But let me remind the American soldier that the real European debtor, the fellow on whom it will fall, the fellow who will have to toil and pay and want, if you can realize that dream of pitiless exaction, is no legendary monster France or Britain; it is that other fellow over there you fought beside, it is the wounded man in blue or khaki you passed by as you went into action, it is the man who smiled his courage at you as you blundered against him in the din and confusion of battle.
If you listen to these stay-at-home patriots and these exotic advisers of yours, it is he who will pay, he and his wife and his child; they will all pay in toil and privation and worry and stunted lives. It is they who will pay—but you will not receive. You too will pay in disorganized business, in restricted production, in underemployment. You will get nothing else out of it except whatever satisfaction you may feel in having made those other fellows over there in Europe pay—and pay bitterly.
XXVIII
THE FOUNDATION STONE AND THE BUILDING
Washington, Dec. 14.
Beginning with the fourth plenary session of the Washington Conference, the registration of “results” in the Pacific, in disarmament, in China, has begun. They are good results, assembled on a basis of broad principles, that may sustain at last an organized permanent peace for the whole world. If there is one thing to be noted more than another about the work that has led up to this settlement it is the adaptability, the intelligent and sympathetic understanding shown by Japan in these transactions. The Japanese seem to be the most flexible minded of peoples. They win my respect more and more.
In the days of imperialistic competition they stiffened to a conscientious selfishness and a splendid fighting energy. Now that a new spirit of discussion, compromise and the desire for brotherhood spreads about the world, they catch the new note and they sound it with obvious sincerity and good will. No people has been under such keen and suspicious observation here as the Japanese. The idea of them as of a people insanely patriotic, patriotically subtle and treacherous, mysterious and mentally inaccessible has been largely dispelled. I myself have tried that view over in my mind and dismissed it, and multitudes of the commonplace men have gone through the same experience here. Our Western world, I am convinced, can work with the Japanese and understand and trust them.
It will be for other and abler pens to record the detailed working out of the results of this great conference, this new experiment in human reasonableness, as far as it affects Shantung and Yap and Hongkong and Port Arthur and so forth. My time in Washington is drawing to an end, and I will confine myself now rather to that broader and vaguer question in which I am more interested—the question of what lies behind and beyond this most successful and hopeful beginning in open international co-operation.
Great and important as the conference is, the growth of a real and understandable project for the steady, systematic development of an effective international world peace, which has been going on in men’s minds here and in the world generally in the last two months is a much greater thing. It is a quite amazing mental growth; something very quiet and simple and yet astonishing, like a clear crystallization out of a turbid solution. Before the conference gathered, civilized people throughout the world were, I think, quite confused about how the peace of the world could ever be organized and rather hopeless about its being done.
Now I think there is a widespread and spreading unanimity that there is a way, a practicable way and a hopeful way, by successive conferences, by widening peace agreements, by the establishment of permanent joint commissions, by systematic education and the sedulous cultivation of confidence, along which humanity may struggle and will struggle out of its present miseries and dangers toward the dawn of a new life.
The next conferences that are indicated will gather in a mood of hopefulness and experience that will be the most precious legacy of the present conference. One that must follow very soon must deal with the economic rehabilitation of Europe. Here, it seems to me, America, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Russia at least must meet. And soon. In the Christmas mood, in the phase of relief that radiates from Washington and Ireland now, we must not let our elation blind us to the fact that, for all the light that breaks in upon us, we are not yet out of the woods. Millions are starving today, great masses of men degenerate physically and morally in unemployment, European industrialism crawls and staggers still.