We shall have to leave November 12, 1921, the opening day of the Conference on the Limitation of Armament, to History for a final appraisement. Arthur Balfour told Mr. Hughes after he had had time to gather himself together from the shock of the American program that in his judgment a new anniversary had been added to the Reconstruction Movement. “If the 11th of November,” said Mr. Balfour, “in the minds of the allied and associated powers, in the minds perhaps not less of all the neutrals—if that is a date imprinted on grateful hearts, I think November 12 will also prove to be an anniversary welcomed and thought of in a grateful spirit by those who in the future shall look back upon the arduous struggle now being made by the civilized nations of the world, not merely to restore pre-war conditions, but to see that war conditions shall never again exist.”
Whatever place it may turn out that November 12 shall hold on the calendar of great national days, this thing is sure; it will always be remembered for the shock it gave Old School Diplomacy. That institution really received a heavier bombardment than War, the real objective of the Conference. The shelling reached its very vitals, while it only touched the surface of War’s armor.
Diplomacy has always had her vested interests. They have seemed permanent, impregnable. What made November 12, 1921, portentous was its invasion of these vested interests. Take that first and most important one—Secrecy. When Secretary Hughes followed the opening speech of welcome and of idealism made by President Harding, not with another speech of more welcome and more idealism, as diplomacy prescribes for such occasions, but with the boldest and most detailed program of what the United States had in mind for the meeting, Diplomacy’s most sacred interest was for the moment overthrown. To be sure, what Secretary Hughes did was made possible by John Hay’s long struggle to educate his own countrymen to the idea of open diplomacy; by what President Wilson tried to do at the Paris conference. Mr. Wilson won the people of the world to his principle, but his colleagues contrived to block him in the second stage of the Paris game. Mr. Hughes, building on that experience, did not wait for consultation with his colleagues. On his own, in a fashion so unexpected that it was almost brutal, he threw not only the program of the United States on the table, but that which the United States expected of two—two only, please notice—of the eight nations she had invited in, Great Britain and Japan.