M. Briand has spoken and now departs. France will not disarm until she has a binding treaty which her former allies are not yet prepared to give her. She ignores the assurances of her proved allies and the experiences of the Great War. She goes in fear of desolate Russia and bankrupt Germany and she is “assailable on three coasts.” So she retains her great armies, and especially her “colonial” army. M. Briand’s departure has something of the effect of France shaking the dust from her feet and departing from the conference.
But France cannot step out of her share in the leadership of peace in this fashion. France has not finished with the conference yet. She will speak now at Washington with a voice perhaps less romantically impressive but more practically helpful. She has explained the terrors of her position and the assembled delegates have said “There! There!” to her as politely and soothingly as possible. But nobody really believes in the terrors of her position. Mr. Hughes is a man of great tenacity of purpose, and his chief reply to M. Briand’s speech is to keep military disarmament upon the agenda. A third committee of five powers has been added to the two already in existence to deal with land disarmament. It is doubtful if it can get very far unless it can bring in German and Russian representatives to reply to the alarmist charges of M. Briand.
With the formation of this third committee the Washington Conference would seem to have got as much before it as it is likely to handle. The Hughes impetus has done its work and done its work well. The conference has followed his rigorous lead almost too rigorously. It has cut off a manageable part of the vast problem of world peace and seems well on the way to manage it. That is exemplary—if limited. To manage a sample is to go some way toward demonstrating that the whole is manageable. A war on the Pacific has been averted, I think, at least for some years. But the more general problem of world peace as one whole, the problem of ending war for good, still remains untouched, and it is well to bear in mind that that is so.
It is impossible not to contrast this phase in the life of the Washington Conference with the great propositions of the opening days, when President Harding was speaking at Arlington and in the Continental Building of making an end to offensive—and with that of defensive—war forever in the world. It is impossible to ignore this shrinkage of aim and to refrain from measuring the vast omissions. That prelude, one perceives, was the prelude to something greater than this present conference, and more than this conference must ensue from it. The haggling and adjustment that is now going on in the committee of five powers on naval limitation and in the committee of nine powers on the Pacific settlement I will not attempt to follow. It is a matter for the experts and diplomatists; the public is concerned not with the methods of the wrangle but with the general purport and practical outcome.
We of the general public are incapable of judging upon the merits of battle cruisers and the possible limits to the size of submarines. Our concern is to see such things grow rarer and rarer until they disappear. I will not apologize, therefore, for going outside the conference chamber for the matter of my next few papers. I will go back from Mr. Secretary Hughes and his proposals and their consequences to President Harding and to the great expectations with which the conference assembled.
These expectations looked not merely to an arrest of international competition on the Pacific, and to giving threatened China a breathing time to bring itself up to modern conditions; they looked frankly toward the establishment of a world peace. But so far as Europe goes, where as M. Briand’s speech reminded us, the nations are locked together in a state of extreme danger, the conference has as yet done nothing. It is quite possible to believe that it will do very little. It is doubtful if the peace of Europe can ever be dealt with effectually in Washington. The troubles of the European Continent are an old, intricate story, and I believe the attitude ascribed here to the American Centre and West, the attitude of “let Europe solve her own international problems and not bother us with them,” is a thoroughly sound and wise one. America has neither the time and attention to spare nor the particular understandings needed to grasp the tangled difficulties of Europe. Such initiatives as those of President Wilson about Danzig and Fiume settle nothing and leave rankling sores. It is up to Europe to clear up and simplify itself before it comes into the world arena with America.
It is just within the range of possibility, therefore, that some sort of European conference may arise out of the Washington gathering. Such a conference is becoming necessary. The divergence in spirit and aim of France and Britain that Washington has brought out is not a divergence to be smoothed over. Better it should flare now than smoulder later. I have done my own small best to exacerbate it, because I believe that a brisk quarrel and some plain speaking may clear the air for a better understanding. Europe needs ventilation. When France, Britain, Italy and Germany meet together to discuss their common interests, cut through their impossible entanglements and get rid of their mutual suspicions and precautions with the frankness of this Washington gathering, with as open and free a discussion and as ample a public participation, European affairs will be on the mend.
But there is another issue which America cannot keep out of as she can keep out of the Franco-German-British situation, and upon this second issue the world looks to her for some sort of leadership. So far the Washington Conference has excluded any consideration of the economic and financial disorder of the world. But that consideration cannot be indefinitely delayed; it is becoming pressingly necessary. All the while we are debating here about Japanese autocracy and ambitions, and what we really mean by the “open door,” and whether we shall have 40,000 or 90,000 tons of submarines, and so on, the economic dissolution of the world goes on.
The immediate effect of partial disarmament, indeed, both in Britain and Japan, may be even to increase the economic difficulties of these countries by throwing considerable masses of skilled labor out of work. I propose in my next paper to discuss this process of economic and social dissolution which is now going on throughout the world, beneath the surface of our formal international relations. It is the larger reality of the present world situation which the brighter, more dramatic incidents of the earlier sessions at Washington have for a time thrust out of our attention.