Part XIX of Washington and the Riddle of Peace by H. G. Wells. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. AN ASSOCIATION OF NATIONS The futility of the idea of a limitation of armaments, or any limitation of warfare, and as a possible remedy for the present distresses of mankind, without some sort of permanent settlement of the conflicts of interest and ambition which lie at the root of warfare, has grown clearer and clearer with each day's work of the Washington Conference, and the conviction that no permanent settlement is conceivable without a binding alliance to sustain it also grows stronger each day. For security and peace in the Pacific, an alliance of at least America, Britain and Japan, is imperative, and Britain cannot play her part therein unless Europe is safe also, through a binding alliance of at least France, Germany, Britain, and America. To arrest the economic decadence of the world, a still wider bond is needed. So the inflexible logic of this situation brings us back to the problem of a world alliance and a world guarantee, the problem of which the League of Nations was the first attempted solution. The conference is being forced toward that Ampler problem again, in spite of the severe restrictions of its agenda. After President Wilson's League comes President Harding's Association. Senator Bora, in alarm, emerges from the silence he has hitherto kept during the conference, to declare that this association is only another name for the League. On that we may differ from him. The primary difference is that, while the League was a very clearly defined thing, planned complete from the outset, a thing as precise and inalterable as the United States Constitution, the Harding Project is a tentative experimental thing, capable of great adaptations by trial and corrected error. A flexible and living thing that is intended to grow and change in response to the needs of our perplexing and incalculable world. The Harding idea, as it is growing up in people's minds in Washington, seems to be something after this fashion, that this present conference shall be followed by other things. The Harding idea, as it is growing up in people's minds in Washington, seems to be something after this fashion, that this present conference shall be followed by others having a sort of genetic relationship to it, varying in their scope, in their terms of reference, in the number of states invited to participate. A successor to the present one seems to be already imminent in the form of a conference on the economic and financial disorder of the world. Such a conference would probably include German and Spanish and possibly Russian representatives, and it might take on, in addition to its economic discussion, any issues that this present conference may leave outstanding. These Washington conferences, it is hoped, will become a sort of international habit, will grow into a world institution in which experience will determine usages and usage harden into a customary rule. They will become, by insensible degrees, a world parliament, with an authority that will grow or decline with the success or failure of the recommendations. One advantage of having experiments made will occur at once to those who have been present at the plenary sittings of the present conference. The method of trial and error will afford an opportunity of working out the grave inconveniences of the language difficulty. It is plain that, with only three languages going, French, Japanese, and English, proceedings may easily become very serious. There is no true debate, no possibility of interpolating a question or a comment, no real and vivid discussion. The real debating goes on in notes and counternotes, in prearranged speeches, communications to the press representatives, and so forth. The plenary sessions exist only to announce or confirm. They are essentially ceremonial. In any polyglot gathering, it seems inevitable that this should be so. The framers of the League of Nations Constitution, with its Council and Assembly, seem to have been far too much influenced by the analogy of single language governing bodies, in which spontaneous discussion is frequent and free. World conferences are much more likely to do their work by translated correspondence, and by private sessions of preparatory committees, and to use the general meeting only for announcement, endorsement, and confirmation. But the preparatory committees are only the first organs developed by the conference. Certain other organs are also likely to arise out of it, as necessary to its complete function. Whatever agreements are arrived at here, about either the limitation of armaments or the permanent regulation of the affairs of China and the Pacific, it is clear that they will speedily become seedbeds of troublesome misunderstanding and divergent interpretation, unless some sort of permanent body is created in each case, with very wide powers entrusted to it by the treaty-making authorities of all the countries concerned to interpret, defend, and apply the provisions of the agreement. Such permanent commissions seem to me to be dictated by the practical logic of the situation. Quite apart from the later conferences that President Harding has promised, a standing Naval Armament Commission and a Pacific Commission, with very considerable powers to fix things, seems to be a necessary outcome of the First Washington Conference. But these two commissions will not cover all the ground involved. This conference cannot leave European disarmament and the European situation with its present ragged and raw ends. Nothing has been more remarkable, nothing deserves closer study by the thoughtful Americans than the fluctuations of the British delegation at this conference with regard to a Pacific settlement. I see that able writer upon Chinese affairs, Dr. John Dewey, comments upon these changes of front and hints at some profound disingenuousness on the part of the British. But the reasons for these fluctuations lie on the surface of things. They are to be found in the European situation. Britain, secure in Europe, unthreatened on her Mediterranean roots, can play the part of a strong supporter of American ideals in China. She seems, indeed, willing and anxious to do so in spite of her past. But threatened in Europe, she can do nothing of the sort. She cannot extend an arm to help shield China while a knife is held at her throat. So the Pacific is entangled with the Mediterranean and the coasts of France, and it becomes plain that a peace commission for Europe is a third necessary consequence of this conference, if this conference is to count as a success. Suppose now that this present conference produces the first two commissions I have sketched, and gives way to a second conference with an ample representation of the European powers, which will direct its attention mainly to the presence and disarmament of France and Germany and Britain, a second conference whose findings may finally be embodied in this third commission I have suggested. Then suppose further that an international debt and currency conference presently gets to effective work. Surely we may claim that the promised association of nations is well on its way toward crystallization. Simply and naturally, step by step, the President of the United States will have become the official summoner of a rudimentary world parliament. By the time that stage is reached, a series of important questions of detailed organization will have arisen. Each executive commission, as the successive conference brings these commissions into being, will require in its several spheres agents, officials, a secretariat, a home for its archives, a budget. These conferences cannot go on meeting without the development of such a living and continuing body of world administration through the commissions they must needs create. Presumably that body of commissions will grow up mainly in and about Washington. If it does, it will be the most amazing addition to Congress conceivable. It will be the voluntary and gradual aggregation of a sort of loose world empire round the monument of George Washington. But I do not see that all these commissions and parliaments need sit in Washington, or that it is desirable that they should. A world commission for land disarmament might function in Paris or Rome. A world commission for finance in New York or London. And meanwhile, at Geneva or in Vienna, to which place there is some project of removal, the League of Nations, that first concrete realization of the American spirit, will be going on in its own rather cramped, rather too strictly defined lines. It also will have thrown out world organizations in connection with health, with such world interests as the white slave traffic, and so forth. It will be conducting European arbitrations, and it will be providing boundary commissions and the like. And somewhere there will also be a sort of world supreme court getting to work upon judicial international differences. Now this, I submit, is the way that world unity is likely to arise out of our dreams into reality. And this partial, dispersed, experimenting way of growth is perhaps the only way in which it can come about. It is not so splendid and impressive a vision as that of some world parliament, some perfected league, suddenly flashing into being and assuming the leadership of the world. It will not be set up like a pavilion, but it will grow like a tree. But it is a reality, and it comes. The association of nations grows before our eyes. And meanwhile there is an immense task before teachers and writers, before parents and talkers, and all who instruct and make and change opinion. And that is the task of building up a new spirit in the hearts of men and a new dream in their minds. The spirit of fellowship to all men. The dream of a great world released forever from the obsession of warfare and international struggle. A great world of steadily developing unity in which all races and all kinds of men will be free to make their distinctive contributions to the gathering achievements of the race. Part 19 Part 20 of Washington and the Riddle of Peace by H. G. Wells This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. France and England The Plain Facts of the Case If we are to have any fundamental improvements in the present relations of nations, if we are to achieve that change of heart, which is needed as the fundamental thing for the establishment of a world peace effort, then we must look the facts of international friction squarely in the face. It is no good pretending there is no jar when there is a jar. This business of the world peace effort, of which the Washington Conference is now the center, is not to smooth over international difficulties. It is to expose, examine, diagnose, and cure them. Now here is this Franco-British clash. A plain quarrel serving to the American audience. The Americans generally don't like this quarrel. They are torn between a very strong traditional affection for the French, and a kind of liking for at least one or two congenial things about the British. They would like to hear no more of it, therefore. They just simply want peace. But there the quarrel is. Was it an avoidable quarrel, or was it inevitable? Perhaps it is something very fundamental to the European situation. Perhaps if we analyze it and probe right down to the final causes of it we may learn something worthwhile for the aims and ends of the Washington Conference. Now let us get a firm hold upon one very important fact indeed. This clash is a clash between the present French government and the present British government. But it is not a clash between all the French and all the British. It is not an outbreak of national antipathy, or any horrible irreconcilable thing of that sort. There are elements in France strongly opposed to the French government upon the issues raised in this dispute. There is a section of the English press fantastically on the French side, and bitterly opposed even to the public criticism of the public speeches of the French Premier in English. The party politics of both France and Britain and, what is worse, those bitter animosities that center upon political personalities have got into this dispute. It may help to clear the issue if we disregard the attitude of the two governments in naming the sides to the dispute. And if instead of speaking of the French or the British sides, we speak of the keep Germany down and the give Germany a chance sides, or better, we call them the insisters, who insist upon the uttermost farthing of repayment and penitence from Germany, and the believers who don't, for it is upon Germany that the whole dispute turns. There is a very powerful insister party in Great Britain. There is a growing believer party in France, and while France has been steadily insister since the armistice, Britain and the British government have changed round from insister to believer in the last year or so. This change has produced extraordinary strains and recriminations between French and British political groups and individuals, as such changes of front must always do. Such disputes often make far more noise than deep and vital national misunderstandings, and it is well that the intelligent observer and particularly the American observer should distinguish the note of the disconcerted party man in a rage from the note of genuine patriotic anger. The beginnings of the present trouble are to be found in the Versailles Conference. There the only relievers seem to have been the American representatives. Those were the days of the British khaki election, when hang the Kaiser and make the Germans pay were the slogans that carried Mr. Lloyd George to power. For about four months the dispute went on between moderation and overwhelming demands. America stood alone for moderation. The British insisted upon the uttermost farthing, at least as strenuously as the French, and it was general smuts of all people who added the last straw to the intolerable burden of indebtedness that was then piled upon vanquished and ruined Germany. And both America and Britain were the parties to the arrangements that give France the power, the shylock right, of carving into Germany and disintegrating her more and more if Germany failed to keep up with the impossible payments that were then fixed upon her. The position of the French government in this business is therefore a perfectly legal and logical one. France can adhere, as Monsieur Briand says she will, to the Treaty of Versailles. We cannot plow and disregard any disposition of the Washington Conference to qualify or revise that Treaty, and the British government, in a hopelessly embarrassed and illogical position, can appeal only to the hard logic of reality. Britain is much more dependent upon her overseas trade than France, and so the British have earlier realized the enormous injury that the social and economic breakdown of Russia has done or enormous injury that the breaking up of Central European civilization will do. You are quite within your rights, these newly converted relievers, say, to the obdurate and sisters, but you will wreck all Europe. That idea, that the possible destruction of civilization has not yet entered so many minds in France as it has in Britain. Germany is nearer to France than to Britain, and the fear of being nascent and vindictive Germany is greater in France than in Britain. In the French mind, the possibility of a German invasion for revenge twenty years hence still overshadows the possibility of an economic breakdown in a year or two years' time. The British are nearer the breakdown and further from the Germans. That is the reality of this Franco-British clash. Upon that reality, bad temper, party-feeling, personal spite, irrational prejudices are building up a great mass of nasty quarrelsome matter, and the French government and the French nationalist majority are pressing on to naval and military preparations that distinctly threaten Britain. It is no good pretending that they do not do so when they do. The French submarines are aimed at Britain. Empty civilities between France and Britain are of no value in a case of this sort. Both countries are being worried by their infernal politicians, and both are in a state of financial distress and raw nerves. It is not a time when deliberation and clear reasoning are easy. But when we get down to the fundamentals of the case, we find that the antagonism comes out to these two propositions that are not necessarily irreconcilable. One, that Germany, for the good of the whole world, must not be destroyed further, but instead assisted to keep on her feet, relievers, and, two, that Germany must never more become a danger to France, in sisters. And these two propositions are completely reconcilable, and this particular clash can be entirely cured and ended by one thing and by one thing only, a binding alliance watched and sustained by a standing commission of France, Germany, Britain, America, and possibly Italy and Spain to guarantee France and Germany from further invasions and internal interference. If France follows the dictates of her better nature and the advice of her wiser citizens, forgoes her impossible claims and lets up on Germany from now on. And from no country can the initiative of such an alliance come more effectively than from the United States of America, the universal creditor who can bring home to France as no other power can, the beauty and desirability of financial mercifulness. I submit that these are the broad lines, the elements, the ABC of the present situation, and that there is nothing whatever between France and Britain that is not entirely secondary and subordinate to this issue between insistence and relief. And moreover, the issue between France in general and Britain in general is an issue that is going on in parallel forms all over the world. Old Japan insists upon the Versailles Treaty. Young Japan would relieve China, how much is not yet clear. The American scene is a conflict between those who insist fiercely upon the British debt and those who would devise relieving conditions. It is nowhere a struggle between peoples and races. It is everywhere a struggle between logic and reason, between the stipulated thing, the traditional thing, and the humane and helpful thing, between old ways of thinking and you, between the letter and the spirit. Old Shylock was the supreme and sister, and since Portia was the triumphant reliever, we may reasonably look to the woman-voter and the women's organizations of Britain and America for a particular impetus towards relief, and the sooner relief comes, the better. For once Shylock's knife is cut down sufficiently to the living flesh, the cause of the reliever and of civilization, the sooner relief comes, the sooner relief comes, the better. End of Part 20 Part 21 of Washington and the Riddle of Peace by H. G. Wells This Lebervox recording is in the public domain. A REMAINTER ABOUT war. Washington, December 5 An examination of the situation that has arisen in Europe France, England, and Germany, brings us out to exactly the same conclusion as an examination of the Pacific situation. There is no other alternative than this, either to fight it out and establish the definite ascendancy of some one power, or to form an alliance based on an explicit settlement, an alliance indeed sustaining a common executive commission to watch and maintain the observance of that settlement. There is no way out of war but an organized peace. Washington illuminates that point. We must be prepared to see an association of nations in conference growing into an organic system of world controls for world affairs and the keeping of the world's peace, or we must be prepared for a continuation of war. So it is worth considering what that continuation of war will be like. If you will not organize peace through some such association, then organize for war. For certainly war will come again to you or to your children. And for reasons set out in my earlier papers, reasons amply confirmed by the experiences of the Washington gathering. A mere limitation of armaments can be little more than a strategic truce. It may even cut out expensive items and so cheapen and facilitate war. Let me note here, in passing, that the case for some association of nations to discuss and control the common interests of mankind rests on a wider basis than the mere prevention of war. The economic and social divisions and discords of mankind provide, perhaps, in the long run, a stronger and more conclusive argument for human unity than the mere war-eval. And in this paper I will narrow the issue down to war, simply, and ask the reader to consider the probable nature of war in the future if the development of warfare is not checked by deliberate human effort. And I will not deal with the ill-equipped, cutthroat war that has been going on, and, thanks to the divisions and rivalries of France and Britain, is likely still to go on in Eastern Europe for some time to come. To wars of the little self-determined nations that the Treaty of Versailles set loose upon each other, the raids of Poland into Ukraine, and of Romania into Hungary, and of Serbia into Albania, the old-fashioned game enlivened by rape and robbery that was brought to its highest perfection long ago in the Thirty Years' War. These are not so much wars as spasms of energy, phases of accelerated destruction in the rotting body of East European civilization. But I mean the sort of war that will come if presently France attacks England, or if America and Japan start in for a good, long, mutually destructive struggle. You may say that war between France and England is unthinkable, but so far from that being the case certain worthy souls in France have been thinking about it hard. Hard but not intelligently. They do not understand the moral impossibility of Britain fighting America. They have never heard of Canada. They have never examined the text of the Anglo-Japanese alliance. And so they dream of a wonderful time when America will be fighting England and Japan, and when France, with magnificent gestures, and with submarines and Senegalese, at last gloriously justified, will come to her aid. So France will divide and rule and clamber to dizzying destinies. Blushing and embarrassed American statesmen have already had to listen, I guess, to some insidious whispers. Even among our distresses there is something amusing in the thought of this hot breath of old world diplomacy on the fresh American cheek. I do not say that these are the thoughts and acts of France, or of any great section of the French people. But they are certainly the thoughts and proceedings of a noisy nationalist minority in France, which is at present in a position of dangerous ascendancy there. Still, apart from the fact that the British will always refuse to fight America, there does seem to be no reason why, in the absence of a developing peace alliance to prevent it, either of the other two matches I have cited, should not be played. In the long run you cannot avoid fighting, if you avoid comprehensive alliances and standing arrangements for the settlement of differences with the people you may otherwise fight.  They have avoided any entangling alliances, or agreements, or settlements, kept their freedom of action, and are thoroughly prepared. Let us not fall into the trap of supposing that these wars will follow the lines of the Great War of 1914 to 18, and that we shall have a rapid lineup of great entrenched armies, with massed parks of artillery behind them, tank attacks, and all the rest of it. That sort of war is already out of fashion, and the fact that these wars that we are considering will be overseas wars puts any possibility of such a deadlock of land armies out of the case. The combatants will have to set about, getting at each other in quite other fashions. Let us recall the maxim, that the object of all fighting is to produce a state of mind in the adversary, a state of mind conducive to a discontinuance of the struggle, and to submission and acquiescence to the will of the victor. Old-time wars aimed simply at the small antagonist army, and at the antagonist government, but in these democratic days the will for peace or war has descended among the people, and diffused itself among them, and it is the state of mind of the whole enemy population that has become the objective in war. The old idea of an invading army marching on a capital gives place, therefore, to a new conception of an attack through propaganda, through operations designed to produce acute economic distress, and through the air, upon the enemy population. I will take the latter branch first. Few people have any clear ideas at present of the possibilities of air warfare. The closing years of the Great War gave the world only a very slight experience of what aerial offensives can be. Always, air operations were subsidiary to the vast surface engagements of the European belligerents. They were scouting, irritating, raiding operations. There were neither the funds nor the energy available to work them out thoroughly. In these possible overseas wars we are considering, the land armies and the big guns will not be the main factors, and the air and sea forces will. The powers we have considered will, therefore, push their air equipment on a quite different scale. They will be bound to deliver their chief blows with it. We may certainly reckon on the biggest long-range airplanes possible, on the largest bombs, and the deadliest contents for them. We may certainly reckon that, within three or four hours of a declaration of war between France and England, huge bombs of high explosive, or poison gas, or incendiary stuff, we'll have got through the always ineffectual barrage and be livening up the streets of Paris and London. Because it is the peculiarity of air warfare that there are no fronts and no effectual parries, you bomb the other fellow almost anywhere, and similarly he bombs you. Many people seem to think that America and Japan are too far from each other for this sort of thing, but I believe there is nothing insurmountable in these distances for an air offensive.  The job will be a little more elaborate. It will involve getting the air material to a convenient distance from the desired objective, by means of a submersible cruiser. That is all the difference. All the fleets in the world could not prevent a properly prepared Japan from pouncing upon some unprotected point of the California or Mexican coast, setting up a temporary air base there, and getting to work over a radius of a thousand miles. She might even keep an air base at sea, and it would be equally easy for America to do likewise to Japan. The citizen of Los Angeles, as he blew to pieces or coughed up his lungs and choked to death, or was crushed under the falling burning buildings, could at least console himself by the thought that America was so thoroughly prepared that his fellow man in Tokyo was certainly getting it worse, and that he blew to pieces on the soundest American lines, unentangled by any alliances with decadent old world powers. And an air war between America and Japan need not be confined to the Pacific slope. I do not see anything to prevent Japan, if she wanted to do so, with the aid of a venial neutral or so, getting around into the Atlantic to New York, and testing the stability of the great buildings downtown with a few five-ton bombs. The submarine would certainly be able to prevent any armies landing on either side of the Pacific to stop the preparation and launching of such expeditions. I do not know how American populations would stand repeated bombing. In the late war there was not a single intrusion of air warfare into American home life. The hum of the Goltha and the long crescendo of the barrage, as the thing gets near, were not in the list of familiar American war sounds. Some of the European populations, subjected to that kind of thing, got very badly rattled, and yet, as I have noted, the whole force of the combatants was not in the air operations in Europe. One result in nearly every country was an outbreak of spy mania. Everybody with a foreign name or a foreign look in England, for example, was suspected of signalling. There was much mental trouble. London possesses now a considerable number of air raid lunatics and air raid defective children, and these are only the extreme instances of a widespread overstrain. As the war went on, the air stress interwoven with the acute stresses produced in public life by the development of propaganda. Public life in France, Germany, and England got more and more crazy about propaganda. There was a fear of insidious whispering mischief afoot, more like the fear of witchcraft than anything else. Until it last it became dangerous and ineffective to make any utterance at all except the most ferocious threats and accusations against the enemy, and a kind of paralysis of suspicion even affected the adoption of inventions. All this mental and moral confusion and deterioration is bound to happen in any highly organized community that goes into a well-prepared war again. The only difference will be that it will all be larger and intenser and bitterer and worse, and I will not even attempt to elaborate the consequences of the economic attack by submarines upon shipping and by raids of airplane fleets assisted possibly by spies and traitors upon the bridges, factories, depots, grain stores, ports, and so forth of the combatant countries. If such things are not practicable across the Pacific now, they will be practicable in ten years' time. But my subject at Washington is peace and not war. I think it was Nevenson's recent account of the new things in poison gas that set my imagination wandering into these possibilities of the great alternative to entangling treaties and difficult settlements. I will return to certain neglected problems of the peace conference in my next article. End of Part 21. Part 22 of Washington and the Riddle of Peace by H. G. Wells. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Some Stifled Voices. Washington, December 6. I do not think my outline sketch of the Washington conference will be complete if I do not give an account of certain figures and groups in this simmering Washington gathering who have no official standing whatever and who are here in the unpopular role of qualifications and complications of the simpler concept of the Washington issues. They are not conspicuous absentees as are Germany and Russia. They come upon the scene but they come rather like that young woman with the baby who stands reproachfully at the church door watching the wedding in the melodramatic picture. They are full of reproaches and intimations of troubles yet in store. The other evening, for example, I found myself dining with a comfortably housed Korean delegation and listening to the tale of a nation overwhelmed. Korea is as much of a nation as Ireland. She had so recent an independence that she has treaties with the United States recognizing and promising to respect her independence. Yet she is now gripped, held down and treated as Po-san was in the days of Prussian possession. She is being assimilated by Japan. What is to be done about us? My hosts asked. One fellow guest thought nothing could be done because the Korean vote in the United States is not strong enough to affect an election. Amid the tumult of voices here one hears over and again an appeal for something to be done for Korea. Such appeals are addressed chiefly to American public opinion but it is also felt to be worthwhile to let Britain know, at least to the extent of letting me in on this occasion. I was introduced to an editor of a Korean paper which had recently been suppressed and I listened to an account, an amazing account, of the freedom of the press as it is understood in Korea under Japanese rule. Yet it sounded very familiar to me. Indeed I had listened to much the same story of suppressions, rather worse suppressions, the night before. Then I had been the host of two friends of mine, Mr. Hussain and Mr. Sopre, who have had extensive experiences of suppression in India. They are both here in much the same spirit as the Koreans. Whenever I talk to Mr. Hussain we always get to a sort of polite quarrel in which he treats me more and more like the Indian government in its defense and I become more and more like the British ascendancy. I adopt almost inadvertently, as much as is adoptable of the manner and tone of the late Lord Cromer, and say yes, yes, but are you ripe for self-government? These gentlemen say frankly that the British rule in India has displayed so much stupidity in such cases as the Amritsar massacre and the recent suffocation of the Mopla prisoners and that its complete suppression of any frank public discussion of Indian affairs in India is so intolerable that it is becoming unendurable. Everybody is talking of insurrection in India now, nobody talked of it three years ago.  Now that that dinner party has passed and gone, I can confess that I think Mr. Hussain's argument that under British rule India has no chance of getting politically educated because she is prevented from airing her ideas and that if her discontent is incoherent and disorderly, it is because of the complete suppression, completeer now than ever before, of discussion, is a very strong argument indeed. India and Britain cannot talk together about their common future if India remains gagged and without ever a chance of learning to talk. If a break comes in India, it is likely to be a bad and hopeless one because of her lack of worked out political conceptions due to her long mental restraint, while all the rest of the world from Korea to Peru has been trying over political self-expression. But it is interesting and perhaps not quite so pathetically hopeless as it seems at the first glance to find these two men in this city side by side with the Koreans, trying to get something done about it at the Washington Assembly. And a day or so ago I had a call from another unofficial delegate, a Syrian Muslim, who wanted to talk over the education of his people, also fretting beneath the wide surfaces of the Treaty of Versailles, with the ambition to manage the affairs of Syria for themselves. And as another case of the stifled voice here, are the representatives of the Cantonese-Chinese government, who made a scene the other day when the Peking representatives went into secret session with the Japanese. There was an assembly of hostile Chinese shouting, Trader, and things, apparently very disagreeable things, in Chinese. Here again there is a clamor for attention that gets short shrift from the official conference. And, lest these stifled outcries should fill the American reader with self-righteousness, I will note in passing that the entrance to the Second Plenary Conference was besieged by an array of banners reminding us that that evidently most gentle and worthy man, Mr. Debs, is still in prison for saying his honest thought about conscription, and also that I have received, I suppose, over twenty letters about an unfortunate young Englishman, a minor poet named Mr. Charles Ashley, who seems to have come into America looking like a person of advanced views, to have done some publicity work for the IWW, and to have been caught in a gale of indiscriminate suppression, and given a sentence of ten years for nothing at all. The offense of Mr. Debs, and the alleged offense of Mr. Ashley, I may note further, were a premature craving for universal peace, which might have weakened the will for war. All these suppressions of opinion strike me as black sins against civilization, which can only maintain itself and grow and flourish through the free expression and discussion of ideas. The temptation to ride off from the main business of the conference upon some quixotic championship of Korea, or India, or Mr. Ashley, is therefore very considerable. But when we consider that all these particular injustices are incidents in that general disorder, which permits the aggression of nation upon nation, and which blinds justice with cruel passion and urgent necessities of war, these cases appear in a different light. Korea and the suppressed and imprisoned Indian liberals, and Mr. Ashley, are like people hit casually in a great combat. And the immediate work of the ordinary combatant is surely not to specialize upon these special cases, but to go on with the general fight for world peace, which will render the atmosphere that created these particular wrongs impossible. Japan is attempting to crush and assimilate Korea, because Japan wants to be bigger and stronger, then she wants to be bigger and stronger, because of the fear of war and humiliation. Britain holds down India and is reluctant to lose her hold on Ireland for the same cause. If she relax, someone else may seize and use. America also crushes out the anti-conscriptionist, because otherwise he may embarrass the conduct of the next war. In the present conference, the liberal forces of the world may be able to establish a precedent that will at once reflect upon the position of both Korea and India, and to open such a prospect of peace, as will make the release of Messrs. Debs and Ashley inevitable. But that can only be if we stick to the main business of the conference, and do not fuss things up at present with too much focusing upon Korea or India, or the case of Mr. Debs. The precedent that may be established through the conference is the liberation of China, when China is militarily impotent and politically disordered, not only from fresh foreign aggression, but from existing foreign domination. The establishment of such a precedent is a thing of supreme importance to all men. If the conference does not get so far as that, so far as to establish the principle that an Asiatic people has a right to control its own destinies, and to protection while it adjusts these destinies, in spite of the fact that it cannot, as an efficient power, defend that right, it will have made a very wide step indeed, not only toward world peace, but toward a general liberation of Asiatic peoples held in tutelage. It is so important to mankind that that step should be made, that I grudge any diversion of energy to minor injustices, however glaring, or any complication of the issue whatever. So far as the conference goes, I am convinced that stick to the freedom of China is the watchword for all liberal thinkers. By the extent to which China is liberated and secured, the conference will have to be judged. Even the vast problem of India cannot overshadow that issue. End of Part 22 Part 23 of Washington and the Riddle of Peace by H. G. Wells This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. India, the British Empire, and the Association of Nations. Washington, December 7 It is difficult to think of any subject more completely out of the agenda of the Washington Conference than the future of India, but none demands our attention more urgently if we are to build up anything like a working conception of an association of nations. Some days ago Senator Johnson declared he had received assurances from President Harding that no further steps toward a definite organization of an association of nations were to be taken for the present. But these assurances will not hinder the drift of thoughts and events toward such a developing system of understandings as much at last, in fact, if not in name, constitute a world association. Indeed, the less we try to fix such a thing at present, and the more we think it out, the more probable and safe is its coming. Let the President go on, therefore, taking no steps directly toward his association, but proceeding as he must do very soon, with some sort of international conference upon the economic disorders of the world, and also, with the creation of some arrangement, permanent understanding, or whatever other name may be given to that commission, which is inevitable if the peace of the Pacific is to be made secure. Let us, who are dealers in the flimsier preparatory stuff of ideas and public opinion, get on with our discussion of the wider stabilizing understanding that looms behind. I have already said that from every country world peace and universal prosperity will demand a price. The price America will need to pay if she is to impose her conception of a universal peace upon the world is a great intellectual effort, an effort of sympathy, an abandonment of some venerated traditions, and in addition she must nerve herself to what may seem at first very great financial generosity. France must pay by laying aside an ancient and cherished quarrel, her glorious and tragic militarism, and the last vestige of her imperial ambition. The thought of predominance and the thought of revenge must be the German sacrifice, and Britain also must pay, in an altered attitude, to those wide possessions of hers inhabited by alien peoples that have hitherto constituted the bulk of her empire. The destiny of all the English-speaking democracies that have risen now, from being British colonies to semi-independent states, seems fairly clear. They will go on to nationhood, their links to Great Britain, continually less formal and legal, and more and more strongly sympathetic, will be supplemented by their attraction toward America, due to affinity and a common character. All the mischief-makers in the world cannot, I think, prevent the Dutch English of South Africa, the English French of Canada, the English French of Australia, the English Scotch of New Zealand, the Americans, this new emancipated Ireland and Britain, being drawn together at last by all their common habits of thought and speech, and even by the mellowed memories of their past conflicts, into a conscious brotherhood of independent but cooperative nations. The day has come for the Irish to recognize that the future is of more value than the past. Even without any other states, this girdle of English-speaking states about the globe could be of a great predominant association. Within this English-speaking circle of peoples, a whole series of experiments in separation, independent action, readjustment, cooperation and federation, have been made in the last century and a half, and are still going on, of the utmost significance in the problem of human association. No other series of communities have had such experiences. No other communities have so much to give mankind in these matters. The German coalescences have been marred by old methods of force, methods which have usually failed in the English cases. Spain and Latin America are at least half a century behind the English-speaking world, in the arts, and experience of political cooperation. But when we turn to India, we turn to something absolutely outside the English-speaking world girdle. One of the many manifest faults of that most premature project, The League of Nations, was the fiction that brought in India as a self-governing nation, as if she were the same sort of thing as these self-governing western states. It was indeed a most amazing assumption. India is not a nation or anything like a nation. India is a confused variety of states, languages and races, and so far from being self-governing, her peoples are under an amount of political repression, which is now perhaps greater there than anywhere else in the world. Politically she is a profound mystery. We do not know what the political thoughts of these people are, nor indeed whether they have in the mass any political concepts at all parallel to those of western civilizations. The Indian representative at the Washington Conference, Mr. Srinivastra Sastry, is obviously a British nominee. He is not so much a representative, as a specimen Indian gentleman. We do not know what national forces there are behind him, nor indeed if there is any collective will behind him at all. But it would be hard to substitute for him anything very much more representative. What constituency is there? What electoral college to send anyone? India is not in fact so constituted as to send a real representative to a conference or an association of nations at the present time. She is a thing of a different kind, a different sort of human accumulation. She belongs to a different order of creature from the English speaking and European states and from Japan. She is as little fitted to deal on equal terms with them as a jungle deer, let us say, is to join a conference of the larger Cetacea in the North Polar Seas. India is far less able to play an effective and genuine part as a member of an association of nations even then China. She has no real democratic institutions and she may never develop them in forms familiar to European and American minds. We American and English are too apt to suppose that our own democratic methods, our voting and elections and debates, and press campaigns and parliamentary methods which have grown up through long ages to suit our peculiar idiosyncrasies, are necessarily adaptable to all the world. In India they may prove altogether misfitting. India, were she given freedom of self-government under the stimulus of modern appliances and modern thought, would probably induce an entirely different series of institutions from those of Europe, institutions perhaps equally conducive to freedom and development but different in kind. And China also, with untrammeled initiatives, may invent methods of freedom and cooperation at once dissimilar and parallel to western institutions. But the mention of China brings us back to the possibility of applying the precedent of China to India. The discussions and perplexities of the last two or three years, which have culminated in a Washington conference, have slowly worked out and made clear the possibility of a new method in Asia. This is the method of concerted abstinence and withdrawal, the idea of a binding agreement of all the nations interested in China and tempted to make aggressions upon China to come out of and to keep out of that country, while it consolidated itself and develops upon its own lines. This new method, which has had its first trial at the Washington Conference, is a complete reversal of the method of dealing with politically confused or impotent countries and regions adopted at Versailles. It is an altogether more civilized and more hopeful method. Versailles and the League of Nations were ridden by the idea of mandates. All over the world, where disorder or weakness reigned, a single mandatory power was to go in, making vague promises of good behavior to rule and exploit that country. It was the thinnest, cheapest camouflage for annexation. It was a hopeless attempt to continue the worst territory-seizing traditions of the nineteenth century, while seeming to abandon them. It was pecsnip imperialism. So we had the snatching of Syria, of Mesopotamia, and so forth. But any soundly constituted League or Association of Nations should render that sort of thing unnecessary and inexcusable. The reason lying at the base of the British occupation of India, of the Japanese occupation of Korea, of the French Indochina, and so forth, is a perfectly sound reason so long as there is no association of nations. And it is an entirely worthless one when there is such an association. It is that some other power may otherwise come into the occupied and dominated country and use it for purposes of offense. The case of the British in India that they have kept an imperial peace for all the peoples of that land, that they warded off the Afghan raiders who devastated India in the early eighteenth century, and afterward the long arm of Russia, is a very good one indeed. The British have little cause to be ashamed of their past in India, and many things to be proud of. But they have very good cause, indeed, for being ashamed of their disregard of any Indian future. They have sat tight and turned peace into paralysis. They have not educated enough or released enough. Always the excuse for suppression has been that fear of the rival. Well, the whole purpose of an Association of Nations is to eliminate that fear of a rival and all that that fear entails in war possibilities. The Asiatic empires over alien peoples, these possessions of other peoples' lands and lives, have played their part in the world's development. They have become tyrannies and exasperations and taughty grounds for rivalry. A real Association of Nations can have no place for possessions, mandates, or subject peoples within its scheme. OF WASHINGTON AND THE RIDDLE OF PEACE by H. G. Wells This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. THE OTHER END OF PENSELVANIA AVENUE THE SEAVE FOR GOOD INTENTIONS I went to hear the President address Congress on its reassembling on Tuesday. He spoke to a joint session of the Senate and House of Representatives held, as is customary, in the Chamber of Representatives because it is the larger of the two chambers. Hitherto my observations have centered upon the Continental Building and the Pan-American Building up by the White House, and they have concerned the good intentions and great projects that glow and expand like great iridescent bubbles upon the conference that is going on in this region. But the conference, whatever freedom it has to think and discuss, has no power to act. Until the Senate, by a two-thirds majority, has endorsed the recommendations of the President, the United States cannot be committed to any engagement with the outside world. This is a fact that needs to be written in large letters as a perpetual reminder in the editorial rooms and diplomatic offices of all those Europeans who write about or deal with the foreign relations of the United States. For the Constitution of the United States is as carelessly read over there as the Anglo-Japanese alliance has been read here, and it is as dangerously misconceived. Through that first disastrous year of the peace, Europe imagined that the President was the owner rather than the leader of the United States. It was with great interest and curiosity, therefore, that I went down to this assembly at the Capitol to see the President dealing with his legislature. Here was the place not of suggestions but of decisions. What goes through here is accomplished and done, subject only to one thing, the recognition by the Supreme Court if it is challenged that the thing is constitutional. I went down with, what shall I say, some prejudiced expectations. The Americans resemble the English very closely in one particular. They abuse their own institutions continually. Prohibition and the police. But these are outside my scope. I have heard scarcely a good word for Congress since I landed here, and the Senate, by the unanimous testimony of the conversationalists of the United States, combines the ignoble with the diabolical in a peculiarly revolting mixture. Even individual senators have admitted as much, with a sinister pride. It is exactly how we talk about Parliament in London, though with more justice. But this sort of talk soaks into the innocent from abroad, and, though one takes none of it seriously, the whole of it produces any effect. I had the feeling that I was going to see a gathering of records, a barrier, perhaps an insurmountable barrier, in the way of the realization of any dream of America taking her place as the leading power in the world, as the first embodiment of the new thing in international affairs. It puts all this sort of feeling right, to see these two bodies in their proper home, and to talk to these creatures of legend, the representatives, and the senators. One perceives they are not a malignant subspecies of mankind. One discovers a concourse of men, very interested about, and unexpectedly open-minded upon foreign policy. They are critical, but not hostile, to the new projects and ideas. One realizes that Congress is not a blank barrier, but a sieve, and probably a very necessary sieve, for the new international impulse in America. The ceremonial of the gathering was simple and with the dignity of simplicity. The big galleries for visitors, which always impressed the British observer by their size, were full of visitors after their kind, ladies predominating, and particularly full, was the press gallery, which overhangs the speaker and the presidential chair. Some faint vestige of a sound religious upbringing had reminded me that the first are sometimes last, and the last first. I had fallen into the tale of the procession of my fellow newspaper men, from their special room to the House of Representatives. And so I found myself with the overflow of the journalists, not with everything under my chin, but very conveniently seated on the floor of the House, behind the representatives, and feeling much more like a congressman than I could otherwise have done. Away to the right were the members of the cabinet, the British visitor always has to remind himself that they cannot be either representatives or senators. Presently the ninety odd senators came in by the central door, two by two, and were distributed upon the seats in front of their hosts, the representatives. There was applause, and I saw Sir Auckland Getty's, with that large bare smile of his, and the rest of the British delegation entering from behind the chair, for the delegations had also been invited to come down from the unrealities of the conference, and had been assigned the front row of seats. Other delegations followed and seated themselves. At last came a hush and the clapping of hands, and the President entered and went to his place, looking extremely like a headmaster coming in to address the school assembly at the beginning of the term. He is more like George Washington in appearance, I perceive, than any intervening President. He read his address in that effective voice of his, which seems to get everywhere without an effort. I listened attentively to every sentence of it, although I knew that upstairs there would be a printed copy of it for me as soon as the delivery was over. Yet, although I was listening closely, I also found I was thinking a great deal about this most potent gathering, for potent it is, which has been raised up now to a position of quite cardinal importance in human affairs. President Harding is on what are nowadays for a President exceptionally good terms with Congress. He means to keep so. In his address he reiterated his point that even the full constitutional powers of the President are too great and that he has no intention to use them much less to strain them. Nevertheless, or even in consequence of that, he is very manifestly the leader of his legislature. The atmosphere was non-contentious. He was not like a party leader speaking to his supporters and the opposition. He was much more like America soliloquizing. His address was a statement of intentions. I think the President feels that, officially, he is not so much the elect of America as the voice of America. And instead of wanting to make that voice say characteristic and epic-making things, he tries to get as close as he can to the national thought and will. What President Harding says today America will do tomorrow. One human and amusing thing he did, he was careful to drag in that much disputed word of his normalcy, which he has resolved, apparently, shall oust out normality from the current English. And from the point of view of those who are concerned about the dark troubles of the world outside America, it was, I think, a very hopeful address. It reinforced the impression I had already received of President Harding as a man feeling his way carefully but steadily towards great ends. America's growing recognition of her inescapable relationship to world finance and trade came early and his little lecture on the need to give and take in foreign trade was a lecture that is being repeated in every main street in America. He spoke of Russia and returned to that topic. We do not forget the tradition of Russian friendship. It was a good sentence that some countries in Europe may well mark. The growing belief in America of the possibility of going into Russia through the Agency of the American Relief Administration and of getting to deal with the revived cooperative organizations of Russia is very notable. And though there was no mention of the Association of Nations as such, there were allusions to the world hope centered upon this capital city, and to the universal desire for permanent peace. And while I listened I was also thinking of all these men immediately before me, between four and five hundred men including the ninety-six senators with whom rested the power of decision upon the role America will play in the world. I have met and talked now with a number of them and particularly with quite a fair sample of the senatorial body. And I think now that it is going to be a much better body for international purposes than my reading about it before I came to Washington has led me to suppose. We hear too much in Europe of the rule of jobs and interests in Washington. No doubt that sort of thing goes on here as in every legislature, but it has to be borne in mind that it has very little bearing upon the international situation. It is not a matter affecting the world generally. I doubt if there is nearly as much business and financial intrigue in the lobbies of Washington as in the lobbies of Westminster. But anyhow, what there is here is essentially a domestic question. Both representatives and senators approach international questions as comparatively free if rather inexperienced men. Probably the only strong permanent force hitherto in international affairs here has been the anti-British vote based on the Irish hate of Britain. If the Irish settlement weakens or abolishes that, Congress will deal with the world's affairs without any perceptible bias at all. The average senator is a prosperous, intelligent, American thinking man elected to the Senate upon political grounds that have no bearing whatever upon international affairs. He is an amateur in matters international. A bitter political issue at home may make him do any old thing with international affairs, and that was the situation during the last years of President Wilson. Poor, war-battered Europe became upon in a constitutional struggle. But the Harding regime is to be one of cooperation with the Senate, and the dignity of the Senate is restored. This very various assembly of vigorous-minded Americans, for that and other reasons, is getting to grips now with international questions, with all the freshness and vigor of good amateurs, with the detached disinterestedness, a growing sense of responsibility, and the old peace-enforcing traditions of America strong in it. If only it does not delay things too long. I doubt if those who desire to see the peace of the world organized and secure are likely to have any quarrel with the Senate of the United States. The worst evil I fear from the American Senate, now that I have seen something of it, individually and collectively, is the impartial leisureliness of the detached in its dealings with international affairs. The President finished his discourse, and the stir of dispersal began. I had assisted at America reviewing her position in the world. I thought the occasion simple and fine and dignified. I found myself leaving the capital in a mood of quite unanticipated respect. In a previous paper I wrote of certain stifled voices at Washington. There is yet another stifled voice here that I have heard, and to speak of it opens up another great group of questions that stand in the way to any effectual organization of world peace through an association of nations. Until we get some provisional decision about this set of issues, the association of nations remains a project in the air. This stifled voice of which I am now writing is the voice of the colored people. As a novelist, a novelist in my spare time, and as a man very curious by nature about human reactions, the peculiar situations created by color in America have always appealed to me. I do not understand why American fiction does not treat of them more frequently. It is the educated, highly intelligent colored people who get my interest in sympathy. I cannot get up any race feeling about them. I am particularly proud to have known Booker T. Washington, and to know Mr. Dubois, and this time, in spite of a great pressure of engagements, I was able to spend two hours last Sunday listening to the proceedings of the Washington Correspondence Club, an organization which battles by letter and interview and appeal against the harsh exclusions from theaters, schools, meetings, restaurants, libraries, and the like, that prevail here. I will not discuss here the rights and wrongs of a bar that cuts off most of the intellectual necessities and conveniences of life from many people who would pass as refined and cultivated whites in any European country. I mention this gathering merely to note a very interesting topic upon which I was called to account there at. Once or twice in these papers, I do not know if the reader has noted it, I have mentioned the French training of Senegalese troops, and the objection felt by other European peoples to their extensive employment in Europe. I was asked at the Correspondence Club whether the objections I had made to this were not fostering race prejudice, and some interesting exchanges followed. I was inclined to argue that the importation of African Negroes into Europe for military purposes was as objectionable as their importation to America for economic services. But some of my hosts, some of the younger men, did not see it in that light. They are warmed toward the French by the notable absence of racial exclusiveness in France, and they see the ideals of that epic-making book, La France Negrée, from an entirely different angle.  Why not an African Napoleon presently, said the young man, a little wanting, I thought, in that abject meekness which is the American ideal of colored behavior? He was imagining, I suppose, something happening in Africa rather after the fashion of the emancipation of Haiti, and of great African armies pushing their former rulers back to the sea. But Colonel Taylor has recently suggested another possibility, namely that of France finding herself in the grip of a black Pretorian guard. It is a just conceivable fancy, a Pretorian guard, French-speaking and ultra-patriotic, keeping French socialists and pacifists and Bolsheviks in their proper place. I do not believe very much in either of these possibilities, nor even in the third possibility of European powers fighting each other with black armies in Africa. But I do perceive that dreams of a world peace will remain very insubstantial dreams, indeed, until we can work out a scheme, or at least general principles of action, for the treatment of Africa between the Sahara and Zambezi River. A scheme that will give some sort of a quietess to the jealousies and hostilities evoked by the economic and political exploitations of annexed and mandatory territories upon nationalist and competitive lines in this region of the earth. For it seems to be the fact that tropical and subtropical Africa has another function in the world than to be home of the great family of Negro peoples. Africa is economically necessary to European civilization, as the chief source of vegetable oils and fats and various other products of no great value to the native population. European civilization can scarcely get along without these natural resources of Africa. Now, here we are up against a problem entirely different from the problem that arises in the case of India, Indochina and China. Which is the problem of a politically powerless, but essentially civilized population which can be trusted to modernize itself and come into line with the existing efficient powers if only it is protected from oppressive and disintegrating forces while it adjusts itself. Africa is quite incapable of anything of the sort. Negro Africa is mainly still in a state of tribal barbarism. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, its peoples were in a condition of deepening disorder and misery due to the spread of European diseases and to the raiding of the Arab and native adventurers who had obtained possession of modern firearms. The small village communities of tropical Africa were quite unable to stand up against the brigand enterprises of mere bands of ruffians armed with rifles. The scramble for Africa on the part of the European great powers toward the close of the nineteenth century, a scramble largely dictated by economic appetites, did a little to mitigate the miseries and destruction in progress by establishing a sort of order through large areas of Africa. A sort of order that in some regions was scarcely less cruel than the disorders it replaced. But if continuing access to the resources of Africa is to be maintained, and if a return to the Arab raider and general chaos and massacres is to be avoided, it is clear that in some form the control of the central parts of Africa by the modern civilized world must continue. But we must be clear upon one point. If that control is to be maintained, as at present it is maintained, by various European powers acting independently of one another and competing against one another, in the not very remote future Central Africa is bound to become a cause of war. Central Africa was one of the great prizes before the German imagination in 1914, and it is now held in a state of unstable equilibrium by the chief European victors in the Great War. As they recuperate, the African danger will increase. Africa, next after Eastern Europe in the Near East, is likely to become in the course of a dozen years or so the chief danger region of the world. It behooves all those who are dreaming of an organized world peace through an association of nations to keep this African rock ahead in mind, and to think out the possible method of linking this great region with the rest of the world in a universal peace scheme. I submit that it is not premature for those who are concerned with the future of our race to consider the necessity of three chief things. One, the complete abandonment and prohibition now of the enlistment and military use of the African native population. Two, the application of the principle of the open door and equal trading opportunities for all comers in the regions between the Sahara and the Zambezi. Three, a more organized care of the native African population by a tightening up of the existing restrictions upon the arms and drink trades, and the development of some sort of elementary education throughout Africa that will give these very various and largely still untried peoples a chance of showing what latent abilities they have for self-government and participation in the general human common wheel. For my own part, it seems to me that any real League of Nations, any effective association of nations, must necessarily supersede the existing empires and imperial systems and take over their alien possessions, and that one commission embodying the collective will of all the efficient civilized nations of the world is the only practicable form of security for all those parts of Africa incapable or not yet capable of self-government. End of Part 25 Part 26 of Washington and the Riddle of Peace by H. G. Wells. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Fourth Plenary Session, Washington December 12. The reader will have seen verbatim reports of the speeches at the Fourth Plenary Session of the Washington Conference, and he will know already what decisions were handed out to us from the more or less secret session that prepared them for us. There has been a good deal of discussion here about the secret sessions and a certain indignation at their secrecy that I do not share. It is a matter of decency, rather than concealment, that men speaking various languages, representing complicated interests and feeling their way toward understandings, should not be exposed to embarrassing observation and comment until they have properly hammered out what they have to say. It is far better to digest conclusions under cover, and to present the agreed upon conclusion. This is no offense against democracy, no conspiracy against publicity. The mischief of secrecy lies in secret treaties and secret understandings, and not in protected interchanges. There is no sound objection to secret bargaining in committee, provided that finally the public is informed of the agreement arrived at, and of all the considerations in the bargain. The conclusions announced are important enough in themselves, but to all who care for the peace of the world they are far more important in the vista of possibilities they open up. Certain notable precedents are established. The four root resolutions do put very clearly those ideals of withdrawal and abstinence, which must become the universal rule of conduct between efficient and politically confused or enfeebled states. If the peace of the world is to be preserved. That is the new way in international politics. It is the beginning of the end of all Asiatic imperialisms. And, following upon its assent to those resolutions, the conference voted upon certain special applications of them. The abolition of the extraterritorial grievance, the right of China as a neutral power to escape the fate of Belgium, and the right of China to be informed on the article of any treaty affecting her, were established as far as a resolution of the conference could establish them. And then came Senator Lodge. For the fourth plenary session featured Senator Lodge, just as previous ones had featured Secretary Hughes, Mr. Balfour, and Mr. O'Brien. Fifteen years ago I came to Washington, and Senator Lodge showed me a collection of prehistoric objects from Central America and talked very delightfully about them. Fifteen years have changed Washington very greatly, but they have not changed Senator Lodge. He seems perhaps just a little slenderer and neater than before, but that may be a change in my own standards, and it was entirely in character, with my former impressions of him, that in putting the four-power treaty before the conference, he should indulge himself and his hearers in a vision of the realities of the Pacific, the multitudinous interests of its innumerable islands, its infinite variety of races, customs, climates, and atmospheres. It was a most curious and attractive phase of the always interesting conference to have this gray-headed, cultivated gentleman, breaking through all the abstract jargon of diplomacy and militarism, all the talk of powers, radii of action, fortifications, spheres of influence, and so forth, in his attempt to make us realize the physical loveliness and intellectual charm of this enormous area of the world's surface, that the four-power treaty may perhaps save now and for ever more from the fear and horrors of war. The proposed four-power treaty, which thus starts upon its uncertain but hopeful journey toward ratification by the Senate's legislatures and governments of the world, is essentially a departure from the normal tradition of the treaties of the nineteenth century. It is the first attempt to realize, what shall I call it, the American way or the new way in international affairs. Its distinctive feature is the participation of two possible antagonists, America and Japan. Instead of a war, they make a treaty and call in Britain and France to assist. It is a treaty for peace and not against an antagonist. I think that the difference between treaties for and treaties against is one that needs to be stressed. The Anglo-Japanese treaty was a treaty against, a treaty against First Russia, then Germany, and then against some vaguely conceived assailant. It is a great thing to have Japan and England cordially immolating that treaty now that this four-power treaty of the new spirit may be born. After Senator Lodge came Monsieur Viviani, with a very fine, if guarded, speech. Monsieur Viviani is a great speaker, but he is not merely eloquent, and I find people here saying little about his wonderful voice or his overtones and undertones or his romantic charm, but much about the subtle things, he said, in a gathering that is tense with attention, one is apt, perhaps, to transfer one's thoughts and expectations to the gathering as a whole, but it seems to me that when Monsieur Viviani rose to welcome this great beginning on the Pacific, we were all thinking, and how much further, and to what other regions of the world, are you prepared to extend this spirit and method of this Pacific bond. There is another rather threadbare treaty against, or at least an understanding against, known as the Anglo-French Entente. Is the time due yet for the merger of that also in another and greater bond of peace? I do not know how far the question that was in his mind was in the mind of the meeting, but I think that Monsieur Viviani made it very plain that it was in the background of his own mind. His speech was designed to bring simplicity, the easiness of the Pacific problem, into sharp contrast with the tortured complexity of the Atlantic, the Afro-European problem. He spoke of the freedom of the Pacific from long-established hate traditions. He reminded us of the 20 centuries of war and trampled frontiers and outrages and counter-outrages that had left Europe and North Africa scarred and festering. He conjured up no bogies. He had nothing to say about those seven million phantom Germans ready to extract their hidden rifles from seven million mattresses and haylofts and rush upon France. But he reminded the conference, gravely and wisely, of the relative complexity of the European problem, of the new untried nationalities that had been liberated, of the vast heritage of tradition and suspicion that had to be overcome. He addressed not only the conference, but the impatient liberal aspirations of the world. I ask you for forbearance, he said, and repeated that. I ask for forbearance. Now that was a great speech, and Monsieur Viviani is manifestly the sort of Frenchman with whom the new spirit can deal. Forbearance might well serve now as the watchword of Europe, and I wish that Mr. Balfour could have shown a fuller recognition of what Monsieur Viviani had said. Mr. Balfour had been so fine on several occasions at this conference that I felt it is a little ungracious to him to confess, as I must do, that twice in this day of the fourth plenary session, once in the conference and also in the evening when he replied for the Allies at the Gridiron Club, he seemed to be missing an opportunity, the opportunity of holding out a hand of friendship to liberal France. For the reactionary France, for the France of submarines and Senegalese and inflated army and navy estimates, neither Britain nor America nor any other part of the world has any use, and the more often we say that, and the more distinctly we say it, the better for everyone. But toward a France that can teach and practice forbearance, and come into great associations for the common welfare of mankind, we ought to hold out both hands. Most of the bitterness that has been directed towards France of late is not the bitterness of any natural hatred. It is the bitterness of acute disappointment that France, the generous leader of freedom upon both the American and European continents, no longer leads, seems to care no longer for either freedom or generosity. And twice I have seen opportunities lost for an appropriate gesture of reconciliation. Sooner or later, France and England have to say to each other, we have been sore and sick and exasperated and suspicious and narrow. Let us take a lesson from this American plan and set about discussing an Atlantic Treaty, an Afro-European Treaty, worthy to put beside this Pacific Treaty. And since this has to be said, it was a pity that Mr. Balfour could not take up Mr. Viviani's half-lead and begin to say it at the fourth plenary session of the Washington Conference. End of Part 26 Part 27 of Washington and the Riddle of Peace by H. G. Wells This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. About the War Debt Washington, December 13 In the official proceedings of the Washington Conference, the War Debt are never mentioned. It is an improper subject. In the talks and discussions and the journalistic writings round and about the Washington Conference, the War Debt are perpetually debated. The nature of the discussion is so curious and interesting, it throws so strong a light upon the difficulties that impede our path to any settlement of the world's affairs, upon the sound democratic basis of a worldwide will, that some brief analysis of it is necessary if this outline of the peace situation is to be complete. In private talks, almost universally, in the weekly and monthly publications that are here called Highbrow, I find a very general agreement that the bulk of these war debts and war preparation debts, as between Russia and France, and between the European allies and Britain, and between Britain and America, and the bulk of the indemnity and reparation debt of Germany to the Allies, cannot be paid, and ought not to be paid, and that the sooner that this legend of indebtedness is swept out of men's imaginations, the sooner we shall get on to the work of world reconstruction. Only one of these debts is even remotely payable, and that is the British debt to America. But with regard to that debt, the situation rises to a high level of absurdity. The British authorities, it is an open secret, have been offering to begin the liquidation of their debt now. They cannot pay in gold, because most of the gold in the world is already sleeping uselessly in American vaults. But they offer what gold they have, and, in addition, they are willing to get their factories to work and supply manufactured goods to the American creditor. Clothes, boots, automobiles, ships, agricultural, and other machinery, crockery, and so on and so on. Nothing could be fairer. Britain is full of unemployed, they must be fed anyhow, and if America insists upon her industries being buried under a pyramid of gold and manufactured articles, the British bankers and manufacturers believe they can, with an effort, manage the job and pull through. The exchange may take some strange flights and dives in the process. The British system may collapse even as the German system seems to be collapsing, but it is a strange situation anyhow. The British think the effort worth trying and the risk worth taking, and so behind the scenes it is Washington, rather than London, that wants at present to hold up the payment of the British debt. Only one other of the outstanding debts looks at all payable at the present time, and that is so much of the reparation debts of Germany to France as can be paid in kind, in building material and manufactured goods not produced in France. The idea of any other European debt payments, in full, is just nonsense. The gold is not there, and the stuff is not there, and there is no ability to produce anything like sufficient stuff under present conditions. Now the interesting thing about the situation here is that the understanding people in America do not seem to be explaining this very simple situation as frankly as they might do to the mass of American people, or at least that this explanation has not got through to the American people. There is a widespread conviction, which is sedulously sustained by the less intelligent or less scrupulous organs of the American press, that the wicked old European countries, and particularly Britain, that arch-deceiver, are trying very meanly and cunningly to evade the payment of a righteous obligation. Every effort to present the financial and economic disorder of the world as a world task in which the prosperous and fortunate American people may reasonably play a leading, intelligent, and helpful part is misrepresented in this fashion. There is a vast vague clamour for repayment aimed at Britain. Dealers in the old Irish hate business and the German hate business, now a little out of their original stock of grievances, join with shrill but syndicated Hindus in warning the simple citizen against councils of financial sanity as though they were insidious propaganda. Until it lasts an Englishman is sorely tempted to an exasperated, well, take your debt, which does no justice to the patience and intelligence of either England or America. Let us be clear upon one point. So far as the British debt goes the Americans can have it if they prefer to take that line. The British here in Washington and the British writers here are here because the Americans invited them to come to discuss the world situation and the possibilities of world peace. They are not here to beg. The time is not likely to arrive when one English-speaking community will beg from another. It certainly has not arrived now. However, I am an obstinate believer in the common sense and goodwill of the American people, and I do not believe that a press campaign designed to make a great people behave after the fashion of some hysterical backstreet Oriental user who has struck a bad debt is likely to do anything but recoil severely on the heads of those who have set it going. And I am not a believer in that sort of tact which would avoid reminding the American public of the circumstances under which these war debts were incurred. The Russian debt to France was spent largely upon war and war preparations, while Russia was the ally and helper of France. The war debts of the European allies to Britain and America, and the British debt to America, were spent upon war material. All these debts are for efforts spent upon a common cause. Each country spent according to its resources, as good allies should. Russia gave life and blood, and blood. She gave four million men. She smashed up her own social fabric. France and Britain gave the lives of men beyond the million mark. Also they gave much material, an enormous industrial effort. So also did Italy, according to her power. The British developed a vast production of munitions, as the war went on, using great supplies of material from America for which they paid high prices and on which great profits were made in America. At last America joined the war with her enormous reserves and strength, and gave not only great stores of material, but the lives of between 50,000 and 75,000 men. And so altogether America and the allied powers, giving their lives and substance as they could, saved civilization from imperialism. The British do not grudge the contribution they have made, and all that they have still to contribute for their share in that colossal victory. But some of us English here are growing a little irritated at being done as defaulters when we are not going to default, and at having our attempts to work in cooperation with the Americans, for the rehabilitation of a strained and collapsing civilization, explained as the interested approaches of a caging poor relation. I wish that Americans would think of the Europeans more frequently as people like themselves. The boys who came to Europe saw the European armies in ranks like their own, good stuff and kindred stuff. They were their comrades in arms, they fought and died beside them. They saw countries and a common life very like the American country life. They discovered that the French and British and Italians were also just folk. But these American papers of the hostile sort, right of France or Britain, as if they were wicked old spiders, they right of Britain as a monster with a crown and an eyeglass and such like concomitance loathsome to all sound democratic instincts. They right of the designs of France and Italy and Britain as if these horrid monsters were all playing a fearsome game with each other for the soul and body of America. It is easy enough then to clamor for repayments of war debts. It is easy then to excite people by a clamor for a war bonus for the veterans of the Great War to be saddled upon the European debtor. But let me remind the American soldier that the real European debtor, the fellow on whom it will fall, the fellow who will have to toil and pay and want, if you can realize that dream of pitiless exaction, is no legendary monster France or Britain. It is that other fellow over there you fought beside. It is the wounded man in blue or khaki you passed by as you went into action. It is the man who smiled his courage at you as you blundered against him in the din and confusion of battle. If you listen to these stay-at-home patriots and these exotic advisers of yours, it is he who will pay, he and his wife and his child. They will all pay in toil and privation and worry and stunted lives. It is they who will pay, but you will not receive. You too will pay in disorganized business, in restricted production, in underemployment. You will get nothing else out of it except whatever satisfaction you may feel in having made those other fellows over there in Europe pay, and pay bitterly. End of Part 27 Part 28 Of Washington and the Riddle of Peace by H. G. Wells This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Foundation Stone and the Building Washington, December 14 Beginning with the fourth plenary session of the Washington Conference, the registration of results in the Pacific in disarmament in China has begun. They are good results, assembled on a basis of broad principles that may sustain at last an organized permanent peace for the whole world. If there is one thing to be noted, more than another about the work that has led up to this settlement, it is the adaptability, the intelligent and sympathetic understanding shown by Japan in these transactions. The Japanese seem to be the most flexible-minded of peoples. They win my respect more and more. In the days of imperialistic competition, they stiffened to a conscientious selfishness and a splendid fighting energy. Now that a new spirit of discussion, compromise, and the desire for brotherhood spreads about the world, they catch the new note and they sound it with obvious sincerity and good will. No people has been under such keen and suspicious observation here as the Japanese. The idea of them as of a people insanely patriotic, patriotically subtle and treacherous, mysterious, and mentally inaccessible has been largely dispelled. I myself have tried that view over in my mind and dismissed it, and multitudes of the commonplace men have gone through the same experience here. Our western world, I am convinced, can work with the Japanese and understand and trust them. It will be for other and abler pens to record the detailed working out of the results of this great conference, this new experiment in human reasonableness, as far as it affects Shantung and Yap and Hong Kong and Port Arthur and so forth. My time in Washington is drawing to an end, and I will confine myself now rather to that broader and vaguer question in which I am more interested, the question of what lies behind and beyond this most successful and hopeful beginning in open international cooperation. Great and important as the conference is, the growth of a real and understandable project for the steady, systematic development of an effective international world peace, which has been going on in men's minds here and in the world generally in the last two months, is a much greater thing. It is a quite amazing mental growth, something very quiet and simple and yet astonishing, like a clear crystallization out of a turbid solution. Before the conference gathered, civilized people throughout the world were, I think, quite confused about how the peace of the world could ever be organized and rather hopeless about its being done. Now I think there is a widespread and spreading unanimity that there is a way, a practicable way and a hopeful way, by successive conferences, by widening peace agreements, by the establishment of permanent joint commissions, by systematic education and the sedulous cultivation of confidence, along which humanity may struggle and will struggle out of its present miseries and dangers toward the dawn of a new life. The next conferences that are indicated will gather in a mood of hopefulness and experience, there will be the most precious legacy of the present conference, one that must follow very soon, must deal with the economic rehabilitation of Europe. Here, it seems to me, America, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Russia, at least must meet, and soon. In the Christmas mood, in the phase of relief that radiates from Washington and Ireland now, we must not let our elation blind us to the fact that, for all the light that breaks in upon us, we are not yet out of the woods. Millions are starving today, great masses of men degenerate physically and morally in unemployment, European industrialism crawls and staggers still. We have laid the foundations of a new era, but the building has scarcely begun, and in addition to the World Economic Conference, there is also need of another conference to face the still more difficult task of military disarmaments and the re-examination of the factors of conflict in the Afro-European area. Personally, I want to see America in that conference also, because I do recognize that the freshness of mind, the deliberate diplomatic inexperience of America, is a factor of priceless value in these discussions. I would like to see that conference also held in an American atmosphere and before an American audience, if only for the sake of Europe. And if America can be interested in Kuang Tong, I don't see why America should not also be interested in Silesia or Silesia or Senegal or the Congo, which are all very much nearer. The appetite for conferences, the belief in conferences, will grow with what it feeds upon. One sees these gatherings, with their accessory commissions, permanent secretariats, and increasing world services, becoming a customary and necessary peace control of the Earth. And the peace control growing in this natural fashion will consist always and solely of the efficient and willing nations of the world. There will be no forced conclusions and no premature admission of incompetent and feeble peoples. The pedantry that would give every sovereign power, however little or rotten, a vote, a nice, saleable vote, in the management of the world's affairs, will play no part in this evolution. The association of nations will be a growing brotherhood of strong and healthy and understanding peoples, bound only by a bond of self-denial and mutual restraint toward the weaker folk of the Earth. The cooperation of the English-speaking peoples, and particularly the American will for peace, must needs play a very conspicuous part in the crystallization of this association. And so it is inevitable that a certain sort of international expert will be screaming that the world is threatened by an Anglo-American imperialism. It may be worthwhile to say a word or so to dispel this idea. Let us bear in mind that the Washington Conference, whose result may be the cornerstone of the organized peace of the world, is a conference of withdrawal and abstinence, self-restraint and mutual restraint, with regard to China and the Pacific. Its key idea is the cessation of aggressions upon weaker or less advantageously circumstanced people. If America and her kindred nations are most active in pressing for such results, it is not that they are moved by any thoughts of world predominance, but by liberal ideas that are the monopoly of no race and people. It is their fortunate lot to have been most accessible to such ideas, and to be able now to play the leading, most powerful part in establishing them in the world. But these ideas have a broader basis, and claim a wider allegiance than merely that of the English-speaking peoples. Liberalism, the idea of great nations of free citizens held together by bonds of mutual confidence, roots very wide and deep in humanity. It derives from the great traditions of the Greek and Roman republics, and from the traditions of freedom of the Scandinavian and Teutonic peoples. The America of today did not grow from American seed. Let America bear that in mind. The American idea is the embodiment particularly of the liberal thought of England and France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. France cannot destroy the greatness of her past or the greatness of her future by a phase of momentary folly with her submarines and Senegalese, her Polish ally, and all the rest of it. All peoples have such lapses. A few years ago, Britain was disgusting with her jingoistic imperialism. Let us forget our lapses and get back to our more enduring selves. Latin America, quite as much as English-speaking America, belongs to that great tradition of Franco-British liberalism. Liberal Germany in 1848 and again today struggles to take its fitting place among the emancipated peoples, as Italy did half a century ago. These are the peoples who can best understand now and help now. They are all in our system of ideas. They can be brought together into one purpose. It is natural and necessary that the peoples most saturated in that great tradition of European liberalism should be the first full members of the coming association and should be prepared to lead the rest of the world toward the new order. All peoples are not equally prepared. It is not a question of ascendancy. It is a question of those who are able doing the task that they alone are prepared to perform. When I think of an association of nations, I think, therefore, of a sort of club or brotherhood, not of every state in the world, but of the peoples who speak English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Japanese, as the big brotherhood of the world, with such states as Holland and Norway and Bohemia, and so forth, great in quality, if not great in power, and entirely sympathetic by training and tradition, associated with them in a great bond for two ends, for peace among themselves and for restraint and patience toward the rest of mankind. I think of such a brotherhood as the brain and backbone of the organized peace of the world, and I cannot see how it is possible to take in the other peoples of the world as helpers until they respond to the same ideals. I think first of a recovered Russia, and then of a unified and educated China, and of freed and reconstructed India, and of many other states, which can claim to be of a civilized quality, such as Egypt, gradually winning their way from a non-participating to a participating level. The relationship of China to Japan, in a developing association of nations, will be something rather analogous to the relationship of a territory to a state in the Constitution of the United States of America. Unless there is a strong, well-organized collective mentality in a nation or state, I do not see how there can be anything but a sham representation of it upon an association of nations, nor how it can be anything but a responsibility and weakness to such an association. And outside the system of participating states, and non-participating states, there are great regions of the earth, tropical Africa is the most typical case, which must necessarily have a sort of order imposed upon them from without, and for which a joint control by interested, associated nations is probably the best method of government at the present time. That, I think, is the vision of the political future of mankind that is opening out before us, a great system of associated states, locked and interlocked together by fourfold and sixfold, and tenfold treaties, open treaties, of peace and cooperation, ruling jointly the still barbaric regions of the earth, and pledged to respect and to keep, and at last to welcome to their own ranks the now politically enfeebled regions of old civilization. Such an association must necessarily supersede the empires of the 19th century and put an end forever to the imperialistic idea. Of such an association, the fourfold treaty may be the foundation stone, and within the security of such an edifice of peace, mankind will be able to go on to achievements such as we at present can scarcely imagine.