The Washington Conference before it breaks up and disperses must in some way lay an egg to reproduce itself. In some fashion it must presently return. Because we have had to bear in mind that in the final and conclusive sense of the word the conference can decide nothing. It has produced a fine and generous atmosphere about it; it will probably arrive at an effectual temporary solution of a large group of problems, but the power of final decision rests with Governments and Legislatures far away.
The American proposals are only suggestive and they have no value as a treaty, unless they are accepted by the powers and until the American Senate has confirmed them by a two-thirds majority. M. Briand may have wished to be generous and broadminded here, but in Paris is this French Senate, inspired by a mad patriotism that would even now begin to arm France for an “inevitable” war with Britain. The French Senate has made a warlike gesture directly at England, has set its feet in a path that can end only in a supreme disaster for both France and England, and it did so, one guesses, in order to remind M. Briand that if he dared to be reasonable, if he dared to be pacific, if he acted for Great France and mankind, instead of at the dictates of Nationalist France, he did so at his peril. He would have been accused of betraying his country. “Conspuez Briand!” they would have cried in their pretty way. So M. Briand has played the patriot’s role.
In Tokio and in London it is an open secret that the same conflict goes on; the cables are busy with the struggle between reason and fierce patriotism. * * * Every concession made by every country at Washington will go back to the home land to be challenged as “weakness,” as “want of patriotism,” as “treason.”
In America and Britain the ugly side of this business has still to come, the outbreak of the patriotic fanatics, of the disappointed politicians who wanted to come here, of the wrecker journalists, the dealers in suspicion, the evil minds of a thousand types. And the lassitude that follows great expectations has also to be reckoned with. What Washington decides will not be the ultimate outcome; what the world will get at last in treaties ratified and things accomplished will be the mangled and tangled remains of the Washington decisions.
For that reason it is imperative that the Washington Conference should meet again. Its work is not done until its decisions are realized. After it has sent over its reports to the Goverments and Parliaments it will adjourn, but it must not cease. With perhaps rather fuller powers, with perhaps a wider or a different representation of the world, it must come again to a renewed invitation, to restore once more that atmosphere of international good will that has been created here, and to go over the attempts to realize, or the failures to realize, the settlement it has already worked out. And there will be many questions ripening then for solution that it cannot deal with now.
Much remains to be done by the Washington Conference, most of its work, indeed, is still to be done, but enough has been demonstrated already here to convince any reasonable man that a new thing, a new instrument, a new organ, has come into human affairs and that it is a thing that the world needs and cannot do without again. This thing has to recur, has to grow. It has to become a recurrent world conference. And this being clear, it is time that public discussion, public opinion, direct itself to the problem of the renewal of the conference in order that before it disperses we may be assured that it will meet again.
As a temporary, transitory thing, it will presently fade out of men’s memories and imaginations; but as a thing going on and living, which has gone, but which, like the King in circuit, will come again to try the new issues that have arisen and to try again the experiments that have fallen short of expectation, it may become the symbol and rallying point of all that vast amount of sane, humanitarian feeling and all that devotion to mankind as a whole, and to peace and justice, that has hitherto been formless and ineffectual in the world, for the need of such a banner.
XIII
THE LARGER QUESTION BEHIND THE CONFERENCE
Washington, November 23.
The Washington Conference, after its tremendous opening, seems now to be running into slack water. It has had its three great days, in which Secretary Hughes and Mr. Balfour and M. Briand have respectively played the leading parts. The broad lines of a possible naval reduction and of a possible Chinese and Pacific settlement are shaping themselves in men’s minds.