"By debarring the masses from participation in a grandiose scheme, the success of which depends upon their assent, the governments are indirectly but surely encouraging secret combined opposition, and in some cases Bolshevism. The masses resent being treated as children after having been appealed to as arbiters and rescuers. For four and a half years it was they who bore the brunt of the war, they who sacrificed their sons and their substance. In the future it is they to whom the states will look for the further sacrifices in blood and treasure which will be necessary in the struggles which they evidently anticipate. Well, some of them refuse these sacrifices in advance. They challenge the right of the governments to retain the power of making war and peace. That power they are working to get into their own hands and to wield in their own way, or at any rate to have a say in its exercise. And in order to secure it, some sections of the peoples are making common cause with the socialist revolutionaries, while others have gone the length of Bolshevism. And that is a serious danger. The agitation now going on among the people, therefore, starts with a grievance. The masses have many other grievances besides the one just sketched—the survivals of the feudal age, the privileges of class, the inequality of opportunity. And the kernel formed by these is the element of truth and equity which imparts force to all those underground movements, and enables them to subsist and extend. Error is never dangerous by itself; it is only when it has an admixture of truth that it becomes powerful for evil. And it seems a thousand pities that the governments, whose own interests are at stake, as well as those of the communities they govern, should go out of their way to provide an explosive element for Bolshevism and its less sinister variants."
The League was treated as a living organism before it existed. All the problems which the Supreme Councilors found insoluble were reserved for its judgment. Arduous functions were allotted to it before it had organs to discharge them. Formidable tasks were imposed upon it before the means of achieving them were devised. It is an institution so elusive and elastic that the French regard it as capable of being used as a handy instrument for coercing the Teutons, who, in turn, look upon it as a means of recovering their place in the world; the Japanese hope it may become a bridge leading to racial equality, and the governments which devised it are bent on employing it as a lever for their own politico-economic aims, which they identify with the progress of the human race. How the peoples look upon it the future will show.
On the Monroe Doctrine in connection with the League of Nations the less said the soonest mended. But one cannot well say less than this: that any real society of peoples such as Mr. Wilson first conceived and advocated is as incompatible with "regional understandings like the Monroe Doctrine" as are the maintenance of national armaments and the bartering of populations. It is immaterial whether one concludes that a Society of Nations is therefore impossible in the present conjuncture or that all those survivals of the old state system are obsolescent and should be abolished. The two are unquestionably irreconcilable.
It would be a mistake to infer from the unanimity with which Mr. Wilson's Covenant was finally accepted that it expressed the delegates' genuine conceptions or sentiments. Mr. Bullitt, one of the expert advisers to the American Peace Delegation, testified before the Senate committee in Washington that State-Secretary Lansing remarked to him: "I consider the League of Nations at present as entirely useless. The Great Powers have simply gone ahead and arranged the world to suit themselves. England and France, in particular, have gotten out of the Treaty everything they wanted. The League of Nations can do nothing to alter any unjust clauses of the Treaty except by the unanimous consent of the League members. The Great Powers will never consent to changes in the interests of weaker peoples."[358]
This opinion which Mr. Bullitt ascribed to Mr. Lansing was, to my knowledge, that of a large number of the representatives of the nations at the Conference. Among them all I have met very few who had a good word to say of the scheme, and of the few one had helped to formulate it, another had assisted him. And the unfavorable judgments of the remainder were delivered after the Covenant was signed.
One of those leaders, in conversation with several other delegates and myself, exclaimed one day: "The League of Nations indeed! It is an absurdity. Who among thinking men believes in its reality?" "I do," answered his neighbor; "but, like the devils, I believe and tremble. I hold that it is a corrosive poison which destroys much that is good and will further much that is bad." A statesman who was not a delegate demurred. "In my opinion," he said, "it is a response to a demand put forward by the peoples of the globe, and because of this origin something good will ultimately come of it. Unquestionably it is very defective, but in time it may be—nay, must be—changed for the better." The first speaker replied: "If you imagine that the League will help continental peoples, you are, I am convinced, mistaken. It took the United States three years to go to the help of Britain and France. How long do you suppose it will take her to mobilize and despatch troops to succor Poland, Rumania, or Czechoslovakia? I am acquainted with British colonial public opinion and sentiment—too often misunderstood by foreigners—and I can tell you that they are misconstrued by those who fancy that they would determine action of that kind. If England tells the colonies that she needs their help, they will come, because their people are flesh of her flesh and blood of her blood, and also because they depend for their defense upon her navy, and if she were to go under they would go under, too. But the continental nations have no such claims upon the British colonies, which would not be in a hurry to make sacrifices in order to satisfy their appetites or their passions."
The second speaker then said: "It is possible, but nowise certain, that the future League may help to settle these disputes which professional diplomatists would have arranged, and in the old way, but it will not affect those others which are the real causes of wars. If a nation believes it can further its vital interest by breaking the peace, the League cannot stop it. How could it? It lacks the means. There will be no army ready. It would have to create one. Even now, when such an army, powerful and victorious, is in the field, the League—for the Supreme Council is that and more—cannot get its orders obeyed. How then will its behest be treated when it has no troops at its beck and call? It is redrawing the map of central and eastern Europe, and is very satisfied with its work. But, as we know, the peoples of those countries look upon its map as a sheet of paper covered with lines and blotches of color to which no reality corresponds."
The constitution of the League was termed by Mr. Wilson a Covenant, a word redolent of biblical and puritanical times, which accorded well with the motives that decided him to prefer Geneva to Brussels as the seat of the League, and to adopt other measures of a supposed political character. The first draft of this document was, as we saw, completed in the incredibly short space of some thirty hours, so as to enable the President to take it with him to Washington. As the Ententophil Echo de Paris remarked, "By a fixed date the merchandise has to be consigned on board the George Washington."[359]
The discussions that took place after the President's return from the United States were animated, interesting, and symptomatic. In April the commission had several sittings, at which various amendments and alterations were proposed, some of which would cut deep into international relations, while others were of slight moment and gave rise to amusing sallies. One day the proposal was mooted that each member-state should be free to secede on giving two years' notice. M. Larnaude, who viewed membership as something sacramentally inalienable, seemed shocked, as though the suggestion bordered on sacrilege, and wondered how any government should feel tempted to take such a step. Signor Orlando was of a different opinion. "However precious the privilege of membership may be," he said, "it would be a comfort always to know that you could divest yourself of it at will. I am shut up in my room all day working. I do not go into the open air any oftener than a prisoner might. But I console myself with the thought that I can go out whenever I take it into my head. And I am sure a similar reflection on membership of the League would be equally soothing. I am in favor of the motion."
The center of interest during the drafting of the Covenant lay in the clause proclaiming the equality of religions, which Mr. Wilson was bent on having passed at all costs, if not in one form, then in another. This is one example of the occasional visibility of the religious thread which ran through a good deal of his personal work at the Conference. For it is a fact—not yet realized even by the delegates themselves—that distinctly religious motives inspired much that was done by the Conference on what seemed political or social grounds. The strategy adopted by the eminent American statesman to have his stipulation accepted proceeded in this case on the lines of a humanitarian resolve to put an end to sanguinary wars rather than on those which the average reformer, bent on cultural progress, would have traced. Actuality was imparted to this simple and yet thorny topic by a concrete proposal which the President made one day. What he is reported to have said is briefly this: "As the treatment of religious confessions has been in the past, and may again in the future be, a cause of sanguinary wars, it seems desirable that a clause should be introduced into the Covenant establishing absolute liberty for creeds and confessions." "On what, Mr. President," asked the first Polish delegate, "do you found your assertion that wars are still brought about by the differential treatment meted out to religions? Does contemporary history bear out this statement? And, if not, what likelihood is there that religious inequality will precipitate sanguinary conflicts in the future?" To this pointed question Mr. Wilson is said to have made the characteristic reply that he considered it expedient to assume this nexus between religious inequality and war as the safest way of bringing the matter forward. If he were to proceed on any other lines, he added, there would be truth and force in the objection which would doubtless be raised, that the Conference was intruding upon the domestic affairs of sovereign states. As that charge would damage the cause, it must be rebutted in advance. And for this purpose he deemed it prudent to approach the subject from the side he had chosen.