CHAPTER XVII
TOWARDS INTERNATIONAL GOVERNMENT
These are three ways in which the United States might conceivably attempt to promote the international adjustments without which peace cannot be secured. We might seek to "go it alone," righting one wrong after another, intervening whenever and wherever our national conscience directed. Or we might enter into an alliance with one or a few selected democratic and enlightened nations to force international justice and comity upon other nations. Finally we might refrain from ubiquitous interventions and peace-propagating alliances and devote ourselves, in conjunction with all other willing nations, to the formulation of principles of international policy, and unite with those nations in the legalisation and enforcement of such principles. In other words we might become the standard about which the peaceful parties and groups of all nations might rally.
The first of these courses is quite impossible. It is grotesque to think of us, or of any country, as a knight-errant, rescuing nations forlorn from evil forsworn powers. There are two things, besides a saving sense of humour, which preclude us from essaying this rôle; we have not the knowledge and we have not the power.
For the making of peace more than good will is required. Nothing is more harmful in international intercourse than a certain sentimentalism and contempt for realities on the part of many of our pacifists.
The difficulty with most plans for intervention by one moral and infallible power is that they attribute a pikestaff simplicity to international—as, in fact, to all questions. According to certain superlatively well-intentioned people, some nations are wicked and others virtuous; some nations love the clash of arms, some the ways of peace; some nations are greedy, brutal and dishonourable, others are generous, gentle and honourable. It is the absolute bad and the impossible good of the melodrama, in which the human sheep and goats are sundered by an obvious moral boundary line.
In point of fact, no nation is good or bad in this simple sense, but all have a certain justice in their claims, however difficult it is to square these claims with the moral philosophy of the neutral country. The British had a certain justice in their conflict with the Transvaal as had also the Dutch burghers who resisted them. Even in our brutal attack upon Mexico in 1846 we had the justification arising from our greater ability to use the conquered territory. It is easy to find phrases to be used whenever we wish to interfere, but these phrases sometimes conceal an ambiguous meaning and sometimes have no meaning at all. Are we, for instance, to become the defenders of small nationalities, ready to go to war whenever one is invaded? Has a small nation a right to hold its present territory when that right conflicts with the economic advance, let us say, of a whole continent? Should we respect Canada's right to keep New York, had that city originally been settled by Canadians? Should we compel Russia to treat her Poles and Jews fairly and concede to Russia the right to compel us to treat our Negroes fairly? Some extension of the right of interference in what are now called the internal affairs of other nations must be admitted, but it is a precipitous road to travel. The united powers may compel Roumania or Greece to behave, but the United States, acting alone, would find it irksome to have to constrain or discipline Russia.
By this it is not meant that we should never intervene. It would be futile to fix such a rule for conduct which, in the end, will be determined by circumstances. In any question of interference, however, the burden of proof should rest heavily upon the side which urges a nation to slay in order to secure what it believes to be the eternal principles of justice. The general development will be toward greater interference, but this intervention will be increasingly international, not national.
In actual practice the problem when to interfere is immensely difficult. It is easy to say "let America assume her responsibility for policing the world," but the question arises, "What in particular should we do and what leave undone?" Should we war against Germany because of Belgium, and against France and England because of Greece? Should we fight Japan to aid China? Are we to mete out justice even-handed to the Poles, Finns and Jews of Russia, the Czechs and Southern Slavs of Austria, the Armenians and Alsatians? Should we have interposed to save Persia from benevolent absorption by Russia and England? Clearly we could not do these things alone, and to attempt them would be to strike an impossibly virtuous attitude. Even if we had the wisdom or the sure instinct to save us from error, we should not have a fraction of the power necessary to make our benevolent intervention effective.