Fighting For Peace Part 12

C., to the German Minister for Foreign Affairs, April 18, 1916.)

"But we cannot forget that we are in some sort and by the force of circ.u.mstances the responsible spokesmen of the rights of humanity, and that we cannot remain silent while those rights seem in process of being swept away in the maelstrom of this terrible war. We owe it to a due regard for our own rights as a nation, to our sense of duty as a representative of the rights of neutrals the world over, and to a just conception of the rights of mankind to take this stand now with the utmost solemnity and firmness." (President Wilson's Address to Congress, April 19, 1916.)

"The present German warfare against commerce is a warfare against mankind. It is a war against all nations. American s.h.i.+ps have been sunk, American lives taken, in ways which it has stirred us very deeply to learn of, but the s.h.i.+ps and people of other neutral and friendly nations have been sunk and overwhelmed in the waters in the same way. There has been no discrimination. The challenge is to all mankind. Each nation must decide for itself how it will meet it." (President Wilson's Message to Congress, April 2, 1917.)

The United States cannot go back on these words. They are fundamental in our position. I do not know whether the Allies have formally indorsed them or not. But that makes no difference. It seems to me that for America, with her traditional, unalterable devotion to the doctrine of Mare Liberum, as Grotius stated it, there can be no peace conference with a Government which is in active and flagrant violation of that principle.

I think that for us at least--we do not venture to speak for the Allies, though we believe they sympathize with our point of view--there can be no peace parley with Germany until she renounces and abandons her atrocious method of submarine warfare on merchant s.h.i.+pping.

Here, then, are the three conditions which ought to be fulfilled before we can honorably enter a conference on peace with the Imperial German Government. The first is a legitimate inference from the statements of the President. The second has been positively laid down by the President. The third is drawn, purely on my own responsibility, from his words.

First, Germany should frankly declare the aims with which she began this war, and the purposes with which she continues it on the territories which she has invaded.

Second, Germany must offer adequate guarantees that in any peace negotiations her rulers shall speak only and absolutely with the voice of the people behind them--in other words, with a democratic, not an autocratic, sanction.

Third, Germany ought to give a pledge of good faith by the abandonment of her illegal and inhuman submarine warfare on the merchant s.h.i.+pping of the world.

Is it likely that the predatory Potsdam gang will be willing to accept these three conditions soon?

I frankly confess that I do not know. Germany is in sore straits. That I know from personal observation. But I know also that she is magnificently organized, trained, and disciplined for obedience to the imperial will. She will carry her fight for world empire to the last limit.

When that limit is reached, when the German people know that the attempt of their rulers to dominate the world by war has failed, then it will be time to talk with them about the terms of peace.

III

THE TERMS OF PEACE

This is a long subject; and for that reason I mean to make it a short chapter.

1. A discussion of peace terms with our enemy, the Imperial German Government, is neither desirable nor safe under the present conditions.

Until that Government is disabused of the delusion that it has won, is winning, or will win a substantial victory in this war, it is not likely to say anything sane or reasonable about peace. A pax Germanica is what it is willing to discuss.

But that is just what we do not want. To enter such a discussion now would be both futile and perilous.

It would probably postpone the coming of that real pax humana for which the Allies have already made such great sacrifices, and for which we have pledged ourselves to fight at their side.

But meantime it is wise and right and useful to let the German people know, by such means as we can find, that we have not entered this war in the spirit of revenge or conquest, and that their annihilation or enslavement is not among the ends which we contemplate.

An admirable opportunity to give this humane and prudent a.s.surance was offered by the Pope's proposal of a Peace Conference (August, 1917).

President Wilson, with characteristic acuteness and candor, made good use of this opportunity. While declining the proposal clearly and firmly, as impossible under the present conditions, he added the following statement of the peace purposes of the United States--a statement which approaches a definition by the process of exclusion:

"Punitive damages, the dismemberment of empires, the establishment of selfish and exclusive economic leagues, we deem inexpedient, and in the end worse than futile, no proper basis for a peace of any kind, least of all for an enduring peace, that must be based upon justice and fairness and the common rights of mankind." (President Wilson's Note to His Holiness the Pope, August 27, 1917.)

Thus far (and in my judgment no farther) we may go in an indirect, third-personal discussion of the terms of peace with our enemy.

2. On the other hand, a full discussion of the terms of peace with our friends, the allied nations, will be most profitable--indeed, it is absolutely necessary.

The sooner it comes--the more frank, thorough, and confidential it is--the better!

The Allies, as President Wilson said in the address already quoted (January 22, 1917), have stated their terms of peace "with sufficient definiteness to imply details."

These terms have been summed up again and again in three general words:

RESt.i.tUTION, REPARATION, GUARANTEES FOR THE FUTURE.

It is for us to discuss the details which are implied in these terms, not with our enemy, but with our friends who have borne the brunt of this German war against peace.

Nothing which would make their sacrifice vain could ever satisfy the heart and conscience of the United States.

We cannot honorably accept a peace which would leave Belgium, Luxembourg, Servia, Montenegro, Roumania crushed and helpless in the hands of their captors.

We cannot honorably accept a peace which would leave our sister-republic France hopelessly exposed to the same kind of an a.s.sault which Germany made upon her in 1870 and in 1914.

We cannot honorably accept a peace which would leave Great Britain crippled and powerless to work with us in the maintenance of the freedom of the sea.

We cannot honorably accept a peace which would leave the Italian demand for unity unsatisfied, and the new Russian Republic helpless before its foes. Such, it seems to me, are the principles which must guide and govern us in the coming conference with our friends about the terms of peace.

In regard to the right of the peoples of the world, small or great, to determine their own form of government and their own action, we are fully committed. This principle is fundamental to our existence as a nation. President Wilson has reaffirmed it again and again, never more clearly or significantly than in his address to the Senate on January 22, 1917.

"And there is a deeper thing involved than even equality of rights among organized nations. No peace can last which does not recognize and accept the principle that governments derive all their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that no right anywhere exists to hand people about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were property.

"I take it for granted, for instance, if I may venture upon a single example, that statesmen everywhere are agreed that there should be a united, independent, and autonomous Poland, and that henceforth inviolable security of life, of wors.h.i.+p, and of industrial and social development should be guaranteed to all peoples who have lived hitherto under the power of governments devoted to a faith and purpose hostile to their own."

This "example" must be interpreted in its full bearing upon all the questions which are likely to come up in the conference in regard to the terms of peace.

There is one more fixed point in the terms of a peace which the United States and the Allies can accept with honor. That is the formation, after this war is ended, of a compact, an alliance, a league, a union--call it what you will--of free democratic nations, pledged to use their combined forces, diplomatic, economic, and military, against the beginning of war by any nation which has not previously submitted its cause to international inquiry, conciliation, arbitration, or judicial hearing.

Here, again, experience enables me to throw a little new light upon the situation. In November, 1914, on my way home to America for surgical treatment, I had the privilege of conveying a personal, unofficial message to Was.h.i.+ngton from the British Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sir Edward (now Viscount) Grey. Remember, at this time America was neutral, and the "League to Enforce Peace" had not been formed.

This was the substance of the message: "The presence and influence of America in the council of peace after the war will be most welcome to us provided we can be a.s.sured of two things: First, that America stands for the restoration of all that Germany has seized in Belgium and France.

Second, that America will enter and support, by force if necessary, a league of nations pledged to resist and punish any war begun without previous submission of the cause to international investigation and judgment."

This was the message that I took to Was.h.i.+ngton in 1914. Since that time the "League to Enforce Peace" has been organized in America (June 17, 1915). In my opinion it would be better named the "League to Defend Peace." But the name makes little difference. It is the principle, the idea, that counts.

This idea has been publicly approved by the leading spokesmen of all the allied nations, and notably by President Wilson in his speech at the League banquet, May 27, 1916, and in his address to the Senate, January 22, 1917, in which he said:

"Mere terms of peace between the belligerents will not satisfy even the belligerents themselves. Mere agreements may not make peace secure. It will be absolutely necessary that a force be created as a guarantor of the permanency of the settlement so much greater than the force of any nation now engaged in any alliance hitherto formed or projected that no nation, no probable combination of nations, could face or withstand it.

If the peace presently to be made is to endure it must be a peace made secure by the organized major force of mankind."

Consider for a moment what such an organization would mean.

It would mean, first of all, the strongest possible condemnation of the att.i.tude and action of Germany and her a.s.sistants in plotting, choosing, beginning, and forcing the present war upon the world.

It is precisely because she disdained and refused to submit the Austro-Servian quarrel, and her own secret plans and purposes to investigation, conference, judicial inquiry, that her blood-guiltiness is most flagrant, and her criminal a.s.sault upon the world's peace cries to Heaven for punishment.

Moreover, such an organization of free democratic states would mean a practical step toward a new era of international relations. It would amount, in effect, to what Premier Ribot, in his recent address at the anniversary of the battle of the Marne, called "a league of common defense." It would be a new kind of treaty of alliance--open, not secret--made by peoples, not by monarchs--an alliance against wars of aggression and conquest--an alliance against all wars whose beginners are unwilling to submit their cause to the common judgment of mankind.

Such an open treaty of defense would practically condemn and cancel all secret treaties for offensive war as treasonable conspiracies against the commonwealth of the world.