WASHINGTON AND THE HOPE OF PEACE. H. G. Wells

I can ascertain, the advocates of what I may call mere disarmament propose to scrap this mass of interests more or less completely, to put its tremendous array of factories, arsenals, dockyards and so forth out of action, to obliterate its wide-reaching net of financial relationships, to break up its carefully gathered staffs, and to pour all its labor, its trained engineers and sailors and gunners and so forth into the great flood of unemployment into which our civilization is already sinking. And they do not seem to grasp how subtle, various and effective the resistance of this great complex of capable human beings to any such treatment is likely to be. In my supply of League of Nations literature I find only two intimations of this real obstacle to the world common weal. One is a suggestion that there should be no private enterprise in the production of war material at all, and the other that armament concerns shall not own newspapers. As a Socialist I am charmed by the former proposal, which would in effect nationalize, among others, the iron and steel and chemical industries, but as a practical man I have to confess that the organization of no existing state is yet at the level of efficiency necessary if the transfer is to be a hopeful one, and so far as the newspaper restriction goes, it would surely pass the wit of man to devise rules that would prevent a great banking combination from controlling armament firms on the one hand while it financed newspapers on the other.

      Yet the fact remains that this great complex of interests, round and about the armaments interest, is the most real of all the oppositions to a world federation. It supplies substance, direction and immediate rewards to the frothy emotions of patriotism; it rules by dividing us and it realizes that its existence in its present form is conditional upon the continuance of our suspicions and divisions. It does not positively want or seek war, but it wants a continuing expectation of and preparation for war. On the other hand its ruling intelligences must be coming to understand that in the end it cannot escape sharing in the economic and social smash down to which we are all now sliding so rapidly. It is too high a type of organization to be altogether blind and obdurate. It will not, of course, be represented officially at Washington for what it is, but in the form of pseudo-patriotic, naval, military and financial experts it will be better represented than any other side of human nature. One of the most interesting things to do at the conference will be to watch its activities.

      How much can we common men ask for and hope for from this great power? Self extinction is too much—even if it were desirable.

      But it is reasonable to demand a deflection of its activities to meet the urgent needs of our present dangers. We do not want the extinction of this great body of business, metallurgical, chemical, engineering and disciplined activities, but we do want its rapid diversion from all too easily attained destructive ends to creative purposes now. A world peace scheme that does not open out an immediate prospect for the release of financial and engineering energy upon world-wide undertakings is a hopeless peace scheme. Enterprise must out. Were this world one federated state concerned about our common welfare there would be no over-whelming difficulty in canalizing all this force now spent upon armament in the direction of improved transport and communications generally into the making of great bridges, tunnels and the like, into the rebuilding of our cities upon better lines, into the irrigation and fertilization of the earth’s deserts and so forth. The way to world peace lies not in fighting and destroying the armament interests but in turning them to world service.

      But to do such a thing requires a united financial and economic effort; it cannot be done nationally by little groups of patriots all scheming against one another. It must be big business for world interests, unencumbered by national frontiers, or it is impossible.

      All these considerations you see converge on the conclusion that there is no solution of the problem of war, no possibility of a world recovery, no possibility of arresting the rapid disintegration of our civilization, except a Pax Mundi, a federated world control, sufficiently authoritative to keep any single nation in order and sufficiently coherent to express a world idea. We need an effective world “Association of Nations,” to use President Harding’s phrase, or we shall perish. And even in this fantastic dream of Mere Disarmament, of a world of little independent states, all sovereign, all competing against each other and all carrying on a mean financial and commercial warfare against each other to the common impoverishment, all standing in the way of any large modern-spirited handling of modern needs, yet all remaining magically disarmed and never making actual war on each other—even if this dream were possible, it is still utterly detestable—more detestable even than our present dangers and miseries. For if there are any things in life worse than pain, fear and destruction, they are boredom, pettiness and inanity, and such would be the quality of such a world. However much the diplomatists at Washington may seek to ignore the fact, may fence their discussion within narrowly phrased agenda, and rule this, that and the other vital aspect outside the scope of the conference, the fact remains that there is no way out, no way of escape for mankind from the monstrous miseries and far more monstrous dangers of the present time except an organized international co-operation, based upon a frank and bold resolve to turn men’s minds from ancient jealousies and animosities to the common aims and the common future of our race.

      If the Washington Conference cannot rise to the level of that idea, then it were better that the Conference never gathered together.

      III. — THE TRAIL OF VERSAILLES:

       TWO GBEAT POWERS ARE SILENT AND ABSENT

       Table of Contents

      WASHINGTON, the guide books say, was planned by Major Pierre Charles L’Enfant in imitation of Versailles. If so, it has broken away from his intentions. I know Versailles pretty well, and I have gone about Washington looking vainly for anything more than the remotest resemblance. There is something European about Washington, I admit, an Italianate largeness, as though a Eoman design has been given oxygen and limitless space. It is a capital in the expanded Latin style. It has none of the vertical uplift of a real American city. But Versailles!

      Versailles was the home and embodiment of the old French Grand Monarchy and of a Foreign Policy that sought to dominate, Frenchify and “Versaillize” the world. A visit to Versailles is part of one’s world education, a visit to the rather faded, rather pretentious magnificence of its terraces, to that Hall of Mirrors, all plastered over with little oblongs of looking-glass, which was once considered so wonderful, to the stuffy, secretive royal apartments with their convenient back stairs, to the poor foolishness of the Queen’s toy village, the Little Trianon. A century and a half ago the people of France, wasted and worn by incessant wars of aggression, weary of a Government that was an intolerable burden to them and a nuisance to all Europe, went to Versailles in a passion and dragged French Policy out of Versailles for a time.

      Unhappily it went back there.

      In 1871, when Germany struck down the tawdry imperialism of Napoleon III (who was also for setting up Emperors in the New World) the Germans had the excessive bad taste to proclaim a New German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors. So that Versailles became more than ever the symbol of the age-long, dreary, pitiful quarrel of the French and Germans for the inheritance of “the Empire” that has gone on ever since the death of Charlemagne. There the glory of France had shone; there the glory of France had been eclipsed. I visited Versailles one autumnal day in 1912, and it was then a rather mouldy, disheartened, empty, picturesque show place, pervaded by memories of flounces, furbelows, wigs and red heels and also by the stronger, less pleasant flavor of that later Prussian triumph.

      It was surely the least propitious place in the whole world for the making of a world peace in 1919. It was inevitable that there the Ehine frontier should loom larger than all Asia and that the German people should be kept waiting outside to learn what vindictive punishment victorious France designed for them.

      The Peace of Versailles was not a settlement of the world, it was the crowning of the French revanche. And since Russia had always been below the horizon of Versailles it was as inevitable that the Russian people, who had saved France from utter defeat in 1914, who had given far more dead to the war than France and America put together, and who had collapsed at last, utterly exhausted by their stupendous war efforts, should be considered merely as the defaulting debtors of