June 28, 1919, should have been an epic, an ecstatic day. It was a day of disillusion and disappointment on which we abandoned the age-old and stubborn hope of a peace that would end war. Were we foolish to have forgotten in the early days of the Peace Conference how slowly the mills of the gods do grind, and that our diplomats were children of their ancestors, still fettered by the chains of the past, still confronting the insoluble problems of unregenerate human nature?
The Peace Conference was a Tower of Babel, where different tongues championed divergent national interests. The only Esperanto was the old diplomatic language of suspicion and greed. The mental pabulum that fed the public was clothed in new terminology. When hammer struck anvil in the high places, sparks shot out. We caught flashes of liberty, brotherhood, the rights of small nations. But in the secret conferences decisions were dominated by the consideration of the interests (as they were judged by our leaders) of the most powerful.
One day there appeared in our press room in the Place de la Concorde a Lithuanian, who had made an incredibly long journey, much of it on foot, to come to the Peace Conference. He had been fired by President Wilson's speeches. He wanted to tell the American prophet how the Poles, in his part of Europe, were interpreting self-determination. He did not see the President. Although touched by his sincerity, we wondered at his naïvety. Did he really believe that the same principle could be applied everywhere? Practical common sense urged me to believe that the liberty propaganda was overdone and that it was impossible to give justice to everybody. But I was clinging to my idealism as the Lithuanian clung to his. A plain body like me could not know or understand what was going on. But why preach idealism in international relations, if an honest effort to apply justice impartially was impossible? Surely the Great Powers could act as judges in assigning boundaries between the smaller nations. Liberty, like the love of God, is "broader than the measure of man's mind."
Quoting from a hymn I learned in childhood brings me to what I think was the reason of the failure of the Peace Conference: men forgot. They labored for the meat which perisheth. They posed as creators of a new world order but ignored the means of establishing it. They forgot that Jesus said, "He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it."
"But wait a minute," I hear one say, "did you expect a peace conference to be run on those lines?"
An ordinary peace conference such as we had always had, where the victors divide the spoils—certainly not! But this was not to have been an ordinary peace conference. We had been given to understand that the Conference at Paris met to incorporate in a document the principles for which millions had given their lives. Germany stood for the unclean spirit that was to be exorcised. Men had died on the field of battle for a definite object. There was the poem that was like a new Battle Hymn of the Republic, "In Flanders Fields the Poppies Grow."
When nations are not ready to love their enemy or even to love each other, the creation of a League to do away with war is an absurdity.
Either we believe in the coming of God's Kingdom or else we do not. The remedy for sin and evil, the means of securing the triumph of right over might, is in keeping the commandments. The peace-makers forgot the summary of the law as Jesus gave it in two commandments. If they had tested their own schemes for world peace by this measure, strange and rapid changes would have followed. If they had listened to Him as He spoke to them, it would have been as of old when "no man was able to answer Him a word, neither durst any man from that day forth ask Him any more questions."
The ceremony of Versailles did not lift the shadow of Germany hanging over France. And when I look at my son, I wonder what will come.