"THE DIALOGUE OF GODS"

W

E are once again indebted to Alfred G. Gardiner, the sometime brusk and brilliant editor of "The London Daily News," for a happy phrase. On his last visit, at the close of his first day in the United States, he said in an interview that when in the closing days of the war messages between Washington and Berlin were hurtling over their heads in England, it was like "the dialogue of gods." And it was. In those tense days justice sat for a season in the councils of diplomacy, and idealism invaded the field of international politics long preempted by the cynical and the selfish. America was, to use another phrase from Mr. Gardiner, "dictating the terms of a new world." Seasoned cynics were thrown off their guard. Many who were not millennial-minded thought maybe the day of a new deal had dawned. Would "the dialogue of gods" be followed by godlike action? There was an almost pathetic popular confidence in this Olympian conversation. Then came the armistice; then came the peace conference; then came the Treaty of Versailles; then came the timid assumptions or flat denials of international responsibility by parliaments and chambers and senates; then came the world-wide welter of social unrest, with its destructive effects; then came the frank defiance of certain features of the Versailles settlement by national groups, with each defiance met by nothing more decisive than an unbacked ultimatum.

More than a year has passed since we listened to "the dialogue of gods," and in the always self-critical atmosphere of a New Year we are casting up accounts. What has happened to our

blue-prints of a new world? Just what did we win when we won the war? How much unfinished business is before the world? This is no time for cynicism, but still less is it a time for self-delusion. We cannot wisely steer our course in the year ahead unless we know definitely our latitude and longitude in relation to our war-time ideals.

To begin with, as far as international idealism is concerned, we "are in the doldrums," to use Mr. Taft's expressive phrase. We are in the position of having given international thought a new vocabulary and of being among the first to return to the old dialects. Having talked most loudly about international obligations, many of our political leaders are exhausting the arts of sophistry in a search for definitions of proposed international obligations that will make them not obligatory save in a tenuous "moral" sense. After challenging Europe to a new sort of international organization, we covet the status of visitor and adviser only in the councils of world politics. All of which is fresh proof that a national mind is not susceptible to the quick conversion that furnished the dramatic element in the primitive campmeeting. We are creatures of more than a century of mental as well as geographical isolation from the mêlée of world politics. It is not didactic diplomacy, but the slow tutelage of economic necessity that will finally make us a fullfledged member of the society of nations.

In the matter of economic relations we shall go ahead shouldering our full responsibility at the very moment we are talking most of our sovereign isolation.

What a happy thing it is for the world that nations are not logical! In extending the necessary credit that Europe needs to set her industries going again, we shall find ourselves enmeshed in the councils of the world, regardless of

our final decisions respecting the treaty of peace and the League of Nations.

There is no need of professing now a modesty we did not practise at the peace conference. We went to Paris as a veiled dictator, an assumption redeemed only by the fact that we sought no selfish pay for our dictation. Our rôle may have been that of the benevolent autocrat bent upon giving the world democracy by decree, but it was benevolent. If now the United States has a cooling interest in the task of dictation and a reluctance to assume the inevitable responsibilities of an American peace, what is happening to Europe's attitude toward an American peace?

Two ideas were in constant conflict during the peace conference, the American idea and the European idea. Stripping the problem of its detailed issues, the American idea started from the conception of a "concert of power" as the only workable method for administering the modern world, while the European idea clung to a "balance of power" as essential to the practical protection of the several nations in the doubtful years ahead. It may be said that this statement is over-simplified and not literally true. It may be said that a concert of power or a league of nations was not an American idea, but a Wilson idea pure and simple, or that it was not an exclusively American idea, as outstanding leaders in virtually all nations espoused the league idea; the statement may be taken as an unwarranted reflection upon the idealism of England, France, Italy, and other European nations. Whether Mr. Wilson accurately interpreted the American purpose or not, he did officially represent American policy, and in any analysis of results we must consider his policy as the American idea. No one who has had opportunity to come in contact with public opinion in all regions of our country during the last three years can doubt that Mr. Wilson did faithfully interpret the incorrigible idealism of the American mind, however much it may welch at the assumption of costly responsibility in the end. As to European idealism, actions speak louder than words-actions in the peace conference and actions since the peace conference.

The fact is that the European nations accepted American leadership in the peace conference, to the extent that they did, with grave misgivings, frank protest, and under compulsion. We were rich and, as Europe felt her flattened purse, many reluctant concessions were made to American contentions. The peace-conference deliberations were far from the antiphonal response of OldWorld and New-World idealisms that "the dialogue of gods" foreshadowed. The response to American leadership was never hearty, and there has been a marked European reaction against it since the conference.

The first element in Europe's reaction has been a result of the general reaction from the inflated hopes with which the world approached the conference. With sublime confidence the conferees sat down in Paris to the solution of all the problems that had proved insoluble through the centuries. It was a magnificent gesture at the control of a drifting civilization that had been getting increasingly out of hand for years, but some Gibbon of the twenty-first century will probably write a chapter on the naïve egotism of a generation that attempted to do so much at one sitting.

We are beginning to see that aside from settling the problem of an imminent German domination there are few problems that we have really settled. This is not of necessity ground for despair. The defeat of the German plan was a deliverance worth its full cost. But of much of our larger plan for a new sort of world we must frankly confess shipwreck. German power has been for the time broken, but has the German spirit been chastened and changed? The problem of the Adriatic, which has been since the dawn of history a bone of contention between Latin, Slav, and Teuton, and the trade-concern of others as well, has not been settled. The flaming fagots of the Balkan question may not be blazing with their accustomed flare, but who can say that they are dead? The Turkish cancer has not been cut out. Can any one yet say whether the policy of self-determination is to result in salutary race deliverance or in the general license of incompetency? The peace conference had not been going

a week before we saw how quickly the brotherhood of the battle-field could give way to mutual suspicion and clever trading. We have ordered plebiscites right and left in disputed territories, but have we made adequate provision that the votes will do more than register the fears of the inhabitants and dramatize the internal differences of the territories? Has any statesmanlike approach been made to the problem of Japan as the Prussia of the far East? Is India an extinct volcano? The Irish question we have always with us. Have we even faced seriously the possibility of a future alliance between the German genius for organization and the inexhaustible raw materials of Russia, when the Russian bear has recovered from his madness, or before? In Shan-tung democracy's hopes hang upon the promise of a nation with a dangerous penchant for imperialism.

Even this is a long catalogue, and it is only a selection at random. In common with the rest of the world, Europe sees this long agenda of unfinished business after the peace conference made such an ambitious attempt to settle all the major problems of the world's tangled politics. It is only natural that the sight has produced a reaction against the Wilson idealism, since that idealism was primarily responsible for making the peace conference an agency for placing the whole life of the world on a new basis. But this, after all, is only an abstract and instinctive reaction in which Europe shares with the rest of the world. It makes no difference that much of this reaction may be unreasonable, placing blame where blame does not rest. It exists. And we are here casting up accounts, not passing judgment ex cathedra.

But the European reaction against the American idea in world politics has a specific and detailed side that we shall do well to keep in mind. We may think that the League of Nations, elementary and imperfect as it is, offers hope for a better system than the old competition in armaments; but the indisputable fact is that in Europe practical trust in the league as a means of protection during the next ten years has been growing daily weaker.

This weakening faith in the league means that Europe must begin to look, as, indeed, Europe is already looking, to the possibility of alliances that will serve as protection in the next embroilment. Each and all of the Allied nations see that adherence to the American idea of settlement is not only failing to produce a workable new organization of Europe, but is awakening new rivalries and breeding new hatreds that may play havoc with the alliances they will want to form if or when the League of Nations proves unable to give the nations at least as good protection as the old system gave them. To be specific, suppose France follows the American idea in the Fiume question, Italy grows bitter toward France, the League of Nations. breaks down, and some years hence another war breaks out between France and Germany. France will need Italy as an ally; but with Fiume freshly in mind, how will Italy feel toward France? If France would not trust to the League of Nations without the promise of an English-French-American alliance, is it strange that she has gone slowly in taking any decisive stand on the Fiume matter that will alienate Italy as a future ally? It is not a question of assuming a holier-than-thou attitude and condemning France. Granted an honest disbelief in the protective power of the League of Nations, any nation would act as France is acting. France does not stand alone in this matter. All of the major Allied powers are showing a marked reluctance to take any very decisive action toward enforcing the plain decrees of the peace conference where those decrees run counter to the aspirations of a people that might be needed as an ally in a next war. Whether it is reluctance to oust D'Annunzio from Fiume, the Rumanians from Budapest, or decisively to handle the whole medley of unsettled questions left by the peace conference, there stands in the background the fear of any action that might defeat the formation of future alliances.

The reaction of Europe against the American peace, which has been growing greater and greater with every week since the peace conference, is due primarily to these two causes- -a general instinctive reaction against an idealism

that attempted so much and accomplished so little, and the unwillingness to follow American leadership to the point of alienating peoples that will be needed as allies later.

When the first effect of this reaction on our tired minds has worn off, our sense of realism will return, and we shall see that while we fell far short of accomplishing the ambitious results toward which we looked during the war, we did meet the immediate menace of German power gone mad, and we shall then settle down to the slow process of achieving a better world through a change of mind as well as a change of machinery.

DRAMATIC D'ANNUNZIO

TUCKED away in an obscure corner of our morning papers a while ago was the interesting information that the ItalianAmerican State Executive Republican Committee had issued to the Italian voters of New Jersey an appeal to "choose between the Democratic party with Wilson and the Republican party with D'Annunzio." Is this, perchance, an illuminating commentary upon the increasing interdependence of a world in which a problem of far-off Italy may become an issue in American state politics, or is it just a serio-comic sidelight on campaign ingenuity? At any rate, it reminds us once more of the man who contrived to galvanize the wearied attention of a whole world just emerged from a war that had reduced the sensational to the prosaic level of the usual.

Some months ago when Gabriele D'Annunzio seized the disputed city of Fiume, it was set down as the errant prank of a mad poet. It was recalled that before the war D'Annunzio was said to have asserted that he had sucked the world dry of its sensations and looked enviously upon death as a 'release from boredom. So this lone-man defiance of the entire diplomatic world, this single-handed nullification of the edicts of Versailles, this solitary hold-up of the nascent League of Nations was credited to a search for sensation by a blasé amorist to whom the war had been one continuous orgy of dramatics. Certain it is that no more diverting incident

has invaded the rather sordid field of international politics for many moons. But, then, D'Annunzio, the voluptuary turned valiant, could not be other than diverting. He disputes with Cardinal Mercier and Albert the distinction of being the most dramatic figure of the

war.

D'Annunzio's every public act during the war seemed somehow incomplete without footlights. His impassioned appeal to the soul of Italy for entering the war ended with a triumphant and theatrical flourish on May 17, 1915, when, at Campidoglio, he lifted to his lips the historic sword of Nino Bixio, Garibaldi's associate, kissed it with ceremonial reverence, and shouted to the mob: "The hour has come. Ring your bells!" He never failed to coin the electrifying phrase at a critical hour, as when, during the sorry plight of the Italian Army in the autumn of 1917, he said, "Rather than give up Venice to the enemy, let us raze it to the ground." His flight over Vienna in the autumn of 1918, when he showered upon the city thousands of copies of his appeal to the Viennese, was another feat that stirred the Italian imagination. And where can one find a better adventure story than D'Annunzio's setting out with thirty companions in three small vessels to sail in under the very noses of the guns of the Austrian fleet in the port of Buccari to renew the Italian challenge to the fleet to come into the open, throwing his sarcastic challenge, incased in a bottle, into the waves?

But can D'Annunzio be defined in terms of the dramatic alone? Can the Fiume episode be dismissed as the mere stage-strut of a quixotic temperament? Is he just a bucaneering claim-jumper going entirely on his own? To the first question his countrymen will answer, "No!" And in answering the latter it is well to remember that international politics is a game reduced to a science in which little leeway is left for the freelance. There are grand adventures without number in the game, but they are usually adventure of plan rather than of impulse. The most casual gesture is likely to be calculated.

To the Italian masses D'Annunzio will always remain prophet extraordinary,