Two days after Mr. Hughes had laid out his plan for ship reduction, and it had been accepted in principle and turned over to the naval committee, I heard an eager, suspicious young journalist ask Lord Lee who, at the end of eight hours of committee work—grilling business always—was conducting a press conference, if they were really “doing anything.” His tone showed that he doubted it, that in his judgment they must be loafing, deceiving the public; that if they were not, why, by this time the program ought to be ready for his newspaper. Lord Lee was very tired, but he had not lost his sense of humor. He made a patient answer. But one understood that there had already begun in Washington that which one saw and heard so much two years and a half before in Paris—a feeling that taking time to work out problems was a suspicious performance.
The calm of steady effort on the part of the Conference was brief. Mr. Hughes in closing the second plenary session where his naval program had been so generously accepted “in principle,” had said “I express the wish of the Conference that at an opportune time M. Briand will enjoy the opportunity of presenting to the Conference most fully the views of France with regard to the subject of land armaments which we must discuss.” Mr. Hughes kept that promise, fixing November 21, nine days after the opening, as the “opportune time.”
The Conference went into M. Briand’s open session serene, confident, self-complacent. It came out excited, scared, ruffled to the very bottom of its soul. In an hour one-third of Mr. Hughes’ agenda had been swept away. Could this have been avoided? I am inclined to think that it would have been if there had been a larger sympathy, a better understanding of the French and their present psychology. If we are to carry on the world coöperatively, as seems inevitable, we must have a much fuller knowledge of one another’s ways and prejudices and ambitions than was shown at the outset of the Washington Conference.
Back of the commotion that M. Briand stirred up on November 21 lay the idiosyncrasies and experiences of France. To understand at all the crisis, for so it was called, one must understand something of France—that she is a land which through the centuries has held herself apart as something special, the élite of the nations. The people of no country in the civilized world are so satisfied with themselves and their aim. There are no people that find life at home more precious, guard it so carefully, none who care so little about other lands, and it might be said, know so little of other lands.
It is only within the last twenty years that the Frenchman has come to be anything of a traveler. To-day, in many parts of France, the young man or young woman who comes to America has the same prestige on returning that thirty years ago the person in towns outside of the Atlantic border had in his town when he returned from a trip abroad. I was living in Paris in the early 90’s when Alphonse Daudet made a trip to England. It was a public event. Peary discovered the pole with hardly less newspaper talk.
Now this country, so wrapt up in itself and the carrying out of its notions of life—among the most precious notions in my judgment that mankind have—finds itself for a long period really the center of the world’s interests. It makes a superhuman effort, is valiant beyond words, practically the whole civilized world rallies to its help. It comes off victorious, and when it gathers itself together and begins to examine its condition it finds the ghastly wounds of a devastated region; the work of centuries so shattered that it will take centuries to restore the fertility, beauty, interest. It finds itself with an appalling debt; with a population depleted at the point most vital to a nation, in its young men, threatening the oncoming generation. It sees its enemy beaten, to be sure, but with its land practically unimpaired.
France not only had her condition in her mind, she had all her past:—reminiscences of invasions, from Attila on. Old obsessions, old policies revived:—the belief that she would never have safety except in a weak Central Europe—a doctrine she had repudiated—broke out.
She came to the peace table in Paris under an accepted program which said: Reparations, but no indemnities. And her bitterness so overwhelmed her that she forgot the principle pledge and demanded indemnities in full. She forgot her pledge to annex nothing and called for the Rhine Border. Every effort to reason with her, to persuade her not to ask the impossible of her beaten enemy, she interpreted as lack of sympathy, and pointed to her devastated region, her debts, her shrunken population. She accused of injustice those who felt that mercy is the great wisdom. Justice became her great cry. Intent on herself, her dreadful woes, her determination to have the last pound, she magnified her perils, saw combinations against her, and went about in Europe trying to arm other peoples, to build up a pro-France party. Any effort to persuade her that the spirit which underlay the Versailles Treaty was pro-humanity and not pro-French embittered and antagonized her. She resented the English effort to bring some kind of order into the Continent. She resented the conclusion of the world—slow enough though it was—to let Russia work out her own destiny.
No lover of France has any right to overlook or encourage this attitude. It is the most dangerous course she could take. She is building up anti-French antagonisms in beaten Europe, and she is alienating countries that want to bring the world onto a new basis of Good Will and who believe it can be done.
When M. Briand came to the Washington peace table, he left behind him a country in this abnormal mood—her thoughts centered on herself—her needs, her dangers. M. Briand knew well enough that she would not see the program that Mr. Hughes had thrown out as it was intended—a tremendously bold suggestion for world peace—a call to the sacrifice that each country must make if order was to be restored, the awful losses of recent years repaired. M. Briand knew that what France expected him to get at Washington was recognition, sympathy, guarantees. The last thing that she wanted brought back was a request to join in a program of sacrifice.