In the first place, it is agreed that there would have to be an identical treaty between all the great powers of the world binding them to certain things.It would have to provide:---That the few great industrial states capable of producing modern war equipment should take over and control completely the manufacture of all munitions of war in the world.And that they should absolutely close the supply of such material to all the other states in the world.This is a far easier task than many people suppose.War has now been so developed on its mechanical side that the question of its continuance or abolition rests now entirely upon four or five great powers.
Next comes the League of Peace idea; that there should be an International Tribunal for the discussion and settlement of international disputes.That the dominating powers should maintain land and sea forces only up to a limit agreed upon and for internal police use only or for the purpose of enforcing the decisions of the Tribunal.That they should all be bound to attack and suppress any power amongst them which increases its war equipment beyond its defined limits.
That much has already been broached in several quarters.But so far is not enough.It ignores the chief processes of that economic war that aids and abets and is inseparably a part of modern international conflicts.If we are to go as far as we have already stated in the matter of international controls, then we must go further and provide that the International Tribunal should have power to consider and set aside all tariffs and localised privileges that seem grossly unfair or seriously irritating between the various states of the world.It should have power to pass or revise all new tariff, quarantine, alien exclusion, or the like legislation affecting international relations.Moreover, it should take over and extend the work of the International Bureau of Agriculture at Rome with a view to the control of all staple products.It should administer the sea law of the world, and control and standardise freights in the common interests of mankind.Without these provisions it would be merely preventing the use of certain weapons; it would be doing nothing to prevent countries strangling or suffocating each other by commercial warfare.It would not abolish war.
Now upon this issue people do not seem to me to be yet thinking very clearly.It is the exception to find anyone among the peace talkers who really grasps how inseparably the necessity for free access for everyone to natural products, to coal and tropical products, e.g.free shipping at non-discriminating tariffs, and the recognition by a Tribunal of the principle of common welfare in trade matters, is bound up with the ideal of a permanent world peace.But any peace that does not provide for these things will be merely laying down of the sword in order to take up the cudgel.And a "peace" that did not rehabilitate industrial Belgium, Poland, and the north of France would call imperatively for the imposition upon the Allies of a system of tariffs in the interests of these countries, and for a bitter economic "war after the war" against Germany.That restoration is, of course, an implicit condition to any attempt to set up an economic peace in the world.
These things being arranged for the future, it would be further necessary to set up an International Boundary Commission, subject to certain defining conditions agreed upon by the belligerents, to re-draw the map of Europe, Asia, and Africa.This war does afford an occasion such as the world may never have again of tracing out the "natural map" of mankind, the map that will secure the maximum of homogeneity and the minimum of racial and economic freedom.All idealistic people hope for a restored Poland.But it is a childish thing to dream of a contented Poland with Posen still under the Prussian heel, with Cracow cut off, and without a Baltic port.These claims of Poland to completeness have a higher sanction than the mere give and take of belligerents in congress.
Moreover this International Tribunal, if it was indeed to prevent war, would need also to have power to intervene in the affairs of any country or region in a state of open and manifest disorder, for the protection of foreign travellers and of persons and interests localised in that country but foreign to it.
Such an agreement as I have here sketched out would at once lift international politics out of the bloody and hopeless squalor of the present conflict.It is, I venture to assert, the peace of the reasonable man in any country whatever.But it needs the attention of such a disengaged people as the American people to work it out and supply it with--weight.It needs putting before the world with some sort of authority greater than its mere entire reasonableness.Otherwise it will not come before the minds of ordinary men with the effect of a practicable proposition.I do not see any such plant springing from the European battlefields.It is America's supreme opportunity.And yet it is the common sense of the situation, and the solution that must satisfy a rational German as completely as a rational Frenchman or Englishman.It has nothing against it but the prejudice against new and entirely novel things.
3
In throwing out the suggestion that America should ultimately undertake the responsibility of proposing a world peace settlement, I admit that I run counter to a great deal of European feeling.Nowhere in Europe now do people seem to be in love with the United States.But feeling is a colour that passes.And the question is above matters of feeling.Whether the belligerents dislike Americans or the Americans dislike the belligerents is an incidental matter.The main question is of the duty of a great and fortunate nation towards the rest of the world and the future of mankind.
