When one attempts to set down, with any degree of candor, his impressions of a great gathering like the Conference on the Limitation of Armament, he will find himself swayed from amusement to irritation, from hope to despair, from an interest in the great end to an interest in the game as it is being played. My hopes and interests and irritations over the Washington Conference began weeks before it was called. What could it do? All around me men and women were saying, “It will end war,” and possibly—so deep was the demand in them that war be ended—believing what they said. It has always been one of the singular delusions of people with high hopes that if nations disarmed there could be no wars. Take the gun away from the child and he will never hurt himself. If it were so easy!

Their confidence alarmed the authors of the Conference. They did not mean disarmament, but limitation of armament. Moreover it was not even a Conference for but one on limitation. This was equivalent to saying that there were other matters involved in cutting down arms—the causes that had brought them into being in the first place, the belief that only in them was security, and that if you were to do away with them you must find a substitute, and a way to make this substitute continually effective. That is, there were several problems for the Conference to solve if they were to put a limit to armaments, and they were not easy problems. But those who kept their eyes on disarmament, pure and simple, refused to face them.

Along with the many who believed the coming Conference could say the magic word were not a few—the sophisticated, who from the start said: “Well, of course, you don’t expect anything to come out of it.” Or, “Are you not rather naÏve to suppose that they will do anything?” And generally the comment was followed by “Of course nothing came from Paris.”

This superior attitude—sometimes vanity, sometimes disillusionment, sometimes resentment at trying any new form of international dealing—was quite useless to combat. You had an endless task of course if you attacked them on the point of nothing coming out of Paris when you believed profoundly that a great deal of good, as well as much evil, had come out of Paris, and that the good is bound to increase and the evil to diminish as time goes on.

Very singular, the way that people dismiss the treaty of Versailles, drop it out of count as a thing so bungling and evil that it is bound to eventuate only in wars, bound to be soon upset. The poor human beings that made the treaty of Versailles lacked omniscience, to be sure, and they certainly strained their “fourteen points,” but it will be noted that not a few of the arrangements that they made are working fairly well.

Moreover, what the Superior forget is that that treaty had an instrument put into it intended for its own correction. The Covenant of the League of Nations is a part of the treaty of Versailles and it says very specifically that if at any time in the future any treaty—if that means anything it must include the treaty of Versailles—becomes “inapplicable,” works disturbance between the nations instead of peace, the League may consider it.

The belief in political magic on one side and doubt of all new political ventures on the other, made the preliminary days of the Washington Conference hard for the simple-minded observer, prepared to hope for the best and to take no satisfaction in the worst, not to ask more than the conferring powers thought they could safely undertake, to believe that the negotiators would be as honest as we can expect men to be, and that within the serious limits that are always on negotiators, would do their best.

One had to ask himself, however, what substantial reasons, if any, he had that the Conference would be able to do the things that it had set down as its business. This business was very concisely laid down in an agenda, divided into two parts and running as follows:

Limitation of Armaments:

(1) Limitation of naval armaments under which shall be discussed the following:

(A) Basis of limitation

(B) Extent

(C) Fulfillment

(D) Rules for control of new agencies of warfare

(E) Limitation of land armaments.

Far Eastern Questions:

(1) Questions relating to China

First. Principles to be applied

Second. Application

Subjects:

(A) Territorial integrity

(B) Administrative integrity

(C) Open door

(D) Concessions, monopolies, preferential privileges

(E) Development of railways, including plans relative to the Chinese Eastern Railway

(F) Preferential railway rates

(G) Status of existing commitments.

Siberia:

Sub-headings the same as those under China.

Mandated Islands:

Sub-headings the same as those under China with railway sections eliminated.

What reasons were there for thinking that the nations—England, France, Italy, China, Japan, Belgium, Holland, Portugal—could, with the United States, handle these problems of the Pacific in such a way that they would be able to cut their armaments, and, cutting them, find a satisfactory substitute. There were several reasons.

A first, and an important one, was that the difficulties to be adjusted were, as defined, confined to one side only of the earth’s surface which, if huge, is nevertheless fairly simple, being mostly water. It was the problems of the Pacific Ocean that they prepared to handle. These problems are comparatively definite—the kind of thing that you can get down on paper with something like precision. They had one great advantage, and that is that in the main they did not involve a past running into the dim distance. England has held Hongkong for only about eighty years. We, the United States, have had port privileges in China only since 1844. France first got a stronghold in Cochin China in 1862, and her protectorate over Annam is less than forty years old. It was only twenty-five years ago that the war between Japan and China over Korea began; the complications in eastern Russia are still younger. So are those in Shantung, Yap, the Philippine Islands. That is, the chief bones of contention in the Conference were freshly picked. In most of the cases there were men still living who helped in the picking.

It was the same when it came to concessions. The question of the ownership and administration of railroads and mines—they belong to our age. We can put our fingers on their beginnings, trace with some certainty what has happened, find the intriguers, the bribe givers and takers, the law breaker, if such there have been. In the case of most of the concessions we can get our hands upon the very men involved in securing them and in carrying on their development.

How different from the problems of Europe, running as they do through century after century, involving as they do successions of invasions, of settlements, of conquests, of incessant infiltration of different races, and the consequent mingling of social, political, industrial and religious notions. The quarrels of Europe are as old as its civilization, their bases are lost in the past. Without minimizing at all the difficulty of the questions on the agenda of the Conference, they did have the advantage of being of recent date.

There was encouragement in the relations of the conferees. These were not enemy nations, fresh from wars, meeting to make treaties. They were nations that for five years had been allies, and from the life-and-death necessity of coÖperation had gained a certain solidarity. True, their machinery of coÖperation was pretty well shot up. The frictions of peace are harder on international machinery than the shells of war. The former racks it to pieces; the latter solidifies it. Nevertheless, the nations that were coming to the Conference were on terms of fairly friendly acquaintance, an acquaintance which had stood a tremendous test.

These nations had all committed themselves solemnly to certain definite ideals, laid down by the United States of America. True, their ideals were badly battered, and as a government we were in the anomalous position of temporarily abandoning them after having committed our friends to them. However, they still stood on their feet, these ideals.

It could be counted as an advantage that the associations of the years of the War had made the men who would represent the different nations at the Conference fairly well acquainted with one another. Whatever disappointments there might be in the delegations we could depend upon it that the men chosen would be tried men. They were pretty sure to be men of trustworthy character, with records of respectable achievement, men like Root and Hughes and Underwood in our own delegation. They would not come unknown to each other or unknown to the nations involved. It would be a simple matter for us, the public, to become acquainted with their records. If by any unhappy chance there should be among them a political intriguer, that, too, would be known.

These were all good reasons for expecting that the Conference might do something of what it started out for. How much of it it would do and how permanent that which it did would be would depend in no small degree upon the attitude of mind of this country, whether the backing that we gave the Conference was one of emotionalism or intelligence. We were starting out with a will to succeed; we were going to spend our first day praying for success. It would be well if we injected into those prayers a supplication for self-control, clearness of judgment, and willingness to use our minds as well as our hearts in the struggles that were sure to come.

Alarms went along with these hopes. There were certain very definite things that might get in the way of the success of the Conference—things that often frustrate the best intentions of men, still they were matters over which the public and the press would have at least a certain control, if they took a high and intelligent view of their own responsibility.

First, there were the scapegoats. There are bound to be periods in all human undertakings when the way is obscure, when failure threatens, when it is obvious that certain things on which we have set our hearts are unobtainable. Irritation and discouragement always characterize these periods. It is here that we fall back on a scapegoat. An international conference usually picks one or more before it gets through—a nation which everybody combines to call obstinate, unreasonable, greedy, a spoke in the wheel. Then comes a hue and cry, a union of forces—not to persuade but to overwhelm the recalcitrant, to displace it, drive it out of court. The spirit of adjustment, and of accommodation which is of the very essence of success in an undertaking like the Conference on the Limitation of Armaments is always imperiled and frequently ruined by fixing on a scapegoat. Would this happen at Washington?

Of course the nation on which irritation and suspicion were concentrated might be in the wrong. It might be deep in evil intrigue. It might be shockingly greedy. But it was a member of the Conference and the problem must be worked out with it. You work nothing out with scapegoats. Abraham Lincoln once laid down a principle of statesmanship which applies. “Honest statesmanship,” he said, “is the employment of individual meanness for the public good.”

It takes brains, humor, self-control to put any such rule as this in force. If unhappily the Conference did not furnish a sufficient amount of these ingredients, would the press and public make good the deficit? They are always in a strategic position where they can insist that everybody must be considered innocent until he is proved guilty, that nothing be built on suspicion, everything on facts. Something very important for them to remember if they insisted was that these facts had a history, that they were not isolated but related to a series of preceding events. For instance, there was the high hand that Japan had played with China. We must admit it. But in doing so we must not forget that it was only about sixty years ago that the very nations with whom Japan was now to meet in council in Washington had gathered with their fleets in one of her ports and used their guns to teach her the beauties of Christian civilization. She had decided to learn their lessons. She has wonderful imitative powers. She had followed them into China, and if she had played a higher hand there than any of them—and there might be a question as to that—it should be remembered that she had only sixty years in which to learn the degree of greed that can safely be practiced in our modern civilization. We must consider that possibly she had not had sufficient time to learn to temper exploitation with civilized discretion.

No scapegoats. No hues and cries. And certainly no partisanship. Was it possible for the United States to hold a truly national parley, one in which party ambitions and antipathies did not influence the negotiations? We had had within three years a terrible lesson of the lengths to which men’s partisanship will go in wrecking even the peace of the world. Would we repeat that crime? It was an ugly question, and be as optimistic as I would I hated to face it.

There was another danger on the face of things—crudeness of opinion. We love to be thought wise. There are thousands of us who in the pre-Conference days were getting out our maps to find out where Yap lay or the points between which the Eastern Chinese railroad ran, who would be tempted sooner or later to become violent partisans of, we will say: Yap for America—Shantung for China—Vladivostok for the Far Eastern Republic. There was danger in obstinate views based on little knowledge or much knowledge of a single factor.

And there were the sacrifices. Were we going to accept beforehand that if we were to have the limitation of armament which we desired—we, the United States might have to sacrifice some definite thing—a piece of soil, a concession, a naval base in the Pacific—and that nothing more fatal to the success of the Conference could be than for us to set our teeth and say: “We must have this”—quite as fatal as setting our teeth and saying: “This or that nation must do this.”

But my chief irritation in these pre-Conference days lay with the agenda. It was illogical to place limitation of armament at the head of the program. That was an effect—not a cause. It looked like an attempt to make reduction of taxes more important than settlement of difficulties. Was the Conference to be merely a kind of glorified international committee on tax reduction? Not that I meant to underestimate the relief that would bring.

Suppose the Conference should say: We will reduce at once—by the simplest, most direct method—cut down fifty per cent. of our appropriations—for five years and before the term is ended meet again and make a new contract.

What a restoration of the world’s hope would follow! How quickly the mind sprang to what such a decision would bring to wretched, jobless peoples—the useful work, the schools, the money for more bread, better shelter, leisure for play. How much of the resentment at the huge sums now going into warships, cannon, naval bases, war colleges, would evaporate.

The mere announcement would soothe and revive. Labor bitterly resents the thought that it may be again asked to spend its energies in the creation of that which destroys men instead of that which makes for their health and happiness.

“Get them to plowing again, to popping corn by their own firesides, and you can’t get them to shoulder a musket again for fifty years,” Lincoln said of the soldiers that the approaching end of the Civil War would release. As a matter of fact—suppression of the Indians aside—it was only thirty-three years when they were at it again, but there was no great heart in the enterprise; they still preferred their “plows and popcorn,” and the experience of the Great War had only intensified that feeling.

Cut down armament now merely for sake of reducing taxation and you would give the world’s love of peace a chance to grow—and that was something. But it was something which must be qualified.

The history of man’s conduct shows that however much he desires his peaceful life, the moment what he conceives to be his country’s interest—which he looks at as his interest—is threatened, he will throw his tools of peace into the corner and seize those of war. It does not matter whether he is prepared or not. Men always have and, unless we can find something beside force to appeal to in a pinch, always will do just as they did at Lexington, as the peasants of Belgium did at the rumor of the advance of the Germans—seize any antiquated kicking musket or blunderbuss they can lay their hands on and attack.

There was another significant possibility to limitation, on which the lovers of peace rightfully counted—certainly believers in war do not overlook it—and that was the chance that the enforced breathing spell would give for improving and developing peace machinery. It would give a fresh chance to preach the new methods, arouse faith in them, stir governments to greater interest in them and less in arms.

It was a possibility—but to offset it experience shows that with the passing of the threat of war, interest in pacific schemes is generally left to a few tireless and little considered groups of non-official people. Active interest inside governments dies out. The great peace suggestions and ventures of the world have been born of wars fought rather than of wars that might be fought. The breathing spell long continued might end in a general rusting and neglect of the very methods for preventing wars which peace lovers are now pushing.

What it all amounted to was that the most drastic limitation was no sure guarantee against future war. Take away a man’s gun and it is no guarantee that he will not strike if aroused. You must get at the man—enlarge his respect for order, his contempt for violence, change his notion of procedure in disputes, establish his control. It takes more than “gun toting” to make a dangerous citizen, more than relieving him of his gun to make a safe one.

If the Conference only cut down the number of guns the nations were carrying, it would have done little to insure permanent peace. The President’s conference on unemployment which held its sessions just before the Conference on the Limitation of Armament spent considerable time in considering what the industry of the country might do to prevent industrial crises. Among the principles it laid down was one quite as applicable to international as to business affairs.

“The time to act is before a crisis has become inevitable.”

That was the real reason for the existence of the coming Conference—to act before the jealousies and misunderstandings around the Pacific had gone so far that there was no solution but war. Let us suppose that in 1913 say, England, France, Germany, Austria and Russia had held a conference over an agenda parallel to the one now laid down for the Washington Conference—one that not only considered limiting their armies and navies but boldly and openly attacked the fears, the jealousies, the needs, and the ambitions of them all—might it not have been possible that they would have found a way other than war? Are governments incapable in the last analysis of settling difficulties save by force and exhaustion, or are they made impotent by the idea that no machinery and methods for handling international affairs are possible save the ones which have so often landed their peoples in the ditch?

In his farewell words to this country at the end of his recent visit, the late Viscount Bryce remarked that anybody could frighten himself with a possibility but the course of prudence was to watch it and estimate the likelihood that it would ever enter into the sphere of probability.

It is just here that governments have fallen down worst. They might watch the war possibilities, but they have refused or not been able to evaluate them. They seemed to have felt usually that closing their eyes to them or at least refusing to admit them was the only proper diplomatic attitude.

As a rule, it has been the non-responsible outsider that has exploited war possibilities. Sometimes this has been done from the highest motives, with knowledge and restraint. More often it has been done on half-knowledge and with reckless indifference to results. There are always a number of people around with access to the public ear who love to handle explosives—never quite happy unless their imaginations are busy with wars and revolutions. There are others possessed by the pride of prophecy—their vanity is demonstrating the inevitable strife in the situation. They are the makers of war scares—the breeders and feeders of war passions. Sometimes war possibilities are the materials for skillful national propaganda—the agent of one nation working on a second to convince it of the hostile intent of a third.

It is the governments concerned that should be handling this sort of stuff and handling it in such a way that they would cut under the malicious and the wanton, get at the real truth and get at it in time and get it out to the world.

One of the chief reasons for some sort of active association of nations is that there should be a permanent central agency always working over war possibilities, estimating them, heading them off.

Present diplomacy does not do it. Could the coming Conference find a way for just this service in the Pacific situation?

How could the public be sure the Conference was really seeking these ends? Only by openness and frankness. Could one really expect that? No one of sense and even a very little knowledge of how men achieve results, whether in statecraft or in business, would think for a moment that the Conference must sit daily in open session with a public listening to all that it said. There was only one practical way of handling the agenda. The Conference must form itself into groups, each charged with a subject on which it was to arrive at some kind of understanding. The report must be presented at the Conference. But when this was done there should be free, open discussion.

To handle the plenary sessions of the present Conference as they were handled in Paris in 1919 would be a tragic mistake. These plenary conferences were splendidly set scenes. No one who looked on the gathering at which the Covenant of the League of Nations was presented would ever forget it. Nor would he forget how the gloved-and-iron hand of Clemenceau never for a moment released its grip; how effectively, for example, the incipient revolt against the mandate system aimed at making nations the protectors and not the exploiters of the German territories to be disposed of was soft-pedaled. Nor would he ever forget certain sinister faces in the great picture that chilled at their birth the high hopes which the Conference championed.

Free discussion, running, if you please, over days at this juncture, might have insured an easier, straighter road for the treaty of Versailles and particularly for the League of Nations.

Frankness would be the greatest ally of all who looked on the great mission of the coming Conference as preventing the Pacific crisis from ever ending in war. Frankness would break the war bubbles that the irresponsible were blowing so gayly. It would be the surest preventive of the fanatical and partisan drives which are almost certain to develop if there was unnecessary secrecy. Naturally, those on the outside would look on a failure to take the public in as proof that sinister forces were at work in the Conference, that dark things were brewing which must be kept out of sight.

As a matter of fact, one look inside would probably show a group of worn and anxious gentlemen honestly doing their best to find something on which they could agree with a reasonable hope that the countries that had sent them to Washington would accept their decisions. After one good look the public might change suspicion to sympathy.

There was always the argument from the conventionally minded that “it isn’t done,” that diplomacy must be secret. John Hay didn’t think so. He told his friend Henry Adams in the course of his efforts to establish the “open door” in China that he got on by being “honest and naÏf!”

The point in this policy at which most people, in and out of the present Conference, would stick is that word “naÏf.” They would prefer to be thought dishonest rather than simple-minded. However, if everybody who had a part in the gathering could be as simple-minded as he was in fact, would pretend to know no more than he did in truth and would be as honest as it was in his nature to be, there would be a good chance of keeping Mr. Hay’s door in China open. And if that could be done along with the other things it implied, the Conference would have actually contributed to the chances of more permanent peace in the world and could cut down its armaments, because it had less need of them, not merely because it wanted temporarily to reduce taxation.