In The Fourth Year - Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) | Page 7

and drawing lines with a large black
soldierly thumbnail across maps, is--old-fashioned. They have made
their eastern treaties, it is true, in this mode, but they are still looking
for some really responsible government to keep them now that they are
made. From first to last clearly the main peace negotiations are going to
follow unprecedented courses. This preliminary discussion of war aims
by means of great public speeches, that has been getting more and more
explicit now for many months, is quite unprecedented. Apparently all
the broad preliminaries are to be stated and accepted in the sight of all
mankind before even an armistice occurs on the main, the western front.
The German diplomatists hate this process. So do a lot of ours. So do
some of the diplomatic Frenchmen. The German junkers are dodging
and lying, they are fighting desperately to keep back everything they
possibly can for the bargaining and bullying and table-banging of the
council chamber, but that way there is no peace. And when at last
Germany says snip sufficiently to the Allies' snap, and the Peace
Congress begins, it will almost certainly be as unprecedented as its
prelude. Before it meets, the broad lines of the settlement will have
been drawn plainly with the approval of the mass of mankind.

II
THE LEAGUE MUST BE REPRESENTATIVE
A Peace Congress, growing permanent, then, may prove to be the most
practical and convenient embodiment of this idea of a League of
Nations that has taken possession of the imagination of the world. A
most necessary preliminary to a Peace Congress, with such possibilities
inherent in it, must obviously be the meeting and organization of a

preliminary League of the Allied Nations. That point I would now
enlarge.
Half a world peace is better than none. There seems no reason whatever
why the world should wait for the Central Powers before it begins this
necessary work. Mr. McCurdy has been asking lately, "Why not the
League of Nations _now_?" That is a question a great number of people
would like to echo very heartily. The nearer the Allies can come to a
League of Free Nations before the Peace Congress the more prospect
there is that that body will approximate in nature to a League of
Nations for the whole world.
In one most unexpected quarter the same idea has been endorsed. The
King's Speech on the prorogation of Parliament this February was one
of the most remarkable royal utterances that have ever been made from
the British throne. There was less of the old-fashioned King and more
of the modern President about it than the most republican-minded of us
could have anticipated. For the first time in a King's Speech we heard
of the "democracies" of the world, and there was a clear claim that the
Allies at present fighting the Central Powers did themselves constitute
a League of Nations.
But we must admit that at present they do so only in a very rhetorical
sense. There is no real council of empowered representatives, and
nothing in the nature of a united front has been prepared. Unless we
provide beforehand for something more effective, Italy, France, the
United States, Japan, and this country will send separate groups of
representatives, with separate instructions, unequal status, and very
probably conflicting views upon many subjects, to the ultimate peace
discussions. It is quite conceivable--it is a very serious danger--that at
this discussion skilful diplomacy on the part of the Central Powers may
open a cleft among the Allies that has never appeared during the actual
war. Have the British settled, for example, with Italy and France for the
supply of metallurgical coal after the war? Those countries must have it
somehow. Across the board Germany can make some tempting bids in
that respect. Or take another question: Have the British arrived at
common views with France, Belgium, Portugal, and South Africa about
the administration of Central Africa? Suppose Germany makes sudden
proposals affecting native labour that win over the Portuguese and the
Boers? There are a score of such points upon which we shall find the

Allied representatives haggling with each other in the presence of the
enemy if they have not been settled beforehand.
It is the plainest common sense that we should be fixing up all such
matters with our Allies now, and knitting together a common front for
the final deal with German Imperialism. And these things are not to be
done effectively and bindingly nowadays by official gentlemen in
discreet undertones. They need to be done with the full knowledge and
authority of the participating peoples.
The Russian example has taught the world the instability of diplomatic
bargains in a time of such fundamental issues as the present. There is
little hope and little strength in