Today this is an entirely practicable and hopeful proposal if only we can overcome the opposition of those who cling to the belief that it is possible for a country to be at the same time entirely pacific and entirely unresponsible to and detached from the rest of mankind.
Given such a body, such a great alliance of world powers, much else in the direction of world pacification becomes possible. Without it we may perhaps expect a certain benefit from the improved good feeling of mankind and the salutary overthrow of the German military culture, but we cannot hope for any real organized establishment of peace.
I believe that a powerful support for the assembly and continuance of such a world congress as this could be easily and rapidly developed in North and South America, in Britain and the British Empire generally, in France and Italy, in all the smaller States of northern, central, and western Europe. It would probably have the personal support of the Czar, unless he has profoundly changed the opinions with which he opened his reign, the warm accordance of educated China and Japan, and the good will of a renascent Germany. It would open a new era for mankind.
III.
Now, this idea of a congress of the belligerents to arrange the peace settlements after this war, expanding by the accession of neutral powers into a permanent world congress for the enforcement of international law and the maintenance of the peace of mankind, is so reasonable and attractive and desirable that if it were properly explained it would probably receive the support of nineteen out of every twenty intelligent persons.
Nevertheless, its realization is, on the whole, improbable. A mere universal disgust with war is no more likely to end war than the universal dislike for dying has ended death. And though war, unlike dying, seems to be an avoidable fate, it does not follow that its present extreme unpopularity will end it unless people not only desire but see to the accomplishment of their desire.
And here again one is likely to meet an active and influential opposition. Though the general will and welfare may point to the future management of international relations through a world congress, the whole mass of those whose business has been the direction of international relations is likely to be either skeptical or actively hostile to such an experiment. All the foreign offices and foreign ministers, the diplomatists universally, the politicians who have specialized in national assertion, and the courts that have symbolized and embodied it, all the people, in fact, who will be in control of the settlement, are likely to be against so revolutionary a change.
For it would be an entirely revolutionary change. It would put an end to secrecy. It would end all that is usually understood by diplomacy. It would clear the world altogether of those private understandings and provisional secret agreements, those intrigues, wire-pullings, and quasi-financial operations that have been the very substance of international relations hitherto. To these able and interested people, for the most part highly seasoned by the present conditions, finished and elaborated players at the old game, this is to propose a new, crude, difficult, and unsympathetic game. They may all of them, or most of them, hate war, but they will cling to the belief that their method of operating may now, after a new settlement, be able to prevent or palliate war.
All men get set in a way of living, and it is as little in human nature to give up cheerfully in the middle of life a familiar method of dealing with things in favor of a new and untried one as it is to change one's language or emigrate to an entirely different land. I realize what this proposal means to diplomatists when I try to suppose myself united to assist in the abolition of written books and journalism in favor of the gramophone and the cinematograph. Or united to adopt German as my means of expression. It is only by an enormous pressure of opinion in the world behind these monarchs, ministers, and representatives that they will be induced even to consider the possibility of adapting themselves to this novel style of international dealing through a permanent congress. It is only the consideration of its enormous hopefulness for the rest of the world that gives one the courage to advocate it.
In the question of the possible abolition of the present diplomatic system, just as in the case of the possible abolition of war, while on the side for abolition there must be a hugely preponderating interest and a hugely preponderating majority, it is, nevertheless, a dispersed interest and an unorganized, miscellaneous majority. The minority is, on the other hand, compact, more intensively and more immediately interested and able to resist such great changes with a maximum of efficiency. There is a tremendous need, therefore, for a world congress organization propaganda if this advantageously posted minority is to be overcome.