The Genoa Conference
I
MANY during the last month have wondered why Genoa, of all places, was chosen for a great European Conference. Even Spa, where the various missions were perched each on its own hill as in an inaccessible fortress, was not so inconvenient. Here the trouble is the lateral extension of the delegates. Genoa city has the Alps almost on its back, and seems in momentary danger of being pushed over into the sea. The streets are sometimes as steep as those of Lisbon, and, tired of climbing, stop dead at a precipice. The result is that the town has had to extend laterally along the seashore. There is no seaport that looks so beautiful as Genoa, seen from the harbor, whether in the daytime, colored from the hectic paint-box of the Riviera, or, better still, at night, when you can imagine yourself on a darkened stage, with footlights running along the galleries and circles and balconies of a vast theatre.
But for all this beauty, there is very little comfort in the town, and its hotels are not its strong point. The Miramare, where the British delegation is staying, and one or two others which house delegations, have pretensions; but the average hotel, though it has many sauces, has only one bathroom.
To escape the queue at the bathroom door, we have, most of us, scattered ourselves all over the surrounding country. Mr. Lloyd George was offered a magnificent palace, islanded on a promontory by the slums round the Ansaldo works, but he wisely preferred a much smaller and cozier villa on the hills at Quarto, four miles on the Italian side of Genoa. M. Barthou has a fine place a little nearer town. But the Russians at Santa Margherita are an hour and a quarter’s run in a fast car from Genoa; and from their place to Pegli, on the French side of the town, where some of the Scandinavians are staying, must be nearly thirty miles. At Nervi, a charming little town seven miles out, are most of the Germans, Poles, Hungarians, and Spaniards. The Eden Hotel manages to find room for one British flag on its roof, I suppose out of compliment to three solitary English people staying there—Colonel Repington, my daughter, and myself. I had almost forgotten to mention the Lord Chancellor of England, Lord Birkenhead, who, when he was here, lodged on an 80-ton yacht moored off Rapallo.
It is a great disappointment that there is no American delegation; but America has excellent representation in some fine journalists, passing rich, in a place where the pound sterling is worth 80 lire, on their expenses of I forget how many score dollars a day. The rest of us are hard put to pay our bills for motor cars, so far flung is the front of the Conference. But the Italians are admirable hosts, and have done their best to make us comfortable. They have fitted up one old palace in the Via Corsica as a journalists’ hotel, and put in baths, too; only they forgot for a week to lay on the water. Another palace, known as the Casa della Stampa, has been set apart for the use of journalists during the day. It has a great staircase, a tiny bar about ten feet square, and a magnificent room for writing. This is crowded with a polyglot mob of journalists, who write incessantly from early mom to dewy eve; though what they find to write so much about, I cannot conceive, even when I read the papers next day. The room is known as the Monkey House, because its windows are never opened. And yet, when all is said, I think that a picture of the room with everyone writing, talking, or telephoning would make a fine frontispiece for a book on the working of democratic institutions. And what a helpful kindly crowd it is. Journalism is a wonderful freemasonry.
It is a liberal education to sit for half an hour in that room. Every now and then typewritten documents in one language or another are handed round from the various delegations; and it has interested me very much to observe that the messengers who hand them never can tell to what nation a man belongs, so as to give him the document in his own language. I am always being handed documents in Italian or French or Polish, never in English. My daughter, again, has been mistaken by Poles for the young wife of a Spanish ambassador, by Spaniards for a Pole, by Hungarians for a Swede, and by Russians for a Frenchwoman.
These are trivialities, but beneath them there is a profound truth: namely, that the racial distinctions in Europe are artificial and unreal. There is, in fact, a European type as distinct as the American; and if that be so, may we not look forward some day to a European equivalent of a United States of America? Get rid of competitNe armaments, suspend for a few years the miserable games of the old diplomacy, and I cannot see that the formation of a Europe federalized for the important purposes of international life is materially a more difficult problem than that with which American statesmen deal every day. Perhaps, on a broad view, the real business of the Conference is to prepare the way for that ideal.
II
What the material reasons may have been for choosing Genoa for the Conference, I do not know; but one cannot be long in the place without feeling how appropriate, on general grounds, the choice has been. It may sound ridiculous, but modern Genoa (and the same holds good of Milan, and, to a less extent, of other commercial towns of Northern Italy) has a strong spiritual affinity with Manchester. Manchester, with its doctrine of laissez faire, its free trade, and its conception of the world as an economic unity transcending nationalist divisions, arose out of the ashes of the Napoleonic wars; and many people have observed what a great impulse a rather tight-belted peace has ghen to these ideas in England. Back to Manchester (people are thinking but half-consciously), or England cannot support her population.
So with Italy. If her industrial system is to flourish, she must depend on free interchange of commodities abroad. She is not a self-contained country, with a monopoly of certain luxuries, like France; and whereas post-war unemployment has hardly affected France, in Northern Italy, especially in the engineering and shipbuilding trades, it is most acute. The great engineering shops, which sprang up like mushrooms in the war and are now mouldering to decay, are, to adopt Lord Derby’s celebrated phrase about unemployment in the North of England, Italy’s dewastated regions. Nor has she a great colonial empire, with protected markets. For these and other reasons, you find all over industrial Italy a keenness of perception of economic truths — and of that greatest, of economic truths, that nations prosper by each other’s prosperity — such as you find nowhere else in the world, except in Lancashire when times are bad. Moreover, there are few traces in Italy of bitter antiGerman sentiment. She hardly thinks of herself as having been at war with Germany, but only with Austria; and Austria’s humiliation is so complete that magnanimity costs her no great effort. The Italians, too, are a softer and gentler people, at any rate than the Northern French. Their passions are quick, but soon burn themselves out, and they are restored to sane judgment by their good nature and keen sense of humor. Make an Italian laugh, and he is your friend.
If these things be true of all Northern Italy, they are branded in the historical consciousness of Genoa. Shut out by the hills from the hinterland, her past has been on the water. The city abounds in beautiful old palaces; but, except Paganini, she has given birth to no great artist. Her fame has been in affairs of politics and war. The formal opening of the Conference, on April 10, took place in the St. George’s Palace which saw the beginnings of international banking and the mechanism of exchange; and Mr. Lloyd George and others have not been slow to remind us of the fact. Politics may divide, but the seas, and the commerce that crosses them, unite the nations of the world. Genoa must decline the honor which the Lord Chancellor in one speech put upon her, of being the port from which Columbus sailed on his first voyage to America; but she is justly proud of being his birthplace; and that fact, too, gave the Prime Minister a good mot in his opening speech. Genoa, he said, had discovered America; would that the Conference at Genoa might help America to rediscover Europe—a friendly and not unhopeful reference to America’s absence from the Conference.
It was at Genoa, too, — in a little street that you can see from one of the windows of the Monkey House, — that Mazzini, great idealist and apostle of Italian unity, was born; and from Quarto, halfway between Genoa and Nervi, Garibaldi and his Thousand Redshirts set sail on their fateful expedition. On the hall table of Mr. Lloyd George’s villa, there are two oblong copper tablets, mounted on wood, and inscribed, the one to Mazzini and the other to Garibaldi, with words expressing the Prime Minister’s admiration of those two great men.
Yes, Genoa, after all, is a singularly appropriate meeting-place, despite her inconveniences. Dante, for reasons of his own, said horrible things about the Genoese; but, however hard the classic age of Genoa may have been, with its grand heroic figure of Andrea Doria, who routed the Turks at Lepanto, the modern Genoese are more amiable than Dante ever could have been.
It may well be that history will account that first meeting in the St. George’s Palace, on April 10, as more fateful than the Vienna, Berlin, or Paris Conferences ever were. Imagine a room nearly square, and about the size of a British Methodist chapel. The limewashed walls are adorned with statues, set in niches, of ancient commercial worthies of the city (commerce and politics were one in those old days, and merchants financed their own tradewars), and with a spirited picture of St. George fighting the Dragon. (Nobody has been able to tell me why there are so many St. Georges and Dragons in Genoa.) At one end of the room is a gallery, which would comfortably seat perhaps two hundred people; but on April 10 it was crowded with some four hundred journalists, many hanging to railings or perched precariously on the pediments of statues. The floor of the room is empty, except for what look like big curtained bookcases and rows of tables and chairs. These are arranged like the sides of a square, the fourth side, nearest the gallery, being left with an opening, to give a passage through to the tables for the official reporters and interpreters.
We writing people scrambled to our places an hour before the session began. The whole of the city was beflagged, the streets and balconies were crowded with sightseers; and all along the line of approach was a fringe of graytunicked soldiers and more picturesque carabineers, with their dark cloaks, silver buttons, navy blue uniforms, pipe-clay belts, and Napoleon hats. The Italian Government had omitted neither precaution nor stately and picturesque pageantry from its preparations; and the happy crowd in the sunny streets contributed the friendliness.
We sat in the gallery, waiting for the delegates to enter. But there was no entry, only a sort of infiltration, which gradually filled up the benches below until they became full of interest. The first plans of the seats had put the five Allies at a sort of high table, separated from the rest by a narrow gangway; but, as the seats filled up, we saw that this gangway had disappeared, and that the tables and seats were continuous. It was, one hoped, a symbol.
At the top table, in the middle, are the Italians, with Signor Facta in the chair, and Signor Schanzer, the Foreign Minister, on his left. Facta is an old Giolittian, with a brisk and decisive moustache, who showed later in the sitting that he is a firm and tactful chairman. Schanzer is drowsily eloquent.
On the right of the Italians are the French, with Monsieur Barthou and Monsieur Barrère; and to their left again, the Japanese. Barthou, the head of the French delegation, is a tallish man, with literary tastes, a big moustache, and a sense of humor. He comes with a reputation as a destroyer of ministries comparable to that of Clemenceau himself. He it was who pulled Briand down after Cannes; and he showed before the Conference had been sitting for many hours that he felt like a stepfather toward it. And yet, later on, he developed a certain regard for the brat whom Briand had left on the doorstep of the French Foreign Office. Barrère, they say,is a bad man; a wasp with a thin drone of voice, a reactionary of the Quai d’Orsay, which, be it remembered, always maintains a certain independence, both of the French people and of its own Government, and lives on a special diet of diplomatic formulas and hard French logic.
What ails France, the former friend of liberal ideas in Europe, that at this hour of crisis she should suffer her rulers to make her out a courtesan, proportioning her favors to the amount of the rewards, and carrying over no sentiment or affection from one transaction to another? Had France moved at the rate of England from the psychology of war, by this time there would have been a new Europe.
On the left of the Italians are the British; Sir Robert Horne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer; Sir L. Worthington Evans, Secretary for War; Sir Philip Lloyd Graeme of the Board of Trade, and others. Horne entered politics at the last election by way of most useful work on the administrative side of the war. A Scots lawyer and a bachelor turning fifty, he has won his way to his high position by genuine capacity, — which, however, is differently measured by friends and critics, high spirits, and a magnificent fund of good stories, which he tells inimitably. He is baldish, with a sandy complexion, dances well, can do without sleep, and finds relief from tiredness in a hard game of tennis. The Secretary for War has the long lean figure that often goes with a bass voice like his, an exceedingly clear head, especially for figures, and combines an artificially heavy Philistinism with a good sense of John Bull humor. Llovd Graeme is the typical English public-school boy grown up; and among the secretaries, Sir Edward Grigg (the ‘Lord Grigg’ of the Italian papers), with his ruddy round face and his jolly laugh, has given rise to the expression, ‘as merry as a grigg.’ There are plenty of able men in the British company, among them Sir Basil Blackett of the Treasury, — a typical civil servant, learned without ponderousness, — and Sir Sydney Chapman, an economist of parts, and of mild and balanced judgment. The only criticism I have heard of the English team is that there are too many experts and not enough poker-players among them. Again, I have nearly omitted to mention Lord Birkenhead, who has been and gone, but is expected here again soon. He is still at his old game of falsifying the dismal prophesies of old fogies as to his future. A few years ago, all good family solicitors were wringing their hands over his appointment as Lord Chancellor, and already he has established his claim to rank among the great Lord Chancellors. He does everything well that he is expected to do ill.
The Germans are already in their places on the side-benches, with the Belgians between them and the British. Rathenau is the most learned and famous among them, with his slightly Mongoloid cast of features; Wirth, the Chancellor, is the typical big gemüthlich German. The Austrians are on the side-benches on the Chairman’s right; and on the cross-benches forming the base of the square are the Poles and the Russians. On the natural charm of most Poles, Dr. Skirmunt, their Foreign Minister, has imposed a taciturnity of manner rather than of speech (for when he does speak he is almost voluble), and an unusual appearance of strength. The jaws are Americanly square, the skin has a parchment clearness and pallor, and the mouth is loose and humorous.
Of the Russians, Chicherin, aristocrat by birth, looks as if he might be a watchmaker or a cultivated ironmonger. He is undoubtedly clever, but both his voice and his pen are scratchy, and the first favorable impression, made by his tall figure and oval, rather unhealthy, face, is lost. He is reputed to do all his work o’ nights, and sometimes to be sixteen hours late for an engagement. Krassin, despite a Van Dyck beard and a certain air of urbanity, is less the man of affairs than his history would incline one to think. Perhaps Litvinoff, whom one remembers as the first minister of the Bolsheviki in London, living in a mean house but full of the new gospel, is the most sensible and practical man of them all. He is a short, heavy-shouldered Jew, with a slow manner and a quick mind.
All, or nearly all, the delegates are now in their places, and the lights, low until now, are turned up. It is an animated scene, but the conversation in the crowded room sounds curiously distant, like the buzz of an insect on a hot day. For one’s mind wanders away from the room to the days before the war, which seem to have belonged to another world. Would Europe ever again be what it was then? No, not the same, for the wise men knew that we were living on the sides of a volcano; but prosperous anew, without the former arrogance, and peaceful without pride, because we have learned, through years surfeited with horror, that we are all members of the one body, and that, when one of us is morbid, the whole of Europe sickens with him. We say that a man’s head aches, when what we really mean is that the man aches in his head. And, similarly, we may say that Germany or Russia is sick, but what we really mean is that all Europe is sick through Germany and Russia. Should we, at this Conference, made wiser by the war, be able to found a new united Europe, working together for peace? The dullest man could not but tall to chastening introspection. Could we would we—rise to the height of the opportunity, and have done with playing at soldiers and with the wicked chessboard of the old diplomacy?
It is nearly four in the afternoon, and there is but one chair vacant. It is that of Mr. Lloyd George, who has earned the right to come in last by being the only begetter of the Conference, and the one who has risked most for the welfare of his child. He is undoubtedly the Man of Destiny at Genoa, whether for good or ill cannot yet be said; but the opening session had not been in progress half an hour before he established his mastery, and he has never wholly lost it since. If he could be in every part of the field at once, and also at the other end of the telegraph in Paris, where M. Poincaré is intrenched, the success of the Conference would by now be assured. As it is, considerable as his personal triumphs have been, the battle is on a wide front, and in its confused complicated infighting has been compared, not inaptly, to the trenchwarfare that set in after the Marne.
III
Readers would not wish me, with the Conference still unfinished, even to attempt an account of the deliberations, especially as by the time these words appear in print they will know the event that is now hidden. A better way of presenting its story would be through the eyes of one of its leading personalities. Which one shall this be? I have just now spoken severely of the present rulers of France, but Barthou has contracted infection with the humane ideals of the Conference, and his position, now drawn toward them, now drawn back by irksome and somewhat humiliating instructions from Paris, would make an excellent subject for analysis, if only enough were known of the details of these attractions and repulsions.
No less interesting is the position of the Germans, who, it is known, were divided among themselves at the time about the wisdom of their agreement with Russia. They all realize now what a mistake it was, and regret having given occasion to the reproach that they have changed their circumstances but not their nature. Alas, that Germans should combine so much knowledge with so little understanding.
Bénès of Czechoslovakia is one of the ablest men here, and a full account of his activities would be as interesting as a Disraeli novel. And there are the Russians—if only one could transfer one’s sympathy with Russia to their somewhat unattractive personalities. But the completest idea of the Conference is to be got by seeing it through the eyes of Mr. Lloyd George. As a representative of one of the smaller Powers said to me, ’The rest are officemen; civil servants more or less competent. He is the Man and the Idea of this Conference.'
The Man is, before everything else, a Realist. There are two sorts of politicians: those who measure all facts by the foot-rule of what they call their principles, and those who try to shape facts and events in accordance with a creative idea. Lloyd George is of the latter type; and it is surely the higher one. For what are the principles of smaller men, but the ideas of great men broken up as it were into crystals? Fixed principles in politics he has none, but that does not mean that he is unprincipled; always in his mind there is the dominating idea, at once the product and the transformer of his surroundings. And the dominating idea of Lloyd George at this Conference is the unity of Europe. He realizes more acutely than any other politician that, unless Europe can combine for certain common interests and heal its internecine conflicts, its place in the world is lost. It is only by a great effort of the imagination that we can ever conceive the break-up of the civilization in which we have grown up; but Europe is, in fact, on the brink of a miserable relapse into the Middle Ages.
And England is, economically, part of Europe. The unemployment that has followed the war is not an accident, but a solemn warning. Unless Europe can be reconstituted, England cannot support forty-five millions, or anything like that number, despite her colonial commonwealths.
The detached observer has two difficulties in understanding the policy of Mr. Lloyd George at this Conference. The first is, how the same man who pleads so eloquently for the unity of Europe could have set his hand to the Treaty of Versailles. How can the same man make himself responsible one year for expeditions against Russia, costing 100,000,000 pounds, and presently urge the recognition of those same rulers of Russia against whom he fought? Did he not promise that the Kaiser should be tried and executed, and that the Germans should be made to pay to the last farthing?
All this is true, but in justice to him it must be remembered that, when he was negotiating the Versailles Treaty, he dared not press any conviction to the point of a rupture with France; that to quarrel in the face of an enemy still armed was to jeopardize the victory; that with all his gifts he knows no economics; that the end of the war came unexpectedly soon, and found us still in a tremor of moral indignation; and that the transfer from this state to one of cool calm reflection is one of extreme difficulty. Remember, too, that the foolish tactics of the official Liberals had forced him to work with the Conservatives. But remember, finally, that everything he says now he said with greater or less distinctness in the Versailles Conference. No, his ideals noware no sudden conversion, dictated by party convenience: they are the old grain, showing again as the grime of war is cleansed away.
He has made new friends in the Conference, and one frequently comes across old enemies who boast that they now support him for the first time. Particularly gratifying has been the measure of support, slight though it is, that latterly has been given him by his old Liberal friends. He has shown no lack of ins old skill in negotiation, and his optimism has been an inspiration. Sometimes, one thinks, his very cleverness has been a snare, tempting him to brilliant but sterile tours-de-force, and putting everyone on his guard against wiles so fascinating. In some ways the finest thing he has done at the Conference, because it was so simple and so obviously sincere, was his speech at the dinner given him by the English and American journalists here. In a vibrant but quiet voice, he asked for our help in the remaking of Europe. I know one important Liberal journalist who was converted from a suspicious critic into a zealous and hopeful friend.
He certainly needed all the help he could get, for never did conference meet in circumstances of such complicated difficulty. When the revolt against him in the Conservative party began, early in the year, he missed a great opportunity. He had only to go out into the open as a Liberal, without adjective, and he could in a few months have become the leader of a united progressive party. He failed to take the opportunity, not because he did not see it, but because (as I happen to know) he felt it his duty to stand by the Conservative leaders who had helped him to carry his Irish policy. But he lost in prestige by his failure to quell the revolt. In addition, he was pursued by the Northcliffe vendetta. In a speech attacking Lord Northcliffe in the House, about a couple of years ago, he accused him of tête montée and (I am told) touched his head as he said it. That gesture has never been forgiven and has sensibly affected European history. In England the political influence of the Northcliffe papers is much less than it was, and than is commonly supposed. The chief mischief has arisen from the fact that France has mistaken the voice of the grasshoppers (another of the Georgian gibes) for the voice of the field. The result has been that official France has been in working alliance with the unofficial Opposition in England. One can recall nothing in history quite so foolish from the French side, or so discreditable on the English side, as this alliance. At this moment it is doing more to wreck the Entente than the woodenness of Poincaré or the militarist follies of the French General Staff.
IV
This Conference arose out of the Cannes Resolutions, which everyone talks about but no one ever quotes. They began by postulating that the resumption of international trade and the development of European resources are necessary, and laid down six conditions alone on which this beneficent work could be accomplished. These are as follows (I summarize for brevity’s sake):—
1. Nations have no right to dictate to each other on their internal economy and government; but
2. If foreign capital is to help, it must be assured of guaranties that its rights shall be respected.
3. Among these guaranties necessary to give foreign capital the sense of security are the recognition of public debts and the obligation to restore, or compensate, foreign interests for loss or damage caused by the measures of the Soviet Government.
4. Adequate exchange.
5. An undertaking on the part of all nations to refrain from propaganda subversive of order in other countries.
6. A pact against aggression.
These conditions have formed the basis of all the work of the Conference. Observe that the two really contentious subjects — the reconstruction of Russia and the Pact—are political, the one going back to the Prinkipo proposals, the other, part of a great project of world-peace and world-disarmament, of which the disarmament of Germany was one installment, the Agreement of Washington another. The purely economic part of the Conference’s work has given no difficulty. The trouble is, Russia and the Pact.
A week ago the British were still confident that France would not continue her policy of obstruction. They are less confident now, since M. Barthou returned from Paris, but they still hope that the Russian reply to the last Note of the Powers will give sufficient ground of agreement to make it worth while to continue the negotiations. If it does not, the Conference will very definitely have failed, and the future of Europe is dark indeed. If, on the other hand, it does, the Conference will produce solid and beneficial results.
' I want a definite answer from Russia to our Note— Yes or No,’ said M. Barthou, on his return from Paris. But the British position is very different. ‘We want evidence of Russian bona fides; if that is forthcoming, we shall continue the negotiations with or without France.’
I do not think that France, when it comes to the pinch, will stay outside the negotiations; for the danger of isolation in Europe is a real one. But, even if she stays outside, the door will remain open for her to come in whenever she likes. If France broke loose from the rest of Europe and occupied the Ruhr, we might decline to be further responsible for carrying out the provisions of the Versailles Treaty, withdraw our troops from the Rhine and our members from the various commissions; and, in that case, the Entente would be at an end. But no mere disagreement about Russia would be sufficient to bring about that disaster. There must be some overt, specific act on the part of France before that can happen.
No conference has been so difficult and, in many of its phases, so obscure, as this. The first task of Mr. Lloyd George, and one in which at first he looked like succeeding, was to produce an atmosphere of confidence. Apart from the obstruction of France, which was directed from Paris, and the malignant campaign of the Times, two events clouded the hopes of the opening days. One was the Russo-German Treaty, which set all nerves on edge. The other was the rumor that the Shell Company had taken advantage of the Conference to obtain a monopoly of Russian oil. ‘Ah! these hypocritical Britons,’ people said, ‘getting their rivals into church, and rigging up a combine while they are at their devotions.’ In fact, though there were negotiations between the Shell and the Russians before the Conference, there were none, so far as one can gather, at the Conference; and if there were, the British Government was certainly in complete ignorance of them. But the whole incident was unfortunate. Who, one wonders, set the rumor going? Certainly he could have been no friend to the Conference. When the Russian negoliations were at their most critical stage, the hostile French papers persisted in calling the old Russian capital, ‘ Petrolgrad. ’
V
Official America is not sympathetic with the Georgian projects of recognizing the Russian Government and bringing the country back into the commercial and political comity of nations; and at this stage it would not be interesting to tell the whole complicated story of the negotiations. But it is just that the point of view of the British Prime Minister should be understood in America, the more so as, owing to opposition both among his own Conservative supporters and by the French Government, he cannot carry the opposing position by direct frontal attack, but must lay siege to it, advancing his lines at one point, withdrawing them at another, so that their configuration is never the same for two days together.
Imagine the United States split up, as Europe is, into a number of jealous states. Suppose the whole of the West (which is Russia) ruined by revolution, so that it can contribute nothing but political disease to the rest of the country; the Middle West, which is Germany and Austria, paralyzed with debt; the South, say at New Orleans, working in collusion with half a dozen states for the further humiliation of Ohio and Illinois; and the New England States sick of war and bowed down by the double burdens of crushing taxation and the loss of its customers. Is there an American of these states who would not make it his first object to restore unity, to stop the competitive armaments and the insane political rivalry, which, we will suppose, is being watched by a United States of Europe with mingled disgust and alarm? Such is the problem of Europe now. Any attempt to translate it into terms of the American Continent has necessarily a ludicrous appearance, because America has enjoyed unity, — whereas Europe never has, — and fought her great war to maintain it. But what, transferred to the American Continent, reads like printer’s pi, is dreadful reality here. Only one man on this side is working to make sense of it all. Whatever his faults may have been, there is no hope for Europe at present but in him. Who is Poincaré, that he should loll in his easy-chair in Paris, with a telephone receiver at his ear, and damn the Conference people for standing up? The present state of Europe will not get better of itself, — indeed, one may well despair of the future of Europe,— if the half-baked economics and the puerile politics of revenge for which the present rulers of France stand are to prevail.
A distinguished American observed to me during the Conference that there is only one real division in Europe — between the powers like France, who are self-contained, and the powers like England, who live on their foreign trade. The cruelty of the policy of obstruction pursued by France at Genoa has lain in the fact that England could not hit back, Over and over again has Mr. Lloyd George been urged to break with France and cease the attempt to reconcile two incompatibles. He has refused, because he recognizes that Europe can never be a single family without France. France convinced herself that Mr. Lloyd George would not break with her, and pressed that advantage very ungenerously. The Georgian ideal of a united Europe has borne the strain of French unfriendliness. But the sentiment of the British people is becoming more and more antiFrench, and sooner or later, if France continues her present policy, the Entente must break. The alternative is a new grouping of European powers. It is not true to say that Lloyd George has threatened the French with this new grouping. What he has said, all the time at Genoa, to France is, ‘Help me; don’t drive my people too far, or that will be the inevitable consequence.’
The Americans may be right in their attitude toward the recognition of Russia, if they regard her problems from the standpoint of pure economics. They are, at bottom, political. There is no hope for peace in Europe with Russia left outside, no chance of a reduction of armaments, or of a permanent pact of peace. You in America may be able to regard that prospect with comparative equanimity. But for us it is the death knell of the free Europe for which we fought the war.
Genoa will not accomplish all that it set out to do, and the ideal of a united Europe is still distant. None the less, this Conference has set forces in motion which must triumph, if Europe is not to relapse into the Middle Ages. Europe will some day find its Lincoln — perhaps not in our day. But when it does, the Genoa Conference, even though it fails, will be hailed as the beginning of a new epoch; and Lloyd George’s failure — should it come to that — will be hailed as the biggest and best thing he has ever done. One thing is certain: he has fixed British policy for the next generation, and given it a liberal bias which the next few years will accentuate, but cannot alter.