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

by Ida M. Tarbell

He followed this by reading the written consent of the United States to another chunk of the League of Nations. What it amounted to was that the United States agreed to the mandate given Japan by the Versailles Treaty over the islands in the Pacific north of the equator, late the property of Germany. The United States also accepted all the terms of the mandate as laid down by the League of Nations. Excellent terms they are, too. We are even to get a copy of the annual report of her stewardship which Japan, like all other League mandatories, is obliged to make, showing that she is really developing and not exploiting the territory which she is being allowed to administer. This was a good deal for one day!

What did it mean? Why, most important of all, that the delegates of the United States had seen that limitation of armament means sacrifice. It was unwillingness to sacrifice that had prevented the disarmament proposed at Paris.

England must have her navy; her security required it.

France and Italy must have their armies; their security required it.

Each one of the little new nations that one would have supposed to have been so fed up on war that they never again would have been willing to spend a dollar on a soldier, must have their armies; their security required it.

Japan must have her army, her navy, her war loot; her security required it.

That is, no one of the allied nations was ready to make a sacrifice to carry out the plank of disarmament they had adopted. They insisted on applying the plank to the enemy they had beaten, but not to themselves. This was not in any large degree because of greed or revenge, it was because of fear—fear of the vanquished. There was utter lack of confidence in the plan of peaceful international coöperation which they had written into their program. Force alone spelt security in their minds. They had no sense of safety in a mere covenant, though all the nations of the world did commit themselves to its provisions.

It has been our boast that we alone asked nothing at Paris. But was this true? When it came to working out the code which the world had acclaimed as the true path to permanent peace, we refused to accept the one point on which all the rest hung; that for an association of nations looking to the continuous peaceful handling of international difficulties. Such an association we saw would invade our isolation and that isolation we have come to believe to be our chief security. That is, in essence, the United States was no more willing to make a sacrifice for permanent peace than were the distracted and disheveled nations of Europe. We and they all held on to the particular device which we had come by national experience to believe essential to safety—England her navy, France her army, Japan her army and her navy, we our freedom from entangling alliances.

The Four Power Pact proved that we were willing to sacrifice something of our isolation—just how much the future would have to show. But would we be willing to sacrifice anything of our naval program? There had been rumors of changes asked by both England and Japan. The ugliest gesture seen in Washington in the early days of the Conference had greeted these rumors. We were not going to tolerate tampering with the great work. It must be accepted as it was laid down, and if it was not, we would build the biggest navy on earth; we had the money; moreover we would call our foreign loans and then we’d see!

Various rumors of objections to the naval program, now that it had gone to the committee for detailed examination, were said to have been made. There was a disturbing rumor that England wanted the submarine banished from the navies of the world, and that we flatly refused to consider a request which could not but be welcome to the mass of the country, anxious to see not only capital ships scrapped, as had been proposed on the opening day, but auxiliary craft of all sorts. The chief irritation, however, had been over Japan’s strenuous objection to doing away with the greatest of her ships—indeed, the greatest ship afloat, the Mutsu. It was just what we might have expected of Japan; her acceptation of the program at the opening of the Conference was a pretense. She was going to object at every point. What the public was still not realizing in regard to the Mutsu was that to Japan it had become a tremendous, almost sacred, symbol. It was a ship designed entirely by the Japanese naval architects, built of materials prepared by Japanese workmen, named for a beloved emperor. The delegation feared to consent to her destruction. So much national pride had been aroused by the great ship that to consent to her destruction might ruin the whole naval program with Japan.