It takes brains, humor, self-control to put any such rule as this in force. If unhappily the Conference did not furnish a sufficient amount of these ingredients, would the press and public make good the deficit? They are always in a strategic position where they can insist that everybody must be considered innocent until he is proved guilty, that nothing be built on suspicion, everything on facts. Something very important for them to remember if they insisted was that these facts had a history, that they were not isolated but related to a series of preceding events. For instance, there was the high hand that Japan had played with China. We must admit it. But in doing so we must not forget that it was only about sixty years ago that the very nations with whom Japan was now to meet in council in Washington had gathered with their fleets in one of her ports and used their guns to teach her the beauties of Christian civilization. She had decided to learn their lessons. She has wonderful imitative powers. She had _followed_ them into China, and if she had played a higher hand there than any of them—and there might be a question as to that—it should be remembered that she had only sixty years in which to learn the degree of greed that can safely be practiced in our modern civilization. We must consider that possibly she had not had sufficient time to learn to temper exploitation with civilized discretion.
No scapegoats. No hues and cries. And certainly no partisanship. Was it possible for the United States to hold a truly national parley, one in which party ambitions and antipathies did not influence the negotiations? We had had within three years a terrible lesson of the lengths to which men’s partisanship will go in wrecking even the peace of the world. Would we repeat that crime? It was an ugly question, and be as optimistic as I would I hated to face it.
There was another danger on the face of things—crudeness of opinion. We love to be thought wise. There are thousands of us who in the pre-Conference days were getting out our maps to find out where Yap lay or the points between which the Eastern Chinese railroad ran, who would be tempted sooner or later to become violent partisans of, we will say: Yap for America—Shantung for China—Vladivostok for the Far Eastern Republic. There was danger in obstinate views based on little knowledge or much knowledge of a single factor.