M. Briand’s speech made one realize how France and Italy must consider possible continental alliances of powers that were not represented at this Conference; must consider a possible Russian crusade to convert the world by force to its gospel. And if France and Italy must, or thought they must, secure themselves against these possibilities, could England weaken herself disproportionately? When you began to consider the question of armament in terms of the world and not simply of nine nations, you could not if you were candid find any peaceful solution but by bringing everybody in—Germany, Turkey, Russia. Now it may be, though we do not know Mr. Harding well enough yet to say, that the logic of the experiences that the Conference had been through up to date laid hold of him and he said it like a man—“there is but one way out, and that is by One Big Union.”
Of course there is another explanation of why he did it and I rather think it may be the true one, after all. The President may have been hearing from the country. One thing that we do know about him is that he is a man who with almost religious care listens to the voices that come up to him from the people. And it was no secret that a multitude of them, strong and weak, had been calling to him in the weeks preceding—“conference,” “association,” “league,” “some method of carrying on in which everybody can join,” “in no other way can we hope for permanent peace.” It may be that Mr. Harding had heard so much of this that he felt he must reply. And if this was true, he did wisely.
We may lay it down as one of the great facts of the present international state of mind, that the world is intent on some sort of an association of nations. It is not set, so far as one can determine, on any particular covenant, though of course there is one to which some fifty nations of the world have subscribed and in which for some two years now they have been doing increasingly practical work in adjusting difficulties between nations. The very fact that the League of Nations lives—the divers ways in which its adventures in world unionism come to us—only makes the idea of association stronger in the minds of the peoples of the earth.
The Conference might limit armaments, naval and land, in the nine nations that were here gathered. It might make settlements of the Far Eastern questions, but there still would remain the rest of the world. It is a part of things. The world is one. It has come to a consciousness of its oneness. Nothing can dull that consciousness, stop the determination to realize it. Not Mr. Borah, not Mr. Lodge. Somehow we have got to learn to come together and stay together. Walt Whitman once said of Abraham Lincoln’s passion for the Union that unionism had become “a new virtue” with him,—a virtue like honesty, goodness, truthfulness. There is no manner of doubt that in the minds of this world unionism is coming to be regarded as a virtue; that the demand for its realization as the only road to world peace is becoming more and more universal.