XIV.

THE PEACE OF THE PRESIDENT.1

It is generally worth while to discuss an ideal, however unattainable it may appear; for a world without ideals is a world without a future, and it is by the selection of our ideal that we determine the direction of our progress. If our aim is in the right direction we can put up with the length of the journey, and we do not complain of a guide-post because it points to a distant goal. An end that is easily reached is of little value as an ideal; and the homely analogue of the bunch of carrots at the end of a stick derives its lesson from the fact that the carrots advanced as fast as the donkey. Even if it be true that President Wilson's recent speech to the Senate held out an unattainable object to mankind, it need not be devoid of stimulus and guidance; and a Europe that is riven in twain by war will do wisely to ponder as best it can in the storm and stress of the conflict, the peace that appeals to the responsible ruler of far the most powerful neutral State.

It is the atmosphere of quiet calm deliberation that is so difficult to create and maintain. President Wilson is thinking and speaking in terms of the future: we feel so acutely the ills we bear that

1 "The Times" Literary Supplement, 1 February, 1917; the reference is to the President's speech in the Senate on 22 January.

we can think only in terms of the present; and it needs an effort to reach the plane of the President's thought and to grasp his reason. He is not compassed about with the hosts of Midian or cumbered with the needs of defence and the means of victory. He serenely assumes the event and is only concerned with its effects. We must grasp that point clearly first of all, or we shall entirely fail to understand the President's propositions. "The present war," he says, "must first be ended," and further he declares that the United States will "have no voice in determining" the treaties and agreements which will bring it to an end. He has, and he will have, nothing to do with the war; neutral the States have been from the first, and neutral they will remain to the last; and quite logically and fairly the President disclaims any ambition to act as umpire between the belligerent Powers. He will not play the part of President Roosevelt at the Portsmouth negotiations between Russia and Japan. For that we are grateful, believing as we do in our victory;1 we shall only regret it if we are beaten. But that is our affair; the President's policy is more original and more ambitious than that of Mr. Roosevelt.

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While he will have nothing to do with bringing peace to pass, Mr. Wilson hopes to assist in making permanent. He is a political architect of the future, and it is with the permanence of peace after the war that he is concerned. There must, he says, be "a definite concert of the Powers which will make it

1 The Russian Revolution of course destroyed for the time the basis of the confidence that became general after the fall of Bapaume and Baghdad.

virtually impossible that any such catastrophe should ever overwhelm us again". But a mere European concert will be unequal to maintaining the peace of the world; it would not, we may interject, preclude a war between the United States and Japan. Hence the interest of America in the future peace of mankind. The United States must join the League of Nations. But it can only come in on terms consistent with its liberal principles. James Monroe could not join the Holy Alliance projected by Alexander I and perverted by Metternich; indeed, he set up against it that famous doctrine of his own, which Canning and his successors and the British Navy turned into practical politics and President Wilson now seeks to apply to Europe. We need not grudge this victory of the doctrinal offspring we fathered over the legitimism we abandoned. Nor need we feel hurt if the President leaves it to the belligerents to garner the harvest which he will only help to guard if he considers it worth protecting. Neutrality is imposed upon him by the public opinion to which he is responsible, and our business is to see what can be made out of his contingent co-operation in the future. He cannot assist in the harvesting; he will not hinder, but he will not help us further than by saying that, unless we reap a satisfactory crop, it will not be worth America's while to partake in preserving the fruits of our labour.

Our difficulty lies in appearances, and the President seems to pose as our taskmaster. We are to win the war and he is to keep the peace that is won. But if the task is not of his doing, it is also not of his setting; it is one we have set ourselves and shall be proud of

achieving without assistance. It is well that Europe should redeem herself; but we need not doubt the President's sympathy merely because he has expressed our ideals in the catchwords of our enemies. Catchwords, unfortunately, have a much larger and more rapid circulation than reasoned arguments; and the President's references to a "peace without victory" and "freedom of the seas"-designed, no doubt, to sugar the pill for German and some American readers -have rendered the substance of his policy unpalatable to superficial tastes in Entente countries. But if we

probe a little deeper than the surface we shall find that the President's peace is almost as far as our own from a German peace, and that his conditions imply the triumph of our principles. He contends that the statesmen of both belligerent groups "have said in terms that could not be misinterpreted, that it was no part of the purpose they had in mind to crush their antagonists". But there are pitfalls in oratio obliqua, and what statesmen on both sides aver is that the crushing of peoples is no part of the purpose they have in mind. Germans themselves have disavowed objects they avowed two years ago; and "peace without victory" means a peace without the victory of those who set out to crush Serbia and France.

This becomes clear as we pursue the President's definition of the peace he has in mind. It is to rest on certain fundamental principles. The first is the absolute equality of nations, great and small-not, of course, an equality of territory or resources, but an equal right to peace, security, and independence in the development of their own moral and material activities.

The second," a deeper thing involved

than even equality of right among organized nations," is the recognition of "the principle that Governments derive all their just powers from the consent of the governed". These indeed are the principles for which we fight and President Wilson argues; but before we attempt to elucidate and apply them we stumble across another catchword, the "freedom of the seas". The trouble again is ambiguity. The President opens his paragraph with what looks like a plea for Russian freedom of access to the sea through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles; and the Germans, not owning both shores of these narrows like the Turks, admit that there is something in the argument, desiring only its extension to the Suez, but not to the Kiel, Canal, and discreetly refraining from reference to Panama. But Mr. Wilson goes on to claim that "the paths of the sea must alike in law and in fact be free . . . in practically all circumstances for the use of mankind". Now, this is a crucial ambiguity. Does the President mean freedom in times of peace or freedom in times of war? If in times of peace, there is nothing to discuss the seas, thanks mainly to the British Navy, are always free in times of peace alike in law and in fact, and the Germans do not dispute it. But what they, and some of the President's supporters, mean is freedom in times of war; and by the freedom of the seas they mean the restriction of a belligerent's naval power.

This, the President admits, "opens the wider and perhaps more difficult question of the limitation of armies and of all programmes of military preparation". Even that does not meet the point. This is not a question of limiting armaments, naval or military,