Washington and the Riddle of Peace

by H. G. Wells

Whatever little modifications and limitations the small cunning of diplomatists may impose upon the terms of reference of the conference, the plain common sense of mankind will insist that its essential inquiry is, “What are we to do, if anything can possibly be done, to arrest and reverse the slide toward continuing war preparation and war and final social collapse?” And you would imagine that this momentous conference would gather in a mood of exalted responsibility, with every conceivable help and every conceivable preparation to grasp the enormous issues involved.

Let us dismiss any such delusion from our minds.

Let us face a reality too often ignored in the dignified discussion of such business as this Washington Conference, and that is this: that the human mind takes hold of such very big questions as the common peace of the earth and the general security of mankind with very great reluctance and that it leaves go with extreme alacrity.

We are all naturally trivial creatures. We do not live from year to year; we live from day to day. Our minds naturally take short views and are distracted by little, immediate issues. We forget with astonishing facility. And this is as true of the high political persons who will gather at Washington as it is of any overworked clerk who will read about the conference in a street car or on the way home to supper and bed. These big questions affect everybody, and also they are too big for anybody. A great intellectual and moral effect is required if they are to be dealt with in any effectual manner.

I find the best illustration of this incurable drift toward triviality in myself. In the world of science the microscope helps the telescope and the infinitely little illuminates the infinitely great.

Let me put myself under the lens: Exhibit 1—If any one has reason to focus the whole of his mental being upon this Washington Conference it is I. It is my job to attend to it and to think of it and of nothing else. Whatever I write about it, wise or foolish, will be conspicuously published in a great number of newspapers and will do much to make or mar my reputation. Intellectually, I am convinced of the supreme possibilities of the occasion. It may make or mar mankind. The smallest and the greatest of motives march together; therefore my self-love and my care for mankind. And the occasion touches all my future happiness.

If this downward drift toward disorder and war is not arrested, in a few years’ time it will certainly catch my sons and probably mutilate or kill them; and my wife and I, instead of spending our declining years in comfort, will be involved in the general wretchedness and possibly perish in some quite miserable fashion, as thousands of just our sort of family have already perished in Austria and Russia. This is indeed the outlook for most of us if these efforts to secure permanent peace which are now being concentrated at Washington fail.

Here surely are reasons enough, from the most generous to the most selfish, for putting my whole being, with the utmost concentration, into this business. You might imagine I think nothing but conference, do nothing but work upon the conference.

Well, I find I don’t.

Before such evils as now advance upon humanity, man’s imagination seems scarcely more adequate than that of the park deer I have seen feeding contentedly beside the body of a shot companion.