No, the limitation of armaments quite as much as the mitigation of warfare is impossible until war has been made impossible, and then the complete extinction of armaments follows without discussion; and war can only be made impossible when the powers of the world have done what the thirteen original States of American Union found they had to do after their independence was won, and that is set up a common law and rule over themselves. Such a project is a monstrously difficult one no doubt, and it flies in the face of great masses of patriotic cant and of natural prejudices and natural suspicion, but it is a thing that can be done. It is the only thing that can be done to avert the destruction of civilization through war and war preparation. Disarmament and the limitation of warfare without such a merging of sovereignty look, at the first glance, easier and more modest proposals, but they suffer from the fatal defect of absolute impracticability. They are things that cannot be made working realities. A world that could effectually disarm would be a world already at one, and disarmament would be of no importance whatever. Given stable international relations, the world would put aside its armaments as naturally as a man takes off his coat in winter on entering a warm house.
And as a previous article has pointed out, wars, preparations for war and the threat of war are only the more striking aspect of human disunion at the present time. The smashing up of the world’s currency system and the progressive paralysis of industry that follows on that is a much more immediate disaster. That is rushing upon us. This war talk between Japan and America may end as abruptly as the snarling of two dogs overtaken by a flood. There may not be another great war after all, because both in Japan and America social disruption may come first. Upon financial and economic questions the powers of the earth must get together very quickly now or perish; the signs get more imperative every day; and if they get together upon these common issues, then they will have little reason or excuse for not taking up the merely international issues at the same time.
There is a curious exaggeration of respect for patriotism and patriotic excesses in all these projects for disarmament and the mitigation of warfare. We have to “consider patriotic susceptibilities”; that is the stereotyped formula of objection to the plain necessity of overriding the present barbaric sovereignty of separate states by a world rule and a world law protecting the common interests of the common people of the world. In practice these “patriotic susceptibilities”; will often be found to resolve themselves into nothing more formidable than the conceit and self-importance of some foreign office official. In general they are little more than a snarling suspiciousness of foreign people. Most people are patriotically excitable, it is in our human nature, but that no more excuses this excessive deference to patriotism than it would excuse a complete tolerance of boozing and of filthy vices and drunken and lustful outrages because we are all more or less susceptible to thirst and desire. And while there is all this deference for the most ramshackle and impromptu of nationalisms there is a complete disregard of the influence and of the respect due to one of the greatest and most concentrated interests of our modern world, the finance, the science, the experts, the labor, often very specialized and highly skilled, of the armament and munitions and associated trades and industries.
So far as I can ascertain, the advocates of what I may call mere disarmament propose to scrap this mass of interests more or less completely, to put its tremendous array of factories, arsenals, dockyards and so forth out of action, to obliterate its wide-reaching net of financial relationships, to break up its carefully gathered staffs, and to pour all its labor, its trained engineers and sailors and gunners and so forth into the great flood of unemployment into which our civilization is already sinking. And they do not seem to grasp how subtle, various and effective the resistance of this great complex of capable human beings to any such treatment is likely to be. In my supply of League of Nations literature I find only two intimations of this real obstacle to the world common weal. One is a suggestion that there should be no private enterprise in the production of war material at all, and the other that armament concerns shall not own newspapers. As a Socialist I am charmed by the former proposal, which would in effect nationalize, among others, the iron and steel and chemical industries, but as a practical man I have to confess that the organization of no existing state is yet at the level of efficiency necessary if the transfer is to be a hopeful one, and so far as the newspaper restriction goes, it would surely pass the wit of man to devise rules that would prevent a great banking combination from controlling armament firms on the one hand while it financed newspapers on the other.
Yet the fact remains that this great complex of interests, round and about the armaments interest, is the most real of all the oppositions to a world federation. It supplies substance, direction and immediate rewards to the frothy emotions of patriotism; it rules by dividing us and it realizes that its existence in its present form is conditional upon the continuance of our suspicions and divisions. It does not positively want or seek war, but it wants a continuing expectation of and preparation for war. On the other hand its ruling intelligences must be coming to understand that in the end it cannot escape sharing in the economic and social smash down to which we are all now sliding so rapidly. It is too high a type of organization to be altogether blind and obdurate. It will not, of course, be represented officially at Washington for what it is, but in the form of pseudo-patriotic, naval, military and financial experts it will be better represented than any other side of human nature. One of the most interesting things to do at the conference will be to watch its activities.
How much can we common men ask for and hope for from this great power? Self extinction is too much—even if it were desirable. But it is reasonable to demand a deflection of its activities to meet the urgent needs of our present dangers. We do not want the extinction of this great body of business, metallurgical, chemical, engineering and disciplined activities, but we do want its rapid diversion from all too easily attained destructive ends to creative purposes now. A world peace scheme that does not open out an immediate prospect for the release of financial and engineering energy upon world-wide undertakings is a hopeless peace scheme. Enterprise must out. Were this world one federated state concerned about our common welfare there would be no overwhelming difficulty in canalizing all this force now spent upon armament in the direction of improved transport and communications generally into the making of great bridges, tunnels and the like, into the rebuilding of our cities upon better lines, into the irrigation and fertilization of the earth’s deserts and so forth. The way to world peace lies not in fighting and destroying the armament interests but in turning them to world service.
But to do such a thing requires a united financial and economic effort; it cannot be done nationally by little groups of patriots all scheming against one another. It must be big business for world interests, unencumbered by national frontiers, or it is impossible.
All these considerations you see converge on the conclusion that there is no solution of the problem of war, no possibility of a world recovery, no possibility of arresting the rapid disintegration of our civilization, except a Pax Mundi, a federated world control, sufficiently authoritative to keep any single nation in order and sufficiently coherent to express a world idea. We need an effective world “Association of Nations,” to use President Harding’s phrase, or we shall perish. And even in this fantastic dream of Mere Disarmament, of a world of little independent states, all sovereign, all competing against each other and all carrying on a mean financial and commercial warfare against each other to the common impoverishment, all standing in the way of any large modern-spirited handling of modern needs, yet all remaining magically disarmed and never making actual war on each other—even if this dream were possible, it is still utterly detestable—more detestable even than our present dangers and miseries. For if there are any things in life worse than pain, fear and destruction, they are boredom, pettiness and inanity, and such would be the quality of such a world. However much the diplomatists at Washington may seek to ignore the fact, may fence their discussion within narrowly phrased agenda, and rule this, that and the other vital aspect outside the scope of the conference, the fact remains that there is no way out, no way of escape for mankind from the monstrous miseries and far more monstrous dangers of the present time except an organized international co-operation, based upon a frank and bold resolve to turn men’s minds from ancient jealousies and animosities to the common aims and the common future of our race.
If the Washington Conference cannot rise to the level of that idea, then it were better that the Conference never gathered together.