The futility of the idea of a limitation of armaments or any limitation of warfare 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 the 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 Borah, 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. Association and League are alike in seeking to organize the peace of the world but in every other respect they are different schemes, differing in aims, scope and spirit.

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 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 tedious; 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 counter notes, 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, indorsement 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 seed beds of troublesome misunderstanding and divergent interpretation unless some sort of permanent body is created in each case, with very wide powers intrusted 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 routes, 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 ampler representation of the European powers, which will direct its attention mainly to the reassurance and disarmament of France and Germany and Britain, a second conference whose findings may be finally embodied in this third commission I have suggested; and 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 towards 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.