Peacemakers—Blessed and Otherwise / Observations, Reflections and Irritations at an International Conference

by Ida M. Tarbell

It is just here that governments have fallen down worst. They might watch the war possibilities, but they have refused or not been able to evaluate them. They seemed to have felt usually that closing their eyes to them or at least refusing to admit them was the only proper diplomatic attitude.

As a rule, it has been the non-responsible outsider that has exploited war possibilities. Sometimes this has been done from the highest motives, with knowledge and restraint. More often it has been done on half-knowledge and with reckless indifference to results. There are always a number of people around with access to the public ear who love to handle explosives—never quite happy unless their imaginations are busy with wars and revolutions. There are others possessed by the pride of prophecy—their vanity is demonstrating the inevitable strife in the situation. They are the makers of war scares—the breeders and feeders of war passions. Sometimes war possibilities are the materials for skillful national propaganda—the agent of one nation working on a second to convince it of the hostile intent of a third.

It is the governments concerned that should be handling this sort of stuff and handling it in such a way that they would cut under the malicious and the wanton, get at the real truth and get at it in time and get it out to the world.

One of the chief reasons for some sort of active association of nations is that there should be a permanent central agency always working over war possibilities, estimating them, heading them off.

Present diplomacy does not do it. Could the coming Conference find a way for just this service in the Pacific situation?

How could the public be sure the Conference was really seeking these ends? Only by openness and frankness. Could one really expect that? No one of sense and even a very little knowledge of how men achieve results, whether in statecraft or in business, would think for a moment that the Conference must sit daily in open session with a public listening to all that it said. There was only one practical way of handling the agenda. The Conference must form itself into groups, each charged with a subject on which it was to arrive at some kind of understanding. The report must be presented at the Conference. But when this was done there should be free, open discussion.

To handle the plenary sessions of the present Conference as they were handled in Paris in 1919 would be a tragic mistake. These plenary conferences were splendidly set scenes. No one who looked on the gathering at which the Covenant of the League of Nations was presented would ever forget it. Nor would he forget how the gloved-and-iron hand of Clemenceau never for a moment released its grip; how effectively, for example, the incipient revolt against the mandate system aimed at making nations the protectors and not the exploiters of the German territories to be disposed of was soft-pedaled. Nor would he ever forget certain sinister faces in the great picture that chilled at their birth the high hopes which the Conference championed.

Free discussion, running, if you please, over days at this juncture, might have insured an easier, straighter road for the treaty of Versailles and particularly for the League of Nations.

Frankness would be the greatest ally of all who looked on the great mission of the coming Conference as preventing the Pacific crisis from ever ending in war. Frankness would break the war bubbles that the irresponsible were blowing so gayly. It would be the surest preventive of the fanatical and partisan drives which are almost certain to develop if there was unnecessary secrecy. Naturally, those on the outside would look on a failure to take the public in as proof that sinister forces were at work in the Conference, that dark things were brewing which must be kept out of sight.

As a matter of fact, one look inside would probably show a group of worn and anxious gentlemen honestly doing their best to find something on which they could agree with a reasonable hope that the countries that had sent them to Washington would accept their decisions. After one good look the public might change suspicion to sympathy.