PEACEMAKERS- 
 BLESSED AND OTHERWISE 
 
 Observations, Reflections and Irritations 
 at an International Conference 
 
BY 
 IDA M. TARBELL 
 
 FATHER ABRAHAM 
 IN LINCOLN'S CHAIR 
 HE KNEW LINCOLN 
 THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 THE RISING OF THE TIDE 
 NEW IDEALS IN BUSINESS 
 LIFE OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 HE KNEW LINCOLN, AND OTHER BILLY BROWN 
 STORIES. 
 
PEACEMAKERS- 
 BLESSED AND OTHERWISE 
 
 Observations, Reflections and Irritations at an 
 International Conference 
 
 BY 
 
 IDA M. TARBELL 
 
 gorfc 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 1922 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
* ' "*..;,' 
 
 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1922, 
 BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Set up and printed. Published April, 1822. 
 
 Press of 
 
 J. J. Little & Ives Company 
 New York, U. S. A. 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 This book does not pretend to be a history 
 or even an adequate review of the work of 
 the Conference on the Limitation of Arma- 
 ment, nor does it pretend to be the writer's 
 full appraisement of that work. It is what 
 its sub-title suggests, a collection of ob- 
 servations, rejections and irritations. 
 These were set down each week of the first 
 two months of the Conference and were pub- 
 lished practically as they stand here by the 
 McClure Syndicate. 
 
 I. M. T. 
 
 471 
 
 a 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTBB 
 
 I. PRE-CONFERENCK REFLECTIONS . . 1 
 
 II. ARMISTICE DAY 29 
 
 III. NOVEMBER 12, 1921 41 
 
 IV. THE FRENCH AT THE CONFERENCE . 60 
 
 V. THE PARIS SHRINE OF OUR LADY OF 
 
 HATES 83 
 
 VI. WHY DID HE Do IT? .... 99 
 
 VII. DRAMATIC DIPLOMACY . . . . 114 
 
 VIII. THE MOODS OF AN INTERNATIONAL 
 
 CONFERENCE 137 
 
 IX. PUT YOURSELF IN THEIR PLACES . 160 
 
 X. CHINA AT THE CONFERENCE . . . 186 
 
 XI. THE MEASURE OF THE WASHINGTON 
 
 CONFERENCE . . 206 
 
PEACEMAKERS- 
 BLESSED AND OTHERWISE 
 
 Observations, Reflections cmd Irritations 
 at an International Conference 
 
PEACEMAKERS BLESSED 
 AND OTHERWISE 
 
 CHAPTEE I 
 
 PRE-CONFERENCE REFLECTIONS 
 
 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 him- 
 self 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 Con- 
 ference began weeks before it was called. 
 What could it do? All around me men and 
 women were saying, "It will end war/ 7 and 
 1 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 possibly so deep was the demand in them 
 that war be ended believing what they 
 said. It has always been one of the singu- 
 lar 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 dis- 
 armament, 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 in- 
 volved 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 prob- 
 lems for the Conference to solve if they 
 were to put a limit to armaments, and they 
 2 
 
PKE-CONFEBElSrCE BEFLECTIONS 
 
 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 naive to sup- 
 pose that they will do anything?" And 
 generally the comment was followed by 
 "Of course nothing came from Paris." 
 
 This superior attitude sometimes van- 
 ity, sometimes disillusionment, sometimes 
 resentment at trying any new form of in- 
 ternational 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 pro- 
 foundly 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. 
 3 
 
PEACEMAKEKS 
 
 Very singular, the way that people dis- 
 miss 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 cer- 
 tainly strained their "fourteen points," but 
 it will be noted that not a few of the ar- 
 rangements 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 fu- 
 ture any treaty if that means anything it 
 must include the treaty of Versailles be- 
 comes "inapplicable," works disturbance 
 between the nations instead of peace, the 
 League may consider it. 
 
 The belief in political magic on one side 
 4 
 
PRE-CONFERENCE REFLECTIONS 
 
 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 under- 
 take, 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 
 (0) Fulfillment 
 
 (D) Rules for control of new agencies of war- 
 fare 
 
 5 
 
PEACEMAKEES 
 
 (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 
 
 (B) Concessions, monopolies, preferen- 
 tial privileges 
 
 (E) Development of railways, includ- 
 
 ing 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 arma- 
 ments, 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 de- 
 
PKE-CONFEKENCE EEFLECTIONS 
 
 fined, 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 pre- 
 pared to handle. These problems are com- 
 paratively definite the kind of thing that 
 you can get down on paper with something 
 like precision. They had one great advan- 
 tage, and that is that in the main they did 
 not involve a past running into the dim dis- 
 tance. 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 strong- 
 hold in Cochin China in 1862, and her pro- 
 tectorate 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 
 Kussia 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 
 7 
 
PEACEMAKEES 
 
 of the cases there were men still living who 
 helped in the picking. 
 
 It was the same when it came to conces- 
 sions. 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 in- 
 triguers, 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 Eu- 
 rope, running as they do through century 
 after century, involving as they do succes- 
 sions of invasions, of settlements, of con- 
 quests, 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 
 8 
 
PRE-COOTERENCE REFLECTIONS 
 
 in the past. Without minimizing at all the 
 difficulty of the questions on the agenda of 
 the Conference, they did have the advan- 
 tage of being of recent date. 
 
 There was 1 encouragement in the rela- 
 tions 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 cooperation had 
 gained a certain solidarity. True, their 
 machinery of cooperation 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 na- 
 tions that were coming to the Conference 
 were on terms of fairly friendly acquaint- 
 ance, an acquaintance which had stood a 
 tremendous test. 
 
 These nations had all committed them- 
 selves solemnly to certain definite ideals, 
 laid down by the United States of America. 
 9 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 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. What- 
 ever 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 Eoot 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 
 10 
 
PBB-COOTBBBNCB KEFLECTIONS 
 
 should be among them a political intriguer, 
 that, too, would be known. 
 
 These were all good reasons for expect- 
 ing 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 mat- 
 11 
 
PEACEMAKEKS 
 
 ters 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 under- 
 takings when the way is obscure, when fail- 
 ure threatens, when it is obvious that cer- 
 tain things on which we have set our hearts 
 are unobtainable. Irritation and dis- 
 couragement 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 com- 
 bines 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 recalci- 
 trant, to displace it, drive it out of court. 
 The spirit of adjustment, and of accommo- 
 dation which is of the very essence of suc- 
 cess in an undertaking like the Conference 
 12 
 
FEE-CONFERENCE REFLECTIONS 
 
 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 in- 
 trigue. 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. Abra- 
 ham 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 unhap- 
 pily the Conference did not furnish a suffi- 
 cient 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 
 13 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 be considered innocent until he is proved 
 guilty, that nothing be built on suspicion, 
 everything on facts. Something very im- 
 portant for them to remember if they in- 
 sisted 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 gath- 
 ered with their fleets in one of her ports 
 and used their guns to teach her the beau- 
 ties of Christian civilization. She had de- 
 cided to learn their lessons. She has won- 
 derful 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 
 
PRE-CONFERENCE REFLECTIONS 
 
 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 na- 
 tional parley, one in which party ambitions 
 and antipathies did not influence the nego- 
 tiations? 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 
 15 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 sooner or later to become violent partisans 
 of, we will say: Yap for America Shan- 
 tung 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-Con- 
 ference 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 at- 
 16 
 
PBE-CONFEKENCE REFLECTIONS 
 
 tempt to make reduction of taxes more im- 
 portant than settlement of difficulties. 
 Was the Conference to be merely a kind of 
 glorified international committee on tax re- 
 duction? Not that I meant to underesti- 
 mate 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 be- 
 fore 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 
 17 
 
PEACEMAKEKS 
 
 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 pop- 
 ping corn by their own firesides, and you 
 can't get them to shoulder a musket again 
 for fifty years," Lincoln said of the sol- 
 diers 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 
 18 
 
PKE-CONFEBENCE KEFLECTIONS 
 
 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 kick- 
 ing 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. 
 Ift 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 It was a possibility but to offset it ex- 
 perience 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 guar- 
 antee 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 re- 
 lieving him of his gun to make a safe one. 
 20 
 
PRE-CONFERENCE REFLECTIONS 
 
 If the Conference only cut down the num- 
 ber of guns the nations were carrying, it 
 would have done little to insure perma- 
 nent peace. The President's conference on 
 unemployment which held its sessions just 
 before the Conference on the Limitation of 
 Armament spent considerable time in con- 
 sidering 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 be- 
 come inevitable." 
 
 That was the real reason for the exist- 
 ence of the coming Conference to act be- 
 fore the jealousies and misunderstandings 
 around the Pacific had gone so far that 
 there was no solution but war. Let us sup- 
 pose that in 1913 say, England, France, 
 Germany, Austria and Kussia had held a 
 conference over an agenda parallel to the 
 one now laid down for the Washington Con- 
 21 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 ference one that not only considered limit- 
 ing 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 anal- 
 ysis 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 esti- 
 mate the likelihood that it would ever en- 
 ter into the sphere of probability. 
 
 It is just here that governments have fal- 
 len down worst. They might watch the 
 war possibilities, but they have refused or 
 22 
 
PKE-CONFEBENCE REFLECTIONS 
 
 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 possibili- 
 ties. 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 indiffer- 
 ence 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 na- 
 23 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 tion 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 al- 
 ways working over war possibilities, esti- 
 mating 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 Confer- 
 ence 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 
 24 
 
PRE-CONFERENCE REFLECTIONS 
 
 Conference must sit daily in open session 
 with a public listening to all that it said. 
 There was only one practical way of han- 
 dling 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 gath- 
 ering 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 na- 
 tions the protectors and not the exploiters 
 of the German territories to be disposed of 
 25 
 
PEACEMAKEES 
 
 was soft-pedaled. Nor would lie ever for- 
 get certain sinister faces in the great pic- 
 ture that chilled at their birth the high 
 hopes whieh the Conference championed. 
 
 Free discussion, running, if you please, 
 over days at this juncture, might have in- 
 sured 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 irre- 
 sponsible were blowing so gayly. It would 
 be the surest preventive of the fanatical 
 and partisan drives which are almost cer- 
 tain 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 
 
FEE-CONFERENCE REFLECTIONS 
 
 probably show a group of worn and anx- 
 ious gentlemen honestly doing their best 
 to find something on which they could 
 agree with a reasonable hope that the coun- 
 tries that had sent them to Washington 
 would accept their decisions. After one 
 good look the public might change suspi- 
 cion 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 naif !" 
 
 The point in this policy at which most 
 people, in and out of the present Confer- 
 ence, would stick is that word "naif." 
 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 
 27 
 
PEACEMAKEES 
 
 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 arma- 
 ments, because it had less need of them, not 
 merely because it wanted temporarily to re- 
 duce taxation. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 ARMISTICE DAY 
 
 IT was the Unknown Soldier Boy that 
 put an end to the doubt, the faultfinding, 
 the cynicism that was in the air of Wash- 
 ington as the day for the opening of the 
 Conference approached. It all became 
 vanity, pettiness, beside that bier with its 
 attending thousands of mourning people. 
 
 They carried the body to the capitol 
 where for a day it lay in state. Busy with 
 my attempts to learn something of what it 
 was all about, it was not until late in the 
 afternoon that I thought of the ceremony 
 on the hill, and made my way there for my 
 daily walk. It had been a soft, sunny day, 
 the air full of gray haze. Everything 
 around the great plaza the Capitol, the 
 29 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 library, the trees, the marble Senate and 
 House buildings right and left was tender 
 in its outline. There were no crowds, but 
 as I looked I saw massed four abreast from 
 the entrance door to the rotunda, down 
 along terraces of steps, across the plaza as 
 far as I could see, a slowly moving black 
 mass, kept in perfect line by soldiers stand- 
 ing at intervals. I made my way across. 
 Where was its end? I went to find it. 
 
 I walked the width of the great plaza 
 and turned down the Avenue. As far as I 
 could see the people were massed one 
 block, two blocks, three blocks, four and 
 from every direction you could see men and 
 women hurrying to fall in line. I had had 
 no idea of joining that line, of passing 
 through that rotunda. My only notion was 
 to take a glimpse of the crowd. But to have 
 gone on, to have been no part of something 
 which came upon me as tremendous in its 
 feeling and meaning, would have been a 
 
 withdrawal from my kind of which I think 
 30 
 
AEMISTICE BAY 
 
 I should always have been ashamed. And 
 so I fell in. 
 
 The mass moved slowly, but very steadily. 
 The one strongest impression was of its 
 quietness. Nobody talked. Nobody seemed 
 to want to talk. If a question was asked, 
 the reply was low. We moved on block 
 after block turned the corner now we 
 faced the Capitol amazingly beautiful, 
 proud and strong in the dim light. I never 
 had so deep a feeling that it was something 
 that belonged to me, guarded me, meant 
 something to me, than as I moved slowly 
 with that great mass toward the bier. The 
 sentinels stood rigid, as solemn and as 
 quiet as the people. The only murmur that 
 one heard was now and then a low singing, 
 "Nearer My God to Thee." How it began, 
 who suggested it, I do not know; but 
 through all that slow walk, the only thing 
 that I heard was women's voices, now be- 
 hind me, now before me, humming that air. 
 It took a full three-quarters of an hour to 
 31 
 
PEACEMAKEES 
 
 reach the door and pass into the rotunda. 
 It took strong self-control not to kneel by 
 the bier. They told me that there were 
 women, bereft mothers, to whom the appeal 
 was too much mothers of missing boys. 
 This might have been hers. Could she 
 pass? The guards lifted them very gently, 
 and in quiet the great crowd moved for- 
 ward. I fancy there were thousands that 
 passed that place that day that will have 
 always before their eyes that great dim cir- 
 cle with bank upon bank of flowers, from all 
 over the earth flowers from kings and 
 queens and governments, from great 
 leaders of armies, from those who labor, 
 from the mothers of men, and hundreds 
 upon hundreds from those who went out 
 with the dead but came back. The only 
 sound that came to us as we passed was 
 the clear voice of a boy, one of a group, once 
 soldiers. They came with a wreath. They 
 carried a flag. The leader was saying his 
 farewell to their buddy. 
 32 
 
AEMISTICE DAY 
 
 A hundred thousand or more men and 
 women made this pilgrimage. A hundred 
 thousand and many more packed the 
 streets of Washington the next day when 
 the bier was carried from the Capitol to 
 the grave at Arlington. 
 
 The attending ceremony was one of the 
 most perfect things of the kind ever 
 planned. It had the supreme merit of re- 
 straint. Every form of the country's serv- 
 ice had a place not too many a few 
 but they were always of the choicest from 
 the President of the United States down to 
 the last marine, the best we had were 
 chosen to follow the unknown boy. 
 
 There was an immense sincerity to it all. 
 They felt it the vast, inexpressible sorrow 
 of the war. And no one felt it more than 
 the President of the United States. What 
 he said at Arlington, what he was to say 
 the next day at the opening of the Confer- 
 ence, showed that with all his heart and 
 all his mind the man hated the thing that 
 33 
 
PEACEMAKEKS 
 
 had brought this sorrow to the country, 
 and that he meant to do his part to put an 
 end to it. 
 
 The ceremony was for the dead sacrifice, 
 but the feature of it which went deepest to 
 the heart and brought from the massed 
 crowds their one instinctive burst of sym- 
 pathy and greeting was the passing, almost 
 at the end of the procession, of the War's 
 living sacrifice Woodrow Wilson. 
 
 The people had stood in silence, rever- 
 ently baring their heads as the bier of the 
 soldier passed, followed by all the official 
 greatness of the moment the President of 
 the United States, his cabinet, the Supreme 
 Court, the House, the Senate, Pershing, 
 Foch. And then, quite unexpectedly, a car- 
 riage came into view two figures in it 
 a white-faced man, a brave woman. Un- 
 conscious of what they were doing, the 
 crowd broke into a muffled murmur "Wil- 
 son!' 7 The cry flowed down the long ave- 
 nue a surprised, spontaneous recognition. 
 
 34: 
 
AEMISTICE DAY 
 
 It was as if they said: "You you of all 
 living men belong here. It was you who 
 called the boy we are honoring you who 
 put into his eye that wonderful light the 
 light that a great French surgeon declared 
 made him different as a soldier from the 
 boys of any other nation." 
 
 "I don't know what it is," he said, 
 "whether it is God, the Monroe Doctrine or 
 President Wilson, but the American soldier 
 has a light in his eye that is not like any- 
 thing that I have ever seen in men." Wood- 
 row Wilson, under God, had put it there. 
 His place was with the soldier. The crowd 
 knew it, and told him so by their uncon- 
 scious outburst. 
 
 His carriage left the procession at the 
 White House. Later the crowd followed it. 
 All the afternoon of Armistice Day men 
 and women gathered before his home. All 
 told there were thousands of them. They 
 waited, hoping for his greeting. And when 
 he gave it, briefly, they cheered and cheered. 
 35 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 But they did not go away. It was dark be- 
 fore that crowd had dispersed. 
 
 But this expression of love and loyalty 
 and interest in Woodrow Wilson is no new 
 thing in Washington. For months now, on 
 Sundays and holidays, men, women and 
 children have been walking to his home, 
 standing in groups before it, speaking to- 
 gether in hushed tones as if something 
 solemn and ennobling stirred in them. 
 Curiosity? No. Men chatter and jibe and 
 jostle in curiosity. These people are silent 
 gentle orderly. You will see them be- 
 fore the theater, too, when it is known that 
 he is within, quietly waiting for him to come 
 out one hundred, two hundred, five hun- 
 dred even a thousand sometimes, it is said. 
 They cheer him as he passes and there 
 are chokes in their voices and always 
 tenderness. Let it be known that he is in 
 his seat in a theater, and the house will 
 rise in homage. Let his face be thrown on 
 a screen, and it will receive a greeting that 
 36 
 
AKMISTICE DAY 
 
 the face of no other living American will 
 receive. It requires explanation. 
 
 The people at least recognized him as be- 
 longing to the Conference. And, as a mat- 
 ter of fact, the Conference never was able 
 to escape him. Again and again, he ap- 
 peared at the table. The noblest words that 
 were said were but echoes of what he had 
 been saying through the long struggle. The 
 President's great slogan Less of arma- 
 ments and none of war was but another 
 way of putting the thing for which he had 
 given all but his last breath. The best they 
 were to do their limitation of armaments, 
 their substitute to make it possible, were 
 but following in the path that he had cut. 
 The difficulties and hindrances which they 
 were to meet and which were to hamper 
 both program and final settlements were 
 but the difficulties and hindrances which he 
 had met and which hampered his work at 
 Paris. From the start to the finish of the 
 Conference on the Limitation of Armament, 
 37 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 the onlooker recognized both the spirit and 
 the hand of Woodrow Wilson as the crowd 
 recognized him on Armistice Day. 
 
 There was another figure in the memorial 
 procession which deeply touched the crowd 
 and which stayed on, uninvited. She came 
 with the dead soldier boy. She stood by 
 him night and day as he lay in state, fol- 
 lowed him to the grave in which they laid 
 him away at Arlington, a symbol of the 
 nation's grief over all its missing sons. She 
 did not go with the crowds. She took her 
 place at the door of the Conference, and 
 there, day by day, her solemn voice was 
 heard. 
 
 "I am the mother of men. Never before 
 have I lifted my voice in your councils. I 
 have been silent because I trusted you. But 
 to-day I speak because I doubt you. I have 
 the right to speak, for without me mankind 
 would end. I bear you with pain, such as 
 you cannot know. I rear you with sacrifice, 
 such as you cannot understand. I am the 
 38 
 
AEMISTICB DAY 
 
 world's perpetual soldier, facing death that 
 life may be. I do not recoil from my great 
 task. God laid it on me. I have accepted 
 it always. I give my youth that the world 
 may have sons, and I glory in my harvest. 
 
 "But I bear sons for fruitful lives of labor 
 and peace and happiness. And what have 
 you done with my work? To-day I mourn 
 the loss of more than ten million dead, 
 more than twenty million wounded, more 
 than six million imprisoned and missing. 
 This is the fruit of what you call your Great 
 War. 
 
 "It is I who must face death to replace 
 these dead and maimed boys. I shall do it. 
 But no longer shall I give them to you un- 
 questioning as I have in the past, for I 
 have come to doubt you. You have told 
 me that you used my sons for your honor 
 and my protection, but I have begun to read 
 your books, to listen to your deliberations, 
 to study your maneuvers; I have learned 
 that it is not always your honor and my 
 39 
 
PEACEMAKEES 
 
 protection that drives you to war. Again 
 and again it is your own love of glory, of 
 power, of wealth; your hate and contempt 
 for those that are not of your race, your 
 color, your point of view. You cannot 
 longer have my sons for such ends. I ask 
 you to remold your souls, to make effective 
 that brotherhood of man of which you talk, 
 to learn to work together, white and black 
 and brown and yellow, as becomes the sons 
 of the same mother. 
 
 "I shall never leave your councils again. 
 My daughters shall sit beside you voicing 
 my command you shall have done with 
 war." 
 
 40 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 NOVEMBER 12, 1921 
 
 WE shall have to leave November 12, 
 1921, the opening day of the Conference on 
 the Limitation of Armament, to History for 
 a final appraisement. Arthur Balfour told 
 Mr. Hughes after he had had time to gather 
 himself together from the shock of the 
 American program that in his judgment a 
 new anniversary had been added to the Re- 
 construction Movement. "If the llth of 
 November," said Mr. Balfour, "in the minds 
 of the allied and associated powers, in the 
 minds perhaps not less of all the neutrals 
 if that is a date imprinted on grateful 
 hearts, I think November 12 will also prove 
 to be an anniversary welcomed and thought 
 of in a grateful spirit by those who in the 
 41 
 
PEACEMAKEES 
 
 future shall look back upon the arduous 
 struggle now being made by the civilized 
 nations of the world, not merely to restore 
 pre-war conditions, but to see that war con- 
 ditions shall never again exist." 
 
 Whatever place it may turn out that No- 
 vember 12 shall hold on the calendar of 
 great national days, this thing is sure; it 
 will always be remembered for the shock it 
 gave Old School Diplomacy. That insti- 
 tution really received a heavier bombard- 
 ment than War, the real objective of the 
 Conference. The shelling reached its very 
 vitals, while it only touched the surface of 
 War's armor. 
 
 Diplomacy has always had her vested in- 
 terests. They have seemed permanent, im- 
 pregnable. What made November 12, 1921, 
 portentous was its invasion of these vested 
 interests. Take that first and most impor- 
 tant one Secrecy. When Secretary 
 Hughes followed the opening speech of wel- 
 come and of idealism made by President 
 42 
 
NOVEMBER 12, 1921 
 
 Harding, not with another speech of more 
 welcome and more idealism, as diplomacy 
 prescribes for such occasions, but with the 
 boldest and most detailed program of what 
 the United States had in mind for the meet- 
 ing, Diplomacy's most sacred interest was 
 for the moment overthrown. To be sure, 
 what Secretary Hughes did was made pos- 
 sible by John Hay's long struggle to edu- 
 cate his own countrymen to the idea of open 
 diplomacy ; by what President Wilson tried 
 to do at the Paris conference. Mr. Wilson 
 won the people of the world to his prin- 
 ciple, but his colleagues contrived to block 
 him in the second stage of the Paris game. 
 Mr. Hughes, building on that experience, 
 did not wait for consultation with his col- 
 leagues. On his own, in a fashion so unex- 
 pected that it was almost brutal, he threw 
 not only the program of the United States 
 on the table, but that which the United 
 States expected of two two only, please 
 notice of the eight nations she had in- 
 vited in, Great Britain and Japan. 
 43 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 His proposals came one after another ex- 
 actly like shells from a Big Bertha! "It 
 is now proposed that for a period of ten 
 years there should be no further construc- 
 tion of capital ships." One after another 
 the program of destruction followed. 
 
 The United States : to scrap all capital ships now 
 under construction along with fifteen old battle- 
 ships, in all a tonnage of 845,740 tons; 
 
 Great Britain: to stop her four new Hoods and 
 scrap nineteen capital ships, a tonnage of 583,375 
 tons; 
 
 Japan: abandon her program of ships not laid 
 down, and scrap enough of existing ones, new and 
 old, to make a tonnage of 448,928 tons. 
 
 I once saw a huge bull felled by a sledge 
 hammer in the hands of a powerful Czecho- 
 Slovac farm hand. When Mr. Hughes be- 
 gan hurling one after another his revolu- 
 tionary propositions the scene kept flash- 
 ing before my eyes, the heavy thud of the 
 blow on the beast's head falling on my 
 ears. I felt almost as if I were being hit 
 myself, and I confess to no little feeling of 
 regret that Mr. Hughes should be putting 
 his proposals so bluntly. "It is proposed 
 that Great Britain shall," etc. "It is pro- 
 44 
 
NOVEMBER 12, 1921 
 
 posed that Japan shall," etc. Would it have 
 been less effective as a proposal and would 
 it not have been really more acceptable as 
 a form if he had said "We shall propose to 
 Great Britain to consider so and so." But, 
 after all, when you are firing Big Berthas 
 it is not the amenities that you consider. 
 
 Mr. Balfour and Sir Auckland Geddes, 
 sitting where I could look them full in the 
 face, had just the faintest expression of 
 "seeing things." I would not have been 
 surprised if they had raised their hands in 
 that instinctive gesture one makes when he 
 does "see things" that are not there. The 
 Japanese took it without a flicker of an 
 eyelash neither the delegates at the table 
 nor the rows of attache's and secretaries 
 moved, glanced at one another, changed ex- 
 pression. So far as their faces were con- 
 cerned Mr. Hughes might have been con- 
 tinuing the Harding welcome instead of 
 calling publicly on them for a sacrifice un- 
 precedented and undreamed of. 
 45 
 
PEACEMAKEES 
 
 The program was so big its presentation 
 was so impressive (Mr. Hughes looked seven 
 feet tall that day and his voice was the voice 
 of the man who years ago arraigned the In- 
 surance Companies) that one regretted that 
 there were omissions so obvious as to force 
 attention. There was a singular one in the 
 otherwise admirable historical introduction 
 Mr. Hughes made to his program. He re- 
 viewed there the efforts of the first and 
 second Hague Conferences to bring about 
 disarmament explained the failure and 
 jumped from 1907 to 1921 as if in 1919, at 
 the Paris Peace Conference, man's most 
 valiant effort to bring about disarmament 
 had not been made. He failed to notice 
 the fact that to this effort scores of peo- 
 ples had subscribed, including all of the na- 
 tions represented at the council table; that 
 these nations had been working for two 
 years in the League of Nations, under cir- 
 cumstances of indescribable world confu- 
 sion and disorganization, to gather the in- 
 46 
 
NOVEMBER 12, 1921 
 
 formation and prepare a practical plan not 
 only to limit the world's arms but to regu- 
 late for good and all private traffic in arma- 
 ments. Before Mr. Hughes sat M. Viviani 
 of France who had been serving on the 
 Commission charged with this business. 
 Before him, too, was man after man fresh 
 from the discussions of the second annual 
 Assembly of the League. Disarmament and 
 many other matters pertaining to world 
 peace had been before them. They came 
 confident that they had done something of 
 value at Geneva however small it might be 
 compared with the immense work still to 
 be done. Arthur Balfour of England, 
 Viviani of France, Wellington Koo of 
 China, Senator Schanzer of Italy, Sastri of 
 India, Van Karnebeck of Holland were 
 among those that heard Mr. Hughes jump 
 their honest efforts, beginning in 1919, to 
 bring* the armaments of the world to a 
 police basis. It must have bewildered them 
 a little but they are gentlemen who are 
 4T 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 forced by their profession to take hints 
 quickly they understood that as far as the 
 American Conference on Limitation of 
 Armament was concerned, the League of 
 Nations was not to exist. From that day, 
 if you wanted information on the League 
 from any one of them you had to catch him 
 in private, and he usually made sure no- 
 body was listening before he enlightened 
 you as to his opinions, which invariably 
 were "not for publication." 
 
 One could not but wonder if Mr. Bal- 
 four had this omission in mind when at a 
 later session he said in speaking of Mr. 
 Hughes' review of past disarmament ef- 
 forts that "some fragments" had been laid 
 before the Conference. What Mr. Hughes 
 really did in ignoring the work for disarma- 
 ment carried on at Paris and Geneva in the 
 last three years was to call attention to it. 
 
 After all, was it not petty to be irritated 
 when something so bold and real had been 
 initiated? Was it not yielding to the de- 
 48 
 
NOVEMBER 12, 1921 
 
 sire to "rub in" the omission as bad or 
 worse than the omission? As a matter of 
 fact, the thing going on at the moment was 
 so staggering that one had no time for more 
 than a momentary irritation. Mr. Hughes 
 swept his house on November 12 swept it 
 off its feet. If secret diplomacy was given 
 by him such a blow as it never had received 
 before, diplomatic etiquette was torn to 
 pieces by the Senate and the House of the 
 United States, each of which had a section 
 of the gallery to itself. Possibly their ac- 
 tion was due to a little jealousy. They are 
 accustomed to holding the center of the de- 
 liberative stage in Washington, and they 
 always have, possibly always will resent a 
 little the coming of an outside deliberative 
 body which for the time being the public 
 regards as more interesting than them- 
 selves. They made it plain from the start 
 that they were not awed. The House of 
 Representatives particularly was a joy to 
 see if it did make a shocking exhibition of 
 49 
 
PEACEMAKEES 
 
 itself. It looked as if it were at a ball 
 game and conducted itself in the same way. 
 It hung over the gallery, lolled in its seats, 
 and when the President struck his great 
 note, the words which ought to become a 
 slogan of the country "Less of Armament 
 and None of War" it rose to its feet and 
 cheered as if there had been a home run. 
 
 Having once broke out in unrestrained 
 cheers, they gave again and again what Wil- 
 liam Allen White called "the yelp of de- 
 mocracy." Even after the program was 
 over and the remaining formalities cus- 
 tomary on such occasions were about at an 
 end, they took things into their own hands 
 and finished their attack on diplomatic eti- 
 quette by calling for Briand as they might 
 have called for Babe Kuth. "It isn't done, 
 you know," I heard one young Britisher 
 say after it was over. But it had been done, 
 and the chances are that there will be more 
 of it in the future. 
 
 If this day does work out to be porten- 
 60 
 
NOVEMBEK 12, 1921 
 
 tous in history, as it possibly may, the time 
 will come when every country will hang 
 great historical pictures of the scene in its 
 public galleries.. We should have one, what- 
 ever its fate. And I hope the artist that 
 does it will not fail to give full value to the 
 Congress that cracked the proprieties. Let 
 him take his picture from the further left 
 side of the auditorium. In this way he can 
 bring in the House of Representatives. He 
 can afford to leave out the diplomatic gal- 
 lery, as he would have to do from this posi- 
 tion. The diplomatic gallery counted less 
 than any other group in the gathering. 
 
 Secrecy and etiquette were not. the only 
 vested interests attacked on November 12, 
 1921. There was a third that receiver! a 
 blow lighter to be sure, but a blow all the 
 same and a significant one. The exclusive 
 vested right of man to the field of diplomacy 
 was challenged. Not by giving a woman a 
 seat at the table, but by introducing her on 
 the floor, in an official capacity, a new 
 51 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 official capacity, rather problematical as yet 
 as to its outcome a capacity which if it 
 ranks lower than that of delegate is still 
 counted higher than that of expert, since 
 it brings the privilege of the floor. 
 
 Behind the American delegation facing 
 the hall and inside the sacred space devoted 
 to the principals of the Congress, sat a 
 group of some twenty-one persons, the rep- 
 resentatives of a new experiment in diplo- 
 macy a slice of the public brought in to act 
 as a link between the American delegates 
 and the public. Four of these delegates 
 were women well-chosen women. They 
 are the diplomatic pioneers of the United 
 States. 
 
 Who were those people, why were they 
 there? I heard more than one puzzled for- 
 eign attach^ ask. When you explained that 
 this was an advisory body, openly recog- 
 nized by the government, they continued, 
 "But why are women included?" They 
 understood the women in the diplomatic 
 52 
 
NOVEMBER 12, 1921 
 
 gallery, the women in the boxes. It was a 
 great ceremony. It was quite within estab- 
 lished diplomatic procedure that the ladies 
 of the official world should smile upon such 
 an occasion. 
 
 They understood the few women scat- 
 tered among the scores of men in the press 
 galleries but women on the floor as part 
 of the Conference? What did that mean? 
 It meant, dear sirs, simply this, that man's 
 exclusive, vested interest in diplomacy had 
 been invaded its masculinity attacked like 
 Its secrecy and propriety. What would 
 come of the invasion no one could tell. 
 
 It is doubtful if ever a program has re- 
 ceived heartier acclaim from this country 
 than that of Mr. Hughes. It stirred by its 
 boldness, its breadth. "Scrap!" Whoever 
 had said that word seriously in all the long 
 discussion of disarmament. Ten years! 
 the longest the most sanguine had suggested 
 was five. It caught the imagination had 
 the ring of possibility in it. It might be 
 53 
 
PEACEMAKEKS 
 
 putting the cart before the horse, as I had 
 been complaining, but it made it practically 
 certain that the horse would be acquired 
 even if you had to pay a good round sum 
 for him, so desirable had the cart been 
 made. 
 
 And then the way the nations addressed 
 picked it up! Three days later their for- 
 mal acceptances were made. For England, 
 Arthur Balfour accepted in principle, de- 
 claring as he did so : 
 
 "It is easy to estimate in dollars or in 
 pounds, shillings and pence the saving to 
 the taxpayer of each of the nations con- 
 cerned which the adoption of this scheme 
 will give. It is easy to show that the relief 
 is great. It is easy to show that indirectly 
 it will, as I hope and believe, greatly stimu- 
 late industry, national and international, 
 and do much to diminish the difficulties 
 under which every civilized government is 
 at this time laboring. All that can be 
 weighed, measured, counted; all that is a 
 64 
 
NOVEMBEK 12, 1921 
 
 matter of figures. But there is something 
 in this scheme which is above and beyond 
 numerical calculation. There is some- 
 thing which goes to the root, which is 
 concerned with the highest international 
 morality. 
 
 "This scheme, after all what does it do? 
 P. rn-'kes idealism a practical proposition. 
 It takes hold of the dream which reformers, 
 poets, publicists, even potentates, as we 
 heard the other day, have from time to time 
 put before mankind as the goal to which 
 human endeavor should aspire." 
 
 "Japan/' declared Admiral Baron Kato, 
 "deeply appreciates the sincerity of purpose 
 evident in the plan of the American Gov- 
 ernment for the limitation of armaments. 
 She is satisfied that the proposed plan will 
 materially relieve the nations of wasteful 
 expenditures and cannot fail to make for 
 the peace of the world. 
 
 "She cannot remain unmoved by the high 
 aims which have actuated the American 
 55 
 
PEACEMAKEES 
 
 project. Gladly accepting, therefore, the 
 proposal in principle, Japan is ready to 
 proceed with determination to a sweeping 
 reduction in her naval armament." 
 
 Italy, through Senator Schanzer, greeted 
 the proposal as "The first effective step 
 toward giving the world a release of such 
 nature as to enable it to start the work of 
 its economic reconstruction." 
 
 France her Premier, Briand, spoke for 
 her slid over the naval program. France, 
 he said, had already entered on the right 
 way the way Mr. Hughes had indicated; 
 her real interest was elsewhere. "I rather 
 turn/ 7 said M. Briand, "to another side 
 of the problem to which Mr. Balfour has 
 alluded, and I thank him for this. Is it 
 only a question here of economy? Is it 
 only a question of estimates and budgets? 
 If it were so, if that were the only pur- 
 pose you have in view, it will be really 
 unworthy of the great nation that has called 
 us here. 
 
 56 
 
NOVEMBER 12, 1921 
 
 "So the main question, the crucial ques- 
 tion, which is to be discussed here, is to 
 know if the peoples of the world will be at 
 last able to come to an understanding in 
 order to avoid the atrocities of war. And 
 then, gentlemen, when it comes on the 
 agenda, as it will inevitably come, to the 
 question of land armament, a question par- 
 ticularly delicate for France, as you are all 
 aware, we have no intention to eschew this. 
 We shall answer your appeal, fully con- 
 scious that this is a question of grave and 
 serious nature for us." 
 
 What more was there to do? England, 
 Japan and the United States had accepted 
 "in principle" a program for the limitation 
 of navies, much more drastic than the ma- 
 jority of people had dreamed possible. To 
 be sure the details were still to be worked 
 out, but that seemed easy. Had not the 
 Conference finished its work? There were 
 people that said so. No. Mr. Hughes had 
 simply awakened the country to what was 
 57 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 possible if the reasons for armament could 
 be removed. 
 
 So far as we, the United States, were con- 
 cerned, these reasons were fourfold: 
 
 (1) Our Pacific possessions. Until we felt rea- 
 sonably sure that they were safe from possible attack 
 by Japan, we must keep our navy and strengthen our 
 fortifications. 
 
 (2) The England-Japan pact. We suspected it. 
 It might be a threat. So long as it existed could we 
 wisely limit our navy ? 
 
 (3) Our Open Door policy in China. We meant 
 to stand by that. It had been invaded by Japan in 
 the Great War; could we reaffirm it now and secure 
 assurances we trusted that there would be no further 
 encroachments? If not, could we limit our arma- 
 ment? 
 
 (4) Our policy of the integrity of nations China 
 and Russia. We had announced a "moral trustee- 
 ship" over both. No more carving up. Let them 
 work it out for themselves. How were we going to 
 back up that policy? 
 
 That is, we had possessions and policies 
 for which we were responsible. Could we 
 protect them without armament? That de- 
 pended, in our judgment, upon England 
 and Japan. Would they be willing to make 
 agreements and concessions which would 
 convince us that they were willing to respect 
 68 
 
WVEMBEK 12, 1921 
 
 our possessions and accept our policies in 
 the Pacific? 
 
 If so, what assurances could we give them 
 in return that would convince them that we 
 meant to respect their possessions and poli- 
 cies? How could we prove to them that 
 they need not fear us? 
 
 It was within the first month of the Con- 
 ference that the answers to these questions 
 were worked out "in principle" again. 
 
 59 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE FRENCH AT THE CONFERENCE 
 
 THE morale of an international conference 
 is easily shaken in the public's mind. 
 Seeming delay will do it. Those who look 
 on feel that whatever is to be done must be 
 done quickly, that things must go in leaps. 
 They mistrust days of plain hard work 
 work which yields no headlines. It must 
 be, they repeat, because the negotiators 
 have fallen on evil times, are intriguing, 
 bargaining. 
 
 Two days after Mr. Hughes had laid out 
 his plan for ship reduction, and it had been 
 accepted in principle and turned over to 
 the naval committee, I heard an eager, sus- 
 picious young journalist ask Lord Lee who, 
 at the end of eight hours of committee 
 60 
 
THE FRENCH AT THE CONFERENCE 
 
 work grilling business always was con- 
 ducting a press conference, if they were 
 really "doing anything." His tone showed 
 that he doubted it, that in his judgment 
 they must be loafing, deceiving the public; 
 that if they were not, why, by this time the 
 program ought to be ready for his news- 
 paper. Lord Lee was very tired, but he 
 had not lost his sense of humor. He made 
 a patient answer. But one understood that 
 there had already begun in Washington 
 that which one saw and heard so much two 
 years and a half before in Paris a feeling 
 that taking time to work out problems was 
 a suspicious performance. 
 
 The calm of steady effort on the part of 
 the Conference was brief. Mr. Hughes in 
 closing the second plenary session where 
 his naval program had been so generously 
 accepted "in principle," had said "I express 
 the wish of the Conference that at an op- 
 portune time M. Briand will enjoy the 
 opportunity of presenting to the Conference 
 61 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 most fully the views of France with regard 
 to the subject of land armaments which we 
 must discuss." Mr. Hughes kept that 
 promise, fixing November 21, nine days 
 after the opening, as the "opportune time." 
 
 The Conference went into M. Briand's 
 open session serene, confident, self-compla- 
 cent. It came out excited, scared, ruffled 
 to the very bottom of its soul. In an hour 
 one-third of Mr. Hughes' agenda had been 
 swept away. Could this have been avoided? 
 I am inclined to think that it would have 
 been if there had been a larger sympathy, 
 a better understanding of the French and 
 their present psychology. If we are to carry 
 on the world cooperatively, as seems in- 
 evitable, we must have a much fuller knowl- 
 edge of one another's ways and prejudices 
 and ambitions than was shown at the out- 
 set of the Washington Conference. 
 
 Back of the commotion that M. Briand 
 stirred up on November 21 lay the idiosyn- 
 crasies and experiences of France. To un- 
 62 
 
THE FRENCH AT THE CONFERENCE 
 
 derstand at all the crisis, for so it was 
 called, one must understand something of 
 France that she is a land which through 
 the centuries has held herself apart as 
 something special, the elite of the nations. 
 The people of no country in the civilized 
 world are so satisfied with themselves and 
 their aim. There are no people that find 
 life at home more precious, guard it so care- 
 fully, none who care so little about other 
 lands, and it might be said, know so little 
 of other lands. 
 
 It is only within the last twenty years 
 that the Frenchman has come to be any- 
 thing of a traveler. To-day, in many parts 
 of France, the young man or young woman 
 who comes to America has the same pres- 
 tige on returning that thirty years ago the 
 person in towns outside of the Atlantic 
 border had in his town when he returned 
 from a trip abroad. I was living in Paris 
 in the early 90's when Alphonse Daudet 
 made a trip to England. It was a public 
 63 
 
PEACEMAKEES 
 
 event. Peary discovered the pole with 
 hardly less newspaper talk. 
 
 Now this country, so wrapt up in itself 
 and the carrying out of its notions of life 
 among the most precious notions in my 
 judgment that mankind have finds itself 
 for a long period really the center of the 
 world's interests. It makes a superhuman 
 effort, is valiant beyond words, practically 
 the whole civilized world rallies to its help. 
 It comes off victorious, and when it gathers 
 itself together and begins to examine its 
 condition it finds the ghastly wounds of a 
 devastated region ; the work of centuries so 
 shattered that it will take centuries to re- 
 store the fertility, beauty, interest. It finds 
 itself with an appalling debt ; with a popu- 
 lation depleted at the point most vital to 
 a nation, in its young men, threatening the 
 oncoming generation. It sees its enemy 
 beaten, to be sure, but with its land practi- 
 cally unimpaired. 
 
 France not only had her condition in her 
 64 
 
THE FKENCH AT THE CONFERENCE 
 
 mind, she had all her past: reminiscences 
 of invasions, from Attila on. Old obses- 
 sions, old policies revived: the belief that 
 she would never have safety except in a 
 weak Central Europe a doctrine she had 
 repudiated broke out. 
 
 She came to the peace table in Paris 
 under an accepted program which said: 
 Separations, but no indemnities. And her 
 bitterness so overwhelmed her that she for- 
 got the principle pledge and demanded in- 
 demnities in full. She forgot her pledge to 
 annex nothing and called for the Rhine 
 Border. Every effort to reason with her, 
 to persuade her not to ask the impossible of 
 her beaten enemy, she interpreted as lack 
 of sympathy, and pointed to her devastated 
 region, her debts, her shrunken population. 
 She accused of injustice those who felt that 
 mercy is the great wisdom. Justice became 
 her great cry. Intent on herself, her dread- 
 ful woes, her determination to have the last 
 pound, she magnified her perils, saw com- 
 65 
 
PEACEMAKEES 
 
 binations against her, and went about in 
 Europe trying to arm other peoples, to 
 build up a pro-France party. Any effort 
 to persuade her that the spirit which under- 
 lay the Versailles Treaty was pro-humanity 
 and not pro-French embittered and antag- 
 onized her. She resented the English ef- 
 fort to bring some kind of order into the 
 Continent. She resented the conclusion of 
 the world slow enough though it was to 
 let Kussia work out her own destiny. 
 
 No lover of France has any right to over- 
 look or encourage this attitude. It is the 
 most dangerous course she could take. 
 She is building up anti-French antago- 
 nisms in beaten Europe, and she is alienat- 
 ing countries that want to bring the world 
 onto a new basis of Good Will and who be- 
 lieve it can be done. 
 
 When M. Briand came to the Washington 
 peace table, he left behind him a country in 
 this abnormal mood her thoughts cen- 
 tered on herself her needs, her dangers. 
 66 
 
THE FKENCH AT THE CONFEKENCE 
 
 M. Briand knew well enough that she would 
 not see the program that Mr. Hughes had 
 thrown out as it was intended a tremen- 
 dously bold suggestion for world peace a 
 call to the sacrifice that each country must 
 make if order was to be restored, the awful 
 losses of recent years repaired. M. Briand 
 knew that what France expected him to get 
 at Washington was recognition, sympathy, 
 guarantees. The last thing that she wanted 
 brought back was a request to join in a 
 program of sacrifice. 
 
 Moreover, M. Briand came to the Confer- 
 ence at considerable peril to himself. He 
 was Premier, and in this office he had been 
 doing as much as he seems to haye thought 
 possible to hold down the military trend of 
 the country. His policy had been fought 
 for a year by a strong party, intent on 
 demonstrating that France was the most 
 powerful nation on the continent of Eu- 
 rope, that it was her right and her ambition 
 to hold first place there. M, Briand's 
 67 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 friends thought that he should not come to 
 the United States. But, as he publicly said, 
 he wanted to come in order to persuade the 
 Conference that France was not as military 
 in spirit as much of the world seemed to 
 believe, that she did want peace, that her 
 refusals to disarm came from the fact that 
 she was still threatened by both Germany 
 and Russia and must either have arms or 
 guarantees. 
 
 M. Briand knew the line of argument that 
 the Hughes program would awaken in 
 France. This argument was admirably set 
 forth early in the Conference by the semi- 
 official Le Temps: 
 
 <C L. Under a regime of limited armaments such 
 as that of which Mr. Hughes has defined the basis, 
 each state has the right to possess force proportioned 
 to the dangers to which, in the opinion of all the 
 contracting powers, it may reasonably believe itself 
 to be exposed. 
 
 "II. When powers agree among themselves to 
 limit their armaments they oblige themselves by that 
 very fact even though tacitly aiding that one of 
 themselves which should find itself at grips with a 
 danger which its limited armaments would not allow 
 it to subdue. 
 
 68 
 
THE FKENCH AT THE CONFEKENCE 
 
 "III. It is not possible to have a contractual 
 limitation of armament without there being at the 
 same time among all the contract ants a joint and 
 several obligation of mutual aid." 
 
 It is not unfair, I think, to say that when 
 M. Briand came to speak to the Washington 
 Conference on November 21, he was not 
 thinking of the peace of the world; he was 
 thinking of the needs and ambitions of 
 France. Moreover, his mood was not the 
 most conciliatory in the world. His pride 
 and his pride for his country had been 
 deeply wounded on the opening day of the 
 Conference. He had found himself on that 
 occasion set at one side. To be sure, he 
 and his colleagues were given a position at 
 the right of the American delegates, Great 
 Britain being at the left; but when Mr. 
 Hughes presented his naval program, 
 France did not figure in it, except inci- 
 dentally. The whole discussion was cen- 
 tered on Great Britain, Japan and the 
 United States. France and Italy were set 
 aside with the casual remark that it was not 
 69 
 
PEACEMAKEES 
 
 thought necessary to discuss their tonnage 
 allowance at that time. 
 
 Did Mr. Hughes lack tact and understand- 
 ing when he confined his opening speech to 
 three nations? I think that the after 
 events point that way. To have invited 
 eight nations and to have spoken to but two 
 at the start was a good deal like inviting 
 eight guests to a dining table and talking 
 to but two of them through the meal. The 
 oversight, if that's the proper word for it, 
 was forgotten, if noticed by any one in the 
 really tremendous thing that Mr. Hughes 
 did. The trouble is that there is almost 
 always one among a number of neglected 
 guests that does feel and does not for- 
 get it. 
 
 The opening week of the Conference kept 
 France in about the same position that she 
 had on the opening day. She was not yet 
 a principal, and another point and one 
 that is hard on the French they saw here 
 what they began to see in Paris in 1919 and 
 70 
 
THE FRENCH AT THE CONFERENCE 
 
 so openly resented there that English is 
 taking the place of French as the language 
 of diplomacy. There is no mistake about 
 this, and I don't wonder that all French- 
 men resent it. At the opening day every 
 delegate, except M. Briand, spoke in Eng- 
 lish; the French translations which fol- 
 lowed each speech were made purely out of 
 compliment to the French delegation. M. 
 Briand is one of not a few in France who 
 will take no pains, whatever their contracts, 
 to learn a word of English. For the last 
 two years he has been constantly in con- 
 ference with Lloyd George, he has had most 
 of that time the remarkable interpreter, M. 
 Carmlynck, at his side. I have heard 
 M. Carmlynck say that in all this time M. 
 Briand has not learned a word of English, 
 although Lloyd George, who at the start 
 understood no French at all, is now able to 
 follow closely the arguments in French, and 
 even will at times correct or question the 
 phrasing of the translation into English. 
 71 
 
PEACEMAKEES 
 
 The French are not a race that conceal 
 their feelings. An Englishman, an Ameri- 
 can, is apt to accuse anybody who does not 
 cover up disappointment, resentment, of 
 being a poor sport. France's chief con- 
 tempt for the Anglo-Saxon is that he is not 
 out and out with everything; that he has 
 reticences and reserves, conceals his dis- 
 likes, his vices, his emotions. The French 
 showed at Washington from the start that 
 they were disappointed. They did not mix 
 freely; they did not use the ample offices 
 prepared for them in the Annex to the Pan- 
 American Building, where the delegates sat, 
 although every other nation was making 
 more or less use of these quarters. They 
 insisted on conducting all their press meet- 
 ings in French alone, although every other 
 nation, when it put up somebody who did 
 not speak English, provided a translator. 
 The result was that the French press gath- 
 erings were sparsely attended. 
 VAnd then came M. Briand's speech, 
 72 
 
THE FKENCH AT THE COOTEKENCE 
 
 which caused the first Conference crisis. 
 For days after that speech was made, I lis- 
 tened to people remake it, giving their idea 
 of how he might have used the same matter 
 and carried his audience with him, giving 
 them the impression of a courageous peo- 
 ple, as they really are, intent not only on 
 the restoration of their tormented and suf- 
 fering land but willing to do their part to 
 restore the rest of the world. Instead, M. 
 Briand gave an impression of a land in 
 panic, its mind centered on possible dangers 
 from a conquered enemy. It was France 
 Sanglante that he held in upraised arms be- 
 fore the Conference, a bleeding France at 
 whom ravening German and Russian wolves 
 were snapping and threatening. All his 
 powerful oratory, his wealth of emotional 
 gesture, upraised arms, tossed black locks, 
 rolling head, tortured features all these 
 M. Briand brought into play in his ef- 
 forts to arouse the Conference to share 
 the fears of France. He could not do it. 
 73 
 
PEACEMAKEES 
 
 He was talking to people as well informed 
 as himself on the actual facts of Europe, 
 but people who are not interpreting those 
 facts in the way that the French do. He 
 was talking to people who view the situa- 
 tion of the present world as one to be cor- 
 rected only by hard, steady sacrifice and 
 work in a spirit of good will and mercy. 
 Unhappily he gave them the impression 
 that France thought only of herself and of 
 what the world should do for her to pay her 
 for her terrible sacrifices. In his picture 
 of bleeding France he did not include bleed- 
 ing Belgium, Italy, England, Canada, Aus- 
 tralia, New Zealand, all of whom sat at 
 the table and all of whom had suffered 
 losses and are staggering under debts, if 
 not equal, at least comparable to those of 
 France. 
 
 It was a mistake of emphasis, that bril- 
 liant journalist Simeon Strunsky said. He 
 pointed out that the thing really relevant 
 in M. Briand's speech was practically con- 
 74 
 
THE FRENCH AT THE CONFERENCE 
 
 cealed from the public, that France had dis- 
 armament plans on hand which soon would 
 reduce her army one half and her term of 
 military service from three years to eigh- 
 teen months. M. Briand's tragic picture of 
 the danger of France so obscured this state- 
 ment, so vitally important to the work of 
 the Conference, that not a few people con- 
 tended that no such statement was ever 
 made. One has only to look at the text of 
 the address to see that it was there, though 
 so out of proportion to the bulk of the 
 speech that it failed of its effect. 
 
 The speech was disastrous. "I was never 
 so heartsick in my life," I heard one of the 
 greatest and most important men in Wash- 
 ington say after it was over. Mr. Wells, 
 that ardent advocate of the brotherhood of 
 man, knocked his doctrine all to smither- 
 eens by accusing France of wanting arms 
 to turn against England. Lord Curzon, as 
 militant as Mr. Wells, made a most un- 
 guarded speech for a man in his position. 
 75 
 
PEACEMAKEES 
 
 France, sore and sensitive, cried aloud 
 that the United States and Great Britain 
 were trying to isolate her. Mr. Hughes 
 and Mr. Balfour had, to be sure, made con- 
 soling speeches after M. Briand's outburst, 
 but they were rather the efforts of serene 
 elderly friends trying to calm the panic of 
 a frightened child, and their effect was 
 rather to aggravate France's determination 
 to assert herself, to prove herself the equal, 
 by arms, if necessary, of any nation in the 
 world, England included. 
 
 The irritation of that day spread over the 
 world. The Conference was "wrecked," 
 cried the lovers of gloom and chaos. Wash- 
 ington buzzed with gossip of wrangling be- 
 tween even the heads of delegations. There 
 was a rumor spread of a sharp quarrel be- 
 tween Mr. Balfour and Mr. Hughes on the 
 way the discussions in the committees were 
 to be handled. It was said that Mr. Hughes 
 wanted everything that was voiced put 
 down ; that Mr. Balfour thought a digest of 
 76 
 
THE FEENCH AT THE CONFEEENCE 
 
 the discussions would be sufficient. This 
 rumor was followed by the story of an ugly 
 scene in committee between the French 
 Premier, Briand, and the Italian Senator 
 Schanzer over the morals of the Italian 
 army. 
 
 Now, luckily the Conference was admir- 
 ably arranged to scotch vicious rumors. 
 There never has been a great international 
 gathering in which the press had as real an 
 opportunity to learn what was going on. 
 Every morning there was given out at press 
 headquarters a list of delegates who at 
 fixed hours would receive the press. This 
 morning bulletin ran something like this: 
 
 11 :00 A.M. Lord Lee 
 
 11:30 Ambassador Schanzer 
 
 3 :00 P.M. Lord Eiddle 
 
 3:30 Secretary Hughes 
 
 4:00 The President of the United States 
 
 (twice a week) 
 
 5:30 Admiral Kato 
 
 6 :00 Mr. Balfour 
 
 and so on. Every day from six to eight op- 
 portunities were given to correspondents 
 
 77 
 
PEACEMAKEKS 
 
 to question principals of the Conference. 
 How much they got depended upon how 
 much they carried how able they were to 
 ask questions how sound their judgment 
 was of the answers they received how hon- 
 est their intent in interpreting. When ugly 
 rumors such as those which disturbed the 
 second week of the Conference's life oc- 
 curred, this method of treating the press 
 was of real advantage to the powers con- 
 cerned. It was a joy to see the way Secre- 
 tary Hughes, for instance, handled the 
 rumors at this moment. 
 
 It was always a joy to see Mr. Hughes 
 when he was righteously indignant, and he 
 certainly was so on the afternoon of Novem- 
 ber 25. He lunged at once at the report 
 of the break between himself and Mr. Bal- 
 four. The statement had no basis but the 
 imagination of the writer. It was unjust 
 to Mr. Balfour, who had been cooperative 
 from the start. To put him of all men at 
 the Conference in a position of opposing the 
 78 
 
THE FKENCH AT THE CONFEEENCE 
 
 United States was most unfair. There had 
 been no clashes in committees, no quarrels. 
 There had, of course, been differences in 
 points of view, candid statements, free ex- 
 planations, but any one with common sense 
 knew that such exchange of views must 
 take place. It was a fine, generous, con- 
 vincing answer to the ugly rumors, and the 
 beauty of it was that you believed Mr. 
 Hughes. You knew that he was not lying 
 to you. I believe this to have been the gen- 
 eral conviction of the newspaper men. He 
 convinced them and they were all for him. 
 This was a real achievement for any man, 
 for the press craft are hard to convince and 
 quick to suspect. Many of them have been 
 for years in the thick of public affairs, 
 watching men go up and down; seeing 
 heroes made and unmade ; the incorruptible 
 prove corruptible. One wonders sometimes 
 not that they have so little faith, but that 
 they have any. They believed Mr. Hughes. 
 When he denied the rumors his word was 
 79 
 
PEACEMAKEES 
 
 accepted. But the rumors were out, and 
 had been cabled abroad and were already 
 doing their ugly work there fighting right 
 and left like mad dogs. There was even riot 
 and bloodshed in Italy over the report that 
 Briand had spoken lightly of their army. 
 
 It looked for the moment as if an at- 
 mosphere was gathering around the Wash- 
 ington Conference similar to that in which 
 the Paris Conference had done its work. 
 Indeed, already the observer who had been 
 in Paris in 1919, had been more than once 
 startled with the way the two conferences 
 were beginning to parallel each other. Just 
 what happened in Paris had already hap- 
 pened here a wonderful first stage in which 
 a noble program had been given out a pro- 
 gram to which all the world had responded 
 with joy and hope. Then came a second 
 stage in which the delegates attempted to 
 make their noble ideas realities. It was in 
 this transition period that the first convul- 
 sions of public and press began. They saw 
 80 
 
THE FRENCH AT THE CONFERENCE 
 
 that, as a matter of fact, the Conference 
 had no magic to practice, that it was noth- 
 ing but the same old hard effort to work out 
 by conferring, by bargaining, by compro- 
 mise, the best that they could get. And they 
 saw, too, that most of this work was going 
 on behind closed doors. The moment that 
 the Washington Conference attempted to 
 get down to cases there was the same burst 
 of remonstrance, suspicion, accusation that 
 we saw in Paris. "Secret diplomacy." 
 Then came rumors of quarrels. If it was 
 secret, must it not have been because there 
 were things that they did not want known 
 outside breaks in their good will? The 
 rumors of quarrels were spread with relish, 
 and often malice. Dislike of this or that 
 nation flared up, mistrust of this or that 
 man. Washington air was saturated with 
 impatience, suspicion, intrigue. Was the 
 Conference to gather about it the same 
 storm of wicked passions that had been so 
 strong in Paris, doing their best to wreck 
 81 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 the work, and frustrating some of the no- 
 blest attempts. That dreadful "outside" of 
 the Paris Conference, created by the unrea- 
 son, hate, vanity and ambitions of men, 
 seemed about to be duplicated. I had never 
 set down my impressions of the Paris at- 
 mosphere at the time of the Peace Confer- 
 ence ; I would do it now, that I might have 
 it to compare with what seemed to me was 
 about to develop in Washington. 
 
 82 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE PARIS SHRINE OF OUR LADY OF HATES 
 
 MEN and women who have been spectators 
 of great human tussles are generally pos- 
 sessed by a desire to tell what they saw, 
 thought and felt during its progress, and 
 until they have relieved themselves of this 
 obsession they are uneasy, as from a duty 
 undone. Until one carries for a time such 
 an obsession as this he cannot realize the 
 patness of the vulgar expression getting a 
 thing "off one's chest." It lies there, liter- 
 ally a load. He may have a notion and his 
 delay is probably due to that that he will 
 only be adding another folio to a more or 
 less pestiferous collection; that, as a mat- 
 ter of fact, he will not, and cannot, com- 
 municate anything that others have not al- 
 83 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 ready communicated. All he can do is to 
 say, "So I saw it ; so it seemed to me." 
 
 For three years I had carried around a 
 few impressions of the Paris Conference of 
 1919. I had meant to keep them to myself 
 they were so ungracious. Summed up 
 they amounted to a melancholy conclusion 
 that in times of stress, public and press, 
 unrestrained, make a bedlam in which 
 steady constructive effort, if not frustrated 
 utterly, is sure to be hindered and distorted. 
 Taken as a whole the milieu in which the 
 Paris Conference operated, furnished the 
 most perfect example the world has ever 
 seen of the arrogance of the one who calls 
 himself liberal, of the irresponsibility of 
 him who calls himself radical, of the unut- 
 terable stupidity of him who calls himself 
 conservative, of the universal habit of sav- 
 ing your face by crying down what others 
 are attempting to do, and of the limita- 
 tions which the laws of human nature and 
 human society put upon the collective ef- 
 forts of human beings. 
 84 
 
SHRINE OF OUR LADY OF HATES 
 
 From the day that the Conference opened 
 you had the impression of each man I am 
 talking here only of the man on the out- 
 side being for himself in what was plainly 
 and admittedly the world's most gigantic 
 effort to sink this each man in the whole. 
 It was the insistence of the individual and 
 his way of thinking, so long held in check 
 by the terrific necessities of the war, that 
 caused the first doubts of the undertaking 
 to one who struggled to keep a disinter- 
 ested outlook. Take the idealists who had 
 accepted the great formula for world peace 
 laid down; they regarded it as something 
 accomplished because for the moment it 
 stood out as the clear desire of the world, 
 and were heedless and contemptuous of the 
 wisest words that were uttered at the start, 
 the words of Georges Clemenceau, who, at 
 the first session, told the delegates of all 
 the nations of the world that if this daring 
 thing, which he doubted but to which he 
 consented, went through it meant sacrifice 
 for everybody. But your idealist had not 
 85 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 come for sacrifice. He had come to put into 
 operation his particular formula for a per- 
 fect world. 
 
 With every day the numbers in Paris 
 grew who had come to help to get a hear- 
 ing to help in the group at the top to be 
 heard by principals. They failed. Disap- 
 pointment, wounded vanity, the sense that 
 they were somebody, had something to con- 
 tribute, stirred them to resentment. They 
 would serve, and they were rejected. There 
 was, to be sure, one thing that those who 
 resented this apparent unconsciousness of 
 their importance by those charged with the 
 conduct of things might have done one 
 surely useful thing, and that was, casting 
 an eye about and seeing the multitude of 
 problems that shrieked for solution, master 
 one, little as it' might be: the .case of 
 Teschen, of the Banat of Tamesvar, the his- 
 tory of a boundary, the need of a coal mine 
 here or there and working, really working, 
 on this particular problem, produce some 
 
SHEINE OF OUE LADY OP HATES 
 
 sound presentation, something that men 
 could not get around. The whole bubbling 
 pot of trouble called for such cooling drops 
 of real, carefully considered work. 
 
 But this demanded self -direction, poise, a 
 wiP.ingness to make a very small contribu- 
 tion, to have no pretense of being called 
 into council, to trust to the gods and your 
 own knowledge of what really counts in 
 solving complications. It called for going 
 aside, of not pretending to be on the in- 
 side. Minds were too troubled, vanity was 
 too keen. You eased your mind and poul- 
 ticed your vanity by talk talk at dinner 
 tables, over restaurant coffee, over tea 
 and talk in endless articles. 
 
 One of the banes of the Paris Peace Con- 
 ference was that there were so many men 
 and women on the field under contract to 
 write, to produce so many words every day 
 or every week. There was no contract that 
 these words should add something to the 
 knowledge of the many things about which 
 87 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 it was so necessary for men and women to 
 learn no contract that they should con- 
 tribute by ever so little to the great need 
 of control on every side, that they should 
 comfort, soften hates, stimulate common 
 sense. Writers covered up their ignorance 
 of things doing by prophecies, by shrieks of 
 despair, by poses of intimacy with the 
 great, by elaborately spun-out theories. 
 And they built up superstitions. They 
 created things absolutely created supersti- 
 tions that may never be dispelled from the 
 minds of those who read them back home. 
 There was the superstition of the mys- 
 terious four who, without advice, without 
 use of the vast machinery of expert knowl- 
 edge that had been called into existence, 
 without consideration of political prejudice, 
 of ancient hates and struggles, carved up 
 countries, made artificial boundaries, and 
 did it with a nicely calculated sense of re- 
 venge, hate, self-advantage. This "Big- 
 Four" came in popular minds to be a hydra- 
 88 
 
SHRINE OF OUR LADY OF HATES 
 
 headed tyrant more irresponsible, brutal, 
 and cynical than any czar of Bussia or 
 Machiavelli of the Middle Ages. 
 
 And it was a creation that left out of con- 
 sideration facts that were there for every- 
 body to read if they were willing to work. 
 It was a Putois they created. Who was 
 Putois? Head your Anatole France, or if 
 Crainquebille is not at hand, read Joseph 
 Conrad's review. 
 
 The malevolence of those not charged 
 with the conduct of affairs against those so 
 charged grew thicker and thicker as the days 
 went on. Gossip became more and more un- 
 restrained. It was the only refuge of the 
 numbers who had no definite business in the 
 scene but who had come to watch often 
 with the idea in their minds that they might 
 be able to contribute some definite, salutary, 
 stimulating something, often again with a 
 very definite idea that they might be able 
 to pull down this 1 or that person having some 
 actual inside hold. 
 
PEACEMAKEES 
 
 There were those who set themselves with 
 calculation to destroy the prestige of the 
 President of the United States; not to de- 
 stroy it by sound criticism of his point of 
 view, by the presentation of a larger aspect 
 of things than his, but to do it by a calcu- 
 lated meanness of mind. In the general and 
 frightful disorder left by the war, every- 
 thing begged that men should sink their 
 littleness and show bigness, if there was 
 any in them, or if not leave the scene, in 
 order at least, by their absence, there might 
 be so much less of littleness of mind around. 
 But these men and women stayed on. 
 They sat at the tables of the Ritz and 
 smacked their lips over a nasty piece of 
 scandal, born of mischief-making partisans 
 in far distant places; the meanness of the 
 "outs" against the leader of the "ins." And 
 there were always those to listen and to 
 spread. 
 
 In the greatness of the calamity that had 
 overwhelmed the world, it would seem that 
 90 
 
SHRINE OF OUE LADY OF HATES 
 
 men should have gone beyond the point not 
 only of this wanton mischief but beyond 
 the point of sneering. A sneer in the face 
 of this vast destruction of mankind was like 
 a sneer at an angry Jehovah. But men 
 everywhere sneered at the attempts at order, 
 at justice. And, curiously enough, it was 
 those who labeled themselves liberal, hu- 
 mane, that sneered most. 
 
 There was a despairing consciousness at 
 times that in every heart some unextinguish- 
 able hatred was nourished. There were the 
 hatreds against those who did not believe 
 with you. You began to see growing in 
 Paris among Americans what we have seen 
 growing here at home since the war the 
 revival of that old, old hate of England. 
 What hope is there of the world, one felt 
 sometimes like asking, when some man or 
 woman who literally had given his life to 
 good works or good causes poured a vial 
 of vitriol on the English nation? It took 
 you back to the Civil War, and the delivery 
 91 
 
PEACEMAKEES 
 
 up to England, by the wisdom of Abraham 
 Lincoln, of the Confederate commissioners. 
 Owen Love joy, lifelong friend of human 
 freedom, enemy of human slavery, rose in 
 the Congress of the United States then and 
 swore, so that all the country heard, his 
 own undying hatred of England. 
 
 What was the world problem, after all, 
 but to extinguish hatred? 
 
 Unless that hymn of hate could be si- 
 lenced, what hope was there of peace, order, 
 or the forms of order? And yet the advo- 
 cates of peace fed the fires in their own 
 hearts and did their best to enkindle them 
 in others. 
 
 And it was not alone American hatred of 
 England, French hatred of Germany, or 
 English hatred of Germany that you heard 
 of, but new hates. They ran about like fire 
 maniacs, pouring oil on old factional, na- 
 tional and international troubles, the 
 Egyptian against the English, the Greek 
 against the Turk the Pole against the 
 Russian. 
 
 92 
 
SHRINE OF OUR LADY OF HATES 
 
 There used to stand in Brittany one of 
 those frank, realistic shrines that the Gallic 
 honest with the ways of his own heart so 
 often sets up, a statue to Notre Dame des 
 Haines Our Lady of the Hates. A mob 
 from all over the earth flocked to Paris, car- 
 rying under their arms big or little replicas 
 of Notre Dame des Haines intent on rear- 
 ing them at the doors of the Conference. 
 
 Savage instincts came to the top, and no 
 contradiction, in all this sea of contradic- 
 tion, stared at you more hatefully than that 
 of announced pacifists lending all their ef- 
 forts to a May Day riot, almost panting to 
 see blood run, and perching themselves on 
 possible vantage points, to cheer on any 
 possible disorder at a time when tormented 
 authorities had ordered the public to stay 
 indoors, and had taken taxis and omni- 
 buses from the streets. They wanted the 
 protest of blood against what? As nearly 
 as one could see, it was against the only 
 organized widespread effort then making in 
 the tormented world to bring the peace and 
 93 
 
PEACEMAKEBS 
 
 justice which they had made it their pro- 
 fessional business to preach. 
 
 A despairing fact was that individuals 
 and groups, whose profession in life it had 
 been to be auxiliaries of peace and order, 
 became auxiliaries of war and disorder. 
 There was one way of counteracting their 
 power, and that was using them, putting it 
 up to them as Mr. Lincoln put it up to 
 Horace Greeley in 1864. 
 
 To put it up to them in the way of the 
 Niagara Conference that was the real wis- 
 dom, the real wisdom of the leader always 
 toward protesting groups let them try 
 their hand. Possibly they can pull it 
 through, contribute something which he and 
 those of his type cannot do. But in this 
 avalanche of demands causes, old and new ; 
 injustices running back to the Flood; with 
 a hundred unsolvable problems for every 
 hour how place all this pestiferous mob 
 that knew how to do it? It was to bale out 
 the Seine with a teaspoon a vaster river 
 
 than the Potomac and a smaller teaspoon. 
 94 
 
SHEINE OF OUE LADY OF HATES 
 
 And the trying came so often to naught. 
 There was Prinkipo modeled on the real 
 idealist's formula, sound enough for a lim- 
 ited scene, with a limited cast "get to- 
 gether around a table and talk it over." 
 
 But the table? How find it in this still 
 seething land over so much of which the 
 lava was still hot and uncrossable, with 
 so many craters where at every instant new 
 eruptions threatened. They tried it went 
 into the sea for their table, at a spot of 
 which some of those who chose it had never 
 heard, and to which one at least objected 
 soundly enough because the name sounded 
 so like the name of a comic opera. 
 
 And the table selected, how get contest- 
 ants there? In this Europe they were re- 
 making, such was the physical, military and 
 political hampering that there was no spot 
 to which it was certain that everybody could 
 reach. And, as in the Prinkipo case, you 
 ran up against things more unyielding than 
 armies or parties that hardening of will, 
 that deadening of the spirit of cooperation 
 95 
 
PEACEMAKEES 
 
 which is one of the most terrible works of 
 revolutions something happening to men 
 who have all their lives been good men, de- 
 voted to the end of human happiness, freez- 
 ing them until they will no longer work 
 with other men to bring order and peace to 
 a tormented land for which they have al- 
 ways slaved. 
 
 To sit at a table and hear a great noble, 
 white-bearded advocate of human rights, 
 turned to bitterness and scorn of those who 
 have ruined his plan of doing things but 
 who, for the moment, are in the saddle, 
 carrying out their own violent, fanatic way, 
 refuse to even meet at the Prinkipo table 
 the representative of those advocates of vio- 
 lence in order to attempt to somehow soften 
 their madness you know then that you 
 have reached a human limit, a limit to the 
 human being's capacity to face those who 
 disagree and those whom he despises though 
 in that meeting there may be a remote, 
 though -ever so remote, chance to stay a 
 
SHKIKE OF OUE LADY OF HATES 
 
 murderous hand and soften a murderous 
 spirit. 
 
 It was not only such curious impressions 
 of the limitations of the human mind one 
 received, but of the human heart as well. 
 It seemed as if it were not big enough 
 even in the case of those whose profession 
 it is to be humane not big enough to cover 
 anything but some special group whose 
 cause they espoused. There were many dis- 
 heartening exhibits of this limitation. One 
 that will always stick in my mind as one of 
 the most hideous was the tears of a great 
 humanitarian over the German prisoner in 
 France a prisoner at that time receiving 
 the same rations and even better shelter 
 and more clothes than most French refugees, 
 and an absolute setting of lips and hardness 
 of eyes at the mention of children and 
 women in the caves of Lens, the shattered 
 ruins of Peronne it was not humanity but 
 an espoused group of humanity that stirred 
 his sympathy. 
 
 97 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 Limits to human endurance, human ca- 
 pacity, human kindness, human foresight 
 that was what every day of the Peace Con- 
 ference cried louder and louder into your 
 ear. 
 
 98 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 WHY DID HE DO IT? 
 
 BUT Washington was not to parallel 
 Paris. The uproar caused by M. Briand's 
 speech died away in an amazingly short 
 time so far as Washington was concerned. 
 The violence and indiscretions of the press 
 to which so much of the disturbance on the 
 other side of the Atlantic was due was not 
 followed up. Those that had been responsi- 
 ble were all of them, I think, a little 
 ashamed, though Mr. Wells obstinately came 
 back one or twice to tell what he thought of 
 the French. Explanations quieted the Ital- 
 ians. M. Briand had never used the offen- 
 sive word attributed to him, it had been but 
 a mistake of the cables and a serious mis- 
 take, it should be said, too, of the journal- 
 99 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 1st that had cabled it without verification. 
 On all sides lectures were read to the cor- 
 respondents. Go on this way and they could 
 easily wreck the whole thing. Go on this 
 way and peace never at any time could be 
 made in the world. Any effort of man could 
 be easily upset if passionate judgments and 
 unconfirmed suspicions were to be sent 
 broadcast through the newspapers. Peo- 
 ple believe what they read, unhappily, and 
 have little or no way of verifying. There 
 was much of this reproving talk going on 
 and some of those who handled it most vig- 
 orously belonged to the Washington press. 
 It had its effect at once. 
 
 Then, too, it was hard to be continuously 
 violent and suspicious in Washington. The 
 lovely days, the wide streets, the freedom 
 from the turmoil of business and industry, 
 the very absence of exciting night life all 
 tended to calm the spirit. How different 
 from Paris in 1919 ! There one lived in a 
 city encircled by vast hospitals where thou- 
 100 
 
WHY DID HE DO IT? 
 
 sands upon thousands of shattered men 
 tossed on their beds of pain. Soldiers of all 
 nations swarmed everywhere. In many 
 streets of the city the shops were still sealed 
 up. On all sides one found great staring 
 gaps the wounds of the city made by the 
 shells of Big Bertha or the nightly visits of 
 airplanes. Everywhere you went you saw 
 still the signs "Abri" (shelter), vividly re- 
 calling the long years in which no man safely 
 went out without knowing that there was 
 a refuge near by. The streets at night were 
 still dark, and those within still tightened 
 their shutters and drew close their curtains, 
 unable to believe that light was no longer 
 a danger. 
 
 You rode in battered taxicabs over streets 
 that were rough from long inattention. In 
 every house you entered the marks of war 
 still remained. Nothing had been mended 
 or repaired in Paris for five years. A heat- 
 ing apparatus out of order, it stayed out of 
 order. A window broken, it stayed broken. 
 101 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 A hinge off, it stayed off. Carpets and 
 furniture went uncleaned. And in the 
 homes of the rich where there had been beau- 
 tiful pictures, empty frames hung on the 
 wall, the canvas having been cut out and 
 sent to some place of safety. There was 
 no color. All Paris was in black. Even in 
 the windows of the shops you saw nothing 
 but black. Your dressmaker and milliner 
 had no heart to work in colors, it still to 
 them was bad taste. It was only the influx 
 and the demand of the visiting foreigners, 
 who multiplied as the Conference went 
 on, that brought back colors to the shop 
 windows. 
 
 What a contrast to all this was Washing- 
 ton in the fall of 1921, with its gayety and 
 lavishness, its incessant round of lunches 
 and teas and dinners, its over-weighted 
 tables, unbelievable in their abundance to 
 the visiting strangers, so long and still 
 on stricter rations. You could not be tragic 
 long in Washington. 
 
WHY DID HE DO IT? 
 
 Then there was Mr. Hughes' steady hand. 
 He laughed daily at his press conferences 
 at the insinuations and solemnity of the 
 questioning press correspondents. Every- 
 thing was going on swimmingly, he asserted. 
 "Excellent progress." The naval commit- 
 tee was at work, the Far Eastern commit- 
 tee had begun its sessions, the agenda would 
 be followed step by step, but one thing at 
 a time would be attempted; when they had 
 finished what they were at now they would 
 take up the next step, and not before. It 
 was certainly steadying, if not exciting. It 
 gave confidence, if not headlines. All of this 
 quieted the storm, but it was left to the 
 President of the United States to sweep it 
 entirely from the Conference sky, though 
 whether he did it intentionally or acci- 
 dentally is still, I think, an unanswered 
 question. 
 
 Why did President Harding, without 
 warning, inject an Association of Nations 
 into the Conference on the Limitation of 
 103 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 Armament, on the last day of its second 
 week of life? The Conference had a definite 
 agenda. Mr. Hughes, its chairman, was fol- 
 lowing it with the rigor of a good school- 
 master. That agenda made no mention of 
 a conference, association or league of na- 
 tions. So far as it was concerned, the world 
 war is made up of nine nations. And here 
 came the President of the United States 
 and casually announced that before the 
 work was completed it should include an 
 association of all the nations of the earth. 
 
 Why did he do it? Did he want to divert 
 public attention from the dangerous irri- 
 tations of the moment? We do not yet know 
 enough of the workings of Mr. Harding's 
 mind to be able to say whether he would, 
 like Napoleon III, gild a dome when there 
 was squally public weather. All we do 
 really know about the President, so far, is 
 his genuinely beneficent intent. Is he canny 
 enough to know that the public is as easily 
 diverted as a child and capable of attempt- 
 104 
 
WHY DID HE DO IT? 
 
 ing the trick when things are getting a 
 bit out of hand? 
 
 Whether this is true or not, he certainly 
 put an end to the ticklish situation in which 
 the Conference found itself in Thanksgiv- 
 ing week. Everybody fell to discussing the 
 proposition. Was the Conference really to 
 end up in an Association of Nations? Did 
 this mean that the United States would 
 suggest to the delegates gathered at the 
 Conference all of them members of the 
 League of Nations that they scrap that in- 
 stitution? There had been much specula- 
 tion in Geneva before the Washington Con- 
 ference was called as to whether the inten- 
 tion was to force the League out of existence. 
 So great was the anxiety of more than one 
 European country to be in any congrega- 
 tion in which the United States figured, 
 that it was pretty generally agreed that if 
 such a proposition should be made it would 
 be assented to. Was this Mr. Harding's 
 first feeler then toward substituting some- 
 105 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 thing of his own for the League? But this 
 was only a speculation. Nobody could get 
 from any official source any confirmation 
 that Mr. Harding had anything definite in 
 mind. And yet they were not unwilling to 
 accept the notion that he had inadvertently 
 thrown out so important a suggestion. 
 
 There were those who had an unamiable 
 explanation. We are all human, they said. 
 We must remember that this has ceased to 
 be Mr. Harding's conference. His fine senti- 
 ments on Armistice Day on the opening of 
 the Conference had been greeted with loud 
 acclaim the world over. But after he had 
 opened the Conference he left the hall. 
 Secretary Hughes appeared, and it was Sec- 
 retary Hughes who stirred the world. 
 From that time on, the Secretary had been 
 the one man quoted. We have had great 
 secretaries Mr. Boot, for instance, who 
 never allowed his shadow to fall across that 
 of the President of the United States. 
 When Mr. Boosevelt was President, Mr. 
 Boot prepared some very remarkable state 
 106 
 
WHY DID HE DO IT? 
 
 papers, but they always began "The Presi- 
 dent instructs me to say." Mr. Hughes 
 has been speaking for himself. It is quite 
 possible, said these interpreters, that the 
 President thinks the time has come to let 
 the public know that, after all, it is he who 
 occupies the White House. 
 
 I am quite sure that if this had been true, 
 we should have had other evidence of it 
 as time went on, but none came. Mr. Hard- 
 ing knew well enough that a successful Con- 
 ference was in the long run his triumph. 
 He knew well enough that the only man who 
 could give him this success was Secretary 
 Hughes. Possibly the wisest thing that Mr. 
 Harding has yet done as President has been 
 to let the members of his cabinet do their 
 own work. Jealousy is not, I am sure, an 
 explanation of Mr. Harding's sudden intro- 
 duction of an Association of Nations into 
 the Conference on the Limitation of Arma- 
 ment. Was it to be found in M. Briand's 
 speech? 
 
 M. Briand did not convince his audi- 
 107 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 ence, as we have seen. That is, he did not 
 bring it to the point at which he was aim- 
 ing. But one thing that he did do was to 
 bring into sharp relief the fact that land 
 and naval armaments cannot be handled 
 separately. They dovetail in the game of 
 war, are mutually defensive and offensive; 
 to cut the navy of a nation whose main 
 defense is ships, without considering the 
 relation of that cut to the size of the armies 
 of those nations in which armies are the 
 chief defense, is to leave an unbalanced 
 situation. 
 
 A second realization went along with this, 
 and that was that the scrapping and cutting 
 by nine nations must be done with an eye 
 to the actual or potential naval armaments 
 of the other forty-five or so nations of the 
 earth. Senator Schanzer had already sug- 
 gested this in his speech made on November 
 15, accepting in principle for Italy the naval 
 program. "I think it rather difficult," he 
 said, "to separate the question of Italian 
 and French naval armament limitation from 
 108 
 
WHY DID HE DO IT? 
 
 the general question of naval armaments of 
 the world." 
 
 M. Briand's speech made one realize how 
 France and Italy must consider possible 
 continental alliances of powers that were 
 not represented at this Conference; must 
 consider a possible Russian crusade to con- 
 vert the world by force to its gospel. And 
 if France and Italy must, or thought they 
 must, secure themselves against these possi- 
 bilities, could England weaken herself dis- 
 proportionately? When you began to con- 
 sider the question of armament in terms of 
 the world and not simply of nine nations, 
 you could not if you were candid find any 
 peaceful solution but by bringing everybody 
 in Germany, Turkey, Russia. Now it may 
 be, though we do not know Mr. Harding 
 well enough yet to say, that the logic of 
 the experiences that the Conference had 
 been through up to date laid hold of him 
 and he said it like a man "there is but one 
 way out, and that is by One Big Union." 
 
 Of course there is another explanation of 
 109 
 
PEACEMAKEKS 
 
 why he did it and I rather think it may be 
 the true one, after all. The President may 
 have been hearing from the country. One 
 thing that we do know about him is that he 
 is a man who with almost religious care lis- 
 tens to the voices that come up to him from 
 the people. And it was no secret that a 
 multitude of them, strong and weak, had 
 been calling to him in the weeks preceding 
 "conference," "association," "league," 
 "some method of carrying on in which every- 
 body can join," "in no other way can we 
 hope for permanent peace." It may be that 
 Mr. Harding had heard so much of this that 
 he felt he must reply. And if this was true, 
 he did wisely. 
 
 We may lay it down as one of the great 
 facts of the present international state of 
 mind, that the world is intent on some sort 
 of an association of nations. It is not set, 
 so far as one can determine, on any particu- 
 lar covenant, though of course there is one 
 to which some fifty nations of the world 
 110 
 
WHY DID HE DO IT? 
 
 have subscribed and in which for some two 
 years now they have been doing increasingly 
 practical work in adjusting difficulties be- 
 tween nations. The very fact that the 
 League of Nations lives the divers ways 
 in which its adventures in world unionism 
 come to us only makes the idea of associ- 
 ation stronger in the minds of the peoples of 
 the earth. 
 
 The Conference might limit armaments, 
 naval and land, in the nine nations that 
 were here gathered. It might make settle- 
 ments of the Far Eastern questions, but 
 there still would remain the rest of the 
 world. It is a part of things. The world 
 is one. It has come to a consciousness of 
 its oneness. Nothing can dull that con- 
 sciousness, stop the determination to real- 
 ize it. Not Mr. Borah, not Mr. Lodge. 
 Somehow we have got to learn to come to- 
 gether and stay together. Walt Whitman 
 once said of Abraham Lincoln's passion for 
 the Union that unionism had become "a 
 111 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 new virtue" with Mm, a virtue like hon- 
 esty, goodness, truthfulness. There is no 
 manner of doubt that in the minds of this 
 world unionism is coming to be regarded as 
 a virtue; that the demand for its realiza- 
 tion as the only road to world peace is be- 
 coming more and more universal. 
 
 Mr. Harding may have seen this. He may 
 have gone over in his mind the steps that 
 in the last twenty-five years not to go back 
 farther the world has taken toward this 
 the steps at the Hague, the various peace 
 conferences, the greatest of all experiments 
 now making at Geneva and he may have 
 seen that he could no longer deny the de- 
 mand of this people that he take another 
 step toward the realization of this great 
 hope. Whatever the reason, however, of 
 his unexpected suggestion, it served the 
 excellent purpose of turning the mind of 
 the public to the fact that however complete 
 the work of the Conference might be there 
 would still be more to do if the world was 
 to remain at peace. 
 
 112 
 
WHY DID HE DO IT? 
 
 In the meantime the Conference itself was 
 going steadily ahead. Everybody seemed 
 cheerful. Everybody was cheerful. If the 
 Conference had rocked on its base for a mo- 
 ment, it had come back to its position ; and 
 it was obvious enough, too, from all that 
 one heard and saw, that there was going 
 soon to be something definite and important 
 to announce as a result of the work that 
 was going on. 
 
 113 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 DRAMATIC DIPLOMACY 
 
 WHO was the dramatist of the Confer- 
 ence on the Limitation of Armament? Mr. 
 Hughes? I would never have believed it. 
 I could never have conceived of his delib- 
 erately staging his diplomatic achievements 
 with an appreciation of the time, the place 
 and the world at large which was really 
 amazing. It did not need Mr. Balf our's deli- 
 cate and humorous understanding to point 
 out to those who were present at the open- 
 ing on November 12 that the dramatic qual- 
 ity of Mr. Hughes' great speech rivaled, if 
 it did not outstrip, its splendid matter. But 
 who would have believed that he would re- 
 peat himself? Yet he did it. Just four 
 weeks from his first great coup he pulled 
 114 
 
DRAMATIC DIPLOMACY 
 
 off another that had every element of drama 
 which characterized the first and it had 
 more strains of genuine emotion and one 
 scene of biting satire. (Not for a moment, 
 however, do I believe that Mr. Hughes in- 
 tended that.) 
 
 The surprise of the opening day of the 
 Conference, November 12, lay in the unex- 
 pectedness of what Mr. Hughes had to say. 
 The first surprise, of December 10, lay in 
 the fact that there was to be a full session. 
 It was not until nearly midnight of the 9th 
 that it was announced. A few diners linger- 
 ing late heard of it. The press of course 
 was informed. But to most of us the news 
 came when we opened our morning paper 
 over our coffee a full headline across the 
 top of the page 
 
 PLENARY SESSION TO-DAY 
 
 Of course we realized that it was going to 
 be a big day. For days there had been hid- 
 den in the mists about the Conference 
 115 
 
PEACEMAKEES 
 
 thing which those who were able to pene- 
 trate near to the center of things declared 
 to be a treaty. Watching this treaty emerge 
 was like watching a ship come out of a 
 thick fog. There were warning signals, 
 faint at first, but growing more and more 
 distinct the Anglo-Japanese pact was dy- 
 ing. If the United States wished it, it 
 should go; and it was certain that the 
 United States had for a long time wished 
 it, also Australia and other parts of the 
 British Empire. Then we began to hear 
 more and more from another direction sig- 
 nals that had been sounded at intervals 
 for weeks before the Conference convened. 
 Japan was uneasy about the naval bases in 
 the Pacific. She would like to have them 
 dismantled. As one listened one began to 
 understand that Mr. Hughes' program of 
 naval limitation would stay where it was 
 until something had been done about both 
 the Anglo-Japanese Pact and the Islands of 
 the Pacific. 
 
 116 
 
DEAMATIC DIPLOMACY 
 
 The logic of the situation began to be 
 clear. The fair-minded began to ask them- 
 selves, "Well, now, after all, how can we 
 expect Japan to strip herself of ships, if 
 she must, as seeins to be inevitable, give 
 up her understanding with England? How 
 can we expect her to weaken her defenses 
 and take no exception to the fortifications 
 in the waters near her? She is the member 
 of this Conference that is being asked to 
 sacrifice until it hurts, and the only one. 
 Is it fair to ask her to sacrifice without 
 guarantees? Is there any way out but a 
 treaty a treaty in which we join?" 
 
 Moreover, if you ask her to sacrifice with- 
 out a guarantee, will she do it? Not Japan. 
 Thus it became more and more clear that 
 the success of the naval program depended 
 on some kind of a pact which would satisfy 
 Japan that she could agree to what Mr. 
 Hughes had asked and still have no reason 
 to feel herself in danger. 
 
 The first definite black-faced, full-width- 
 117 
 
PEACEMAKEES 
 
 of-the-page headline came, as I remember, 
 on December 5 "Four Power Entente to 
 Keplace Anglo-Japanese Alliance." The 
 morning after this bold announcement it 
 was not quite so sure. The newspapers 
 were keeping a line of retreat open. As 
 they now put it: "Discussions of the pro- 
 posals have reached a well-advanced stage," 
 none of the governments concerned had 
 given final approval. There was enough 
 that was sure, however, to give the wicked 
 a chance to jeer at approaching "entan- 
 gling alliances." 
 
 By Friday, December 9, the most careful 
 journals were saying, on what they declared 
 to be the best sort of authority, that the 
 United States was going into a pact with 
 Japan and England and France, guarantee- 
 ing various things. There was considerable 
 diversity in the assertions about what it 
 guaranteed. Washington said nothing. The 
 news came from all of the capitals of the 
 powers concerned, except our own. It was 
 118 
 
DEAMATIC DIPLOMACY 
 
 evidently very hard for Washington to say 
 "treaty." 
 
 There was much entertaining gossip run- 
 ning around as to how Tokyo and London 
 and Paris had been able to give the press 
 the news of what was going to be done, while 
 Washington was silent. One story was that 
 a clever Japanese journalist had managed 
 to get a glimpse of the document in prepara- 
 tion and had cabled what he had been able 
 to make out of its contents to Tokyo; that 
 from there it had gone to Paris and London 
 and finally came here. That was one story. 
 Another was a rather thin version of that 
 old, old device of writers of diplomatic 
 fiction a lively and lovely lady lunches 
 with an elderly diplomat, who, to win her 
 favor, reveals the secret that is in the air. 
 That evening she dines with a young jour- 
 nalist whom she naturally (and necessarily 
 for the purpose of the plot) much prefers, 
 and to prove her devotion she tells him what 
 her elder suitor has revealed. Threadbare 
 119 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 as the formula is, it was honored the week 
 that the treaty was coming out of the fog 
 by at least one important newspaper. 
 
 Mr. Hughes seems to have concluded by 
 the end of Friday, the 9th, that unless he 
 acted quickly his reputation for dramatic 
 diplomacy might be shaken, and so the 
 hasty summons, the thrill at the break- 
 fast table, the quick readjustments of plans, 
 the rush to make sure that your credentials 
 were all right and your ticket waiting you. 
 
 From the beginning of the Conference, 
 sun and air were in league with those who 
 were staging it w r ith such a sense of dra- 
 matic values. Never was there a morning 
 of lovelier tenderness than that on which 
 they carried the Unknown Soldier to his 
 grave ; Mr. Hughes' big gun was fired under 
 a perfect morning sky it was only when 
 we came out that things had grown stern 
 and the clouds were dark, as if to give 
 us a sense that a serious thing had been done 
 that morning and it was well to get down to 
 work, if it was to be made good. 
 120 
 
DEAMATIC DIPLOMACY 
 
 The morning of December 10 there was 
 frost on all the Washington roof tops, the 
 sky was clear, there was an air that put a 
 spring in your heels and it was a joy to 
 hurry down with the crowd to get your 
 ticket; it put you in mood for something 
 exciting, helped enormously the keen antici- 
 pation that stirred the town. 
 
 The scene in the Conference was what it 
 had been at the three previous open ses- 
 sions: each delegate in his place, the ad- 
 visory board banked behind them, the boxes 
 overflowing with ladies, the press in their 
 usual seats, the House gallery even more 
 amusing than on the opening day. It was 
 quite full, for somehow the House had ob- 
 tained permission to bring its family along, 
 and there were many ladies sprinkled 
 through the gallery. They made it more 
 animated but not a whit more dignified in 
 its behavior. 
 
 And then, on the tick of the hour, Mr. 
 Hughes arose. What an orderly mind! A 
 mind that must know where it is headed, 
 121 
 
PEACEMAKEKS 
 
 how it is going to get there, the exact point 
 it has reached at the given moment! He 
 must know himself, and he never fails, when 
 he presents his case, to make sure that you 
 know. Again and again in his talks to the 
 press he would carefully point out to the 
 correspondents who were given to jumping 
 to the future, running back to the past, 
 wanting to know this or that that was not on 
 the agenda by any stretch of the imagina- 
 tion, just what "the muttons" were in this 
 particular Conference. "The agenda is our 
 chart, here is where we have arrived to- 
 day. We are moving in this or that direc- 
 tion. I shall have nothing to say about 
 what we find when we arrive until we are 
 there, then you shall know everything." 
 That is, Mr. Hughes did his utmost to keep 
 the mind of press and public concentrated 
 on the actual problem under his hand. He 
 started the Plenary Conference of December 
 10 in the same fashion. 
 
 The session, he said, was to be devoted to 
 that part of the agenda which concerned 
 122 
 
DRAMATIC DIPLOMACY 
 
 itself with the Pacific and Far Eastern ques- 
 tions. The committee charged with these 
 questions had taken up first a consideration 
 of China; certain conclusions in regard to 
 China already given out to the public had 
 been reached. It was the business of the 
 full Conference, however, to assent to these 
 conclusions. In turn, Mr. Hughes reviewed 
 them, and in turn the Conference assented 
 to them : 
 
 (1) The four resolutions which will go down in 
 history as the Boot resolutions; they are, as Mr. 
 Hughes pointed out eloquently, a charter given 
 China by the eight powers at this Conference, pro- 
 tecting her sovereignty and independence and guar- 
 anteeing that no one hereafter shall Beek within 
 China special advantages at the expense of the rights 
 of others. 
 
 (2) The agreement between powers not to con- 
 clude between themselves any treaty affecting China 
 without previously notifying China and giving her 
 an opportunity to participate. 
 
 (3) A pledge given by all the members of the 
 Conference not to enter into any treaty or under- 
 standing either with one another or with any power 
 which would infringe the principles laid down in 
 the Root resolutions. 
 
 This business done, Mr. Hughes sprang 
 the second surprise of the day : 
 
 "I shall now ask Senator Lodge to make a com- 
 munication to the Conference with respect to a 
 123 
 
PEACEMAKEES 
 
 matter which is not strictly within the agenda, but 
 which should be made known to the Conference at 
 this first opportunity/ 7 
 
 It was the treaty that had been lurking 
 so long behind the fog. A simple enough 
 treaty in form, brief, only 196 words, but 
 how portentous for us, the United States. 
 Those few words bind us to Great Britain, 
 the French Republic, the Empire of Japan 
 in a contract to respect one another's rights 
 in relation to all insular possessions and 
 dominions in the region of the Pacific Ocean. 
 We agree to settle quarrels, if any there 
 should be, by conference, when it cannot be 
 done by diplomacy. We agree also if the 
 rights of any one of the four associates are 
 threatened from the outside "to communi- 
 cate with one another fully and frankly as 
 to the most efficient measures to be taken 
 jointly and separately to meet the exigen- 
 cies of the particular situation. " 
 
 Article X of the League of Nations! I 
 pinched myself to be sure I was not asleep. 
 Swift glances right and left reassured me, 
 
 124: 
 
DEAMATIC DIPLOMACY 
 
 for I could see sly little smiles and some 
 looks of disgust on near-by faces. And 
 then I fixed my eyes on the American dele- 
 gation. They were taking it like gentle- 
 men, though it did seem to me that Mr. 
 Hughes was not sitting quite so straight 
 and looking quite so proud as usual. Article 
 X read by Henry Cabot Lodge! Was the 
 dramatist for the Conference for the Limita- 
 tion of Armament also a great satirist? 
 Surely you must search far in American 
 history to find, another iscene so full of 
 irony. 
 
 Mr. Lodge read the treaty through in his 
 fine, clear voice ; digested it in a few simple 
 words; followed it with a nice little liter- 
 ary talk on the romance that hangs over 
 the isles of the Pacific, which we were pro- 
 tecting from all future aggressors; said 
 some hard things about war, quite justified 
 but I was incapacitated for appreciating 
 his eloquence, for all I could see was the 
 United States climbing into the League of 
 125 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 Nations through the pantry window, while 
 Senator Lodge held up the sash. 
 
 But it was a fine climb for the United 
 States! 
 
 In the week thus opened there followed 
 more agreements, more settlements, all 
 necessary to round out the Four Power 
 Pact. These were presented to the public 
 not in open sessions of the Conference but 
 through the press in what might be called 
 private rehearsals. Standing at one end of 
 the long audience room, opening from his 
 own office in the State Department, a hun- 
 dred or more newspaper folk of various na- 
 tionalities, pressing close to him, Secre- 
 tary Hughes read on Monday afternoon, De- 
 cember 12, the text of an arrangement 
 with Japan concerning Yap, an arrange- 
 ment hanging since last June and now set- 
 tled and settled rightly by a fair give and 
 take on both sides. 
 
 He followed this by reading the written 
 consent of the United States to another 
 chunk of the League of Nations. What it 
 126 
 
DEAMATIC DIPLOMACY 
 
 amounted to was that the United States 
 agreed to the mandate given Japan by the 
 Versailles Treaty over the islands in the 
 Pacific north of the equator, late the prop- 
 erty of Germany. The United States also 
 accepted all the terms of the mandate as 
 laid down by the League of Nations. Ex- 
 cellent terms they are, too. We are even 
 to get a copy of the annual report of her 
 stewardship which Japan, like all other 
 League mandatories, is obliged to make, 
 showing that she is really developing and 
 not exploiting the territory which she is 
 being allowed to administer. This was a 
 good deal for one day! 
 
 What did it mean? Why, most important 
 of all, that the delegates of the United States 
 had seen that limitation of armament means 
 sacrifice. It was unwillingness to sacrifice 
 that had prevented the disarmament pro- 
 posed at Paris. 
 
 England must have her navy ; her security 
 required it. 
 
 127 
 
PEACEMAKEES 
 
 France and Italy must have their armies ; 
 their security required it. 
 
 Each one of the little new nations that 
 one would have supposed to have been so 
 fed up on war that they never again would 
 have been willing to spend a dollar on a 
 soldier, must have their armies ; their secur- 
 ity required it. 
 
 Japan must have her army, her navy, her 
 war loot ; her security required it. 
 
 That is, no one of the allied nations was 
 ready to make a sacrifice to carry out the 
 plank of disarmament they had adopted. 
 They insisted on applying the plank to the 
 enemy they had beaten, but not to them- 
 selves. This was not in any large degree 
 because of greed or revenge, it was because 
 of fear fear of the vanquished. There was 
 utter lack of confidence in the plan of peace- 
 ful international cooperation which they 
 had written into their program. Force 
 alone spelt security in their minds. They 
 had no sense of safety in a mere covenant, 
 128 
 
DEAMATIC DIPLOMACY 
 
 though all the nations of the world did 
 commit themselves to its provisions. 
 
 It has been our boast that we alone asked 
 nothing at Paris. But was this true? 
 When it came to working out the code which 
 the world had acclaimed as the true path 
 to permanent peace, we refused to accept 
 the one point on which all the rest hung; 
 that for an association of nations looking 
 to the continuous peaceful handling of in- 
 ternational difficulties. Such an associa- 
 tion we saw would invade our isolation and 
 that isolation we have come to believe to be 
 our chief security. That is, in essence, the 
 United States was no more willing to make 
 a sacrifice for permanent peace than were 
 the distracted and disheveled nations of 
 Europe. We and they all held on to the 
 particular device which we had come by 
 national experience to believe essential to 
 safety England her navy, France her army, 
 Japan her army and her navy, we our free- 
 dom from entangling alliances. 
 129 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 The Four Power Pact proved that we 
 were willing to sacrifice something of our 
 isolation just how much the future would 
 have to show. But would we be willing to 
 sacrifice anything of our naval program? 
 There had been rumors of changes asked by 
 both England and Japan. The ugliest ges- 
 ture seen in Washington in the early days of 
 the Conference had greeted these rumors. 
 We were not going to tolerate tampering 
 with the great work. It must be accepted as 
 it was laid down, and if it was not, we would 
 build the biggest navy on earth ; we had the 
 money ; moreover we would call our foreign 
 loans and then we'd see ! 
 
 Various rumors of objections to the naval 
 program, now that it had gone to the com- 
 mittee for detailed examination, were said 
 to have been made. There was a disturb- 
 ing rumor that England wanted the sub- 
 marine banished from the navies of the 
 world, and that we flatly refused to con- 
 sider a request which could not but be wel- 
 130 
 
DEAMATIC DIPLOMACY 
 
 come to the mass of the country, anxious to 
 see not only capital ships scrapped, as had 
 been proposed on the opening day, but aux- 
 iliary craft of all sorts. The chief irrita- 
 tion, however, had been over Japan's strenu- 
 ous objection to doing away with the great- 
 est of her ships indeed, the greatest ship 
 afloat, the Mutsu. It was just what we 
 might have expected of Japan ; her accepta- 
 tion of the program at the opening of the 
 Conference was a pretense. She was going 
 to object at every point. What the public 
 was still not realizing in regard to the 
 Mutsu was that to Japan it had become a 
 tremendous, almost sacred, symbol. It was 
 a ship designed entirely by the Japanese 
 naval architects, built of materials prepared 
 by Japanese workmen, named for a beloved 
 emperor. The delegation feared to consent 
 to her destruction. So much national pride 
 had been aroused by the great ship that to 
 consent to her destruction might ruin the 
 whole naval program with Japan. 
 131 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 It was hard for Americans to understand 
 any such feeling as this. We have little or 
 no sentiment about any ship, big or little. 
 They mean nothing to us but taxes. We 
 don't depend upon battleships for safety as 
 an island nation does. There is Japan, 
 a little land all told, Formosa and Korea 
 included, not as large as the state of Texas, 
 with a sea front of over 18,000 miles. Ships 
 mean food, contacts, security to her. When 
 we asked her to sacrifice them we must 
 remember that we were asking much more 
 of her than we were of ourselves though our 
 ratio might have been larger. We must re- 
 member the world is not ruled simply by 
 tons of material. Symbols weigh more with 
 nations than tonnage. We could give up 
 our ships without a sigh; but when Japan 
 scrapped hers, something of her heart went 
 with the scrapping. 
 
 So far as the Mutsu was concerned, the 
 answer came three days after the agree- 
 ment over Yap and the Caroline Islands had 
 132 
 
DRAMATIC DIPLOMACY 
 
 been made public. On the 15th of December, 
 at six o'clock in the evening, Mr. Hughes 
 staged one of his private rehearsals for the 
 press. It was the decision as to the capital- 
 ship ratio which had been so long expected 
 and which had been settled on the basis that 
 had been proposed on November 12 5-5-3. 
 But, while the ratio had been kept, the de- 
 tails had been changed. Great Britain and 
 the United States had had the good will 
 and the wisdom to recognize that Japan's 
 feeling about the Mutsu was genuine. 
 
 One has only to read the revised agree- 
 ment to understand what pains the two 
 countries took to readjust the calculations 
 of the United States in such a way that the 
 desired ratio would be preserved and 
 Japan's pride and sentiment saved. When 
 nations come to the point that they are will- 
 ing to try to understand and to consider 
 one another's feelings as well as one an- 
 other's force, there is some hope for the 
 peace of the world. 
 
 133 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 There was no gainsaying the fact that the 
 great triumph of this dramatic week was 
 Japan's. It was a legitimate triumph, hon- 
 estly won. She understood what she gained. 
 As the session of December 10 broke up, one 
 of the ablest members of her delegation a 
 bitter critic of what had been doing came 
 out from the Conference hall with tears in 
 his eyes, though they do say that no Japa- 
 nese knows how to shed tears. "It is the 
 greatest day in the history of the new 
 world," he said. And that was true, if 
 Japan would now be as generous toward 
 the rights and aspirations of her great 
 neighbor China as she had been tenacious 
 of her own safety and dignity. The world 
 had recognized her power and her diplo- 
 matic skill. Would she now win its confi- 
 dence in her moral integrity? 
 
 But if December 10 was the beginning of 
 Japan's week of triumph, it was Mr. Bal- 
 four's day. He made a little speech which 
 will stick long in the minds of those who 
 heard it. 
 
 134 
 
DRAMATIC DIPLOMACY 
 
 "It so happens," said Mr. Balfour, "that 
 I was at the head of the British administra- 
 tion which twenty years ago brought the 
 great Anglo-Japanese Alliance into exist- 
 ence. It so happens that I was at the head 
 of the British Administration which brought 
 into existence an entente between the British 
 Empire and France, and through all my life 
 I have been a constant, ardent and persist- 
 ent advocate of intimate and friendly re- 
 lations between the two great branches of 
 the English-speaking race. 
 
 "You may we 1 ! conceive, therefore, how 
 deep is my satisfaction when I see all these 
 four powers putting their signatures to a 
 treaty which I believe will for all time in- 
 sure perfect harmony of cooperation be- 
 tween them in the great region with which 
 the treaty deals." 
 
 That little speech gave one a clearer sense 
 of what through all these years Arthur Bal- 
 four has been doing than anything that 
 ever has before come to me. There is some- 
 thing supremely brave about a man of such 
 135 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 fine understanding, such humorous and dis- 
 tinguished cynicism, standing by through 
 all of the disillusions, disgust, deceptions, 
 forced evil choices of public life, never quit- 
 ting whatever the temptation. For forty 
 years now Arthur Balfour has stood by. 
 He is, I believe, 73 years old. He has never 
 had so much reason in all his long political 
 career to believe that the good will of men 
 can be mobilized for the world's service. 
 
 It was a great week, noble in its under- 
 taking, dramatic in its planning, the just 
 triumph of a people who know what they 
 want and are willing to wait to get it. And 
 for us, America, it was a week of brave 
 deeds. We were coming to our senses, real- 
 izing that we are of the world, and if we 
 are to enjoy its fruits, we must bear our 
 share of its burdens ; that if we would have 
 peace, the surest way is to use our strength 
 and our good will to guarantee it. \ 
 
 136 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE MOODS OF AN INTERNATIONAL CONFER- 
 ENCE 
 
 IF we are to succeed in repairing this bat- 
 tered world through the medium of the In- 
 ternational Conference, then plainly it is 
 the business of us all to try to understand 
 the methods, the conduct and particularly 
 the moods of this instrument of peace. It 
 is as temperamental as a stock exchange. 
 The Washington Conference began with a 
 period of tremendous exultation. Mr. 
 Hughes' great naval program lifted the 
 world. For ten days this mood prevailed. 
 Then came the French in the person of their 
 Prime Minister, Briand, and in an hour he 
 had the temple of peace rocking on its base. 
 
 It was very interesting to see how the 
 137 
 
PEACEMAKEKS 
 
 men who made up the Conference went 
 steadily ahead from ten to six every day 
 and sometimes longer in spite of the ex- 
 citement M. Briand had stirred tip. It 
 was a fine example of the stabilizing effect 
 of a daily task regularly followed. They 
 went on for four weeks and then again 
 stirred the world to enthusiasm by their 
 Four Power Pact ; their removal of the Yap 
 irritation; their consent to the Japanese 
 mandate in the Pacific ; their acceptance of 
 the Five-Five-Three naval ratio. At one 
 swoop the war with Japan that a part of 
 the American public has so sedulously cul- 
 tivated for a good term of years was wiped 
 off the map unless the United States Sen- 
 ate prefer to restore it to its position. 
 
 However, the naval program was not a 
 fact accomplished until France and Italy 
 had consented to a ratio. That was the 
 next step, and Mr. Hughes seemed to have 
 turned to it with the utmost confidence 
 1.75 was the ratio he had fixed on as 
 proper; then suddenly, without any warn- 
 138 
 
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE 
 
 ing, the soaring stock of the Conference 
 dropped way below par. A British jour- 
 nalist, with more love of sensation than the 
 honor of his profession, announced that the 
 French had told th6 naval committee that 
 France wanted to build ten 35,000 ton ships. 
 The effect of those numbers suddenly thrown 
 on a table where the figuring for weeks had 
 been down, not up, was more nearly to throw 
 the Conference delegates off their feet than 
 anything that had happened to date. There 
 was no questioning their dismay, for while 
 Mr. Balfour and Mr. Hughes refused, as it 
 was proper for them to do, to discuss the 
 matter, while the French likewise kept their 
 mouths shut, and complained that they had 
 been betrayed, Mr. Hughes showed his ex- 
 citement by a long cablegram, appealing to 
 M. Briand, over the head of the then acting 
 chief of the French delegation, M. Sarraut. 
 Outside the Conference an excited world 
 declared the whole thing was wrecked and 
 that France had wrecked it. 
 
 Could this unhappy incident have been 
 139 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 avoided? If the Conference had shown a 
 more sympathetic understanding of the way 
 France is feeling to-day, if there had been 
 the realization which we certainly should 
 expect of the effect of calling her into a 
 gathering of this kind and then letting her 
 Premier sit for a week with practically no 
 attention, it probably would have been. 
 When M. Briand was leaving the Confer- 
 ence on the opening day an American jour- 
 nalist asked him what he thought of it. The 
 American way, he said, "a la Am6ricaine." 
 And then he went on to remark that when 
 the time came France would do like Mr. 
 Hughes and talk in the American way. 
 Weeks went on and France had no chance 
 to talk in anybody's way about her naval 
 ratio. Everybody else but herself seems 
 to have taken it for granted that 1.75 was 
 to be her proportion. When her turn finally 
 came, however, she began to hurl capital 
 ships at Mr. Hughes' program ten of them, 
 35,000 tons each. The figures looked ap- 
 140 
 
INTEKNATIONAL CONFEKENCE 
 
 palling, preposterous they produced, as I 
 have said, almost a panic. Now, obviously, 
 the panic would have been avoided, as far 
 as the public is concerned, if the matter had 
 been kept in committee where it belonged 
 and where the French intended to keep it. 
 Given to the public, it stirred up anger on 
 both sides of the water, whipped up sus- 
 picion, set all the busybodies at inventing 
 far-fetched explanations and reading sin- 
 ister meanings into the French proposal. 
 
 There was little trouble when Mr. Hughes 
 appealed to M. Briand in getting the capi- 
 tal-ship ratio dropped back to the 1.75 first 
 suggested. But along with this concession 
 in the matter of capital ships went the de- 
 cision that France would not limit her sub- 
 marines and auxiliary craft. She wanted 
 unlimited submarines for defense defense 
 against whom? It must be us, said Eng- 
 land. She wanted auxiliary craft for the 
 protection of scattered colonies. Here she 
 took her position and here she remained. 
 141 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 Mr. Hughes' naval program leaves the num- 
 ber of submarines and light craft a nation 
 builds at its discretion. Too bad could it 
 have been avoided? 
 
 One thing seems quite certain, that Mr. 
 Hughes missed a tremendous opportunity 
 in not boldly declaring in his original pro- 
 gram that as for the United States, it was 
 done with submarines. We did that at 
 Paris in 1919. The head of our delegation, 
 President Wilson, and his naval advisers 
 agreed that in the disarmament pledged by 
 the League of Nations the submarine was 
 one weapon which could and should be put 
 entirely out of existence. Its record of cow- 
 ardice and plain murder no one could de- 
 fend. The treaty of Versailles forbade the 
 Germans to construct submarines for any 
 purpose, and it certainly was the farthest 
 from the thought of the majority of those 
 who made that treaty that they were lay- 
 ing down one rule for Germany and another 
 for themselves. The idea there was to dis- 
 arm and to begin with Germany. 
 142 
 
INTEEFATIONAL CONFEKEJSTCE 
 
 Why the American delegation should not 
 have followed that policy here in regard 
 to the submarine is not clear. But when 
 it was not done in the opening program, it 
 is still less understandable why they did not 
 seize the British suggestion when it was 
 made by Mr. Balfour. The British had the 
 American program for naval reduction 
 flung into their faces without warning, and 
 they picked it up like wonderful sports, as 
 did the Japanese. But when Mr. Balfour 
 notified the Conference that he should pro- 
 pose complete abolition of the submarine, 
 there was no such response. There were not 
 a few of us who had an uncomfortable chill 
 over the Washington Conference when our 
 government failed promptly to follow the 
 British in this policy, failed to say, "Yes, 
 we are with you, it's beastly business this 
 submarine warfare one thing we can do 
 away with. We will join you in outlawing 
 it." But this was not done, and because it 
 was not done, coupled with France's de- 
 termination to seize every chance that came 
 143 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 along to secure recognition for herself, to 
 enforce her argument that she must be pre- 
 pared to defend herself, since nobody in the 
 world seemed prepared to give her the guar- 
 antees which she thought necessary, if she 
 were to disarm, the submarine came in to 
 trouble Mr. Hughes' program, and, inci- 
 dentally, to spoil the Conference's holiday 
 week. 
 
 The regret was the greater because the 
 arguments that Lord Lee and Mr. Balfour 
 had put up for the abolition of the sub- 
 marine were so weighty and conclusive that 
 if they could have been presented at the 
 start, or at least earlier in the negotiations, 
 there seems to be little doubt that they 
 would not have won over the Conference. 
 These arguments have the backing of Great 
 Britain's experience with submarines, the 
 most serious and extensive experience that 
 any nation has yet had with this particular 
 weapon. Lord Lee and Mr. Balfour had 
 the facts to show that the German sub- 
 144 
 
INTEKNATIONAL CONFEHENCE 
 
 marine fleet was able to accomplish rela- 
 tively little in the Great War in the way of 
 legitimate naval warfare. It left the Brit- 
 ish Grand Fleet untouched. In spite of all 
 its efforts, it did not prevent the British tak- 
 ing fifteen million troops across the English 
 Channel, and the Americans two million 
 across the Atlantic. It was of little use to 
 the British in guarding their coast line, 
 which, as Lord Lee pointed out, was almost 
 as great as the combined coast line of the 
 four other powers in the discussion. What 
 the German submarine fleet did do, how- 
 ever, was to destroy some twelve million 
 tons of mercantile shipping* and murder 
 twenty thousand non-combatants men, 
 women and children. The counter defense 
 against the submarine has been so devel- 
 oped, Lord Lee claimed, that an attacking 
 fleet could be equipped to resist any number 
 of them. That is, the methods of detecting, 
 locating and destroying submarines have 
 greatly outstripped their offensive power. 
 145 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 One of the strong arguments for the aboli- 
 tion of the submarine is the fact that it is 
 possible to abolish it by general consent. 
 Its case is very different from that of poison 
 gas, which is a by-product of essential in- 
 dustries. You do not need to set out to find 
 poison gasses; they come to you in the nat- 
 ural course of chemical research, and they 
 do not have to be manufactured until you 
 are forced to do it for defense. Moreover, 
 they have the enormous advantage of not 
 looking like war. They are disgusting, hate- 
 ful things against which man instinctively 
 revolts. They do not tempt the adventur- 
 ous, as the submarine does. 
 
 Although the French particularly, 
 through Admiral le Bon and M. Sarraut, 
 did their utmost to combat the British posi- 
 tion, their arguments had little weight in 
 comparison with the British. The entire 
 discussion which ran more than a week and 
 which was given out day by day practically 
 in full to the press only emphasized my feel- 
 146 
 
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE 
 
 ing that the French, in insisting on a fleet 
 of submarines all out of proportion to that 
 contemplated in the original American pro- 
 gram, were actuated more by a desire to 
 assert themselves in this council of nations, 
 to demonstrate that it is not safe to over- 
 look their susceptibilities, than from any 
 desire to have submarines for defense. If 
 the representatives of the United States are 
 to work successfully with other nations in 
 international conferences, they must learn 
 that diplomats can no more afford to over- 
 look the feelings of other nations than an 
 engineer can afford to overlook the suscepti- 
 bilities of the iron and steel which he em- 
 ploys. France's acute sensitiveness, her 
 black imaginations, may irritate Americans 
 who know nothing of invaded and devas- 
 tated territory, who have not had to sit 
 through five long years with the sound of 
 bursting shells continually in their ears; 
 but if they have not the imagination and 
 the sympathy to tell them what the results 
 147 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 of such an experience are, then let them 
 accept the judgment of physicians and 
 realize that in whatever negotiations they 
 have with the French people at this time, 
 their shell-shocked minds and souls must be 
 taken into account. 
 
 Mr. Hughes lost a second great oppor- 
 tunity in the submarine matter. A few days 
 before Christmas, when it became obvious 
 that the submarine was in danger of de- 
 stroying the American delegation's plans 
 for a glorious Christmas present to the na- 
 tion, Mr. Balfour asked for an open session 
 in which to discuss the matter. For some 
 reason not at all clear, Mr. Hughes did not 
 consent. Our Secretary of State proved 
 himself a superior dramatist at the Confer- 
 ence, but in this instance a poor psycholo- 
 gist ! If there was to be no holiday, as had 
 become clear, then an open session with a 
 chance to hear Mr. Balfour, Lord Lee, M. 
 Sarraut, Admiral le Bon, Senator Schanzer, 
 in the free discussion of a matter in which 
 148 
 
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE 
 
 the whole country was tremendously inter- 
 ested such an open session would have been 
 a Christmas present in itself, and it would 
 have done much to have cleared up the thick 
 atmosphere. 
 
 In these conferences the atmosphere eas- 
 ily becomes heavy with suspicion. The 
 sight of a group of eminent gentlemen of 
 various nationalities shutting themselves 
 up morning after morning, for hours, con- 
 sidering matters which concern the peace 
 and happiness of the world, if too long con- 
 tinued, stirs up resentment in the best of 
 us. If you are an impersonal, detached, 
 philosophical, fairly well-informed person, 
 it is not difficult for you to visualize what 
 those gentlemen are doing; if you take the 
 trouble you can even build up in your mind 
 what they are saying. Suppose it is a ques- 
 tion of the ratio of capital ships. You know 
 that they are listening to disputes over ton- 
 nage and the way it has been computed, are 
 studying long arrays of figures, matters dull 
 149 
 
PEACEMAKEES 
 
 in themselves and requiring the closest at- 
 tention. Most of us would not remain a 
 half hour, unless we were compelled to when 
 such discussions were going on. But if you 
 are a suspicious person, if you have been 
 trained in the cynical school of sensational 
 journalism, to look for mischief and intrigue 
 and often it must be confessed finding 
 it you have dark thoughts about the 
 gentlemen. 
 
 The only way in which such suspicions 
 can be cleared up or better, prevented, 
 is by frequent open sessions and much freer 
 discussion at those sessions than we had at 
 the Conference for Limitation of Armament. 
 Some of the Americans prominent in the 
 Conference have in the last two years fre- 
 quently criticized the secrecy with which 
 the Paris Conference was conducted but 
 there was very little difference in the proce- 
 dure from that in Paris. The work there 
 as here was done in committees. There as 
 here there were daily communications to the 
 150 
 
INTEKNATIONAL CONFEBENCE 
 
 press. They were more satisfactory here, 
 fuller, but that was made possible by the 
 fact that the situation here was far less 
 complicated and by the rigor with which 
 Mr. Hughes kept one thing at a time on the 
 table. As for the press conferences, in 
 Paris as here they were held daily by the 
 Americans and frequently by all of the other 
 delegations. Nobody in Paris, of course, 
 was so satisfactory to the press as Mr. 
 Hughes. His candor, his good humor, his 
 out-and-out, man-to-man conduct of his 
 daily meeting cannot be too highly praised. 
 He has set a pace for this sort of thing very 
 hard to follow. There was no American in 
 Paris in a position to do for the press what 
 Mr. Hughes did in Washington. President 
 Wilson had not the time. The other mem- 
 bers of the delegation were not in Mr. 
 Hughes' position. Nobody else in our dele- 
 gation here would have had the authority, 
 even if he had had the ability, to do what 
 Mr. Hughes did. The difference here and in 
 151 
 
PEACEMAKEES 
 
 Paris was mainly a difference of situation 
 the difference between an infinitely diffi- 
 cult and complicated situation and a com- 
 paratively well defined and definite one. 
 
 Mr. Hughes himself was partly respon- 
 sible for the resentment that the press felt 
 at the failure to follow Mr. Balfour's sug- 
 gestion and conduct the submarine discus- 
 sion in the open. Any one who took the 
 pains to read the text of these discussions as 
 they were printed in the leading journals of 
 the country, can see how well adapted they 
 were to a public meeting. There was noth- 
 ing in them that would jeopardize any na- 
 tion; there was much in them that would 
 have been illuminated, its impression in- 
 tensified, if it could have been heard in- 
 stead of read. Mr. Hughes in his talk of 
 these discussions to the correspondents was 
 actually tantalizing. When he walked 
 briskly into his press conference at the end 
 of a long committee discussion and told a 
 hundred and more men and women gath- 
 152 
 
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE 
 
 ered around him what an intellectual treat 
 it had been, of how Mr. Balfour had been 
 in his best form, of how lively the exchange 
 had been between French and English, his 
 snapping eyes, his appreciative voice, his 
 glow of enthusiasm, were actually antago- 
 nizing. He overlooked entirely the fact that 
 he was making more than one in the as- 
 sembly say : Selfish man, don't you suppose 
 that we would have enjoyed seeing and hear- 
 ing Mr. Balfour in his best form? Is there 
 anything at this Conference that we would 
 have liked so much, except of course hear- 
 ing you? Do you think we are going to be 
 satisfied with your promise that we shall 
 have full reports of all that was said? 
 
 I know very well that it is not considered 
 good form to use the words League of Na- 
 tions in connection with the Conference on 
 the Limitation of Armament, and no offense 
 is intended but if one is really interested 
 in trying to decide just how much publicity 
 is wise in such a conference as this, any ex- 
 153 
 
PEACEMAKEES 
 
 perience of other similar bodies should be 
 considered, and after all it cannot be denied 
 that the assembly of the League of Nations 
 is a similar body to this, the chief differ- 
 ence being that it includes some fifty na- 
 tions instead of nine. At the second meet- 
 ing of the assembly of the League last fall, 
 lasting four and a half weeks, there were 33 
 plenary conferences. One cannot say that 
 the matters under consideration there were 
 less delicate and dangerous than in Wash- 
 ington. They were even more inflamed at 
 the moment, including such open irruptions 
 as the boundary dispute between Jugo- 
 slavia and Albania. 
 
 It was not only Mr. Hughes' naval pro- 
 gram that was seeing heavy weather; the 
 Four Power Pact was in trouble. The Presi- 
 dent did not agree with the American dele- 
 gation that the mainland of Japan was cov- 
 ered by the treaty. For my part I had 
 never questioned that when this Four Power 
 Pact talked about insular dominions as 
 154 
 
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE 
 
 well as insular possessions it meant what it 
 said, and that Nippon as well as Australia 
 and New Zealand was included. Moreover, 
 Mr. Hughes had repeatedly told the press 
 that was the intention. There seems, how- 
 ever, to have been doubts in some minds, 
 and when finally twelve days after the Pact 
 itself was submitted and accepted by the 
 full Conference, an insistent journalist pre- 
 sented Mr. Harding at his biweekly press 
 meeting with a written question. (The 
 President was now requiring all questions 
 at these gatherings to be submitted in writ- 
 ing.) He remarked in his casual manner, 
 "No, the Japan mainland is not included 
 in the treaty." To be sure he took it back 
 that night in a public document, but here 
 was food for the trouble makers a disagree- 
 ment in the cabinet ! All of those who, while 
 loudly declaring themselves advocates of 
 peace, were doing their utmost to belittle 
 the efforts of the responsible, to magnify 
 differences in interpretation, to fan partisan 
 155 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 jealousies, to read in intrigue and deceit and 
 concealment where there was usually noth- 
 ing worse than blundering or stupidity, de- 
 clared with satisfaction or despair that the 
 Conference was now surely wrecked. Joined 
 to the cry of anguish that was rising over 
 the failure to limit the submarine and aux- 
 iliary craft, the chorus was dismal enough. 
 
 Little by little, however, events shut off 
 the pessimists. For instance, one of the 
 "intrigues" that had been brought to light 
 was that Japan and France had combined 
 on the submarine issue, and were lining up 
 in the Conference against England and 
 America. But Japan destroyed that fine 
 morsel, declaring formally that she felt 
 it would be a misfortune if the Conference 
 failed to come to an agreement on limita- 
 tion ; that she supported the original Ameri- 
 can proposal of November 12 in regard to 
 auxiliary craft and hoped that agreement 
 would be reached on that basis. 
 
 She followed this quieting information by 
 156 
 
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE 
 
 an announcement that she did not consider 
 it consistent with her dignity as one of the 
 four powers to accept any special protection, 
 and that she therefore asked that the Four 
 Power treaty be t amended so as to exclude 
 her mainland. 
 
 Even the submarine became less threat- 
 ening as the discussion went on. If it was 
 not to be limited in number, it was in field 
 of action so far as a rule of war could 
 limit. If auxiliary craft were to be built ac- 
 cording to the "needs" of each nation, their 
 tonnage was not to run over 10,000 tons 
 each and their guns 1 were to be but eight 
 inch. Add this to the ratio in capital ships 
 now fixed 5-5-3 1.75 1.75 and to a ten 
 years' naval holiday, and you had a solid 
 something. 
 
 One grew philosophical again and re- 
 flected how childish it was to suppose that 
 a Conference of this importance could be 
 carried on without sharp differences of opin- 
 ion, without those periods which we call 
 157 
 
PEACEMAKEES 
 
 "deadlocks," without the flaring up at times 
 of century-old feuds, such as that between 
 Great Britain and France. All of these 
 things, we told ourselves, were part of the 
 problem of working out new understand- 
 ings, and to overemphasize them or will- 
 fully to exploit them in order to increase 
 ill will and obstruct a progress which was 
 necessarily slow and difficult, was work fit 
 only for the irresponsible and the malicious. 
 The naval program was certain of adop- 
 tion. There were details still unsettled, but 
 it seemed safe to assume that if the patience 
 and good will of the delegates stood the 
 strain, these details would be satisfactorily 
 arranged; but, as from the start, the final 
 success of the Conference depended upon 
 removing the fears that England, Japan and 
 the United States had of one another, of 
 our securing reasonable assurance that our 
 policies of the open door in China and of 
 moral trusteeship for Kussia and China 
 were adopted. We had proposed a pact and 
 158 
 
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE 
 
 it had been accepted; principles regarding 
 China and they had been accepted ; but this 
 was by no means all of the Far Eastern 
 problem. By Christmas we were at the 
 heart of it the hostile relations of China 
 and Japan, and whether it was possible 
 to help them to peacefully adjust these 
 relations. 
 
 159 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 PUT YOURSELF IN THEIR PLACES 
 
 A SHREWD, reflective and cynical doorman 
 with whom I sometimes discussed affairs of 
 state in Washington, confided to me on one 
 of the busy days just before the opening 
 of the Conference on the Limitation of 
 Armament that in his judgment there was 
 a peck of trouble about to be turned loose 
 on the American Government. 
 
 "Take them Japs and Chinamen/' he said, 
 "they're coming with bags of problems, and 
 they're going to dump them on us to sort 
 and solve! And to think we brought it on 
 ourselves I" 
 
 There were people nearer to the admin- 
 istration than this anxious observer who 
 said the same thing. "The Far East is a 
 160 
 
PUT YOURSELF IN THEIR PLACES 
 
 veritable Pandora's box, and why did we 
 open it?" 
 
 I don't remember ever to have seen in 
 Washington, even in war times, so many re- 
 sponsible people who gave me the impres- 
 sion of wanting to hold their heads to keep 
 them from splitting. 
 
 Of one thing there was no doubt if the 
 troubles that were to be loosed on the 
 Conference were as serious as these serious 
 observers feared, it was better that they 
 be out than in the box, for they were of a 
 nature that, confined, would be sure to ex- 
 plode, but give them time and they might 
 dissolve under the healing touch of light, 
 sun and air. 
 
 But why were there people close to things 
 in Washington aghast at the program of the 
 Conference, people who two months before 
 had looked forward to it with confidence and 
 even exultation? No doubt this was ex- 
 plained partly by the realization that cut- 
 ting down armaments did not necessarily 
 161 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 mean long-continued peace ; that there must 
 be settlements. When they looked over the 
 problems to be settled, attempted to put 
 themselves in the place of the people con- 
 cerned, find solutions through agreements 
 which did not require force behind them, 
 they were appalled at the difficulties in the 
 way. 
 
 Put the problems which disturbed them 
 into their simplest terms : Japan could not 
 get enough food on her six big and her 600 
 little islands for her 60,000,000 people. She 
 was spilling over into China and its de- 
 pendencies not merely as a settler, content 
 to till the soil, to work the mines, to sell 
 in the market place, but as an aggressive 
 conqueror, aspiring to military and political 
 control as well as economic opportunity. 
 
 China that is, Young China, the founder 
 of the Republic said she would not have 
 it, that she must govern and administer her 
 own, and we, China's friend, were backing 
 the integrity she demanded. But Japan was 
 162 
 
PUT YOURSELF IN THEIR PLACES 
 
 "in China" "in" as was Great Britain and 
 France. She had an army and navy to back 
 her pretensions and she could very well say 
 and did "Why should Great Britain and 
 France be allowed to hold their political 
 and military control in Hongkong and in 
 Tonkin, raise and train troops, not of their 
 own people but of natives, collect taxes, 
 run post offices, and we be forbidden? If 
 they do these things, and they do, why 
 should Japan not have equal privileges?" 
 
 Young China answered this pertinent in- 
 quiry: "It was Old China that arranged 
 those things. You are dealing now with 
 a new China, one that does not intend to 
 barter its inheritance, that proposes to rule 
 its own; a China that will no longer sub- 
 mit to having a carving knife applied to 
 its heart. 
 
 "What Old China did we inherited and 
 
 must make the best of, but it is our duty to 
 
 see that no nation on earth ever again takes 
 
 from us what we do not willingly give. You 
 
 163 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 must abandon your effort to direct our pol- 
 icies, administer our railroads, keep your 
 troops on our soil." 
 
 What frightened my doorkeeper, who got 
 his views from the press, and the press that 
 got its views from a hundred conflicting 
 sources, was how peacefully Japan's right 
 to food for her people and China's right to 
 her own were to be squared. Could the one 
 inalienable right be fitted into the other in- 
 alienable right by other means than force? 
 Of course there were many places on the 
 earth beside China where Japan might ex- 
 pand, but search as they would these anx- 
 ious observers did not find any available 
 spot except in Asia. 
 
 One of the chief occupations of these 
 friends of mine in Washington as the peace 
 conference opened was trying to find some 
 territory from which Japan could get her 
 food; something the Conference could 
 "give" her; something that would satisfy 
 her. As things now are such a search must 
 164 
 
PUT YOUBSELF IN THEIE PLACES 
 
 start with the provision that there is noth- 
 ing for Japan on the Western Hemisphere. 
 Obviously there is no place for her in Eu- 
 rope. Australia will not have her ; we will 
 not have her. 
 
 "If it were a question of war or restricted 
 immigration," I asked a Calif ornian in the 
 course of the Far Eastern discussion, "which 
 would you choose?" The look of surprise 
 at the question answered me "War." I 
 received the same reply from a Canadian 
 from an American labor leader and they 
 were all "pacifists" ! 
 
 The narrower the confines were drawn 
 around Japan, the more hysterical observ- 
 ers grew in their search, the more they in- 
 sisted the Conference must "give" Japan 
 something. "Give it Eastern Siberia !" But 
 what right did the Conference have to deal 
 with any part of Siberia? The United 
 States had finally settled her attitude to 
 this suggestion by declaring that she would 
 not consider any partitioning of Russian 
 165 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 territory. She refused to countenance the 
 carving up of Russia as she did the further 
 carving up of China. She refused even to 
 recognize the government that was now 
 struggling to plant itself in Eastern Si- 
 beria. It was Russia's problem to take care 
 of the Far Eastern Republic. She must be 
 free, as China must be free, to work out her 
 own destiny. 
 
 Then "give" Japan Manchuria! She al- 
 ready had important recognized rights in 
 Southern Manchuria, rights that came from 
 old wars; the territory borders on Korea 
 which Japan holds and governs, and un- 
 doubtedly the Conference would not dispute 
 her claim to Korea, since that claim stands 
 on about the same kind of a bottom as Eng- 
 land's claim to Hongkong and France's 
 to Tonkin. It was the fruit of the na- 
 tion's dealing with Old China. This being 
 so and Japan having her established hold 
 in Southern Manchuria and having made 
 a remarkable record, give her the country. 
 166 
 
PUT YOURSELF IN THEIR PLACES 
 
 But here came Young China again. 
 "Manchuria is ours/' she said. "We will not 
 recognize the rights that Japan claims 
 through her treaty made in 1915. It 
 really was a treaty with Old China, still 
 alive in our Republic. It was wrested, from 
 us by cunning and bribery. There are 
 twenty million Chinese in Manchuria. They 
 have made that province grow more rapidly 
 in wealth in recent years than any other 
 part of the land. They are converting the 
 wilderness, raising such a crop of soy beans 
 as no other part of the earth has ever seen. 
 We propose to stand by our people. We 
 cannot give Manchuria to Japan, nor can 
 we give her Mongolia. Here, too, our peo- 
 ple are good, patient, hardy settlers, peace- 
 fully converting the wilderness. True, 
 there are great tracts still untouched, but 
 remember that we have surplus millions, 
 and it is here that we expect them to 
 expand." 
 
 What set my doorman and many serious 
 167 
 
PEACEMAKEES 
 
 onlookers to holding their heads was that 
 they could not find a place to put Japan; 
 that is, a place to which she would not have 
 to fight her way. 
 
 But what are they doing in the search of 
 the earth for something to "give" her? Was 
 it anything but following the old formula 
 that has always gone with wars? Was war 
 anything but a necessary corollary to this 
 way of dealing with the earth's surface? 
 No nation or group of nations ever has or 
 will give away without its consent the prop- 
 erty of another nation without sowing 
 trouble for the future. 
 
 Races must settle their own destinies. 
 Japan must settle her food problem by war 
 or by peace, and whether it was to be by 
 the one or by the other depended largely 
 upon Young China. What did Young 
 China think about it? Not a hasty, violent 
 Young China, expecting to convert its great 
 masses in an hour to the Republican form 
 of government that came into being ten 
 168 
 
PUT YOURSELF IN THEIR PLACES 
 
 years ago, but a moderate Young China, that 
 has stayed at home, that knows its people, 
 that is conscious of the length of time, the 
 patience, the sacrifices, the pain that adapt- 
 ing the mind of China to a new order 
 requires. 
 
 What did this moderate Young China 
 think about the relation of Japan to itself? 
 I looked him up and asked. 
 
 He made it quite clear that the Eepublic 
 had come to stay. He did not attempt to 
 minimize its difficulties. He did claim, how- 
 ever, that whatever the surface indications, 
 the whole Yangtze Valley, which is the very 
 heart of the country, is committed to the 
 Republic, and is cooperating with it. He 
 gave a hundred indications of how from this 
 great central artery running east and west 
 democratic influences are surely and 
 steadily spreading north and south. He 
 showed how in the northern provinces the 
 progress was slowest, most difficult, because 
 here conservatism was strongest, most cor- 
 169 
 
PEACEMAKEES 
 
 nipt. He pointed out how Old China is con- 
 centrating in the Peking government all its 
 cunning, its wisdom, its appeal to the old 
 thing, but he claimed, and unquestionably 
 believed, that Young China was going to 
 be too much for it. He went over the south- 
 ern provinces and showed how in all of them, 
 except Canton, there was a steadily im- 
 proving cooperation with the Peking gov- 
 ernment. 
 
 Moderate Young China thinks Canton is 
 wrong in its haste. He does not believe 
 that the people can assimilate the new ideas 
 as rapidly as Canton claims. He believes 
 that its hurry to make over a great coun- 
 try is one of the most dangerous factors in 
 the nation's present problem. To sustain, 
 guard, and develop the struggling Peking 
 government is his program. 
 
 "We are quarreling, to be sure," moderate 
 Young China said, "but it is our quarrel. 
 We are like brothers who have fallen to 
 beating one another let a neighbor inter- 
 
 iro 
 
PUT YOURSELF IN THEIR PLACES 
 
 fere and both turn on him. China will turn 
 on any nation or nations that attempt to 
 coerce her. She alone can work out her 
 difficulties. She can work out best her dis- 
 putes with Japan, and if let alone, will do 
 so." 
 
 "Of course/' continued Young China, 
 "Japan must resign control of Shantung, 
 and particularly of the Shantung railroad. 
 Look at the map and you will understand 
 why. If Japan controls the Shantung rail- 
 road she can at any moment cut our main 
 rail communication between Peking and 
 Shanghai, destroy the main artery of our 
 circulatory system. She can do more than 
 that. By that control she will be able to 
 cut off the two arteries across the mainland, 
 the Yellow Eiver and the Yangtze. No gov- 
 ernment in its senses could permit that. 
 
 "Nor can we consent to her political and 
 
 military control, either, in Shantung or 
 
 Manchuria. But that does not mean, as 
 
 some people pretend, that we want to drive 
 
 171 
 
PEACEMAKEES 
 
 Japan from our country. No intelligent 
 Chinaman does. We need the Japanese 
 to help us open and develop our resources, 
 to buy our raw material; and Japan needs 
 our market in which to sell. We are will- 
 ing she should have the fullest economic 
 privileges if she will cease to interfere with 
 our policies and will withdraw her troops. 
 
 "If she will cooperate with us on an eco- 
 nomic basis purely and simply Young China 
 will welcome Japan and there are liberal 
 Japanese that will do that. It is only Mili- 
 tary Japan, believing in progress by force, 
 that threatens us." 
 
 "How are you going to carry out your 
 program? How enforce it?" 
 
 "The economic boycott," he said. "It has 
 been successful so far. We'll neither buy 
 of Japan nor sell to her until she gives up 
 her pretensions." 
 
 There is something tremendous in the 
 idea of that great passive three hundred and 
 twenty-five million or more, the greatest 
 172 
 
PUT YOURSELF IN THEIR PLACES 
 
 single market on earth, and Japan's natural 
 market, passing by on the other side, leaving 
 the goods untouched on docks and ware- 
 houses but they do it. There are children 
 of China who will refuse a toy to-day if 
 told it was made in Japan, will go hungry 
 rather than eat Japanese food, so they told 
 me, these ardent young Chinamen. 
 
 "But if Japan insists on her demands, 
 turns her navy on you?" I asked. 
 
 "Ah, then," said trustful Young China, 
 "our great friend the United States will 
 take a hand. She will not permit Japan to 
 force us." 
 
 This confidence in America's friendship 
 was China's strongest card at the peace 
 table. For over sixty years we have been 
 her avowed protector ever since in 1858 
 we signed the quaintly worded compact: 
 "They (the United States and China) 
 shall not insult or oppress each other for 
 any trifling cause so as to produce an es- 
 trangement between them, and if any other 
 173 
 
PEACEMAKEES 
 
 nation should act unjustly or oppressively, 
 the United States will exert their good of- 
 fices on being informed of the case to bring 
 about an amicable arrangement of the ques- 
 tion, thus showing their friendly feeling." 
 
 Faith in the protection of the United 
 States has worked its way far inland, to 
 the very sources of the Yellow and the 
 Yangtze rivers. I am told that many China- 
 men in those distant places who never have 
 looked on a white face will point to the 
 Stars and Stripes and say "our friend." 
 
 According to moderate Young China's 
 view of the case, the work of the Conference 
 on the Limitation of Armament was to per- 
 suade Japan that her real economic prog- 
 ress lay in giving up the political and mili- 
 tary privileges in China which she believes 
 are fairly hers, as spoils of the late war, and 
 to accept full opportunities of "peaceful 
 penetration" persuade if possible, force if 
 not! 
 
 There was no question of where sympathy 
 174 
 
PUT YOURSELF IN THEIR PLACES 
 
 lay at the opening of the Conference it 
 was with moderate Young China. Sym- 
 pathy for her and suspicion for Japan this 
 showed in a catlike watchfulness of Japan's 
 every move, particularly by the newspaper 
 correspondents. 
 
 As a rule, newspaper people are instinc- 
 tively suspicious. It seems sometimes to be 
 the pride of the profession, and a smart 
 characterization of a suspicion has almost 
 the value of a scoop. There was an instance 
 at the opening of the Conference, just after 
 the naval program was announced, when 
 Ambassador Shidehara fell ill of intestinal 
 trouble. It had been announced that Japan 
 could make no reply to the naval program 
 until she had communicated with Tokyo, 
 and somebody remarked brilliantly that the 
 Baron's illness was probably a "conges- 
 tion of the cables." As a matter of fact it 
 turned out that the poor Baron was se- 
 riously ill, but the phrase stuck. 
 
 At the first press conference given by 
 175 
 
PEACEMAKEES 
 
 Admiral Baron Kato there was another 
 evidence of this instinct. An interpreter 
 translated the questions of the correspond- 
 ent to the Admiral who replied in his native 
 tongue, a delightfully musical voice; you 
 could hardly believe you did not understand 
 him, so understandable did his words sound. 
 Once or twice Baron Kato did not wait for 
 the interpreter to repeat the English ques- 
 tion to him, but gave his answer at once 
 in Japanese. Instantaneously there ran 
 around the big circle of men the signal 
 "He understands English." Any one who 
 has had any experience with a foreign lan- 
 guage knows that often one does under- 
 stand, but cannot speak; moreover, one un- 
 derstands when the question is simple but 
 cannot follow it when involved. The point 
 is simply here, that the moment Baron 
 Kato showed he understood any English, 
 the guards of the men were up. He was 
 a Jap and must be watched. That is, 
 Japan came to the Washington Conference 
 176 
 
PUT YOUKSELF IN THEIE PLACES 
 
 handicapped by the suspicion of the Ameri- 
 can press and public, while China came 
 strong in our good will. 
 
 Was there anything to be said for Japan? 
 I had believed so a long time, but felt that 
 my impressions were treasonable, so con- 
 trary were they to the expressed judgment 
 of practically all of my liberal and radical 
 friends many of them knew vastly more 
 than I did about the Far East and to the 
 feeling of the general public as I caught it 
 in the press and in conversation. My trea- 
 son consisted in thinking that although, as 
 a matter of fact, Japan had been doing a 
 variety of outrageous things, if you com- 
 pared her operations with those of most of 
 us, there was little reason to make a scape- 
 goat of her. I have been impressed often in 
 the last three years that there were a good 
 many people trying to help China by cry- 
 ing down Japan a practice that has played 
 a mischievous part in history. I felt that 
 we were not giving Japan the fair deal we 
 177 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 should, even if we had no other object than 
 aiding China. The books I read, the ob- 
 servers from the Far East with whom I 
 talked, almost invariably were partisan in 
 their attack. They liked one and did not 
 like the other. Everything that one did 
 was understandable and excusable; every- 
 thing that the other did was oppressive 
 and inexcusable. 
 
 The Japanese had not been long at the 
 Washington Conference, however, before 
 their stock began to rise. The delegation 
 was the most diligent, serious, modest body 
 at the Conference, and so very grateful for 
 every kind word! The contrast between 
 the Chinese and Japanese delegations was 
 striking. Nothing more modernized in man- 
 ner and appearance, democratized in 
 speech, gathered in Washington than the 
 Chinese. They looked, talked, acted like 
 the most sophisticated and delightful of 
 cultivated Europeans. They understood 
 and practiced every social amenity suave, 
 178 
 
PUT YOURSELF IN THEIR PLACES 
 
 at home, frank, gay I have never encoun- 
 tered anything more socially superior than 
 some of the young Chinese. The two dele- 
 gations were perfectly characterized by a 
 woman friend of mine familiar with both 
 peoples "The Chinese look down on every- 
 body; the Japanese look up to everybody." 
 That was the impression. But when it came 
 to diplomacy, the Chinaman was the aris- 
 tocrat begging favors, the Japanese the 
 plebeian fighting for his rights. 
 
 The Japanese seemed to have felt that 
 possibly there might be some intent on the 
 part of their Western brothers to throw 
 them out of China and go in themselves. 
 We cannot blame Japan for such a thought 
 if we review her experience with the West 
 in the last twenty-five years. She was 
 forced into Korea, after China had agreed 
 with her to jointly suppress disorders if 
 they broke out and both of them to with- 
 draw when there was no longer need for 
 their work. It was China's refusal to abide 
 179 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 by the treaty of 1885 that led Japan into 
 war and that brought her, as a result of 
 that war, Formosa, the Pescadores, Liao- 
 tung, with Port Arthur and Dalny. We all 
 remember that is, those of us living then 
 how only a few days after the treaty with 
 China which gave Japan these territories 
 the Czar stepped in and told Japan that he 
 would "give her a new proof of his sincere 
 friendship" by taking over Liaotung. There 
 was nothing for Japan to do but accept the 
 offer. 
 
 Pretty nearly all Europe at once pro- 
 ceeded, as everybody remembers, to give 
 China and Japan further "proofs of sincere 
 friendship.' 7 Germany took over Kiaochow ; 
 England, Weihaiwei ; France, Kwang chow- 
 wan. This is only a little over twenty years 
 ago. 
 
 It was Kussia's obvious effort to get 
 
 Japan out of Korea that caused the Eusso- 
 
 Japanese war, a war which amazed the 
 
 world by its result, put Japan on the map, 
 
 180 
 
PUT YOURSELF IN THEIR PLACES 
 
 very possibly turned her head a bit. She 
 had been studying the West, and the re- 
 markable thing about this country which 
 we call imitative, in studying it she had 
 learned not only its power but its weakness. 
 She had accepted its militarism at its full 
 face value, but she had quickly put her fin- 
 ger on the weak spots in the militarism of 
 different nations. She had seen how corrup- 
 tion, bribery, self-indulgence had weakened 
 the militarism of Kussia; she saw how 
 the half-heartedness of France and England 
 in war weakened them, how liberalism and 
 pacifism undermined militarism; she saw 
 how Germany had the pure science and un- 
 divided devotion, and she took Germany as 
 her model. And then in 1914 her great 
 chance came. She did exactly what the 
 Prussian would have done if he had been in 
 her place. She joined the strong, her great 
 ally, England, against Germany, for Ger- 
 many had possessions in China which Japan 
 coveted. She out-Prussianized Prussia in 
 181 
 
PEACEMAKEKS 
 
 the demands she made upon the corrupt 
 and unstable Peking crowd. There is no 
 shadow of defense for the twenty-one de- 
 mands, except the defense that she was ap- 
 plying the lessons that she had learned 
 from Kussia, from Germany lessons which 
 she had seen applied, in a modified form, it 
 is true, but still in a form by England and 
 by the United States in the Philippines. 
 
 I could never forget all this in Paris. 
 Japan came to the Conference peace table 
 with her treaties read them in that inval- 
 uable compilation of treaties which John Mc- 
 Murray has made and the Carnegie Peace 
 Foundation published. England there sets 
 down her approval; France sets down her 
 approval; they promise the German rights 
 in Shantung to Japan when the treaty shall 
 be made; they promise her the Caroline 
 Islands and the other island possessions of 
 Germany north of the equator. This is all 
 written down in the books, and this was 
 what faced President Wilson when the mat- 
 183 
 
PUT YOURSELF IN THEIR PLACES 
 
 ter of Shantung was taken up. What were 
 England and France to do? England had 
 gone into a war and we had followed her, 
 largely, so we both claimed, because a 
 treaty had been regarded as a scrap of 
 paper. Were you now to treat other 
 treaties as scraps of paper? 
 
 Italy would not have it so. She held 
 France and England to their war promises. 
 And when President Wilson balked, she left 
 the peace table. 
 
 One of the things that interested me most 
 in Paris was that Japan never left the 
 peace table. She was apparently willing to 
 trade anything to get that recognition of 
 racial equality denied her, so far as one can 
 make out, because she is so able, not at all 
 because she is an inferior. She hung on, 
 and by the sheer strength of her position, 
 her refusal, whatever she got or did not get 
 to quit the game, came out with a recogni- 
 tion, partial at least, of what may be cor- 
 rectly called her nefarious demands. 
 183 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 And then she found herself with a whole 
 world jumping on her back. She had played 
 the Western game and the West despised 
 her. I could not help feeling in Paris that 
 Japan must have been bewildered a little by 
 the contradictions of the Occident she had 
 tried so faithfully to follow. She saw the 
 doctrine of force she had accepted grappling 
 with the gospel of the brotherhood of man. 
 There are many who think that the brother- 
 hood got the worst of it in Paris. That gos- 
 pel was driven into the world as never be- 
 fore there. More people were committed to 
 it than ever before. More people realized 
 that it is a power that you must count with 
 in the affairs of nations as well as of indi- 
 viduals. More people accepted it and tried 
 to get together to make it a practical real- 
 ity. Japan herself bowed before the power 
 of this spirit before she left Paris. She 
 never gave up more because of it than she 
 felt she must, but she gave up rather than 
 quit the game. She was learning. She has 
 been learning ever since. She has never 
 184 
 
PUT YOUKSELF IN THEIR PLACES 
 
 stayed away from any international attempt 
 to bring order to the world. She has had a 
 bevy of her people at every meeting of the 
 League of Nations. She has taken an ac- 
 tive part in the work of all of its commis- 
 sions. In 1919 Japan had eighty-seven dele- 
 gates at the International Labor Confer- 
 ence held in Washington, and those dele- 
 gates accepted the radical program there 
 adopted. Japan means to understand the 
 Occident; and she is making the same val- 
 iant attempt to ally herself with the best of 
 the Occident that before the war she made 
 to ally herself with the worst. 
 
 What we have to remember is that Japan 
 is, like all nations to a degree, a dual na- 
 tion; there are two Japans the one cling- 
 ing to the old militaristic, autocratic notion 
 of government, the other struggling to un- 
 derstand and realize the meaning of a 
 united, cooperating world in which each 
 man and each nation shall have a chance at 
 peaceful, prosperous living. 
 
 185 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 CHINA AT THE CONFERENCE 
 
 THE most difficult problems with which 
 the Conference for the Limitation of Arma- 
 ment had to deal were those centering about 
 China. We wanted China to have her own. 
 We wanted her to be let alone, to run her 
 government to suit herself, to be free from 
 exploitation, duress, intrigues. As a people 
 we wanted this very much. We came as 
 near being sentimental over China as one 
 nation can be over another. We like the 
 Chinese as a people. We would like to see 
 them as sanitary as they are friendly, as 
 honest as they are industrious, as free from 
 their own vices as they are from most of 
 ours. 
 
 We are more sentimental about them be- 
 186 
 
CHINA AT THE CONFERENCE 
 
 cause our own dealings with them have 
 been on the whole so fair. We are proud 
 of the position we have taken as a nation 
 toward China and we would like to keep up 
 our record, justifying the Chinese convic- 
 tion that we are a disinterested and reliable 
 friend. Our dealings have been decent 
 the policy of the Open Door, the return of 
 a large share of the Boxer indemnity, the 
 protest that we made in 1915 when we 
 learned of the outrageous twenty-one de- 
 mands that Japan had forced from the 
 Peking government: we have prided our- 
 selves on these things, and when at Paris 
 in 1919 President Wilson consented to the 
 transfer of the German rights in Shantung 
 to Japan, there was a chorus of disap- 
 proval, and we came to this Conference re- 
 solved that Shantung should be restored to 
 China; moreover, that a long list of inter- 
 ferences with her freedom of administration 
 should cease. The disappointment came in 
 finding that what China wanted, and we 
 187 
 
PEACEMAKEES 
 
 wanted her to have, was much more difficult 
 to realize than we had appreciated, and that 
 in a majority of cases, probably the worst 
 thing that could happen would be to have 
 her full requests granted. 
 
 The primary difficulty in China's getting 
 what she wanted was that she has no stable 
 government, nothing upon which she can 
 depend and with which the nations can deal 
 with any assurance that the engagements 
 that are entered into will be faithfully car- 
 ried out. The Conference began with an 
 exhibit of disorganization in the Peking gov- 
 ernment which was most unfortunate the 
 failure to pay a loan due us at that moment. 
 Moreover, it soon became a matter of com- 
 mon knowledge at the Conference that the 
 Peking government was failing to meet all 
 sorts of financial obligations at home as 
 well as abroad, that it was not paying the 
 salaries of its officials, its school-teachers. 
 There were delegates in Washington who, it 
 was claimed, had had no funds from their 
 188 
 
CHINA AT THE CONFERENCE 
 
 government for many months. A greater 
 part of the moneys collected seemed to go 
 into the pockets of the military chiefs of 
 the provinces, whose leading occupation 
 was to make life and property unsafe for 
 the rich and to prevent political conditions 
 becoming settled. 
 
 All of this 1 had an important relation to 
 these demands that the Chinese delegation 
 presented to the Conference. Take the mat- 
 ter of tariff autonomy nothing shows bet- 
 ter China's position. She does not and has 
 not for many years controlled her customs. 
 They are fixed by treaty with the powers and 
 collected by them. They have been netting 
 her recently but 3% per cent, on her impor- 
 tations. Moreover, there have been vexatious 
 discriminations and special taxes which 
 have been both unfair and humiliating. 
 China came to the Conference begging for 
 freedom from all these restrictions. She 
 wanted a tariff autonomy like other nations, 
 and on the face of it what more reasonable 
 189 
 
PEACEMAKEES 
 
 request? And yet, after a very thorough 
 inquiry by a sub-committee of the Confer- 
 ence, headed by Secretary Underwood, con- 
 trol of her tariff was denied her. To be 
 sure, some of the worst of the discrimina- 
 tions were cleared up. She was given a 
 rate which would immediately raise her 
 revenue by some $17,000,000, and the prom- 
 ise of other changes in the near future which 
 would increase the amount to something 
 like $156,000,000. It looks small enough! 
 But why should China's tariffs remain in 
 the hands of foreigners? Why should she 
 not be allowed to collect more than an 
 effective 5 per cent, on her importations, 
 while her exportations to this country, for 
 instance, are weighted with tariffs all the 
 way from 20 to 100 per cent. ? Why, simply 
 because the committee, after a long study 
 made, as it declares and as there is no rea- 
 son to doubt, in a spirit of sympathy and 
 friendliness, believed that tariff autonomy 
 would be a bad thing for China herself. 
 190 
 
CHINA AT THE CONFERENCE 
 
 When the committee presented its report, 
 Senator Underwood said: "I am sure this 
 sub-committee and the coinmitttee to which 
 I am now addressing myself would gladly 
 do much more for China if conditions in 
 China were such that the outside powers 
 felt they could do so with justice to China 
 herself. I do not think there was any doubt 
 in the minds of the sub-committee on this 
 question that, if China at present had the 
 unlimited control of levying taxes at the 
 customs house, in view of the unsettled con- 
 ditions now existing in China, it would 
 probably work in the end to China's detri- 
 ment and to the injury of the world." 
 
 So far as tariff autonomy was concerned, 
 this judgment had to be accepted. It did 
 not, however, answer the question why 
 China should be able to collect but 5 per 
 cent, on the machinery we send her, and we 
 collect 35 to 50 per cent, on her silks. That 
 is, it does not seem that if the powers be- 
 lieve that it is for the good of China that her 
 191 
 
r 
 
 PEACEMAKEES 
 
 duties should be kept at this low rate they 
 would feel, as a matter of fairness, that they 
 should grant reciprocity and collect no more 
 on her goods than she is allowed to collect 
 on theirs. 
 
 When you come to the question of extra- 
 territoriality, by which is meant the estab- 
 lishment and conduct of judicial courts by 
 foreigners in China, a humiliating condition 
 that dates back almost to the beginning of 
 her treaty relations with other countries, 
 you find her own delegates asking no more 
 than that the powers cooperate with China 
 in taking initial steps toward improving 
 and eventually abolishing the existing 
 system. 
 
 There is no real solution of most of the 
 problems which the Chinese delegation 
 pleaded so eloquently and persistently in 
 Washington to have solved, except the es- 
 tablishment within the country of a stable, 
 representative government. That is, if the 
 fine young Chinese that represented their 
 192 
 
CHINA AT THE CONFERENCE 
 
 country want to see their program carried 
 out, they must go back to China and work 
 within the country to secure order, educa- 
 tion, development of their people along mod- 
 ern lines. There were too many Chinese 
 at the Washington Conference who had 
 spent the greater part of their lives in Eu- 
 rope and America and who were actually 
 unfamiliar with home conditions. 
 
 A stable Chinese Republic depends, then, 
 upon long, faithful efforts at reconstruction 
 as well as upon freeing China from foreign 
 encroachments. Not a few people came to 
 the Conference believing that the only prob- 
 lem was to expel the Japanese from Shan- 
 tung and force her to withdraw her twenty- 
 one demands. If China had had a strong, 
 united government in the past there would 
 have been no Japanese now in Shantung, 
 and no twenty-one demands. Shantung is 
 a spoil of war and under the old code by 
 which the world has acquired power and 
 possessions "belonged" to Japan. That is, 
 193 
 
PEACEMAKEES 
 
 her claim to it was as valid as the claim of 
 many nations, ourselves included, to cer- 
 tain territories which we hold without dis- 
 pute. Japan pointed out that she had spent 
 blood and treasure for Shantung, and this 
 is true. And always when in the past men 
 spent blood and treasure, the world has 
 sanctioned their performance. Japan's 
 right to Shantung was questioned now be- 
 cause of the new code we are trying to put 
 in force. That is, men are trying to prove 
 that it shall be no longer by blood and 
 treasure that we progress, but by good will, 
 fair dealing, superior efficiency of mind and 
 hand. The practical question now seems to 
 be, When is this new code to begin to op- 
 erate? In 1922, as Japan wished, or with 
 the first entrance of the foreigner into 
 China, as radical Chinese wished? And if 
 it is to be adopted, is it to apply only to 
 China? The code that would sweep Japan 
 entirely out of China would also sweep us 
 out of the Philippines and Haiti; England 
 194 
 
CHINA AT THE CONFERENCE 
 
 out of India and Egypt. There are strong 
 young nationalist parties to-day in the 
 Philippines and in Haiti, in India and in 
 Egypt, using the same arguments that the 
 Chinese delegation used in Washington, 
 that the foreigners shall go; and in all 
 of these countries as in China to-day, the 
 reason given by the protecting or invading 
 power, as you choose to regard it, that they 
 stay, is that their going would be the worst 
 thing in the world that could happen to the 
 country. 
 
 In the case of Shantung and the twenty- 
 one demands, the solution was going to de- 
 pend upon how far Japan realized that these 
 "valid" claims of hers that is, valid under 
 the old code were handicaps and not ad- 
 vantages to her. How far she realized that 
 by attempting to keep them in force she 
 was going to cripple her own real advance- 
 ment in China, increase and prolong the 
 boycott of her goods, and incur the ill will 
 of other nations, particularly of this nation. 
 195 
 
PEACEMAKEES 
 
 It became clear early in the Washington 
 Conference that we were not going to help 
 China's case, or encourage Japan in gen- 
 erous dealing by continuing to cultivate 
 mistrust and hatred of the Japanese. A 
 systematic effort to make one nation hate 
 another belongs to the old way of doing 
 things. Indeed, it has been one of the chief 
 methods by which we have thought to pro- 
 gress in the world. You built up distrust, 
 dislike, suspicion, until you had created an 
 enemy in the minds of the mass of the peo- 
 ple so hateful that it became an almost 
 religious duty to overthrow it. We have 
 had this sort of thing going on in this coun- 
 try in regard to Japan for years, a calcu- 
 lated, nation-wide, extremely able effort to 
 make the American people fear and despise 
 the Japanese, to bring them to a point where 
 they would gladly, as a relief to their feel- 
 ings, undertake a war against Japan. I do 
 not know that a sterner rebuke to the Ameri- 
 can public the sterner because unconscious 
 196 
 
CHINA AT THE CONFERENCE 
 
 could have been given than the remarks 
 of Prince Tokugawa in one of his little 
 talks before he sailed for home. He was 
 telling how surprised as well as grateful 
 the Japanese had been at American hospi- 
 tality, "Because," he said, "when we came 
 we feared that the Americans were so hos- 
 tile to us that it might be impossible for us 
 to go with safety on the streets." 
 
 Those who know the Orient best all agree 
 that its future peace, and therefore the fu- 
 ture peace of the world, depends largely 
 upon Japan. She is the one strong, stable, 
 unified nation in the East. She has, it is 
 true, a powerful militaristic party, but op- 
 posed to that is a great liberal group. 
 Prince Tokugawa, who played so fine a part 
 in his delegation during the Conference, is 
 a man who has taken keen interest in labor 
 questions, education of the people, the de- 
 velopment of industry, and has thrown all 
 his great interest against the military 
 spirit. It is said by those who know much 
 197 
 
PBACEMAKEES 
 
 of Japan's interior workings that the Em- 
 press herself is convinced that either the 
 empire must have a democratic leadership, 
 a constitutional monarchy with a responsi- 
 ble cabinet, an army and navy under civil 
 control, of that it will be overthrown, and 
 that the reason that the young Crown Prince 
 was sent on his visit to England was that he 
 might have a look at a democratic mon- 
 archy. There are many Japanese saying 
 openly in the press and in public assemblies 
 that the future of Japan depends upon an 
 entire change of policy, that the hard deal- 
 ings in Korea, the wresting of the twenty- 
 one demands from Peking, the methods in 
 Shantung have all been a mistake, that 
 Japan must deny them, correct the wrongs 
 done under them if she is to have the sym- 
 pathy and enjoy the cooperation of the out- 
 side world. It is most important that the 
 people of the United States particularly 
 should understand these liberal leanings in 
 Japan, should give them all the support 
 within their power. 
 
 198 
 
CHINA AT THE CONFERENCE 
 
 There was much irritation at different 
 times in Washington because the Japanese 
 delegation insisted on holding up the march 
 of negotiations until it could hear from 
 Tokyo, and between Tokyo and poor cable 
 connections the answers were slow in com- 
 ing. The delegation always insisted on wait- 
 ing, however, and in this it was wise. It 
 could go no further safely than the govern- 
 ment at home would back it. If it at- 
 tempted to do so, it would mean the final 
 repudiation of the measures to which it had 
 agreed. Certainly Americans should have 
 understood this. It might take time for the 
 Japanese to stop at every point in the nego- 
 tiations to consult their government, but it 
 was a much safer method in the long run 
 than making such haste that a situation 
 could arise such as that between our own 
 delegation and the President of the United 
 States the difference in the interpretation 
 of the Four Power Pact, a difference which 
 no doubt arose from a failure to see that 
 the busy President did have in his head 
 199 
 
PEACEMAKEES 
 
 just what the meaning of the short and 
 simple document really was. It sometimes 
 pays to make haste slowly. 
 
 If the Japanese were cautious in their 
 dealings, haggled over details, were slow to 
 make concessions which it was likely they 
 intended all the time to make, gave up noth- 
 ing until they were sure they would be 
 backed by the home government, it might 
 be exasperating but it was not necessarily 
 a proof of intrigue or of a lack of sympathy 
 with the larger purposes of the Conference. 
 In spite of these methods so irritating to 
 people whose only thought is to put things 
 through in the shortest time possible, . the 
 Japanese made a better impression on the 
 Conference than the Chinese, for the simple 
 reason that the one were workers, the other 
 talkers. More than once in the course of 
 the negotiations it was necessary to recall 
 the Chinese's attention to the fact that what 
 was under discussion was not theories, but 
 conditions. All one's sympathies were with 
 200 
 
CHINA AT THE CONFERENCE 
 
 the talkers, and all one's practical sense 
 with the workers. 
 
 The nations in adopting the principles 
 that they did in regard to China, in insuring 
 her a protecting ring within which they 
 promise to see that she has the chance to 
 develop and maintain effective and stable 
 government, and to give all nations an equal 
 opportunity of carrying on commerce and 
 industry with her, are attempting some- 
 thing that has never before been done in 
 this world they are insuring a great weak, 
 divided nation its chance. Never again 
 under the protection adopted, if the prom- 
 ises made are kept, can anybody chip off a 
 piece of Chinese territory, secure a mo- 
 nopoly of her resources; never again can 
 there be in China a Shantung, a Twenty- 
 one demands, a Port Arthur. The pacts 
 and principles adopted establish over China 
 that "moral trusteeship" of which Mr. 
 Hughes talks. They put upon all nations 
 agreeing and particularly upon this nation 
 201 
 
PEACEMAKEES 
 
 the obligation to see that this moral trus- 
 teeship is something more than a phrase. 
 
 Although the immediate results to China 
 are not as sweeping and generous as many 
 of her friends desire and many believe 
 would have been possible and wise, they are 
 substantial. She will control her own post 
 offices beginning with January, 1923; the 
 correction of the humiliating extra-terri- 
 toriality is being undertaken ; foreign troops 
 will be withdrawn; a beginning at least 
 toward tariff autonomy has been made. No 
 future concessions and agreements will be 
 made by China to other powers except 
 under an international board of review, the 
 office of which will be to see that no terms 
 unjust to China or discriminatory in the 
 favor of any particular outside nation are 
 made. This leaves old commitments where 
 they are, but it is fair to suppose, if the 
 board does its duty, that any manifest injus- 
 tice or flagrant discrimination now existing 
 can and will be eventually cured. 
 202 
 
CHINA AT THE CONFERENCE 
 
 The Shantung question has been settled 
 settled in the way that President Wilson 
 believed at Paris that it finally would be 
 settled by Japan's withdrawing. The real 
 bone of contention between the two coun- 
 tries the Tsingtau-Tsinanfu railway will 
 go back entirely to China within a few 
 years five at the shortest, fifteen at the 
 longest upon terms of payment and of 
 management which, if painful to both coun- 
 tries Japan feeling that she is giving up 
 too much, China that she is getting too lit- 
 tle yet seemed reasonable and the best 
 that could be done by the American and 
 British delegation. 
 
 With the withdrawal of Japan from Shan- 
 tung, will go England's from Weihaiwei, 
 and probably a little later, France's from 
 Kwangchow-wan. 
 
 As for the twenty-one demands, Japan so 
 
 thoroughly realized the discredit they had 
 
 brought her in the eyes of the liberal world 
 
 that she began the discussion upon them by 
 
 203 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 voluntarily withdrawing one whole section, 
 that which compelled China to employ Jap- 
 anese advisers in the military, financial 
 and political departments of her govern- 
 ment. She also declared her intention to 
 give up her preferential rights in Southern 
 Manchuria and to open to the international 
 consortium the railway loans in Manchuria 
 and Mongolia which she has been holding as 
 her exclusive possession. This is going a 
 long way to clear up the difficulties under 
 the commitments. With this start and with 
 intelligent international supervision, it 
 ought to be possible in a reasonable time 
 to free China entirely from whatever is op- 
 pressive in the twenty-one demands. 
 
 It is a beginning. If Young China will 
 take hold vigorously now there is reason to 
 believe that the thongs about her feet will 
 in time be cut. She has work, long, slow 
 work, before her, but she is assured sym- 
 pathy and protection in carrying it on. That 
 is a vastly more important result than to 
 204 
 
CHINA AT THE CONFERENCE 
 
 have been granted all the demands of her 
 eager young democrats and left alone in 
 the world. 
 
 It is the old, old story nations must 
 climb step by step they have no wings. 
 
 205 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE MEASURE OF THE WASHINGTON 
 CONFERENCE 
 
 How are we to measure the Washington 
 Conference? There are people who think 
 it should be by the things that it did not 
 undertake to do. The Conference was in- 
 dicted in Washington in January by a 
 league of people of considerable ability who 
 declared that it had not lessened the chance 
 of war by a fraction of one per cent. The 
 reason they gave for this verdict was that 
 it had not taken up the causes of India, 
 Korea, the Far Eastern Republic, Persia, 
 the Philippines, Haiti, the "Republic of Mt. 
 Lebanon." 
 
 It is certain that the world is going to 
 have no quiet until these troubled coun- 
 206 
 
MEASURE OF THE CONFERENCE 
 
 tries are satisfied. But they are not the 
 only problems to be solved. Mr. Hughes 
 named a considerable number on his 
 agenda. Is an international conference to 
 be declared a farce because it selects one 
 set of problems instead of another, and be- 
 lieves it more practical to give exclusive at- 
 tention to one side of the globe than to the 
 entire surface? You could not persuade 
 Mr. Hughes and his colleagues that any 
 other policy than that of one thing at a time 
 would contribute a "fraction of one per 
 cent/' to the peace of the earth. They be- 
 lieve the block system is the only practical 
 one for setting the world aright. They lay 
 it out something like this: 
 
 "Let us clean up the Pacific, then we can 
 disarm. Having disarmed, we can lend a 
 hand in the next most distressed and trou- 
 blesome block France, Central Europe, 
 Russia. Having helped set them straight, 
 one at a time, then possibly we may con- 
 sider an association of nations but not 
 207 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 now." So convinced was Mr. Hughes of 
 the soundness of his system that he threw 
 out one of the chief subjects on his agenda 
 the limitation of land armament when 
 he discovered he must leave his block the 
 Pacific and pass into Europe if it was 
 considered. 
 
 The only system a man can successfully 
 handle is that in which he has faith, the 
 only fair way to judge what he does is by 
 what he undertakes to do not what you 
 would like him to undertake. Measured 
 by the method it adopted and the limita- 
 tions it set for itself, how does the Confer- 
 ence come out? 
 
 I began my observations on the Confer- 
 ence with a quarrel with the agenda. Put- 
 ting the problem of the limitation of arma- 
 ment before the settlement of the difficul- 
 ties or threats of difficulties in the Pacific, 
 which were keeping the countries concerned 
 in arms, looked illogical. It proved good 
 psychology. The naval program stirred the 
 208 
 
MEASURE OF THE CONFERENCE 
 
 imagination of the country, became at once 
 something tremendously desirable a real 
 move toward peace. When England and 
 Japan at once agreed it became possible and 
 practical. If they agreed, why, then it 
 must be the difficulties could be settled 
 which many had doubted. The Conference 
 thus at the start gained what it needed most, 
 popular faith that it meant to do a con- 
 crete, tangible thing. The proposition that 
 England, the United States, Japan, France 
 and Italy should adopt a naval ratio of 
 5-5-3, 1.75 1.25 and agree not to build 
 for ten years was a big, substantial, stir- 
 ring fact. To have them accept, as they did, 
 strengthened the faith of the world. It was 
 the first time big powers had ever said 
 "scrap," had ever been actually eager for a 
 naval holiday. 
 
 The fact that neither the submarine nor 
 the auxiliary craft are to be limited in ton- 
 nage, as the original program proposed, if 
 disappointing, still does not upset the 
 209 
 
PEACEMAKEES 
 
 achievement. The submarine comes out of 
 the Conference unlimited in number but 
 crippled in its field of action. Merchant 
 ships are forbidden it on penalty of piracy. 
 That will not in the thick of war prevent 
 merchant ships being destroyed but it will 
 take the heart out of the business. Out- 
 lawry helps if it does not prohibit. There is 
 compensation also in the failure in regard 
 to the tonnage of auxiliary craft, for at 
 least their size is limited to 10,000 tons 
 and their guns to 8 inches, and that is a 
 fairly satisfactory substitute for the origi- 
 nal proposal. 
 
 In spite of the changes, cutting and trim- 
 ming, the naval program remains some- 
 thing which the country wants, something 
 which it feels to be a blow at war as wel] 
 as a relief to its tax burdens. 
 
 If the naval program could stand on its 
 own feet, it alone would make the Confer- 
 ence a brilliant success, but it cannot. It 
 was no sooner raised to its feet than its 
 makers had to rush in with props. The 
 210 
 
MEASUEE OF THE CONFEKENCE 
 
 first was a policy in regard to China. The 
 reason was clear enough. Unless the na- 
 tions at the Conference conld agree among 
 themselves on a method of assisting in the 
 development of China which would pre- 
 vent any one of them taking an unfair ad- 
 vantage of the others, there were sure to be 
 quarrels sooner or later and they would 
 need their ships. Unless they could fix on 
 a policy under which not only they each had 
 a fair chance but nations outside not at 
 the Conference, but likely in the future to 
 desire to invest in China were not discrimi- 
 nated against, they would need their ships. 
 They would surely need them, too, one of 
 these days, if they did not satisfy China that 
 what they agreed upon was as good for her 
 as for them. 
 
 Mr. Koot hurried in with his four prin- 
 ciples. Mr. Hughes outlined his Nine Power 
 Pact, which was to assent to the principles 
 and the practical applications of them which 
 were to be worked out. 
 
 But the naval program had to have an- 
 
PEACEMAKEES 
 
 other prop before it could proceed. It was 
 not worth the paper it was written on un- 
 less England and Japan agreed to it. They 
 agreed in principle at the start, but in prac- 
 tice they could and would not until they 
 were sure that the nation that was asking 
 them to disarm wanted peace in the Pacific 
 badly enough to join them in a league to as- 
 sure it by cooperation. Before they scrapped 
 their ships they wanted to know whether 
 their present boundaries and rights were to 
 be respected by their colleagues whether 
 if one of them suffered aggression from with- 
 out the others were to remain indifferent or 
 were willing to pledge at least moral sup- 
 port. The Four Power Pact was the prop 
 desired. England, the United States, 
 France and Japan agree in it to face the fu- 
 ture in the Pacific together. Pull out this 
 prop and your program for scrapping ships 
 and a naval holiday falls flat as flat as 
 the disarmament of France has fallen and 
 for the same reason. If this Conference for 
 212 
 
MEASURE OF THE CONFERENCE 
 
 the Limitation of Armament does nothing 
 more than to make the American public 
 understand better what has been at the bot- 
 tom of the conduct of France since the 
 Armistice, it will have been worth all it 
 cost. 
 
 France has held up the peace of Europe, 
 delayed its reconstruction, lessened her own 
 chances of reparation, alienated her best 
 friends by her persistent militarism. Go 
 back to the peace treaty of 1919 when dis- 
 armament was one of the fundamental prin- 
 ciples adopted by the allied nations. From 
 the start France's argument in regard to dis- 
 armament was that for her it was impossi- 
 ble unless England and the United States 
 would guarantee her against aggression 
 from Germany if they would do that she 
 would disarm. In order to get disarma- 
 ment;, Mr. Wilson and Lloyd George agreed 
 to protect France against unprovoked at- 
 tacks. Our Senate refused to ratify the 
 agreement. 
 
 213 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 Having no guarantees, France kept her 
 arms. Keeping her arms, the military 
 spirit spread, the military group grew 
 stronger. How strong recent events have 
 shown. 
 
 One-third of the agenda of the Washing- 
 ton Conference that in regard to land dis- 
 armament had to be scrapped ten days 
 after the opening because a reduction of 
 land armament still meant to France a 
 guarantee, the same kind of a guarantee in 
 principle that a little later we gave to 
 Japan in order to make it possible for her 
 to agree with Great Britain and ourselves 
 on the naval program. Perhaps the great- 
 est achievement of the Conference on the 
 Limitation of Armament is its demonstra- 
 tion that disarmament means a union of the 
 nations that disarm, that in no other way, 
 the world being what it is, can it be accom- 
 plished. 
 
 Along with this demonstration has gone 
 another, frequently repeated, that this union 
 214 
 
MEASURE OF THE CONFERENCE 
 
 to which you are to pin your faith instead of 
 ships and armies, if it is to be permanent, 
 must be all inclusive. 
 
 Again and again the Conference ran up 
 against the difficulty that although all the 
 nations represented in Washington might 
 make agreements to cut down their capital 
 ships, limit their auxiliary craft to 10,000 
 tons and their guns to 8 inches, put the 
 mark of pirate on a submarine that attacked 
 a merchant vessel, forbid chemical warfare, 
 limit the number of air-craft ships any 
 one or all of these restrictions might over- 
 night be frustrated by one nation or a 
 group of nations outside of the alliance, en- 
 tering on an ambitious and aggressive cam- 
 paign of naval construction. That is, this 
 fine program for the limitation of arma- 
 ment almost certain to be carried out if 
 the Four Power Pact in regard to the waters 
 of the Pacific and the Mne Power Pact in 
 regard to the protection of China are rati- 
 fied by the different governments still may 
 215 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 be destroyed overnight by some part of the 
 world not included in this union for peace. 
 So obvious is this that the naval pact in- 
 cludes an agreement that in case any one 
 of the signing nations finds itself in a dan- 
 gerous position in regard to an aggressive 
 neighbor, it shall have the right to with- 
 draw. Every step that has been taken in 
 the Washington Conference leads inevitably 
 to the conclusion that it is all or none if 
 the work is to stand. 
 
 The difficulty in the way of most people 
 and most nations accepting this conclusion 
 is that they do not believe any such union 
 of all nations practical. They cannot see 
 men of all races working together, settling 
 only by agreement the misunderstandings 
 that inevitably come up. 
 
 If the Conference on the Limitation of 
 Armament has demonstrated the necessity 
 of world cooperation if we are to have peace, 
 it has also demonstrated its practicability. 
 Mr. Hughes started off by calling on the two 
 216 
 
MEASUEE OF THE CONFEKENCE 
 
 nations which the people of this country 
 have for a long time regarded with the most 
 suspicion the two nations against which 
 we have conducted a persistent campaign of 
 ill will England and Japan. Yet for three 
 months the delegations of these two nations 
 worked with ours in the utmost friendliness. 
 Again and again I heard Mr. Hughes de- 
 clare that nobody could have been more 
 cooperative, as he expressed it, than the 
 delegates from England and Japan. It was 
 obvious that those countries were quite as 
 eager as ourselves to work out agreements 
 that would enable them to declare a naval 
 holiday. AJ1 those initial suspicions that 
 we had of England and Japan and that Eng- 
 land and Japan had of us did not prevent 
 the delegates of the three countries from 
 coming to conclusions on matters on which 
 they had differed. What it seems to prove 
 is that you can get peace by friendly nego- 
 tiation, that a cooperation of nations is not 
 a dream, that it is a reality. 
 217 
 
PEACEMAKEES 
 
 What more amazing and convincing proof 
 of this than the fact that China and Japan 
 did, by conference, agree on Shantung? 
 Who would have believed it possible? What 
 made it possible was the faith and the wis- 
 dom of Mr. Hughes and Mr. Balfour, their 
 determination that the Chinese and Jap- 
 anese should learn to work together. "Talk 
 it over" was their instruction. "The Shan- 
 tung question can only be settled peaceably 
 by yourselves." It was one of the wisest, 
 one of the most significant decisions of the 
 Washington Conference. Day after day the 
 Chinese and Japanese held conversations 
 not conferences. They talked, they quar- 
 reled. Day after day they went home in 
 wrath and disgust, refusing suggested com- 
 promises, pleading the danger of losing their 
 heads if they consented. If the Chinese dele- 
 gates offered Peking anything less than an 
 immediate and completely free Shantung, 
 they could never again pass the border of 
 China. If the Japanese gave up even what 
 218 
 
MEASUKE OF THE CONFERENCE 
 
 they had promised to give up, their lives 
 would not be worth a song in Tokyo. Yet, 
 day by day, Japan was giving in a little, 
 China becoming a little more cooperative. 
 Mr. Harding, Mr. Huges and Mr. Balfour 
 stayed on the outside, genial but determined 
 friends determined that these two Eastern 
 neighbors should begin now to settle their 
 disagreements. More than once, China 
 came to them : "Make Japan be good, great 
 friends. You know Shantung is ours. 
 Make her be good." 
 
 Patience won the day. It took thirty- 
 eight "conversations," interminable cables, 
 breaks, returns, the constant counsel of 
 Mr. Balfour and Mr. Hughes "Steady now, 
 steady. Don't give it up. You must do it 
 yourselves" to bring a final agreement be- 
 tween the two nations. But in the end they 
 did settle the Shantung difficulty. It was 
 a tremendous victory for the new interna- 
 tional method of handling quarrels. 
 
 How reasonable it is that it should be so. 
 219 
 
PEACEMAKEES 
 
 It is a direct attack on a difficulty not a 
 roundabout one by correspondence through 
 ambassadors. Face to face, you examine the 
 basis of suspicion. You ask, Is this true 
 or not? Are you doing so-and-so or not? 
 Do you aim to do so-and-so? Thus the 
 actual situation, not the imagined one, is ar- 
 rived at. It becomes the actual property of 
 a group of negotiators sitting at the same 
 table; and when the actuality is before 
 them all, being turned over and examined 
 by them all, adjustment is almost certain 
 if there is good will. And here you come to 
 the crux of the whole matter you get no 
 adjustment unless the negotiators are work- 
 ing in a spirit of good will. 
 
 When I first set out to observe the Wash- 
 ington Conference I looked up a man un- 
 usually wise and experienced in interna- 
 tional affairs, one who for many years has 
 been collecting, arranging and explaining 
 the diplomatic adventures of men and of na- 
 tions so that each coming generation might 
 have, if it would, the materials from which 
 220 
 
MEASURE OF THE CONFERENCE 
 
 to find out what men had already done in 
 making peace and, if it were wise enough, 
 why they so often had failed. I was in 
 search of just the material of which he of 
 all men knew most. "What shall I read 
 first ?" I asked him. His instant reply was, 
 "JEsop's Fables. That should be the text- 
 book of the Conference. Kead ^sop," he 
 said, "to see what they can do, and follow 
 with Don Quixote to see what they cannot 
 do. 
 
 "But there is one book more important 
 than all for the Conference the Gospels. 
 But not King James' version. That is a 
 great and wonderful translation, but it has 
 done some harm in the world by not always 
 giving true values to great truths. It prom- 
 ises peace on earth and good will to men. 
 But that is not what was promised. Peace 
 was promised to men of good will. The suc- 
 cess of the Conference will depend upon the 
 degree to which men of good will are able 
 to prevail over those of ill will." 
 
 This is the way it turned out in Washing- 
 221 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 ton. At every stage it was good will which 
 carried the undertaking forward. What 
 will happen now in the various countries 
 to which the pacts of the Conference go will 
 depend upon the spirit of the peoples to 
 which they are submitted, whether it be 
 malicious or charitable. Will there be good 
 will enough in Japan to make such rear- 
 rangements of her claims in China that 
 Chinese bitterness and suspicion will be 
 removed? Will there be enough good will 
 in China to cooperate when these rear- 
 rangements are made? Will there be 
 enough in the United States to accept the 
 pledges of mutual support which must be 
 made if the nations concerned are to limit 
 their armaments? Have we enough faith in 
 men to accept the only possible alternative 
 in the present world to unlimited armament, 
 and that is, a union of peoples pledged to 
 face misunderstandings at their beginning, 
 to separate them into their elements, and to 
 bring all the force of collective judgment 
 and intelligence to adjustment? 
 222 
 
MEASURE OF THE CONFERENCE 
 
 It may be that the United States does not 
 yet sufficiently understand that the prin- 
 ciple of unionism which is its strength is 
 a world principle, that one primary cause 
 of wars in this world is isolation, with its 
 necessity of being suspicious, on guard, 
 ready to strike like a rattlesnake. 2Esop 
 is a guide here, with his fable of the 
 bundle of sticks sticks easy to break 
 if separated, unbreakable when bound 
 together. 
 
 It may be that the Senate of the United 
 States will refuse to back this pact of good 
 will which is just as essential to carrying 
 out the program of limitation of naval arma- 
 ment as a guarantee to France against un- 
 provoked aggression was two years ago (and 
 is still) to European disarmament. But, 
 refuse it or not, the day will come and 
 nothing has ever demonstrated it more 
 clearly than the Washington Conference, 
 when we are going to understand that the 
 world can only remain in peace through a 
 union which is a practical application of 
 223 
 
PEACEMAKEBS 
 
 the brotherhood of man, not a limited 
 brotherhood of man, such as Mr. Wells 
 preached in his final comment on the Arms 
 Parley, but one including all men. 
 
 Mr. Wells' idea of a brotherhood of na- 
 tions is or was! one that includes not 
 every state of the world but "the peoples 
 who speak English, French, German, Span- 
 ish, Italian and Japanese, with such states 
 as Holland and Norway and Bohemia, great 
 in quality if not great in power sympa- 
 thetic in training and tradition." He would 
 admit only people of like ideals, exclude 
 Kussia, India, China. Could there be a 
 surer way to throw Eussia and India and 
 China into an alliance against this so-called 
 "Brotherhood of Man"? Is there a surer 
 way to awaken an ambition for liberty, to 
 spread ideals than to share what you have 
 with those that seem to you and yet never 
 in all respects are backward nations? Is 
 there any brotherhood of man worthy the 
 name which does not include all men? 
 
 224: 
 
MEASUEE OF THE CONFERENCE 
 
 However we may feel about it as a na- 
 tion to-day, though we may ruin the present 
 program for limitation of armament by re- 
 jection of its underlying pacts, the day will 
 surely come when we shall realize and ad- 
 mit the fullest international association 
 and cooperation. It is the one real asset 
 humanity has carried from this war the 
 sense of the oneness of the world, the im- 
 possibility of order and progress and peace 
 except as each is allowed to develop its in- 
 dividuality, in a free continuing union of 
 all. 
 
 Eventually the Washington Conference 
 for the Limitation of Armament will be 
 judged by what it contributes to this union 
 of nations, exactly as all its predecessors 
 will be judged. The Washington Confer- 
 ence is but one in a long chain of interna- 
 tional undertakings looking to peace. It 
 is built on the experience of many different 
 men, of many different countries, running 
 back literally for centuries. Its immediate 
 225 
 
PEACEMAKERS 
 
 predecessor was the Hague Conferences 
 and tribunal and the Paris Conference with 
 its resultant League of Nations. So far the 
 League of Nations is at once the most ideal- 
 istic and the most practical scheme men 
 have yet framed, the broadest in its scope 
 and the most democratic in its spirit. It 
 may prove that humanity is as yet too back- 
 ward to grasp and realize its intent and its 
 possibilities. It may make too great a de- 
 mand on their faith, their charity, their 
 love ; but nothing can destroy the great fact 
 that it has been undertaken by fifty-one 
 nations, that it is alive and at work. That 
 fact will stand as a hope and a guide to the 
 future. 
 
 The present Conference has boldly and 
 nobly attempted to do in a limited field 
 something of what the Paris Conference at- 
 tempted to do for the whole world. The 
 limitation of armament it proposes rests, 
 like world disarmament, on unionism, 
 standing together. Unionism requires 
 226 
 
MEASURE OF THE CONFERENCE 
 
 faith; have we enough of it? It requires, 
 too, men of good will. Have we enough of 
 them? In the final analysis, it is with them 
 that "peace on earth" rests. 
 
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 General Library 
 
 University of California 
 
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 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY