There were those who had an unamiable explanation. We are all human, they said. We must remember that this has ceased to be Mr. Harding’s conference. His fine sentiments on Armistice Day on the opening of the Conference had been greeted with loud acclaim the world over. But after he had opened the Conference he left the hall. Secretary Hughes appeared, and it was Secretary Hughes who stirred the world. From that time on, the Secretary had been the one man quoted. We have had great secretaries—Mr. Root, for instance, who never allowed his shadow to fall across that of the President of the United States. When Mr. Roosevelt was President, Mr. Root prepared some very remarkable state papers, but they always began “The President instructs me to say.” Mr. Hughes has been speaking for himself. It is quite possible, said these interpreters, that the President thinks the time has come to let the public know that, after all, it is he who occupies the White House.
I am quite sure that if this had been true, we should have had other evidence of it as time went on, but none came. Mr. Harding knew well enough that a successful Conference was in the long run his triumph. He knew well enough that the only man who could give him this success was Secretary Hughes. Possibly the wisest thing that Mr. Harding has yet done as President has been to let the members of his cabinet do their own work. Jealousy is not, I am sure, an explanation of Mr. Harding’s sudden introduction of an Association of Nations into the Conference on the Limitation of Armament. Was it to be found in M. Briand’s speech?
M. Briand did not convince his audience, as we have seen. That is, he did not bring it to the point at which he was aiming. But one thing that he did do was to bring into sharp relief the fact that land and naval armaments cannot be handled separately. They dovetail in the game of war, are mutually defensive and offensive; to cut the navy of a nation whose main defense is ships, without considering the relation of that cut to the size of the armies of those nations in which armies are the chief defense, is to leave an unbalanced situation.
A second realization went along with this, and that was that the scrapping and cutting by nine nations must be done with an eye to the actual or potential naval armaments of the other forty-five or so nations of the earth. Senator Schanzer had already suggested this in his speech made on November 15, accepting in principle for Italy the naval program. “I think it rather difficult,” he said, “to separate the question of Italian and French naval armament limitation from the general question of naval armaments of the world.”