INTRODUCTION
THESE twenty-nine papers do not profess to
be a record or description of the Washington
Conference. They give merely the impressions
and fluctuating ideas of one visitor to that conference. They show the reaction of that gathering upon a mind keenly set upon the idea of an organized world peace; they record phases of enthusiasm, hope, doubt, depression and irritation. They have scarcely been touched, except to correct a word or a phrase here or there; they are dated; in all essentials they are the articles just as they appeared in the New York World, the Chicago Tribune, and the other American and European papers which first gave them publicity. It is due to the enterprise and driving energy of the New York World, be it noted, that they were ever written at all. But in spite of the daily change and renewal of mood and attitude, inevitable under the circumstances, they do tell a consecutive story; they tell of the growth and elaboration of a conviction of how things can be done, and of how they need to be done, if our civilization is indeed to be rescued from the dangers that encompass it and set again upon the path of progress. They record and in a very friendly and appreciative spirit the birth and unfolding of the "Association of Nations" idea, the Harding idea, of world pacification, they note some of the peculiar circumstances of that birth, and they study the chief difficulties on its way to realization. It is, the writer believes, the most practical and hopeful method of attacking this riddle of the Sphinx that has hitherto been proposed.
H. G. WELLS.
THE IMMENSITY OF THE ISSUE AND
THE TRIVIALITY OF MEN
Washington, Nov. 7.
THE conference nominally for the limitation
of armaments that now gathers at Washington
may become a cardinal event in the history of
mankind. It may mark a turning point in
human affairs or it may go on record as one
of the last failures to stave off the disasters
and destruction that gather about our race.
In August, 1914, an age of insecure progress
and accumulation came to an end. When at
last, on the most momentous summer night in
history, the long preparations of militarism
burst their bounds and the little Belgian village
Vise went up in flames, men said: "This is a
catastrophe." But they found it hard to anticipate
the nature of the catastrophe. They
thought for the most part of the wounds and
killing and burning of war and imagined that
when at last the war was over we should count
our losses and go on again much as we did before
1914.
As well might a little shopkeeper murder his
wife in the night and expect to carry on "business
as usual" in the morning. "Business as
usual" that was the catchword in Britain in
1914; of all the catchwords of the world it carries
now the heaviest charge of irony.
The catastrophe of 1914 is still going on. It
does not end; it increases and spreads. This
winter more people will suffer dreadful things
and more people will die untimely through the
clash of 1914 than suffered and died in the first
year of the war. It is true that the social collapse
of Russia in 1917 and the exhaustion of
food and munitions in Central Europe in 1918
produced a sort of degradation and enfeeblement
of the combatant efforts of our race and
that a futile conference at Versailles settled
nothing, with an air of settling everything, but
that was no more an end to disaster than it
would be if a man who was standing up and receiving
horrible wounds were to fall down and
writhe and bleed in the dust. It would be
merely a new phase of disaster. Since 1919
this world has not so much healed its wounds
as realized its injuries.
Chief among these injuries is the progressive
economic breakdown, the magnitude of which
we are only beginning to apprehend. The
breakdown is a real decay that spreads and
spreads. In a time of universal shortage there
is an increasing paralysis in production; and
there is a paralysis of production because the
monetary system of the world, which was sustained
by the honest co-operation of Governments, is breaking down. The fluctuations in the real value of money become greater and greater and they shake and shatter the entire fabric of social co-operation.