CHAPTER X

PREPAREDNESS AND PERMANENT PEACE

Our principles are well known. It is not necessary to avow them again. We believe in political liberty and founded our great Government to obtain it, the liberty of men and of peoples-of men to choose their own lives, and of peoples to choose their own allegiance.

Our ambition also all the world has knowledge of. It is not only to be free and prosperous ourselves, but also to be the friend and thoughtful partisan of those who are free or who desire freedom the world over. If we have had aggressive purposes and covetous ambitions, they were the fruit of our thoughtless youth as a nation, and we have put them aside. We shall, I confidently believe, never again take another foot of territory by conquest. We shall never in any circumstances seek to make an independent people subject to our dominion; because we believe, we passionately believe, in the right of every people to choose their own allegiance and be free of masters altogether.

For ourselves we wish nothing but the full liberty of self-development; and with ourselves in this great matter we associate all the peoples of our own hemisphere.-Address to Manhattan Club, New York, November 1915.

THERE is no more than a superficial inconsistency, if there is even that, between President Wilson's advocacy of a programme of "preparedness," naval, military, and commercial, unprecedented in the history of the United States, and his unqualified support of proposals directed towards so preserving the peace of the world as to render the projected fleets and armies mere wasteful superfluities. Mr. Wilson is an idealist,

but he is not a visionary. The Mexican campaign and the European War had awakened America with a sudden shock to the peril of her own defencelessness. That peril, moreover,

lay not ten years ahead, or five, or two. It stood already at the very door. Mr. Wilson himself had spoken in language of the utmost gravity of not knowing what the morrow, literally the morrow, might bring forth. Even the certainty --if there had been any certainty, and there was none-that after the war the projected League of Peace would fulfil all the hopes centred on, it would not have relieved the President of the necessity of safeguarding his country's interests during that undetermined period, the duration of the war.

But the idea of preparedness and the idea of a League of Peace were not merely not irreconcilable, they were intimately associated. The basis of the League to Enforce Peace, whose principles Mr. Wilson accepted and endorsed, was not the elimination of force, but the application of force to the defence of justice and right. The official proposals of the League included a clause enacting that "the signatory Powers shall jointly use forthwith both their economic and military forces against any one of their number that goes to war, or commits acts of hostility, against another of the signatories before any question arising has been submitted " [to the judicial tribunal or council of conciliation]. If the United States was prepared to commit herself to such proposals as that, she must be prepared to back her word with such military contribution as her popu

lation, area, and importance in the family of nations required.

There was, in the view of most Americans, another and a stronger reason why the United States should arm herself in the interests of peace. No man could foresee the result of the European War or the nature of the settlement, but it was reasonable to assume that for some years at least Europe would be left divided into two hostile and embittered groups, one, indeed, definitely predominant, but the other still sufficiently powerful to perpetuate anxiety and uncertainty as to the future. There would, moreover, in the event of the Allies' victory, be a number of small nationalities whose security would demand international guarantees more effective than the agreements that had failed to save Belgium from destruction in 1914. If the United States entertained any thought of securing the triumph of justice at an international council by throwing her weight on the side of one or other of two opposing groups, if her backing was to give any assurance to a reconstituted Belgium or an independent Poland or a new Jugoslavia, she must, so her politicians contended, take with her into the council of the nations arguments more potent than fair words and high ideals.

Such intervention in European affairs would, of course, mean complete abandonment of America's traditional policy of isolation; but the President and most other practical observers of political development realized that the days of isolation were already at an end. Mr. Wilson

declared publicly in 1916, in language that startled and alarmed many of his fellow-citizens, that this was the last world-war America could ever keep out of; and if she believed herself doomed in the future to submit her cause to the bitter arbitrament of war there was overwhelming reason why she should take a part, and a leading part, in the endeavour to substitute for that the higher arbitrament of peaceful settlement. The belief that a period of armed and guarded peace must precede any future era of disarmament was a complete justification of President Wilson's simultaneous advocacy of a larger Army and Navy and of a League to secure the peace of the world.

But the first purpose of preparedness was national security. From the day of the destruction of the Lusitania war with Germany was always a real and perilous possibility; and the necessity of sending a punitive expedition into Mexico had revealed the comparative worthlessness of the State militias even for the defence of the one land frontier where military operations might be necessary. A hardly less convincing revelation of America's ability to depend on her own resources had been provided in another sphere by the sudden toll levied at the outbreak of war on the mercantile marine of the world. German merchant ships had been swept from the sea before the first month of war had ended, and thousands of vessels on the register of Great Britain and other Allied Powers were withdrawn from their regular vocation to serve as

fleet-auxiliaries, mine-sweepers, transports, supplyships, and patrols. The available carrying capacity of the world had suddenly become hopelessly unequal to the needs of the world, and as American exporters found freight rates soaring to unknown heights, and goods accumulating on the quays for lack of ships to carry them away, they realized for the first time what America's poverty in merchant tonnage involved.

Some 8 per cent. of American foreign trade had hitherto been carried in American vessels, and even those vessels became steadily fewer through submarine losses as the war wore on. The day had been when America was a seafaring nation. The New England colonies bred a race of enterprising and courageous seamen. In the first decade of the nineteenth century over 90 per cent. of American produce was carried in American bottoms and less than 10 per cent. in foreign. By the first decade of the twentieth those proportions had been almost precisely reversed. Any preparedness policy that did not include immediate and comprehensive measures for the acquisition or construction of a mercantile marine would fall far short of meeting the national need.

Accordingly the Administration, as soon as the lessons of Mexico and the European War had been assimilated, decided on proposals falling under three heads a larger Navy, a larger Army, and an adequate mercantile marine. Of these the naval programme took first place. America has