Washington and the Riddle of Peace

by H. G. Wells

Washington, Dec. 9.

I went to hear the President address Congress on its reassembling on Tuesday. He spoke to a joint session of the Senate and House of Representatives held, as is customary, in the chamber of Representatives because it is the larger of the two chambers.

Hitherto my observations have centred upon the Continental Building and the Pan-American Building, up by the White House, and they have concerned the good intentions and great projects that glow and expand like great iridescent bubbles about the conference that is going on in this region.

But the conference, whatever freedom it has to think and discuss, has no power to act. Until the Senate by a two-thirds majority has indorsed the recommendations of the President, the United States cannot be committed to any engagement with the outside world. This is a fact that needs to be written in large letters as a perpetual reminder in the editorial rooms and diplomatic offices of all those Europeans who write about or deal with the foreign relations of the United States. For the Constitution of the United States is as carelessly read over there as the Anglo-Japanese alliance has been read here, and it is as dangerously misconceived. Through that first disastrous year of the peace Europe imagined that the President was the owner rather than the leader of the United States.

It was with great interest and curiosity, therefore, that I went down to this assembly at the Capitol to see the President dealing with his Legislature. Here was the place not of suggestions but of decisions. What goes through here is accomplished and done—subject only to one thing, the recognition by the Supreme Court, if it is challenged, that the thing is constitutional.

I went down with—what shall I say?—some prejudiced expectations. The Americans resemble the English very closely in one particular—they abuse their own institutions continually. Prohibition and the police—but these are outside my scope! I have heard scarcely a good word for Congress since I landed here, and the Senate, by the unanimous testimony of the conversationalists of the United States, combines the ignoble with the diabolical in a peculiarly revolting mixture. Even individual Senators have admitted as much—with a sinister pride.

It is exactly how we talk about Parliament in London—though with more justice. But this sort of talk soaks into the innocent from abroad, and, though one takes none of it seriously, the whole of it produces an effect. I had the feeling that I was going to see a gathering of wreckers, a barrier, perhaps an insurmountable barrier, in the way to the realization of any dream of America taking her place as the leading power in the world, as the first embodiment of the New Thing in international affairs.

It puts all this sort of feeling right to see these two bodies in their proper home and to talk to these creatures of legend, the Representatives and the Senators. One perceives they are not a malignant sub-species of mankind; one discovers a concourse of men very interested about and unexpectedly open-minded upon foreign policy. They are critical but not hostile to the new projects and ideas. One realizes that Congress is not a blank barrier but a sieve, and probably a very necessary sieve, for the new international impulse in America.

The ceremonial of the gathering was simple and with the dignity of simplicity. The big galleries for visitors, which always impress the British observer by their size, were full of visitors after their kind, ladies predominating, and particularly full was the press gallery, which overhangs the Speaker and the Presidential chair. Some faint vestige of a sound religious upbringing had reminded me that the first are sometimes last and the last first; I had fallen into the tail of the procession of my fellow newspaper men from their special room to the House of Representatives, and so I found myself with the overflow of the journalists, not with everything under my chin but very conveniently seated on the floor of the House behind the Representatives, and feeling much more like a Congressman than I could otherwise have done.

Away to the right were the members of the Cabinet—the British visitor always has to remind himself that they cannot be either Representatives or Senators. Presently the ninety-odd Senators came in by the central door, two by two, and were distributed upon the seats in front of their hosts; the Representatives.