The Proud Tower (52 page)

As an old-fashioned Liberal automatically disposed to disarmament,
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C.-B. in his first public speech as Prime Minister somewhat rashly pledged his party to work for it at the coming Conference, although the Czar’s invitation, as opposed to 1898, had conspicuously omitted to mention the subject. Nevertheless, C.-B. boldly took it on, as well as a pledge to work for a permanent court of arbitration. “What nobler role,” he asked, “could this great country assume than to place itself at the head of a League of Peace?” This may have somewhat overstepped the view of a hard bloc within his own Cabinet composed of Asquith, Haldane and Grey, who as Liberal Imperialists were not altogether as peace-minded as himself. With unexpected toughness at seventy, C.-B. had withstood their attempt to elbow him into the House of Lords so as to obtain leadership of the Commons for Asquith. He detested them all and was enjoying his triumph.

Soon the relentless dilemma that attaches to office caught up with his Government. After years of excoriating the Tories as warmongers, the Liberals now suddenly found themselves responsible for the country’s safety. Although committed by election pledges to reduction of military and naval expenditure, once the General Election confirmed them in office they were not anxious to repudiate the work of modernizing the armed forces which the Tories had begun. C.-B. referred to the members of the Committee of Imperial Defence, Fisher, Lord Esher, and Sir George Clark, presumably in that order, as Damnable, Domineering and Dictatorial; but he had inherited them, not to mention the dreadnought program. Haldane, as Secretary for War, undertook to cut £3,000,000 from the Army estimates while at the same time, through sweeping reforms, achieving a more efficient fighting arm, as Fisher had done in the Navy. He created a General Staff and a reserve force called the Territorials. Officers’ Training Corps were formed in the public schools and universities and supplied with arms, ammunition and instructors by the government. Young men responded with enthusiasm. The calling bugle and screaming fife worked their magic, though chiefly upon the officer class. Recruitment of private soldiers for the Territorials dwindled after the first few years.

H.M.S. Dreadrought
was commissioned in 1906, a strange triumph for the Liberals, and Fisher was demanding construction of three more dreadnoughts for 1907. He threatened, if refused, to resign and take three other members of the Board of Admiralty with him. The Liberal dilemma was painful but not beyond solution. By insisting that the Navy was defensive (which, considering the nature of blockade, was arguable), the Government managed to give Fisher his dreadnoughts and absolve the Liberal conscience at the same time.

Once more the nations found themselves committed to go to The Hague and intensely disliking the prospect. All through 1906 and half of 1907 they put off the uncomfortable day while pursuing desultory discussions of agenda. The Russian program, circulated in April, 1906, proposed arbitration and laws of war as subjects for discussion while continuing to ignore disarmament. Emerging from foreign defeats and domestic revolution, Russia was concerned with replenishing, not reducing, armaments and had called the Conference only to retrieve the initiative from the United States. As far as Izvolsky, the current Russian Foreign Minister, was concerned, disarmament was “a craze of Jews, Socialists and hysterical women.” Since the advent of the Liberals in England, however, the question of disarmament could not be escaped. To put it on the agenda after the burial of 1899 was like propping up a dead man; not to put it on was to admit hopelessness and invite public condemnation. At a meeting of the Interparliamentary Union in London in April, 1906, C.-B. urged the delegates to insist at home “in the name of humanity” on their governments going to The Hague with serious intent to decrease military and naval budgets. The meeting was hardly a happy one, for on opening day, as delegates crowded around to congratulate the proud members of the youngest parliament, word came that the Czar had dissolved the Duma. C.-B., who was to give the address of welcome, was so shocked that he challenged the Imperial decision with the words, “Under one form or another the Duma will revive. In all sincerity, we can say, ‘The Duma is dead; long live the Duma!’ ” His outspokenness earned an official Russian protest.

As to disarmament the Kaiser let it be known that if it was brought up for discussion in any form, his delegates would leave the Conference which in any case he “devoutly hoped would not take place.” He was already being blamed at home by the militant Pan-Germans and Crown Prince’s party for yielding at Algeciras instead of fighting, and German diplomats hinted to other ambassadors that he might even be deposed if Germany were forced to agree to any form of arms limitation arising from the Conference. During one of the periodic visits of King Edward required by royal relations, with usually disastrous results, uncle and nephew discussed the forthcoming Conference while remaining for once reasonably amiable, perhaps because on this subject they were not far apart. The King “entirely disapproved” of the Conference, the Kaiser wrote to Roosevelt, “and himself took the initiative of telling me that he considered it a ‘humbug.’ ” According to his report, King Edward said it was not only useless, since in case of need nobody would feel bound by its decisions, but even dangerous as likely to produce more friction than harmony.

To Roosevelt it was apparent that modern Germany, “alert, aggressive, military and industrial,… despises the Hague Conference and the whole Hague idea.” His anxiety at the time was lest the British Liberal Government would “go to any maudlin extreme at the Hague Conference.” He told the new British military attaché, Count Gleichen, a cousin of the King, that he hoped Haldane and Grey would not let themselves be “carried away by sentimental ideas.” He was afraid they might be “swayed by their party in that direction … but don’t let them do it.” He talked fully to Gleichen of his current idea for a limitation on the size of battleships rather than on naval budgets. Unaware that his proposed top limit of 15,000 tons was already outdated by the monstrous hulk then lying in Portsmouth dockyard, Roosevelt explained that he wanted to see the British Navy remain in the same relative position vis-à-vis the navies of Europe and Japan as at present. Conveying the message to the King, Gleichen added that he had found lunch at Roosevelt’s home in Oyster Bay “extremely meagre,” and with only two Negro servants in attendance and no one to meet him at the station, arrangements rather primitive altogether.

Once the
Dreadnought
was commissioned, the United States Navy could not lag behind and two of the new class were authorized by Congress at Roosevelt’s request in January, 1907. The Navy, he wrote to President Eliot, was an “infinitely more potent factor for peace than all the peace societies” and the Panama Canal far more important than The Hague. With regard to the Conference he added, “My chief trouble will come from the fantastic visionaries who are crazy to do the impossible.”

One of these was Andrew Carnegie, whose company, when he sold it in 1900 to Morgan for $250,000,000 in bonds, was producing one-fourth of all the steel in the United States and as much as all of England. Less shy than Nobel, Carnegie was now devoting his profits, while he was still alive, to the welfare of humanity. Next to providing libraries which presumably might make men wiser, he hoped also to make them more pacific, and had agreed on the urging of Andrew White to donate a building for the Arbitration Tribunal at The Hague.

He was now busily engaged between the White House and Whitehall in an effort to promote the cause of the Conference, but Roosevelt had lost interest after the British refused to consider his proposal of a limit on the size of battleships. However, Roosevelt managed to avoid commitments by telling highly placed correspondents what they wanted to hear. He was in correspondence with the sovereigns of both Germany and England, whom he addressed easily as “My Dear Emperor William” and “My Dear King Edward.”

By now scarcely any public official except C.-B. and Secretary Root wanted disarmament on the agenda. Root thought it should be discussed even if nothing were accomplished, because, he said, results are never achieved without a number of failures: “failures are necessary steps toward success.” C.-B. too felt the world must keep on trying. Though a childless man whose wife, his closest companion, had just died and who himself was within a year of his death, he continued his own efforts. In March, 1907, he took the unusual course for a Prime Minister of publishing an article on a current question of policy. Under the title “The Hague Conference and the Limitation of Armaments,” it appeared in the first issue of a new liberal weekly, the
Nation
(of London). Although armaments and engines of war had increased since the First Conference, he wrote, so had the peace movement, which was now “incomparably stronger and more constant.” He thought disarmament should be given a chance to make the same progress as arbitration, which now had acquired a “moral authority undreamt of in 1898.” Britain, he pointed out, had already reduced military and naval expenditures (which was true if the program for the new dreadnoughts was left out of account) and would be willing to go further if other nations would do likewise. Admittedly this would not affect Britain’s naval supremacy, since it would freeze the status quo, but the Prime Minister insisted on the thesis that the British Navy was not a challenge to any state or group of states. The argument was narrow steering between the rocks of conscience and the shoals of political reality and it pleased nobody. The Germans took it as proof of a British plot in concert with France and Russia to force the issue at The Hague before Germany could make good
H.M.S. Dreadnought’s
lead. Bülow announced publicly in the Reichstag that Germany would refuse to discuss disarmament at the Conference. King Edward was equally irritated by the Prime Minister’s espousal of disarmament, as bad as his support of women’s suffrage. “I suppose he will support the Channel Tunnel Bill next week!” he said in disgust, but from that particular horror C.-B. refrained.

As Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey professed himself ready at all times to talk budgetary limitation at The Hague. Haldane talked earnestly to the American diplomat, Henry White, of the need for reducing armaments and had gone to Germany in 1906 to feel out possible ground for an agreement. But the hard fact behind the talk was that neither the British Government nor any other had any intention of limiting its freedom to arm as it pleased. The only person to mention the role of the munitions manufacturers was the King of Italy, who suggested that disarmament would cause “an outburst of opposition” among them and he was sure the Kaiser would never consent to “clipping the wings of Krupp.” When, on behalf of Russia, Professor de Martens toured the capitals to gather opinions as Muraviev, now dead, had done before, the American Ambassador in Berlin summarized the matter flatly: “De Martens does not believe and nobody believes … there is the slightest likelihood of any steps toward practical reduction of armaments being taken at the next Hague Conference.”

These were the private exchanges of diplomats, but peace could not be so rudely handled before the public, at least not in England and the United States. It was not a question of the great mute unknown passive mass. Who knew what opinion lay there? Mass opinion when formed would blow with the winds of circumstance and more likely with the loud circumstance of war than with peace. The vocal opinion, however, of the thinking public—especially of the peace movement—would be outraged by exclusion of disarmament from the Hague agenda. Peace Congresses meeting annually—at Glasgow in 1901, Monaco in 1902, Rouen and Le Havre in 1903, Boston in 1904, Lucerne in 1905, Milan in 1906—passed resolutions demanding that governments make some serious effort to reach a truce on armaments. Baroness von Suttner, who had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1905, and her colleagues in the peace societies and at the annual Lake Mohonk conferences in America, agitated as energetically as ever. In 1907 Jane Addams published a book,
Newer Ideals of Peace
, incurring Roosevelt’s displeasure but adding a respected voice to the chorus.

Carnegie, seizing on C.-B.’s idea of a League of Peace or League of Nations, as he variously called it, decided the Kaiser was the man to establish it because “I think he is the man responsible for war on earth.” Having several times been invited to visit by the Kaiser, who liked millionaires, he now set forth to convince him of his duty. By letter in advance he explained how the Kaiser could earn in history the title of the “Peacemaker” and added in a covering letter to the American Ambassador, “He and our President could make a team if they were only hitched up together in the cause of Peace.” At Kiel, on his arrival in June, 1907, he dined twice with the Kaiser and was invited to a third audience with results eerily echoing the interviews of Stead with the Czar and Baroness von Suttner with Roosevelt. Carnegie found his monarch “a wonderful man, so bright, humorous, and with a sweet smile. I think he can be trusted and declares himself for peace.… Very engaging—very; can’t help liking him.” Once out of reach of the sweet smile, Carnegie remembered his mission and wrote back urging a great gesture by the Kaiser at The Hague to convince the world that he was in reality the “apostle of peace.”

Words and gestures of this kind were a habitual weakness of the peace advocates, with effect on the public, if any, that could only be deceptive. At the same time, political leaders told the public only what sounded virtuous and benign, while reserving the hard realities for each other. Only one man tried to instruct the public to take an honest look at war. Mahan, now an Admiral, continued to publish articles on the necessity of the free exercise of fighting strength and especially, in anticipation of the Conference, on the danger of a renewed demand for immunity of private property at sea. The military function seemed to him to need protection from the uncomprehending view of the layman. “The prepossession of the public mind in most countries,” he wrote worriedly to Roosevelt after a tour abroad, was such that the question of war was “in danger of being misjudged and ‘rushed.’ ”