The Conference went into M. Briand’s open session serene, confident, self-complacent. 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 coöperatively, as seems inevitable, we must have a much fuller knowledge of one another’s ways and prejudices and ambitions than was shown at the outset of the Washington Conference.
Back of the commotion that M. Briand stirred up on November 21 lay the idiosyncrasies and experiences of France. To understand 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 élite 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 carefully, 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 anything of a traveler. To-day, in many parts of France, the young man or young woman who comes to America has the same prestige 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 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 restore the fertility, beauty, interest. It finds itself with an appalling debt; with a population 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 practically unimpaired.