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

by Ida M. Tarbell

If we are to succeed in repairing this battered world through the medium of the International Conference, then plainly it is the business of us all to try to understand the methods, the conduct and particularly the moods of this instrument of peace. It is as temperamental as a stock exchange. The Washington Conference began with a period of tremendous exultation. Mr. Hughes’ great naval program lifted the world. For ten days this mood prevailed. Then came the French in the person of their Prime Minister, Briand, and in an hour he had the temple of peace rocking on its base.

It was very interesting to see how the men who made up the Conference went steadily ahead from ten to six every day—and sometimes longer—in spite of the excitement M. Briand had stirred up. It was a fine example of the stabilizing effect of a daily task regularly followed. They went on for four weeks and then again stirred the world to enthusiasm by their Four Power Pact; their removal of the Yap irritation; their consent to the Japanese mandate in the Pacific; their acceptance of the Five-Five-Three naval ratio. At one swoop the war with Japan that a part of the American public has so sedulously cultivated for a good term of years was wiped off the map—unless the United States Senate prefer to restore it to its position.

However, the naval program was not a fact accomplished until France and Italy had consented to a ratio. That was the next step, and Mr. Hughes seemed to have turned to it with the utmost confidence—1.75 was the ratio he had fixed on as proper; then suddenly, without any warning, the soaring stock of the Conference dropped way below par. A British journalist, with more love of sensation than the honor of his profession, announced that the French had told the naval committee that France wanted to build ten 35,000 ton ships. The effect of those numbers suddenly thrown on a table where the figuring for weeks had been down, not up, was more nearly to throw the Conference delegates off their feet than anything that had happened to date. There was no questioning their dismay, for while Mr. Balfour and Mr. Hughes refused, as it was proper for them to do, to discuss the matter, while the French likewise kept their mouths shut, and complained that they had been betrayed, Mr. Hughes showed his excitement by a long cablegram, appealing to M. Briand, over the head of the then acting chief of the French delegation, M. Sarraut. Outside the Conference an excited world declared the whole thing was wrecked and that France had wrecked it.

Could this unhappy incident have been avoided? If the Conference had shown a more sympathetic understanding of the way France is feeling to-day, if there had been the realization which we certainly should expect of the effect of calling her into a gathering of this kind and then letting her Premier sit for a week with practically no attention, it probably would have been. When M. Briand was leaving the Conference on the opening day an American journalist asked him what he thought of it. The American way, he said, “à la Américaine.” And then he went on to remark that when the time came France would do like Mr. Hughes and talk in the American way. Weeks went on and France had no chance to talk in anybody’s way about her naval ratio. Everybody else but herself seems to have taken it for granted that 1.75 was to be her proportion. When her turn finally came, however, she began to hurl capital ships at Mr. Hughes’ program—ten of them, 35,000 tons each. The figures looked appalling, preposterous—they produced, as I have said, almost a panic. Now, obviously, the panic would have been avoided, as far as the public is concerned, if the matter had been kept in committee where it belonged and where the French intended to keep it. Given to the public, it stirred up anger on both sides of the water, whipped up suspicion, set all the busybodies at inventing far-fetched explanations and reading sinister meanings into the French proposal.

There was little trouble when Mr. Hughes appealed to M. Briand in getting the capital-ship ratio dropped back to the 1.75 first suggested. But along with this concession in the matter of capital ships went the decision that France would not limit her submarines and auxiliary craft. She wanted unlimited submarines for defense—defense against whom? It must be us, said England. She wanted auxiliary craft for the protection of scattered colonies. Here she took her position and here she remained. Mr. Hughes’ naval program leaves the number of submarines and light craft a nation builds at its discretion. Too bad—could it have been avoided?

One thing seems quite certain, that Mr. Hughes missed a tremendous opportunity in not boldly declaring in his original program that as for the United States, it was done with submarines. We did that at Paris in 1919. The head of our delegation, President Wilson, and his naval advisers agreed that in the disarmament pledged by the League of Nations the submarine was one weapon which could and should be put entirely out of existence. Its record of cowardice and plain murder no one could defend. The treaty of Versailles forbade the Germans to construct submarines for any purpose, and it certainly was the farthest from the thought of the majority of those who made that treaty that they were laying down one rule for Germany and another for themselves. The idea there was to disarm and to begin with Germany.

Why the American delegation should not have followed that policy here in regard to the submarine is not clear. But when it was not done in the opening program, it is still less understandable why they did not seize the British suggestion when it was made by Mr. Balfour. The British had the American program for naval reduction flung into their faces without warning, and they picked it up like wonderful sports, as did the Japanese. But when Mr. Balfour notified the Conference that he should propose complete abolition of the submarine, there was no such response. There were not a few of us who had an uncomfortable chill over the Washington Conference when our government failed promptly to follow the British in this policy, failed to say, “Yes, we are with you, it’s beastly business this submarine warfare—one thing we can do away with. We will join you in outlawing it.” But this was not done, and because it was not done, coupled with France’s determination to seize every chance that came along to secure recognition for herself, to enforce her argument that she must be prepared to defend herself, since nobody in the world seemed prepared to give her the guarantees which she thought necessary, if she were to disarm, the submarine came in to trouble Mr. Hughes’ program, and, incidentally, to spoil the Conference’s holiday week.

The regret was the greater because the arguments that Lord Lee and Mr. Balfour had put up for the abolition of the submarine were so weighty and conclusive that if they could have been presented at the start, or at least earlier in the negotiations, there seems to be little doubt that they would not have won over the Conference. These arguments have the backing of Great Britain’s experience with submarines, the most serious and extensive experience that any nation has yet had with this particular weapon. Lord Lee and Mr. Balfour had the facts to show that the German submarine fleet was able to accomplish relatively little in the Great War in the way of legitimate naval warfare. It left the British Grand Fleet untouched. In spite of all its efforts, it did not prevent the British taking fifteen million troops across the English Channel, and the Americans two million across the Atlantic. It was of little use to the British in guarding their coast line, which, as Lord Lee pointed out, was almost as great as the combined coast line of the four other powers in the discussion. What the German submarine fleet did do, however, was to destroy some twelve million tons of mercantile shipping and murder twenty thousand non-combatants—men, women and children. The counter defense against the submarine has been so developed, Lord Lee claimed, that an attacking fleet could be equipped to resist any number of them. That is, the methods of detecting, locating and destroying submarines have greatly outstripped their offensive power.

One of the strong arguments for the abolition of the submarine is the fact that it is possible to abolish it by general consent. Its case is very different from that of poison gas, which is a by-product of essential industries. You do not need to set out to find poison gasses; they come to you in the natural course of chemical research, and they do not have to be manufactured until you are forced to do it for defense. Moreover, they have the enormous advantage of not looking like war. They are disgusting, hateful things against which man instinctively revolts. They do not tempt the adventurous, as the submarine does.

Although the French particularly, through Admiral le Bon and M. Sarraut, did their utmost to combat the British position, their arguments had little weight in comparison with the British. The entire discussion which ran more than a week and which was given out day by day practically in full to the press only emphasized my feeling that the French, in insisting on a fleet of submarines all out of proportion to that contemplated in the original American program, were actuated more by a desire to assert themselves in this council of nations, to demonstrate that it is not safe to overlook their susceptibilities, than from any desire to have submarines for defense. If the representatives of the United States are to work successfully with other nations in international conferences, they must learn that diplomats can no more afford to overlook the feelings of other nations than an engineer can afford to overlook the susceptibilities of the iron and steel which he employs. France’s acute sensitiveness, her black imaginations, may irritate Americans who know nothing of invaded and devastated territory, who have not had to sit through five long years with the sound of bursting shells continually in their ears; but if they have not the imagination and the sympathy to tell them what the results of such an experience are, then let them accept the judgment of physicians and realize that in whatever negotiations they have with the French people at this time, their shell-shocked minds and souls must be taken into account.