Mr. Henry A. Forster, the New York lawyer, has gathered interesting statistics from various sources to prove that Great Britain, Germany, and France receive from investments abroad, many of them in the United States, incredibly large annual interest. It may be, therefore, that the United States is not the creditor nation—in the actual sense of that word—that she is assumed to be; and before we release any of our debtors abroad (they are debtors to the holders of American Government securities, and not to our Government out of Treasury surplus), it would be well for us to find out what are the investment holdings of these Governments and their citizens in securities of every kind in the United States, on which interest is being sent abroad. Then there will be a clearer and fairer conception of the merits of this question on both sides of the Atlantic.
CHAPTER XXX
THE NEXT MOVES IN THE INTERNATIONAL GAME
Out of the Peace Conference and the welter of policies that followed it students of international affairs have learned one thing, if nothing else: to distrust the efficacy of formulas to improve relations among nations. Despite the sacrifices and the heroic deeds of countless millions of civilized human beings, despite the educational propaganda of the war years, despite the high ideals for the triumph of which we believed that we were fighting, there was a scramble for spoils immediately the war was ended. The Paris Peace Conference conclusively proved that there had been no conversion of statesmen from their faith in traditional foreign policies to the widely heralded and much vaunted principles of “self-determination,” “rights of small nations,” “making the world safe for democracy,” “a durable world peace,” and “the league of nations.” No effort was made to repudiate the Prussian idea that “might goes before right,” and it was soon evident that the war fought to liberate subject peoples had resulted in the destruction and ruin of some of them and in bringing out in the rest of them the bad traits we condemned the Germans for showing.
The story of Europe since 1918 gives us furiously to think; for we have seen our statesmen and leaders unable to abandon the traditional rules of the diplomatic game in their efforts to solve post-bellum problems and the great mass of intelligent men and women unwilling to inform themselves about and think constructively upon questions affecting world peace. It was natural that there should have been indulgence in prejudices and passions during the war. Whether in a righteous cause or not, fighting implies the abandonment of the inhibitions of civilized society and a return of the law of the jungle. Violence and the reasoning faculty cannot be used coördinately in the settlement of disputes. The excuse for putting our trust in force was that our opponents would listen to no other argument, and that when we had won we intended to restore the rule of reason. Our methods and our aims were totally different from those of our enemies, so we said, and we were saving civilization while they were trying to destroy it.
In fairness to our statesmen it must be recognized that public opinion in all the victorious countries called out for a victors’ peace and that if the world now exhibits symptoms of social disintegration and is for the time being on the down grade, it is because the passions engendered by the war did not die out and because hysterical peoples forgot or disclaimed in the hour of victory the goal that had made them capable of stupendous sacrifices and effort during the war years.
The Entente Powers and the United States are beginning to recognize that their failure to agree upon a common policy in Europe and the Near East is condemning them to forego the advantages of their victory in the World War. Protagonists and critics of the Paris peace settlement are still poles apart. On one point, however, all must agree. The Treaty of Versailles, and the other treaties modeled after it and dependent upon it, have failed to bring peace to Europe and the world. It is fruitless to talk about the bad faith of Germany, the abstention of the United States, the disconcertingly long lease of life of Soviet Russia, the imperialism of Great Britain, the militarism of France, and the unreasonableness of small states and subject nationalities; for each of these factors, taken by itself, is a result rather than a cause of the failure of the treaties. If we content ourselves with calling each other bad names and seeking to find in some one unruly national current or attitude the source of our ills, the universal chaos will only increase. It would not be hard to build up a convincing brief against the foreign policy followed by every nation, friend and enemy, since the armistice of November 11, 1918. But we get nowhere unless we are able to show that the present state of affairs is due, not to the errors of statesmen dealing with specific problems, but to fundamentally unsound and irrealizable concepts in the general bases of the treaties.
Among the errors of the Paris settlement we can point out: (1) creating a League of Nations whose charter provides for the permanent hegemony of five nations, with widely divergent interests; (2) reserving the advantages of the treaties to a few nations but making all members of the League responsible for their execution; (3) treating the vanquished enemies as criminals without right to counsel or appeal to an impartial tribunal, but at the same time not providing jailers to keep them in prison during the period of punishment; (4) denying the principle of reciprocity in contractual obligations; (5) declaring that the treaties are based upon the policy of freeing peoples from alien rule, but limiting the application of the policy to a few especially favored peoples, and violating it in other cases; (6) failing to apply one weight and one measure in passing upon the claims to reparations of peoples who had suffered in the World War through aggression, invasion, and the violation of international law; and (7) maintaining the old balance of power theory.
When we analyze the treaty, and study the course of the negotiations, we see that the first six errors are the children, that is, the outgrowth, of the seventh. It is possible to explain all the treaties by keeping in mind that the dominating idea of the Peace Conference was the recognition of the transcendent rights of the powers that had big armies and navies. The battle had been to the strong; so likewise should be the spoils. A new balance of power had to be created by virtue of which the strong could remain permanently strong by compounding their rivalries and by allowing one another strategic frontiers and the privilege of forming new international combinations for the purpose of keeping weak the peoples that had been conquered. The methods of waging war and of gauging strength, however, had radically changed during the nineteenth century. No longer were man-power and geographical position decisive elements. Coal, iron, oil, and access to food-stuffs and raw materials had become vital factors in the power of nations.
Far from being discouraged by the alarming condition of international relations five years after the war, we should feel relieved that we have been afforded a salutary demonstration of the futility of the Paris peace settlement at so little cost. If our eyes are now opened to the dangers of the international game, as it has been played since 1918, there is yet a chance to mend our ways before irreparable damage is done. Most of those who are writing on European politics are neither cynics nor pessimists, and they do not record the failure of these years with ghoulish delight. In discussing the possible dangers ahead they do not relish the rôle of Cassandra. The purpose of writing is to show how policies, approved in the beginning by public opinion, are likely to work out. Is the game worth the candle? That is for the reader to decide.