Washington and the Riddle of Peace

by H. G. Wells

“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 in 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 that 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 inability 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 a 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 “Pertinax”—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 contract for her future international relationships as will enable her to beat the swords of her Samurai into ploughshares for good and all?