Q. What are the strong reasons for our wanting to be represented with the armies of liberation?
A. In order to be fully represented at the peace. There is no substitute for an army at a Peace Conference, and we may be sure that, no matter what arrangements may be made between Mr. Churchill and Mr. Roosevelt, if we are not in the war we will not be in the peace. There were many jokes about the famous eight-point meeting to the effect that we were trying to get in the peace before we got in the war. I do not agree that that was the purpose of Mr. Roosevelt in meeting Mr. Churchill, but if it were, it is unlikely to succeed. We will have the influence we wish to have at the peace conference only if we have done our full share in making peace possible by beating Hitler. We ought not to deceive ourselves. We are unpopular enough as it is now. If we stay out of the war, and by a miracle not now foreseeable, Hitler were after all to be defeated, what do you think the victors would think of us? Do you think they would invite us to come in and tell them how to rearrange the world?
Yet if we do not look forward to establishing a peace which will postpone for a long time, if not forever, a repetition of this war, many Americans would feel too discouraged to act. We would be foolish not to fight the Germans now even if we were mathematically certain that we were going to have to go on fighting them once every twenty years for the rest of time. Nevertheless we do not want to face such a prospect; we want to rule out war for as long a time as possible, and we can do it only by repairing at this Peace Conference the errors made after the last one.
These errors were not what they have been represented to be, faults in the Versailles treaty. The mistake we made was that we dodged our responsibility for the peace after we had helped finish the war. First we invested our blood and treasure, and then after the victory, when we were about to gather the dividends of international security and prosperity in the League of Nations, suddenly, because everything in the peace did not completely please us, and because a few politicians hated the President, we withdrew and declined to collect our profits. This ruined the peace, made the League impossible, and another war certain.
Q. How much American blood and treasure did we spend in the last war?
A. Very little blood compared with our Allies. Out of our total mobilized force of 4,355,000 we lost 126,000 dead of all causes, or two and one-half per cent. Out of the total of 17,314,000 British and French soldiers, 2,266,171 lost their lives, or 13 per cent. If we had been compelled from 1914 on to fight as totally as our Allies, with our population more than double the combined French and British populations, we would have lost more than 2,000,000 dead during the time we were leaving the fighting to our Allies, from 1914 to 1917. We sent money instead; altogether our war loans totaled thirteen billion dollars. It is fair to say that this investment of money took the place of investment of lives. It cost us less than $7,000 apiece to save 2,000,000 American men’s lives. Any insurance company would call that a bargain, considering the American man merely from the point of view of what he is economically worth to his nation. Nevertheless we asked for the thirteen billion back. At the same time we put up our tariffs so high that the nations concerned could not pay, but aside altogether from the economic aspect of our war debts, consider what could have happened had we been wiser.
Suppose, at an appropriate period after passions had subsided, we had proposed to Britain and France that we cancel the war debts if they would cancel the reparations owed by Germany. There was a time when such a proposal might have succeeded. What would have been the probable, or at any rate possible, outcome? No war debts, no reparations, no inflation in Germany, no Hitler, no war now. Even if there were only a chance of such miraculous results, it would have been well worth trying, since the actual results of our unenlightened egotism were that we were never paid the money anyway, and the chain of reparations—inflation—Hitler—brought us to this war upon which we are planning already to spend as a mere first installment four times as much as the whole sum we lent the Allies and lost in the last war. It is significant that the very men who urged that we press without respite for full payment of our World War debts, and thus helped make this war inevitable, are the very men who today continue to try to make America shirk her responsibilities.
Q. Do you think a new League of Nations could be successful, since the old one failed so miserably?
A. Yes, if we do our duty and make it possible for the League to work. We blew the old League up when we refused to join it, and rejected the Versailles treaty and declined to join France and England in a treaty of mutual guarantee. With us not participating, the League was doomed from the start. Our withdrawal from Europe upset the balance of power so heavily in Germany’s favor that France, and eventually Britain, had to make out of the League a coalition against Germany. This they did. Even so it failed to keep the peace because Germany was stronger than all the League members together. Had we stayed in the League we might have made collective security really work.
Q. How could America have made the League work?