The war had left the great sea powers with excessive navies and insupportable naval budgets. All wanted naval limitation. It was only necessary to propose an agreement for reduction to have it accepted.
Even the dramatic method of making the proposal, with details of the tonnage to be scrapped, was not Mr. Hughes's idea. Let us do the man in the White House justice. He conceived it on the Mayflower; read it to Senator James Watson who was with him, and wirelessed it to the State Department.
There was the further problem, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. Mr. Hughes wanted it ended. Japan and England wanted it substituted by a compact which should be signed by its two signatories and the United States.
All that Mr. Hughes had to do to establish peace where there was peace was to offer an agreement upon naval armament and accept the Anglo-Japanese plan for a wider pact in the Pacific. The details would involve discussion, but the success of the general program was assured in advance.
The conference was called, hurriedly, because, as Mr. Harding once explained, if he had not hastened someone else would have anticipated him in calling it. This shows how obvious was the expedient. The idea of naval limitation was no more original than the idea of the conference. Mr. Borah had proposed it. Lord Lee had proposed it, in the British Parliament. The idea of the Four Power Pact was made in England—it had long been discussed there—and brought over by Mr., now Lord, Balfour. He laid it at Mr. Hughes's feet.
Mr. Balfour sought no triumphs. They should all go to Mr. Hughes. He has the art of inconspicuousness, the result of many generations of fine breeding. As you saw him in the plenary sessions clutching the lapels of his coat with both hands and modestly struggling for utterance after an immense flow of words from our chief delegate, you could not help feeling patriotic pride in the contrast.
Besides, Mr. Balfour was captivated. He became, for the nonce, perfectly American. Mr. H. Wickham Steed said to me, hearing the chief British delegate speak: "It is a new Balfour at this conference." Certainly as you heard the voice, moved and moving, emotional perhaps for the first time in his life, you realized that it was not Mr. Balfour, "proceeding on his faded way" as the London Nation expressed it, who was speaking. It was Mr. Balfour as he might be at a great revival meeting, such as Mr. Hughes in his youth must have often attended.
On the Four Power Pact the best comment ever made was Mr. Frank Simonds's, "It was invented to save the British Empire from committing bigamy."