PRESIDENT WILSON'S IDEALISM.
IF we are to believe some of our newspapers, President Wilson is alone among the leaders of the Great Alliance in speaking the language of idealism. The European leaders of the Alliance, we are told, still go on mumbling obsolete shibboleths, still introduce material interests into schemes of peace which should contain nothing but high and abiding principles, and generally act as though they wished to make the best of two worlds. While doing lip-service to the creed of the moment about "No annexations," they mean to get what they can for themselves out of the general pother. Most gladly do we subscribe to the belief that President Wilson is the ablest spokesman of the Allies. No word that he utters leaves the situation exactly where it was. Every word of his counts. Moreover, President Wilson has an Army of complete freshness and incalculable weight behind him. Thus he is in a position to make his ideas prevail. We are heartily content that it should be so, for we sincerely believe in his wisdom, his fidelity, and his determination. It seems to us, however, that some of the most ardent of the British admirers of President Wilson are entirely wrong about the nature of his idealism.
To begin with, they assume that when they demand the creation of a League of Nations of the most complicated kind-- a proposal which assumes the good faith of Germany and would bring her into the League at the earliest possible moment— they have the support of President Wilson. They point to him as their leader in this matter. Far be it from us to be unnecessarily contradictory, but having read all President Wilson's speeches with care, we are bound to say that we can discover no evidence for the assurance that President Wilson is at the head of this movement. That he looks forward to the possibility of a mutual guarantee among the nations of territorial integrity is true. He has also in effect said that we must work in future for a recognition of the sanctity of treaties. For our part, we should prefer to concentrate on the single point of the sanctity of treaties, for we cannot, try how we will, eliminate from the problem the factor of human nature, and we fear that the more complicated the international machinery may be, the greater will be the opportunities for the exercise of human nature in the form of intrigue and bad faith. But in any case there is no trace in President Wilson's speeches, so far as we have read them, of any hankering after a kind of Super-Federal World-State to control the destinies of all nations.
In what then does President Wilson's idealism consist ? To many ecstatic imaginations in Great Britain it may seem a very dull and plain thing to say, but in our belief his idealism is chiefly represented by his determination to beat German militarism to its knees—to beat it come what may, at whatever cost, and without any gain to the United States except the triumph of an honourable principle. That, after all, it idealism of the most intense and splendid kind. Yet it ACME to have escaped the notice of several well-known Englishmen in their eagerness to associate Pi esident Wilson's idealism with their own wishes. They make a calm assumption without evidence ; and though they worship the idealism of their hero, they reduce it to something lower than it actually is.
Another matter in which many of our Radical newspapers unconsciously do injustice to President Wilson's idealism is that of "annexation." They continually refer to President Wilson's disapproval of " annexation " and "conquest," and assume that every tract of territory which is transferred from a loser to a victor may properly be described as a " conquest." Personally we have never had the least doubt of the folly and wickedness of conquest as such. Conquests like those of the Danish parts of Schleswig-Holstein, and of Alsace-Lorraine, were conquests of the worst kind. So long as that type of conquest is permitted there can never be an enduring peace. But unless we are very careful in our definitions, unless we avoid the danger of exalting a good principle into a rule of universal application, we shall flounder into appalling follies. If, for example, as the truest lovers of peace devoutly hope we may, we should be able to compel the A-ustrians to leave Trieste and the Trentino, the Austrians, of course, would call that result conquest." We should, however, very properly call it "restoration." Similarly the Germans will swear that we are guilty of conquest if we refuse to hand back to them those colonies which they made hells upon earth. Yet it is difficult to imagine any greater infamy than to hand back to German rule German South-West Africa, German East Africa, Togoland, or any other German colony. Again, theoretically Great Britain has conquered Palestine, but how can we find words to describe the cynicism of which we should be guilty if we allowed the various peoples of Palestine to be handed back to the Turks ? Every one of these cases has to be considered on its merits. Is there any evidence whatever that the idealism of President Wilson, which blows like a refreshing breath over the councils of the Allies, means that a vague principle is really to prevail over the merits of the case ? We believe that there is no evidence whatever. We are certain that the exact contrary is true. So far as is humanly possible, of course, we shall adopt a self-denying ordinance as regards conquest. But what is true for us must also be true for the Germans. If we are to abandon our conquests wherever we humanely and reasonably can—as we hope and believe we shall—a similar self-denying ordinance will have to rest upon Germany. Her conquest of Finland, Lithuania, Cour- land, Russian Poland and Ukraine, and the rest (for conquests they certainly are whatever she may call them) will have to be renounced.
Of course to compel Germany to renounce these conquests is a tall order—a terribly tall order. Its achievement will put President Wilson's idealism to the most bitter and stringent of tests. For all that' we believe that his idealism will suffice. He will perhaps formally warn Germany that although she has acquired the richest parts of Russia, partly by luck and partly by trickery, she is nevertheless indulging in a fearful gamble. He may warn her that if she thinks that the treaties of peace she has already made are only the first of a series of similar peaces, she will live to be disillusioned. If Germany believes that she has only to wait for Italy and then for France to drop out to end the land war, her disillusionment will be just as real in the end. "What I, the President of the United States, wish you to understand," we can imagine Presi- dent Wilson saying to Germany, "is that whatever happens in the land fighting in this war there will be no end of the war for you. To fight on year after year when the war is according to all the old rules ended,' would be wearying for you and it would be wearying for America. None the less war in some kind shall go on relentlessly. This must be so since we are true to our ideals. The world would be an intolerable place by the eonsent of the whole American nation unless our ideals come true. Let the German people understand that even if the land war stopped the sea war would not stop. The United States and Great Britain would keep that going. The war would go on until you had eaten and digested every word that the American people have addressed to you. Tell your Ham- burg shipowners that their city will remain a place of the dead till they come to their senses. Tell your manufacturers that they will get no cotton, no rubber, no jute, till they have changed their ways. Tell your cotton-spinners that till the day of regeneration they may go on using nettles. Tell your makers of cloth that they shall have no British wool till mili- tarism as a policy has been sunk to the bottom of the sea. And even when the war is ended by your surrender to our ideals you will not have paid the full penalty. All those many hundreds of wrecked ships which lie on the bed of the ocean have to be paid for before you can enjoy your full share of material things in the reconstructed world." We are imagining, of course, the sense and not the language in which President Wilson's idealism might express itself. On these lines the whole American people—not only the Army and the manufacturers and the professional classes, but American Labour too—is behind him. If we hr. re misrepresented the nature of President Wilson's idealism, we are at least certain that we have come nearer to it than those Radical newspapers which, in professing to follow him, attribute to him thoughts vhich he has never uttered.
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