American Neutrality

Can We Be Neutral ? By Allen W. Dulles and Hamilton Fish Armstrong. (New York : Harper. London : Royal Institute of International Affairs. Gs.I American Neutrality 1914-1917. Essays on the Causes of American Intervention in the World War. By Charles Seymour. • (Oxford tniversiti. Press. hs.)

The United States in World Affairs. An Account of American

• Foreign Relations, 1934-1935. Ey Whitney H. Shepardson in collaboration with William 0. Seroggs. (Harper. I2s.

IN an able and significant article published in Harpers Magazine

last December, Senator Bennett Champ Clark proposed a " Detour Round War." It is the explicit or implicit lesson of these books that the policy advocated by Senator Clark is too simple, that if America is really resolved, at all costs, to stay out of that great European war which more and more Americans fear is imminent, she will have to be more clear- headed and tough-minded than she has shown any serious signs of being. At the present stage of American popular thought, perpetual neutrality is like prohibition, an experiment noble in purpose " but which few people really want at any stiff price. If it can be had at the cost of a great display of moral indignation and superiority, plus financial loss falling on politically unimportant interests, America will think it a

good buy. Any higher price, in thought or cash, will turn- American public opinion away in search of a substitute t` just as good "—hut cheaper. This substitute will, of course,

be offered with fervid assurances that it involves no danger to peace.

Behind much- of the agitation and some of the legislation

that has revealed America's resolve to stay out of war, lies the wide-spread belief that America was swindled into entering the last war, by the allied powers and, worse still, by the gullibility of her rulers and the malignancy of big business. The bankers, it is believed, involved themselves and their clients in the fortunes of England and France--and the United States broke through a century-old tradition not to make the world safe for democracy, but for the firm of Morgan. Books, articles, senatorial investigations, popular rumour, combine to.asirt that the real secret of American intervention in .1917 lay not at the White House but at the almost equally unostentatious Morgan offices in Wall Street.

. Professor Seymour attacks this potent article of the American Credo. He is both qualified and, perhaps, disqualified to do it with full effect,. for. as the editor of the House papers he has knowledge and commitments which help and hamper.

It is not a case of disingenuous argument- or of the suppression of facts. It is rather a failure to understand the emotional forces behind the legend. Ile points out, for instance, that from the German point of view, it was not the actual munitions, the shells, the rifles, that America supplied to the Allies but the food, the raw materials of all kinds that were an asset the Germans could not equal and which they were tempted to destroy. No doubt this is true, but even in Germany public opinion was a force not completely controllable by authority and the average German spontaneously resented the allied monopoly of the American-made bullet more than of the American-made shoe. And because this was so, the feeble civil rulers of Germany could not resist the soldiers or listen indefinitely to the wise advice of Bernstorff. Professor

Seymour might have allowed more for this emotion if he had renumbered Lowell's bitter verses Jonathan to John: "You wonder why we're hot, John Your mark wuz on the guns, The neutral guns that shot, John, Our brothers an' our sons." And not only the German but the American people made a natantl if naive distinction between supplying " normal "

requirements and supplying weapons. They still do and an embargo on arms is easily justified, even in the eyes of the hard-boiled, But an embargo on anything else ? Then interests which begin .by being economic soon acquire emotional force. In 1914, the Wilson administration had to fear the cotton farmers and the wheat farmers who saw the allied blockade keeping them out of their rightful markets. In 1930, these two interests are not economically as important as they were in 1014 but they ire politically as important, and if an oil embargo seemed at one time to be possible it was due in part (so Messrs. Dulles and Armstrong think) to the unpopularity and political weakness of the oil interests. But Professor Seymour shows that to blame the bankers or any other interest is too simple; the final decision was made by Wilson, although the-roots of

that decision may be traced back to the early reversal of the decision to bar the Allies from the looney-market. Once that was done, it is possible to show that an effective enforcement of absolute equality between the belligerents was almost impossible. It would have brought about an economic crisis of the first order. But if the Germans had kept out of the umrestrieted submarine bhmekade, Professor Seymour argues, there would have been no intervention, and if the Germans' did neglect Bernstorff's advice, it was not only because Wilson did not bring pressure to bear on Britain to respect neutral rights, but because the naval and military experts thought that Britain had immure to lose by the submarine blockade (even with the prize of American intervention) than Germany had to lose by the rig airs of the allied blockade.

Whether all of this argument is equally valid may be doubted. but enough of it is to justify the doubts and fears with which Messrs. Dulles and Armstrong approach the problem of drafting a practicable neutrality policy. They are against- all unnecessary rigidity, against the fiction that all wars are-

equally important. Only when the risks warrant it, will. an American administration be well advised in risking the economic, and so ultimately political. pn,ssure that an embargo, for instance, will bring in its trail. What Jefferson failed to do one hundred and thirty years ago will not be successful now. lint many risks of war can he diminished if American " rights " are rigidly cut down, above all if " trade land travel] at your own risk " be announced as the policy of the government. " Strict accountability.** to use the Wilsonian phrase, must be abandoned. And discretion nmst be left to the President, which is just what Congress, in an election year, recovering from its submission to the Roosevelt spell and full of suspicion of " Wilsonism ' on the part of any President,• is unwilling to allow.

The immediate historical background of this great contro- versy is admirably described in the latest volume of The United Slates in World .Iffoirs. Time defeat of the motion to adhere to the World ('ourt, as well as the more annoying side of American contempt for the wicked Old World are faithfully dealt with, and Sir Samuel Hoares stand for integral League principles is taken as a possible beginning of a new age in which the American people, sulking smugly since 1919,. might play its part. One basis fimr those hopes of a new era has been shaken and the other seems less likely than ever to become more than the shadow of a shade. In any case, it is hard to think that the historical anecdote used is well chosen. If the League brings it off, "the people of Woodrow 1Vilson • might hear in echo the jesting message that Henry IV of France sent to his loyal colonel : Co hang yourself, good Crillon; we have fought the battle of Arques and you were not there.''' The American people associates the name Crillon not with the soldier but with the hotel, in that wicked city in which the hopes of a just peace were shattered. The very