reported in the following summer in favour of a scheme in which the main stress was laid upon the avoidance of war. The French Government had also appointed a commission which likewise reported favourably in the summer of 1918: the principal difference between the two was that the French commission advocated the establishment of an organized standing international army. President Wilson preferred to proceed by means of more informal discussions with committees not appointed by his government; and the American stress was laid rather on the organization of an international council and tribunal. The fruitful idea of a mandatory system was first publicly advocated by General Smuts.
Lord Robert Cecil was charged with the principal share in accommodating such divergences as existed between the various governments on the matter, and remarkable progress was made, which resulted in President Wilson's production before the Conference, on 14 February, of a Covenant embodying the scheme for a future League of Nations. It was subjected to a good deal of criticism, and party-spirit in America sought to make capital out of the proposed abandonment of the self-sufficient isolation of the United States and the subordination of the Monroe Doctrine to the interests of the world and the common judgment of mankind. In Great Britain there were also those who preferred the guarantee of a predominant British navy to the security of any scrap of paper, and somewhat ignored the fact that the war had been fought to establish the sanctity of international obligations. In France, with her vivid recollection of painful experience, there was similarly a tendency to make the most of our military victory and to base the stability of peace upon the establishment of military predominance and the possession of conquests guaranteed by a permanent anti-German alliance. Italy was frankly out for all she could get irrespective of the principles of nationality and self-determination. A rigorous censorship, not merely of news from other countries, but of serious and moderate Italian books on history and politics, had combined with an ingenuous self-esteem to produce the popular conviction that Italy had been the main factor in the victory of the Entente, and that the Conference was therefore bound to concede whatever rewards she might demand in return for her services. She contended that her sentiment for Dalmatia was as sincere as that of the French for Alsace-Lorraine, and ignored the difference made by the fact that Dalmatia was peopled with Jugo-Slavs. Italy therefore had little sympathy with the Fourteen Points which at President Wilson's instigation had been accepted as the basis of the armistice and the principles of peace. Finally, Japan had a special grievance in the reluctance of the United States to accept the maxim of racial equality and a special interest in the acquisition of Chinese territory; and prejudice against her racial claim prejudiced the Aliies' defence of Chinese territorial integrity.
These were some of the fundamental difficulties of the Conference which could only be settled in part by self-restraint and compromise. Much had to be left over to the patient labours of the future League of Nations in an atmosphere less charged than the Conference with the passion of war; and it gradually became evident that, instead of the League of Nations depending upon the excellence of the peace it was to guarantee, the permanence of the peace would depend upon the capacity of the League of Nations to remedy its imperfections. The League emerged as the cardinal factor in the situation which was to make the vital difference between the work of the Conference of 1919 and that of the Congresses of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Reflection tended, moreover, to mitigate some of the objections to the Covenant, though various of its details were modified in response to criticism. Public opinion in the United States rallied to the argument that America would be stultifying herself if, after entering the war to win it and make the world safe for democracy, she refused to participate in the only means of making the peace tolerable and permanent; and it was recognized that the Monroe Doctrine was not so much being superseded as expanded from America to cover all the world. British reliance on sea-power was likewise somewhat impressed by the determination of the United States, if the League of Nations failed, to build a navy at least equal to our own, and by the recognition of the fact that the maintenance of even a two-Power standard would consequently involve us in a race for naval armaments more severe than that before the war and pregnant with an even greater disaster to the cause of civilization. French opinion, too, was gradually modified by the realization that Great Britain and the United States could not be expected to sanction a militarist settlement resembling in its spirit and its motives the German terms of 1871, or to guarantee a peace of which their people disapproved; and a halting trust in a League of Nations was fortified by a more specific guarantee of protection by Great Britain and the United States against an unprovoked attack by Germany. Italy, the youngest of the Great Powers among the Allies, the least mature in its political wisdom, and the most subject before the war to the influence of German realpolitik, carried her obstruction to the point of temporarily leaving the Conference in April; but her delegates returned on finding that the rest of the Allies were prepared to make peace without her participation.