There is the clearest evidence that nearly everyone is anxious to get out of the war now.Nobody at all, except perhaps a few people who may be called to account, and a handful of greedy profit-seekers, wants to keep it going.Quietly perhaps and unobtrusively, everyone I know is now trying to find the way out of the war, and I am convinced that the same is the case in Germany.That is what makes the Peace-at-any-price campaign so exasperating.It is like being chased by clamorous geese across a common in the direction in which you want to go.But how are we to get out--with any credit--in such a way as to prevent a subsequent collapse into another war as frightful?
At present three programmes are before the world of the way in which the war can be ended.The first of these assumes a complete predominance of our Allies.It has been stated in general terms by Mr.Asquith.Evacuation, reparation, due punishment of those responsible for the war, and guarantees that nothing of the sort shall happen again.There is as yet no mention of the nature of these guarantees.Just exactly what is to happen to Poland, Austria, and the Turkish Empire does not appear in this prospectus.The German Chancellor is equally elusive.The Kaiser has stampeded the peace-at-any-price people of Great Britain by proclaiming that Germany wants peace.We knew that.But what sort of peace? It would seem that we are promised vaguely evacuation and reparation on the western frontier, and in addition there are to be guarantees--but it is quite evident that they are altogether different guarantees from Mr.Asquith's--that nothing of the sort is ever to happen again.
The programme of the British and their Allies seems to contemplate something like a forcible disarmament and military occupation of Belgium, the desertion of Serbia and Russia, and the surrender to Germany of every facility for a later and more successful German offensive in the west.But it is clear that on these terms as stated the war must go on to the definite defeat of one side or the other, or a European chaos.They are irreconcilable sets of terms.
Yet it is hard to say how they can be modified on either side, if the war is to be decided only between the belligerents and by standards of national interest only, without reference to any other considerations.Our Allies would be insane to leave the Hohenzollern at the end of the war with a knife in his hand, after the display he has made of his quality.To surrender his knife means for the Hohenzollern the abandonment of his dreams, the repudiation of the entire education and training of Germany for half a century.When we realise the fatality of this antagonism, we realise how it is that, in this present anticipation of hell, the weary, wasted and tormented nations must still sustain their monstrous dreary struggle.And that is why this thought that possible there may be a side way out, a sort of turning over of the present endlessly hopeless game into a new and different and manageable game through the introduction of some external factor, creeps and spreads as I find it creeping and spreading.
That is what the finer intelligences of America are beginning to realise, and why men in Europe continually turn their eyes to America, with a surmise, with a doubt.
A point of departure for very much thinking in this matter is the recent speech of President Wilson that heralded the present discussion.All Europe was impressed by the truth, and by President Wilson's recognition of the truth, that from any other great war after this America will be unable to abstain.Can America come into this dispute at the end to insist upon something better than a new diplomatic patchwork, and so obviate the later completer Armageddon? Is there, above the claims and passions of Germany, France, Britain, and the rest of them, a conceivable right thing to do for all mankind, that it might also be in the interest of America to support? Is there a Third Party solution, so to speak, which may possibly be the way out from this war?
And further I would go on to ask, is not this present exchange of Notes, appealing to the common sense of the world, really the beginning, and the proper beginning, of the unprecedented Peace Negotiations to end this unprecedented war? And, I submit, the longer this open discussion goes on before the doors close upon the secret peace congress the better for mankind.
2
Let me sketch out here what I conceive to be the essentials of a world settlement.Some of the items are the mere commonplaces of everyone who discusses this question; some are less frequently insisted upon.I have been joining up one thing to another, suggestions I have heard from this man and that, and I believe that it is really possible to state a solution that will be acceptable to the bulk of reasonable men all about the world.
Directly we put the panic-massacres of Dinant and Louvain, the crime of the /Lusitania/ and so on into the category of symptoms rather than essentials, outrages that call for special punishments and reparations, but that do not enter further into the ultimate settlement, we can begin to conceive a possible world treaty.Let me state the broad outlines of this pacification.The outlines depend one upon the other; each is a condition of the other.It is upon these lines that the thoughtful, as distinguished from the merely the combative people, seem to be drifting everywhere.
