And from such countries as the American States in particular, and from the small liberal neutrals in Europe, whose diplomacy is least developed and least influential, liberal-minded people through the world are most disposed to expect, and do expect, a lead in this particular matter. The liberal forces in Britain, France, and Russia are extraordinarily embarrassed and enslaved by the vast belligerent necessities into which their lives have been caught. But they would take up such a lead with the utmost vigor and enthusiasm.
No one who has followed the diplomatic history of the negotiations that led to this war can doubt that if there had been no secret treaties, but instead open proclamations of intentions and an open discussion of international ambitions, the world might have been saved this catastrophe. It is no condemnation of any person or country to say this. The reserves and hesitations and misconceptions that led Germany to suppose that England would wait patiently while France and Belgium were destroyed before she herself received attention were unavoidable under the existing diplomatic conditions. What reasonable people have to do now is not to recriminate over the details in the working of a system that we can now all of us perceive to be hopelessly bad, but to do our utmost in this season of opportunity to destroy the obscurities in which fresh mischief may fester for our children.
Let me restate this section in slightly different words. At the end of this war there must be a congress of adjustment. The suggestion in this section is to make this congress permanent, to use it as a clearing house of international relationships and to abolish embassies.
Instead of there being a British Ambassador, for example, at every sufficiently important capital, and an ambassador from every important State in London, and a complex tangle of relationships, misstatements, and misconceptions arising from the ill-co-ordinated activities of this double system of agents, it is proposed to send one or several ambassadors to some central point, such as The Hague, to meet there all the ambassadors of all the significant States in the world and to deal with international questions with a novel frankness in a collective meeting.
This has now become a possible way of doing the world's business because of the development of the means of communication and information. The embassy in a foreign country, as a watching, remonstrating, proposing extension of its country of origin, a sort of eye and finger at the heart of the host country, is now clumsy, unnecessary, inefficient, and dangerous. For most routine work, for reports of all sorts, for legal action, and so forth, on behalf of traveling nationals, the consular service is adequate, or can easily be made adequate. What remains of the ambassadorial apparatus might very well merge with the consular system and the embassy become an international court civility, a ceremonial vestige without any diplomatic value at all.
IV.
Given a permanent world congress developed out of the congress of settlement between the belligerents, a world alliance, with as a last resort a call upon the forces of the associated powers, for dealing with recalcitrants, then a great number of possibilities open out to humanity that must otherwise remain inaccessible. But before we go on to consider these it may be wise to point out how much more likely a world congress is to effect a satisfactory settlement at the end of this war than a congress confined to the belligerents.
The war has progressed sufficiently to convince every one that there is now no possibility of an overwhelming victory for Germany. It must end in a more or less complete defeat of the German and Turkish alliance, and in a considerable readjustment of Austrian and Turkish boundaries. Assisted by the generosity of the doomed Austrians and Turks, the Germans are fighting now to secure a voice as large as possible in the final settlement, and it is conceivable that in the end that settlement may be made quite an attractive one for Germany proper by the crowning sacrifice of suicide on the part of her two subordinated allies.
There can be little doubt that Russia will gain the enormous advantage of a free opening into the Mediterranean and that the battle of the Marne turned the fortunes of France from disaster to expansion. But the rest of the settlement is still vague and uncertain, and German imperialism, at least, is already working hard and intelligently for a favorable situation at the climax, a situation that will enable this militarist empire to emerge still strong, still capable of recuperation and of a renewal at no very remote date of the struggle for European predominance. This is a thing as little for the good of the saner German people as it is for the rest of the world, but it is the only way in which militant imperialism can survive at all.
The alternative of an imperialism shorn of the glamour of aggression, becoming constitutional and democratic—the alternative, that is to say, of a great liberal Germany—is one that will be as distasteful almost to the people who control the destinies of Germany today, and who will speak and act for Germany in the final settlement, as a complete submission to a Serbian conqueror would be.