Peacemakers—Blessed and Otherwise: Observations, Reflections and Irritations at an International Conference

By Ida M. Tarbell

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• Language: English
• Publisher: DigiCat
• Release date: Aug 16, 2022
• ISBN: 8596547171393

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Ida M. Tarbell

Peacemakers—Blessed and Otherwise

Observations, Reflections and Irritations at an International Conference

EAN 8596547171393

DigiCat, 2022

Contact: [e-mail]

Table of Contents

FOREWORD

CHAPTER I PRE-CONFERENCE REFLECTIONS

CHAPTER II ARMISTICE DAY

CHAPTER III NOVEMBER 12, 1921

CHAPTER IV THE FRENCH AT THE CONFERENCE

CHAPTER V THE PARIS SHRINE OF OUR LADY OF HATES

CHAPTER VI WHY DID HE DO IT?

CHAPTER VII DRAMATIC DIPLOMACY

CHAPTER VIII THE MOODS OF AN INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

CHAPTER IX PUT YOURSELF IN THEIR PLACES

CHAPTER X CHINA AT THE CONFERENCE

CHAPTER XI THE MEASURE OF THE WASHINGTON CONFERENCE

FOREWORD

Table of Contents

This book does not pretend to be a history or even an adequate review of the work of the Conference on the Limitation of Armament, nor does it pretend to be the writer’s full appraisement of that work. It is what its sub-title suggests, a collection of observations, rejections and irritations. These were set down each week of the first two months of the Conference and were published practically as they stand here by the McClure Syndicate.

I. M. T.

CHAPTER I

PRE-CONFERENCE REFLECTIONS

Table of Contents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Limitation of Armaments:

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

(A) Basis of limitation

(B) Extent

(C) Fulfillment

(D) Rules for control of new agencies of warfare

(E) Limitation of land armaments.

Far Eastern Questions:

(1) Questions relating to China

First. Principles to be applied

Second. Application

Subjects:

(A) Territorial integrity

(B) Administrative integrity

(C) Open door

(D) Concessions, monopolies, preferential privileges

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

(F) Preferential railway rates

(G) Status of existing commitments.

Siberia:

Sub-headings the same as those under China.

Mandated Islands:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These were all good reasons for expecting that the Conference might do something of what it started out for. How much of it it would do and how permanent that which it did would be would depend in no small degree upon the attitude of mind of this country, whether the backing that we gave the Conference was one of emotionalism or intelligence. We were starting out with a will to succeed; we were going to spend our first