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other from opposite ends of a cable. Writing state papers," for posterity, instead of doing business, is bad enough, but when you add to it the sheer nuisance of coding, decoding, and translating, with the correlative arts of cracking codes and listening-in, you have produced a very subtle engine of mischief.

Then, too, the atmosphere in which embassies exist invites intrigue. In each capital there is a little cosmopolitan village known as the diplomatic set where gossip is a means of social prestige, and whispering a delight. Few can resist the lure of a good "inside" rumor, with all it implies of secrecy and knowing a perfectly tremendously awful lot. That is how diplomacy derives its false glamour. The ordinary business between nations may be difficult, it is nevertheless a concrete and practical business. But in the dinners and week-end parties of a capital that business is made into an artificial game for the titillation of a bored group of privileged people. By them it is refined and subtilized and screened in personality, as if the happiness of mankind

were not at stake.

'All this is complicated further by the employ

ment of propaganda to manipulate opinion. During this war the deliberate manufacture of opinion both for export and for home consumption has reached the proportion of a major industrial operation. This is not the place, nor is it yet possible without breach of confidence to discuss international propaganda freely. But some day the technic must be investigated if the judgments of peoples are to escape persistent exploitation. When the story is told, it will cover a range of subjects extending from legal censorship to reptile press, from wilful fabrication to the purchase of writers, from outright subsidy to the award of ribbons. It will include entertainment, and a vast amount of stimulated snobbishness, and the right way of conducting sightseeing tours. The art of befuddlement engages able men and draws large appropriations. There are in practically all countries Ministries of Befuddlement generally presided over by personal representatives of the leading statesman. What they emit makes unconfused dealing between nations most difficult.

It is necessary consequently to break through all this and establish a personal meeting of repre

sentatives. Two men doing business will write and write and write, and listen to what their friends say at the club, and what their wives heard from somebody else's wife, and go ever deeper into confusion. Unless they meet and talk it out, they never will catch up with each other's misunderstandings. So with governments, and that is why a league of peace cannot get along without a board of delegates and a standing committee as its executive. There is no other basis even with the best of intentions for common action and decent intercourse. If the nations are to work together responsible leaders must confront one another.

A

VI

A WORLD POOL

ND if they meet, they cannot afford to

appear in shining armor each morning after breakfast. For one thing the cost is prohibitive. To start in where the war had led us, to pile up heavy artillery, tanks, airplanes, gas, transports, dreadnoughts, submarines, destroyers for a war as great as the possibilities of science, is a proposal that no statesman in Europe dares to contemplate. That is left for theorists like Mr. Henry A. Wise Wood, and I suspect for him only in the absence of the tax bills. There cannot be another race of armaments-that is flat. There is no need to argue from reasons of humanity. Those who dream of renewing the competition, and contemplate calmly another war fought by our children, are impervious to such arguments, and no one need waste ink and breath trying to convince them. The argument does not

lie between right and wrong, but between the possible and the impossible. The world cannot arm competitively.

Nor can it re-establish a balance of power unless the supreme madness descends upon the English-speaking peoples. I take it that the Treaty of Peace will contain provisions for the disarmament of Germany as a world power. As far as we can see into the future Russia will be militarily impotent, and nobody in his senses, I suppose, intends to arm Africa, or to permit any aggressive armament in Asia. There are in fact but two great states with the resources and the wealth for really modern munitions manufacture. These are the British Empire and the United States. The only possible way in which a balance could be created now is by putting these two powers up as the leaders of rival coalitions. If this idea is abandoned for the nonsense that it is, if Britain and America work out their common purposes, then such a preponderance of power is created as to make all notion of a balance impossible. An Anglo-American entente means the substitution of a pool for a balance, and in that pool will be

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