So far, these economic and financial troubles which are already at a crisis of disaster in Europe have been treated as though they did not exist. But they are the very heart of the trouble across the Atlantic, and with America, the rich creditor of all Europe and the holder of most of the gold in the world, lie enormous possibilities of salvation. The political situation becomes more and more subordinated to the economic.
If America is willing, America is able to reinstate Europe and turn back the decline, and she is in so strong a position that she can make the effectual permanent disarmament of Europe a primary condition of her assistance. If she have the clearness of mind to set aside the eloquent apologetics of that one power that is still militant, adventurous and malignant among the ruins, she can oblige the remnant of Europe to get together and settle outstanding differences by the sheer strength of her financial controls. She can demand a “League to Enforce Peace,” and she can enforce it.
Will she do that now, or will she let this occasion pass from her—never to return?
XVII
EBB TIDE AT WASHINGTON
Washington, Nov. 28.
The League of Nations was the first American initiative toward an organized world peace. Its beginning, the world-wide enthusiasm evoked by its early promise, its struggle to exist, its abandonment by America, its blunders and omissions and the useful, incomplete body that now represents it at Geneva, are the material of an immense conflicting literature. For a time at least the League is in the background. It has not kept hold of the popular imagination of the world.
I will not touch here upon the mistakes and disputes, the possible arrogance, the possible jealousies, the inadvisable compromises, the unnecessary concessions that made the League a lesser thing than it promised to be. I will not discuss why so entirely American a project, into which many nations came mainly to please America, failed to retain the official support of the American Government. Of such things the historian or the novelist may write but not the journalist. The fact remains that the project was a project noble and hopeful in its beginnings, a very great thing indeed in human history, a dawn in the darkness of international conflict and competition, an adventure which threw a halo of greatness about the Nation that produced it and about that splendid and yet so humanly limited man who has been chiefly identified with its promise and its partial failure.
It was, I insist, very largely an American idea, and only America, because of her freedom from the complex and bitter-spirited traditions of the European Foreign Offices, could have brought such a proposal into the arena of practical politics. The American Nation is exceptionally free from ancient traditions of empire, ascendancy, expansion, glory and the like. It is haunted by a dream, an obstinate recurrent dream, of a whole world organized for peace. It comes back to that with a notable persistence.
The League of Nations stands now, as it were, on the shelf, an experiment not wholly satisfactory, not wholly a failure, destined for searching reconsideration at no distant date. Meanwhile, the American mind, with much freshness and boldness, has produced this second experiment, in a widely different direction, the First Washington Conference for the Limitation of Armaments. The League of Nations was too definite and cramped in its constitution, too wide in its powers. It was a premature superstate. One standard objection, and a very reasonable one, was that America might be outvoted by quite minor powers and be obliged to undertake responsibilities for which it had no taste. The second experiment, therefore, has been tried, very properly, with the loosest of constitutions, and the most severely defined and limited of aims. We are beginning to see that it too is an experiment, likely to be successful within its limits but again not wholly satisfactory. Instead of a world constitution we have had a world conversation.
That conversation has passed from the open sessions of the conference to the two committees of five upon the limitation of land and sea armaments and the Pacific Committee of nine. In all these committees there are wide fluctuations of thought and temper. There are daily communications to the press from this committee or that, from this delegation or that, from a score of propagandas. It is really not worth the while of the ordinary citizen to follow these squabbles and flights and recriminations and excitements. Certain broad principles have been established. The ordinary citizen will be advised to hold firmly to these and see that he gets them carried through.