CHAPTER IX
POPE AND PRESIDENT
Peace efforts, assiduously pursued in Berlin, and culminating in the Reichstag resolution recorded in the previous volume, had meantime taken a new turn; but they encountered a new element in the United States as a resolute belligerent.
The Vatican interposed with an olive branch. The Pope tread cautiously, sensible of the delicacy of his task in seeking to effect world peace; but his proposals were hopelessly futile and died in the borning. Their only welcome came from the Central Powers, and even there dissentient voices were heard. The Allies' reception of his note was cold, unresponsive, suspicious, and resentful. "As you were," the Pope virtually proposed to the two groups of belligerents, running directly counter to the chief aim of the Allies, which was to overturn the status quo ante, and establish a European concert of nations on a new, safer, and enduring foundation.
The Papal note, communicated to the various belligerent powers on August 1, 1917, invited their governments to agree on the following points, which seemed to his Holiness, "to offer the basis of a just and lasting peace":
"First, the fundamental point must be that the material force of arms shall give way to the moral force of right, whence shall proceed a just agreement of all upon the simultaneous and reciprocal decrease of armaments, according to rules and guarantees to be established, in the necessary and sufficient measure for the maintenance of public order in every State; then, taking the place of arms, the institution of arbitration, with its high pacifying function, according to rules to be drawn in concert and under sanctions to be determined against any State which would decline either to refer international questions to arbitration or to accept its awards.
"When supremacy of right is thus established, let every obstacle to ways of communication of the peoples be removed by insuring, through rules to be also determined, the true freedom and community of the seas, which, on the one hand, would eliminate any causes of conflict, and on the other hand, would open to all new sources of prosperity and progress.
"As for the damages to be repaid and the cost of the war, we see no other way of solving the question than by setting up the general principle of entire and reciprocal conditions, which would be justified by the immense benefit to be derived from disarmament, all the more as one could not understand that such carnage could go on for mere economic reasons. If certain particular reasons stand against this in certain cases, let them be weighed in justice and equity.
"But these specific agreements, with the immense advantages that flow from them, are not possible unless territory now occupied is reciprocally restituted. Therefore, on the part of Germany, there should be total evacuation of Belgium, with guaranties of its entire political, military, and economic independence toward any power whatever; evacuation also of the French territory; on the part of the other belligerents, a similar restitution of the German colonies.
"As regards territorial questions, as, for instance, those that are disputed by Italy and Austria, by Germany and France, there is reason to hope that, in consideration of the immense advantages of durable peace with disarmament, the contending parties will examine them in a conciliatory spirit, taking into account, as far as is just and possible, as we have said formerly, the aspirations of the population, and, if occasion arises, adjusting private interests to the general good of the great human society.