"And we realized that although it seemed like another world, we grown-ups could look back to before the war; but little children begin to remember in a world at war."
"And what is peace?" said the Minister. "It will not exist again for your children and mine until we educate our democracies in international understanding. The people of one country must know the people of another. When we say France wants this or Italy wants that, we are not talking about the people. How much did our Persians know about America beyond the fact that missionaries came from there? How much did you know about Persia beyond rugs and kittens and the Rubaiyát? I mean you collectively. How many of our people and how many of yours understood what Morgan Shuster was trying to do? No, no, we must not drop propaganda after the signature of peace. We must have exchange students—in agriculture and commerce and the professions. And then," continued the Minister, "peace must bring us work, work for everybody. Work is the only remedy for most of the ills of the world. And that means a common international effort to bring raw materials to, and to aid in the reconstruction of, the countries that have been battlefields."
"Will peace give us all of that?" I enquired. "It sounds like the millennium."
"If we think of peace as an abstract something that will drop on us from one day to another we shall have no change from the war-breeding conditions of the past. Permanent peace is a state of mind. A state of mind among the people and strong enough to control the actions of political leaders. Understanding, I tell you, understanding is the only way."
"I am afraid," said I, "it will be a cold day before the people will have much to say about war and peace. Throughout our politicians are all tarred with the same brush. Invite a doctor, a brick-layer, a parson and a mother of five children to come from each country. Sit them down together at one big table and I'd wager they'd make a good peace quickly. We like to say that the five per cent. of educated men rule the other ninety-five per cent. What is the fiendish power that lets rotten diplomacy order us out to kill each other? The world will have to suffer a good deal more before we learn the lesson. When wire-pulling and economic jealousies wish it, the politicians can plunge the peoples into a war again without their knowing how and why!"
"The war that was to end war," said the Minister, bitterly. He was thinking of the mockery of the Society of Nations as applied to his own country.
"This war that was to end war could have ended it," I cried, "if the Peace Delegates hadn't come here covering their greed and their imperialism with a camouflage of belles phrases. For the life of me, I cannot see why some real leader does not emerge at this crisis, and force the peacemakers to do what the doctor, the concierge, the little tradesman, the professor,—the people—all knew in the beginning had to be done. First make peace with Germany. Then sit around the table men representing the world and draw up a League of Nations. A league without Germany and Russia is only an offensive or defensive alliance. Same old game over again. This peace conference doesn't recognize give and take. It is all take. And they refuse to allow themselves and their frontiers to be measured by the same tape-line we propose to use on our enemies. This means simply that we are going to have once more the old-fashioned peace of might making right. I believe in a League of Nations founded on Christian principles. It is the only kind of a league that will give the weak a chance where the strong are concerned. Civilization is on the upgrade. The reason we are disappointed now and the cause of the unrest is that we thought we had got far enough along in the process of evolution to establish a new order of things. And we haven't. Nobody is willing to give up special privileges, secret treaties, and the balance of power. The Golden Rule is too simple to try."
"Ah, Madame," said the Persian Minister, "our peacemakers are like the sparrow in the Persian fable. The sparrow heard that the sky was going to fall. She flew to her nest and sat there stretching out her wings so that it would not fall on her little ones."
In my attitude toward the Peace Conference I believe I reflected all through the attitude of the common people of France, especially the Parisians. We had suffered too much and too long to want to see Germany let off easily. Our internationalism had nothing in it of pity for the Germans. We did not worry about how they were going to feel when they found out what they were up against. We knew that we could not make the Germans suffer as they had made us suffer. But we wanted written into the Treaty conditions that would make our enemies realize their guilt by finding out that the enterprise had not proved profitable. But along with this natural and justifiable desire we yearned for some greater recompense for our own suffering and sacrifices. Our hatred of war had become as intense as our hatred of the Germans who plunged us into war. We hailed with joy the assurances of our statesmen that they would make this time a durable peace, avoiding the mistakes and errors of the past. Imagine our consternation when we realized that the delegates to the Conference at Paris were not making peace along new lines. They were plotting peace along old lines. Weary months passed. The censorship still muzzled the press. But Parisians knew instinctively that something was wrong. Before Easter we lost faith in the Conference and hope in its intention of changing the old order of things.
But the great fact remained that the war was over and that, despite the soaring cost of living and labor unrest, we were free from having to go through the horrors of the previous winter. We counted our blessings.