(4) Our policy of the integrity of nations—China and Russia. We had announced a “moral trusteeship” 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 depended, 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 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 policies? How could we prove to them that they need not fear us?
It was within the first month of the Conference that the answers to these questions were worked out “in principle” again.
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, suspicious young journalist ask Lord Lee who, at the end of eight hours of committee work—grilling business always—was conducting 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 newspaper. 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 opportune time M. Briand will enjoy the opportunity of presenting to the Conference 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.”