Volume II Part 6 (1/2)

Overwork, or perhaps mainly the indescribable strain on the nerves and vitality of men, caused by this experience, for which in fact men are not built, puts one of our staff after another in bed. None has been seriously sick: the malady takes some form of ”grip.” On the whole we've been pretty lucky in spite of this almost regular temporary breakdown of one man after another. I've so far escaped.

But I am grieved to hear that Whitlock is abed--”no physical ailment whatever--just worn out,” his doctor says. I have tried to induce him and his wife to come here and make me a visit; but one characteristic of this war-malady is the conviction of the victim that he is somehow necessary to hold the world together. About twice a week I get to the golf links and take the risk of the world's falling apart and thus escape both illness and its illusions.

”I cannot begin to express my deep anxiety and even uneasiness about the relations of these two great governments and peoples,” Page wrote about this time. ”The friends.h.i.+p of the United States and Great Britain is all that now holds the world together. It is the greatest a.s.set of civilization left. All the cargoes of copper and oil in the world are not worth as much to the world. Yet when a s.h.i.+pper's cargo is held up he does not think of civilization and of the future of mankind and of free government; he thinks only of his cargo and of the indignity that he imagines has been done him; and what is the American Government for if not to protect his rights? Of course he's right; but there must be somebody somewhere who sees things in their right proportion. The man with an injury rushes to the Department of State--quite properly. He is in a mood to bring England to book. Now comes the critical stage in the journey of his complaint. The State Department hurries it on to me--very properly; every man's right must be guarded and defended--a right to get his cargo to market, a right to get on a steamer at Queenstown, a right to have his censored telegram returned, any kind of a right, if he have a right. Then the Department, not wittingly, I know, but humanly, almost inevitably, in the great rush of overwork, sends his 'demands' to me, catching much of his tone and apparently insisting on the removal of his grievance as a right, without knowing all the facts in the case. The telegrams that come to me are full of 'protests' and 'demands'--protest and demand this, protest and demand that. A man from Mars who should read my book of telegrams received during the last two months would find it difficult to explain how the two governments have kept at peace. It is this serious treatment of trifling grievances which makes us feel here that the exactions and dislocations and necessary disturbances of this war are not understood at home.

”I a.s.sure you (and there are plenty of facts to prove it) that this Government (both for unselfish and selfish reasons) puts a higher value on our friends.h.i.+p than on any similar thing in the world. They will go--they are going--the full length to keep it. But, in proportion to our tendency to nag them about little things will the value set on our friends.h.i.+p diminish and will their confidence in our sincerity decline.”

The note which Lord Bryce and Lord Northcliffe so dreaded reached the London Emba.s.sy in October, 1915. The State Department had spent nearly six months in preparing it; it was the American answer to the so-called blockade established by the Order in Council of the preceding March.

Evidently its contents fulfilled the worst forebodings:

_To Edward M. House_

London, November 12, 1915.

DEAR HOUSE:

I have a great respect for the British Navy. Admiral Jellicoe now has under his command 3,000 s.h.i.+ps of all sorts-far and away the biggest fleet, I think, that was ever a.s.sembled. For the first time since the ocean was poured out, one navy practically commands all the seas: nothing sails except by its grace. It is this fleet of course that will win the war. The beginning of the end--however far off yet the end may be--is already visible by reason of the economic pressure on Germany. But for this fleet, by the way, London would be in ruins, all its treasure looted; every French seacoast city and the Italian peninsula would be as Belgium and Poland are; and thousands of English women would be violated--just as dead French girls are found in many German trenches that have been taken in France. Hence I greatly respect the British fleet.

We have a good navy, too, for its size, and a naval personnel as good as any afloat. I hear--with much joy--that we are going to make our navy bigger--as much bigger (G.o.d save the mark!) as Bryan will permit.

Now, whatever the future bring, since any fighting enterprise that may ever be thrust on us will be just and justified, we must see to it that we win, as doubtless we shall and as. .h.i.therto we always have won. We must be dead sure of winning. Well, whatever fight may be thrust on us by anybody, anywhere, at any time, for any reason--if it only be generally understood beforehand that our fleet and the British fleet shoot the same language, there'll be no fight thrust upon us. The biggest bully in the world wouldn't dare kick the sorriest dog we have. Here, therefore, is a Peace Programme for you--the only basis for a permanent peace in the world. There's no further good in having venerable children build houses of sand at The Hague; there's no further good in peace organizations or protective leagues to enforce peace. We had as well get down to facts. So far as ensuring peace is concerned the biggest fact in the world is the British fleet. The next biggest fact is the American fleet, because of itself and still more because of the vast reserve power of the United States which it implies. If these two fleets perfectly understand one another about the undesirability of wars of aggression, there'll be no more big wars as long as this understanding continues. Such an understanding calls for no treaty--it calls only for courtesy.

And there is no other peace-basis worth talking about--by men who know how the world is governed.

Since I have lived here I have spent my days and nights, my poor brain, and my small fortune all most freely and gladly to get some understanding of the men who rule this Kingdom, and of the women and the customs and the traditions that rule these men--to get their trick of thought, the play of their ideals, the working of their imagination, the springs of their instincts. It is impossible for any man to know just how well he himself does such a difficult task--how accurately he is coming to understand the sources and character of a people's actions. Yet, at the worst, I do know something about the British: I know enough to make very sure of the soundness of my conclusion that they are necessary to us and we to them. Else G.o.d would have permitted the world to be peopled in some other way. And when we see that the world will be saved by such an artificial combination as England and Russia and France and j.a.pan and Serbia, it calls for no great wisdom to see the natural way whereby it must be saved in the future.

For this reason every day that I have lived here it has been my conscious aim to do what I could to bring about a condition that shall make sure of this--that, whenever we may have need of the British fleet to protect our sh.o.r.es or to prevent an aggressive war anywhere, it shall he ours by a natural impulse and necessity--even without the asking.

I have found out that the first step toward that end is courtesy; that the second step is courtesy, and the third step--such a fine and high courtesy (which includes courage) as the President showed in the Panama tolls controversy. We have--we and the British--common aims and character. Only a continuous and sincere courtesy--over periods of strain as well as of calm--is necessary for as complete an understanding as will be required for the automatic guidance of the world in peaceful ways.

Now, a difference is come between us--the sort of difference that handled as between friends would serve only to bind us together with a st.u.r.dier respect. We send a long lawyer's Note, not discourteous but wholly uncourteous, which is far worse. I am writing now only of the manner of the Note, not of its matter.

There is not a courteous word, nor a friendly phrase, nor a kindly turn in it, not an allusion even to an old acquaintance, to say nothing of an old friends.h.i.+p, not a word of thanks for courtesies or favours done us, not a hint of sympathy in the difficulties of the time. There is nothing in its tone to show that it came from an American to an Englishman: it might have been from a Hottentot to a Fiji-Islander.

I am almost sure--I'll say quite sure--that this uncourteous manner is far more important than its endless matter. It has greatly hurt our friends, the real men of the Kingdom. It has made the ma.s.ses angry--which is of far less importance than the severe sorrow that our discourtesy of manner has brought to our friends--I fear to all considerate and thoughtful Englishmen.

Let me ill.u.s.trate: When the Panama tolls controversy arose, Taft ceased to speak the language of the natural man and lapsed into lawyer's courthouse zigzagging mutterings. Knox wrote a letter to the British Government that would have made an enemy of the most affectionate twin brother--all mere legal twists and turns, as agreeable as a pocketful of screws. Then various bovine ”international lawyers” wrote books about it. I read them and became more and more confused the further I went: you always do. It took me some time to recover from this word-drunk debauch and to find my own natural intelligence again, the common sense that I was born with. Then I saw that the whole thing went wrong from the place where that Knox legal note came in. Congressmen in the backwoods quoted cryptic pa.s.sages from it, thought they were saying something, and proceeded to make their audiences believe that somehow England had hit us with a club--or would have hit us but for Knox. That pure discourtesy kept us apart from English sympathy for something like two years.

Then the President took it up. He threw the legal twaddle into the gutter. He put the whole question in a ten-minutes' speech to Congress, full of clearness and fairness and high courtesy. It won even the rural Congressmen. It was read in every capital and the men who conduct every government looked up and said, ”This is a real man, a brave man, a just man.” You will recall what Sir Edward Grey said to me: ”The President has taught us all a lesson and set us all a high example in the n.o.blest courtesy.”

This one act brought these two nations closer together than they had ever been since we became an independent nation. It was an act of courtesy....

My dear House, suppose the postman some morning were to leave at your door a thing of thirty-five heads and three appendices, and you discovered that it came from an old friend whom you had long known and greatly valued--this vast ma.s.s of legal stuff, without a word or a turn of courtesy in it--what would you do? He had a grievance, your old friend had. Friends often have. But instead of explaining it to you, he had gone and had his lawyers send this many-headed, much-appendiced ton of stuff. It wasn't by that method that you found your way from Austin, Texas, to your present eminence and wisdom. Nor was that the way our friend found his way from a little law-office in Atlanta, where I first saw him, to the White House.

More and more I am struck with this--that governments are human.

They are not remote abstractions, nor impersonal inst.i.tutions. Men conduct them; and they do not cease to be men. A man is made up of six parts of human nature and four parts of facts and other things--a little reason, some prejudice, much provincialism, and of the particular fur or skin that suits his habitat. When you wish to win a man to do what _you_ want him to do, you take along a few well-established facts, some reasoning and such-like, but you take along also three or four or five parts of human nature--kindliness, courtesy, and such things--sympathy and a human touch.

If a man be six parts human and four parts of other things, a government, especially a democracy, is seven, or eight, or nine parts human nature. It's the most human thing I know. The best way to manage governments and nations--so long as they are disposed to be friendly--is the way we manage one another. I have a confirmation of this in the following comment which came to me to-day. It was made by a friendly member of Parliament.

”The President himself dealt with Germany. Even in his severity he paid the Germans the compliment of a most courteous tone in his Note. But in dealing with us he seems to have called in the lawyers of German importers and Chicago pork-packers. I miss the high Presidential courtesy that we had come to expect from Mr. Wilson.”