As a matter of fact, one look inside would probably show a group of worn and anxious gentlemen honestly doing their best to find something on which they could agree with a reasonable hope that the countries that had sent them to Washington would accept their decisions. After one good look the public might change suspicion to sympathy.
There was always the argument from the conventionally minded that “it isn’t done,” that diplomacy must be secret. John Hay didn’t think so. He told his friend Henry Adams in the course of his efforts to establish the “open door” in China that he got on by being “honest and naïf!”
The point in this policy at which most people, in and out of the present Conference, would stick is that word “naïf.” They would prefer to be thought dishonest rather than simple-minded. However, if everybody who had a part in the gathering could be as simple-minded as he was in fact, would pretend to know no more than he did in truth and would be as honest as it was in his nature to be, there would be a good chance of keeping Mr. Hay’s door in China open. And if that could be done along with the other things it implied, the Conference would have actually contributed to the chances of more permanent peace in the world and could cut down its armaments, because it had less need of them, not merely because it wanted temporarily to reduce taxation.
It was the Unknown Soldier Boy that put an end to the doubt, the faultfinding, the cynicism that was in the air of Washington as the day for the opening of the Conference approached. It all became vanity, pettiness, beside that bier with its attending thousands of mourning people.
They carried the body to the capitol where for a day it lay in state. Busy with my attempts to learn something of what it was all about, it was not until late in the afternoon that I thought of the ceremony on the hill, and made my way there for my daily walk. It had been a soft, sunny day, the air full of gray haze. Everything around the great plaza—the Capitol, the library, the trees, the marble Senate and House buildings right and left—was tender in its outline. There were no crowds, but as I looked I saw massed four abreast from the entrance door to the rotunda, down along terraces of steps, across the plaza as far as I could see, a slowly moving black mass, kept in perfect line by soldiers standing at intervals. I made my way across. Where was its end? I went to find it.