Observers of European politics invariably write that the verdict of General Elections is the result of a number of causes, and that it is difficult to assert how a so-called paramount issue would have been decided had not other considerations entered in to confuse and influence the judgment of the electors. If this be true in European countries enjoying representative institutions, how much more true is it of the United States, where elections are held at stated intervals, and where great issues can never be brought before the country as they are in Europe? The American executive is vested with great powers, is not dependent upon Congress, and enjoys office for a fixed period. Midway in the Presidential term a national election is held that has no power to change the policies of the administration. When Presidential year arrives, the outs are determined to become the ins. A moot question is found—it is sometimes a question of secondary importance—around which the campaign centers. Is it safe to assume that the people cast their votes upon the merits of this question, throwing aside all other issues?

When Mr. Wilson, returning from Paris with the Treaty of Versailles, failed to secure its ratification without reservations by the Senate, he appealed directly to the people and declared that the Presidential election of 1920 would be a “solemn referendum” on the question of our entry into the League of Nations. Eminent Republicans who were convinced pro-Leaguers announced their intention of sticking by their party, and begged others to do so, on the ground that a vote for Mr. Harding was not a vote against American participation in world affairs. They deplored the attitude of politicians in both parties, who had never considered the League issue on its merits, and expressed their belief that the cause of international coÖperation would gain more by the election of Mr. Harding than by the election of Mr. Cox. They based this opinion upon the Republican platform, which did not reject the idea of international coÖperation, but only opposed the League of Nations without reservations, as Woodrow Wilson would have it. Give the Republican administration the chance, and we should be in the League more quickly than if the Democrats remained in power, they argued. It is true that the Republican candidate stood on a platform, binding us to take the initiative in bringing the nations of the world together. As was so frequently said during the campaign, none was opposed to the attainment, with the coÖperation of the United States, of a new world order through a properly constituted and properly functioning League of Nations. “We are not against a league of nations, and we should even have entered the Versailles League, had we been allowed to make the strictly necessary reservations,” said the Republicans. “The issue is the Versailles Covenant without reservations safeguarding the liberty of action of the United States.”

Almost immediately after his inauguration Mr. Harding declared that the American Government was studying the problem of how we could best help Europe, and pointed out the obvious fact that the burden of heavy armaments was the main cause of the inability of European states to put into execution programs for economic rehabilitation. Although the victory had resulted in the complete disarmament of their enemies, the Entente Powers were spending more money for military purposes than before the war. So was the United States, for that matter. The question of limiting land armaments, however, was complicated by the reparations question and the Bolshevist menace. Could not a beginning be made in limiting naval armaments? The Principal Allied and Associated Powers had complete and absolute control of the seas. The German and Russian navies no longer existed. Why, then, the mad race for more battle-ships? The victors could only be building against one another.

President Harding invited into his Cabinet two men peculiarly qualified to advise him. No outstanding figure in American life had enjoyed a better opportunity to study European conditions during the war and the Peace Conference than Herbert Hoover. The new secretary of state, Republican candidate at the preceding election, was an enthusiastic protagonist of American coÖperation in world affairs. The President gave Mr. Hughes real authority in the State Department, and was not jealous of sharing with him what glory might accrue from success in administration policies.

President Harding and his advisers could not misinterpret the strong sentiment that prevailed throughout the United States, irrespective of party lines, to cut down the army and to modify the naval building program that was an inheritance of the Wilson administration. Generals Pershing and Bliss were the first to recognize the connection between a reduction of the military and naval establishments of the United States and the general problem of world peace. The press hailed with satisfaction their declarations. Then Senator Borah introduced a resolution, as follows:

The President is authorized and requested to invite the Governments of Great Britain and Japan to send representatives to a conference, which shall be charged with the duty of promptly entering into an understanding or agreement by which the naval program of each of the said Governments, to wit, the United States, Great Britain, and Japan, shall be substantially reduced annually during the next five years to such an extent and upon such terms as may be agreed upon, which understanding or agreement is to be reported to the respective Governments for approval.

The proposition for a naval holiday was indorsed by a conference in Chicago in May, attended by official representatives of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, the National Catholic Welfare Council, and the Central Conference of American Synagogues. Public sentiment enabled Senator Borah to get his resolution adopted as a rider to the Naval Appropriation Bill. The details of the plan had to be worked out carefully by the State Department. From a practical point of view, it did not seem possible to the Administration to ignore France and Italy, and Secretary Hughes advised the President that any discussion of naval armaments would inevitably bring up the subject of the balance of power in the Pacific. A proposal for a naval holiday, to be entertained by Japan, would have to take into account China and the Anglo-Japanese alliance.

After these matters had been considered by sounding the powers interested, identical invitations were sent to Great Britain, Japan, France, and Italy, inviting them to participate “in a conference on the subject of limitation of armament, in connection with which Pacific and Far Eastern questions will also be discussed, to be held in Washington on November 11, 1921.” An invitation was sent also to China, in which the paragraph concerning naval armaments was omitted.

The unrecognized Far Eastern Republic of Siberia, Belgium, Portugal, and Holland asked for invitations, on the ground that any international discussion of Pacific and Far Eastern questions interested them as vitally as the other powers. On October 4, Belgium, Portugal, and Holland were asked to send delegates. The request of Siberia was refused, with the following explanation:

In the absence of a single, recognized Russian Government, the protection of legitimate Russian interests must devolve as a moral trusteeship upon the whole Conference. It is regrettable that the Conference, for reasons quite beyond the control of the participating Powers, is to be deprived of the advantage of Russian coÖperation in its deliberations. But it is not to be conceived that the Conference will take decisions prejudicial to legitimate Russian interests or which would in any manner violate Russian rights.

It should be noted that the term “limitation of armament” was used in the original invitation and in all the later official correspondence concerning the conference. The American Government was anxious not to lead the people to expect too much of this first attempt to get the powers together to listen to reason on the subject of competitive armaments, and it was necessary to show that a naval holiday agreement was a benefit that could not be gained without the assumption of definite responsibilities and pledges in regard to international questions, the method proposed for the solution of which had hitherto been force alone.

The success of the Washington Conference depended upon the fulfilment of four conditions, the first of which affected all the powers participating, and the second, third, and fourth of which affected Great Britain, Japan, and the United States respectively. The conditions were: (1) that matters other than those on the agenda be rigorously excluded from the discussions; (2) that the British be willing to give up the supremacy of the sea; (3) that Japan agree to accept an agreement regulating the status quo in the Pacific in return for consenting to an inferiority in sea-power and the abrogation of the Anglo-Japanese alliance: and (4) that the United States ratify a treaty binding us to coÖperate with other powers in maintaining a fixed political status quo for a period of years in Eastern Asia and the Pacific. Without these conditions, limitation of naval armament was impracticable. If they were fulfilled, nothing that France, Italy, the lesser European states, China, or Russia (for the time being) could say, would wreck the adoption and execution of the proposed program of the conference.

In view of the many problems confronting Japan in world politics, discussion of which is beyond the scope of this book, it was predicted freely by Far Eastern experts that Japan would make embarrassing demands at the conference, and that the refusal to accede to them would lead to the withdrawal of Japan. But the same irresistible current of public opinion, voiced by a war-weary and tax-ridden people, forced Japanese statesmen to enter the conference with the idea that failure to arrive at an agreement was unthinkable. In October, just as the delegation was leaving, Tokio newspaper comment indicated this. For example, the “Yomiuri” said:

As to the questions of population and food, these are, of course, matters of life and death, and it is necessary to make efforts at every possible opportunity to secure an understanding with the Powers. But at the same time ... all intelligent men in this country are unanimous in taking the stand that there is no other means of solving these problems except by making our policy toward China thoroughly pacific and economic and by thus developing our trade and industry.... It is urged that the open door and equal opportunity are synonymous with equality of races, and that as such race equality should be proposed to the Conference. If the Japanese delegates should withdraw in case that proposal is rejected, Japan might be the victor from the point of view of international morality, but the practical result would be greater isolation. We cannot afford to attend the Conference in expectation of increased international isolation.

The British had long known that it was hopeless to expect to continue indefinitely the effort to keep ahead of the United States in naval construction. They were pitted against a people possessing superior wealth and means of production, whose Government was already committed to the elaborate program adopted in 1916. It was better to adopt the principle of equality of sea-power with the United States than to find themselves outclassed within the next decade. While it was true that American sentiment had turned against extravagance in naval construction, refusal on the part of the British Government to accept limitation of armament on the basis of equality would undoubtedly have resulted in a determination of the Americans not only to go ahead with their program but to match any program Great Britain might adopt as a counter-measure. British public opinion did not regard the United States as a potential enemy, as had been the case with Germany, and as would be the case with any other European country or Japan. Public opinion in the British self-governing dominions was in favor of the termination of the Japanese alliance, and this fact had to be taken into account by the British Admiralty. The British faced graciously a condition, and accepted it.

Disarmament, or rather limitation of armament, had become a policy almost universally favored among Americans. There was something of religious fervor in the spirit with which the Americans opened the conference. The program proposed by Secretary Hughes meant relief from taxation, of course. But to the man in the street it signified far more than that. Looking at the problem of both land and sea armaments from a more academic standpoint than the other Powers could afford to adopt, the American people believed that the naval holiday was the first step toward the genuine reËstablishment of peace and good will among nations. They were taken somewhat aback when it developed during the conference that the agreement limiting armaments would have to be accompanied by other agreements that appealed less to the imagination and awakened again the fear of foreign entanglements. But in order to secure the first agreement the Senate felt that it did not dare to refuse to ratify a four-power treaty, binding the principal Pacific powers to respect one another’s Pacific territories.25

When the conference finished its work at the beginning of February, there was dissatisfaction in many quarters in America. Some felt that the naval holiday should have included sweeping reductions and a fixed ratio in other kinds of naval craft than capital ships. Others argued that the conference, before breaking up, should have bound the participating powers to reassemble in the near future to consider land armaments. All believed that the old principles of world politics were too much in evidence in the treatment of China. But none was able to contest the statement of President Harding that the Washington Conference was epoch-making in that it marked the beginning, and a distinct step forward, on the path toward a new method in putting an end to competitive armaments.

The conference had also to its credit the diminishing, if not the removal, of causes for conflicts among the powers in the Far East. For a time, at least, there would be no more loose talk of the inevitable war between the United States and Japan, and the suspicion and discord resulting from the Anglo-Japanese treaty improved the relations between the United States and Great Britain, between Great Britain and her self-governing dominions, and between Great Britain and China. The subsequent withdrawal of Japan from Shantung indicated how the Washington Conference had made possible the fulfilment of Japan’s promise to President Wilson. On the other hand, the character of the decisions made at the Washington Conference was in no way harmful to the interests of Russia, and will not be upset when Russia becomes once more a factor in Far Eastern affairs. The non-participation of Russia, therefore, does not vitiate the work of the Washington Conference in the same way as the exclusion of Russia from the deliberations of the Lausanne Conference threatens to make ineffective its decisions as to the Straits and other Near Eastern problems.

From the success of the initiative of the American Government in the autumn of 1921, however, it is unsafe to draw the analogy that we should have been equally successful had we made the same proposal that the powers come together in our far-off and virtually neutral capital to make a similar beginning in solving the imperative problem of limitation of land armaments of European nations. We had a stake at Washington which we do not have in Europe. We had vital interests to safeguard which we do not have in Europe. We had means of bringing pressure to bear upon the participating powers which we would not possess in a land disarmament conference. At Washington we gained equality of sea-power with the greatest naval nation without having to pay heavily for it. No balance of power question or any other subject of international politics in Europe affects our interests in the way the balance of power in the Pacific and the amelioration of China’s international position do. At Washington we had the trump argument that if competition in naval armaments was not stopped we should be compelled to become the predominant naval power.

Naval disarmament was essentially an extra-European question. Land disarmament affects primarily the nations of continental Europe, and enters only secondarily and indirectly into American, British, and Japanese foreign policy. In contrast to the Washington Conference, the continuation conferences in connection with the Paris peace settlement, as we shall see in the next chapter, have been dominated by France’s fear of Germany and the anxiety of the other beneficiaries by the treaties to preserve their newly won independence and increases of territory. Reparations are subordinated to security, and security seems still to depend upon standing armies. Standing armies are a drain on the finances of states already on the verge of bankruptcy. And, inseparable from the question of reparations and security, from the standpoint of the European states, is the problem we vainly try to make a business matter, the settlement of interallied debts.