POPE AND PRESIDENT

Peace efforts, assiduously pursued in Berlin, and culminating in the Reichstag resolution recorded in the previous volume, had meantime taken a new turn; but they encountered a new element in the United States as a resolute belligerent.

The Vatican interposed with an olive branch. The Pope tread cautiously, sensible of the delicacy of his task in seeking to effect world peace; but his proposals were hopelessly futile and died in the borning. Their only welcome came from the Central Powers, and even there dissentient voices were heard. The Allies' reception of his note was cold, unresponsive, suspicious, and resentful. "As you were," the Pope virtually proposed to the two groups of belligerents, running directly counter to the chief aim of the Allies, which was to overturn the status quo ante, and establish a European concert of nations on a new, safer, and enduring foundation.

The Papal note, communicated to the various belligerent powers on August 1, 1917, invited their governments to agree on the following points, which seemed to his Holiness, "to offer the basis of a just and lasting peace":

"First, the fundamental point must be that the material force of arms shall give way to the moral force of right, whence shall proceed a just agreement of all upon the simultaneous and reciprocal decrease of armaments, according to rules and guarantees to be established, in the necessary and sufficient measure for the maintenance of public order in every State; then, taking the place of arms, the institution of arbitration, with its high pacifying function, according to rules to be drawn in concert and under sanctions to be determined against any State which would decline either to refer international questions to arbitration or to accept its awards.

"When supremacy of right is thus established, let every obstacle to ways of communication of the peoples be removed by insuring, through rules to be also determined, the true freedom and community of the seas, which, on the one hand, would eliminate any causes of conflict, and on the other hand, would open to all new sources of prosperity and progress.

"As for the damages to be repaid and the cost of the war, we see no other way of solving the question than by setting up the general principle of entire and reciprocal conditions, which would be justified by the immense benefit to be derived from disarmament, all the more as one could not understand that such carnage could go on for mere economic reasons. If certain particular reasons stand against this in certain cases, let them be weighed in justice and equity.

"But these specific agreements, with the immense advantages that flow from them, are not possible unless territory now occupied is reciprocally restituted. Therefore, on the part of Germany, there should be total evacuation of Belgium, with guaranties of its entire political, military, and economic independence toward any power whatever; evacuation also of the French territory; on the part of the other belligerents, a similar restitution of the German colonies.

"As regards territorial questions, as, for instance, those that are disputed by Italy and Austria, by Germany and France, there is reason to hope that, in consideration of the immense advantages of durable peace with disarmament, the contending parties will examine them in a conciliatory spirit, taking into account, as far as is just and possible, as we have said formerly, the aspirations of the population, and, if occasion arises, adjusting private interests to the general good of the great human society.

"The same spirit of equity and justice must guide the examination of the other territorial and political questions, notably those relative to Armenia, the Balkan States, and the territories forming part of the old Kingdom of Poland, for which, in particular, its noble historical traditions and suffering, particularly undergone in the present war, must win with justice, the sympathies of the nations."

The deep esteem in which the Allies and the rest of the nations held the Pontiff assured an attentive and respectful hearing of his appeal. But his intervention was nevertheless denounced as an espousal of a German peace, in that it would enable Germany to take her place at the peace council table with all her lost colonies restored, exempt from every demand for reparation for the ruin she had wrought, secure in the possession of all her territory, and with the future of Alsace-Lorraine, Trent, Trieste, Poland, Rumania, and Serbia left for settlement by negotiation by the parties in conflict. The Papal proposals were also objected to in making no distinction between the combatants, but placed them all on the same footing as apparently "stricken by a universal madness."

It soon became apparent that the Allied Powers, including the United States, were a unit in agreeing that the Papal note, because it overlooked the issues for which the Entente was fighting, must be respectfully rejected. President Wilson became their spokesman in a note he addressed to the Pontiff on August 27, 1917. While recognizing the Pope's "moving appeal" and the "dignity and force of the humane motives which prompted it," the President considered it would be folly to take the path of peace the Pope pointed out if that path did not in fact lead to the goal proposed. As to the Pope's proposals generally, he said:

"It is manifest that no part of this program can be successfully carried out unless the restitution of the status quo ante furnishes a firm and satisfactory basis for it. The object of this war is to deliver the free peoples of the world from the menace and the actual power of a vast military establishment, controlled by an irresponsible Government, which, having secretly planned to dominate the world, proceeded to carry the plan out without regard either to the sacred obligations of treaty or the long-established practices and long-cherished principles of international action and honor; which chose its own time for the war; delivered its blow fiercely and suddenly; stopped at no barrier, either of law or of mercy; swept a whole continent within the tide of blood—not the blood of soldiers only, but the blood of innocent women and children also and of the helpless poor; and now stands balked, but not defeated, the enemy of four-fifths of the world. "This power is not the German people. It is the ruthless master of the German people. It is no business of ours how that great people came under its control or submitted with temporary zest to the domination of its purpose; but it is our business to see to it that the history of the rest of the world is no longer left to its handling.

"To deal with such a power by way of peace upon the plan proposed by his Holiness, the Pope, would, so far as we can see, involve a recuperation of its strength and a renewal of its policy; would make it necessary to create a permanent hostile combination of nations against the German people, who are its instruments; and would result in abandoning the newborn Russia to the intrigue, the manifold subtle interference, and the certain counter-revolution which would be attempted by all the malign influences to which the German Government has of late accustomed the world.

"We cannot take the word of the present rulers of Germany as a guaranty of anything that is to endure unless explicitly supported by such conclusive evidence of the will and purpose of the German people themselves as the other peoples of the world would be justified in accepting. Without such guaranties treaties of settlement, agreements for disarmament, covenants to set up arbitration in the place of force, territorial adjustments, reconstitutions of small nations, if made with the German Government, no man, no nation, could now depend on.

"We must await some new evidence of the purposes of the great peoples of the Central Powers."

In other words, the Pope's proposals were regarded as untenable because the Allies could not trust the kaiser and his government to respect any covenants that might flow from them. There was no responsible person to negotiate with. The Vatican was disappointed, the German press greeted the President's answer with abuse, and the Allies found the American note so comprehensive and satisfying in expressing their views that they paid no further attention to the proposal.

Germany and Austria were more responsive; but the Allies' rejection through President Wilson of the papal suggestions imparted something of an anticlimax to the Teutonic replies when they were forthcoming a month later. Both reflected an earnest desire for peace; both gave whole-hearted support to the Vatican's efforts. Austria was especially eager to enter into negotiations on the basis the Pope proposed. But neither was specific. The Austrian emperor favored disarmament and arbitration in a cloud of platitudes. The kaiser accepted the Pope's general aims, but was mute on particularizing the German aims. Both suppressed whatever terms of peace they longed to offer. Sifted down to essentials, and extricating their meaning from a welter of unctuous verbiage, the Teutonic answers merely conveyed an eager desire to reach a peace conference, withholding terms for submission until such parleys could begin. As each evaded any suggestion of definite concessions on vital points, the absence of which constituted the principal obstacles to peace, and as the Allies had already refused to negotiate with the German Government in any event, the Teutonic answers lost all significance except as diplomatic courtesies in response to the Pope's well-meant mediation. That was probably their main purpose.

Germany proposed nothing except that the war be ended by a promise on her part to reduce her army reciprocally with other nations—a promise she would not fulfill; by a promise that Great Britain reduce her navy—a promise she would expect Great Britain faithfully to fulfill; and a promise of the nations to arbitrate in future—a promise Germany would ignore if conditions favored a new war. She saw "the freedom of the seas" as the issue of the war; but the seas were as free to Germany in time of peace as they were to Great Britain, their reputed mistress. The rest of the world saw the German Government as the real issue of the war.

The next peace manifestation, which caused a momentary disturbance in Allied circles, came from the Marquis of Lansdowne, a former British Foreign Secretary, who had also been Viceroy of India and Governor General of Canada. Fearing that the prolongation of the war might lead to "the ruin of the civilized world," he besought the Allies to make a restatement of their war aims in order to bring about peace before that catastrophe came.

The Lansdowne communication to the press looked like a plea for Germany, and coming as it did from a British noble of ingrained toryism, who had done his share as a Cabinet Minister to develop British imperialism, was startling enough. To forestall any suspicion that he was voicing unofficial sentiments of the British Government, Bonar Law and Lord Robert Cecil declared that Lord Lansdowne only spoke his own views. The Government repudiated them, as did the Unionist party. Lord Lansdowne himself was obliged to acknowledge that his proposals were solely his own and that he consulted no one in formulating them. It was realized that his note only encouraged the German war party, which construed it as evidence of divided counsels in Great Britain, and that the British were weakening in their determination to conquer. The air was quickly cleared and showed that no peace movement was possible in England while Germany remained impenitent and unbeaten.