Washington and the Riddle of PeaceWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
History
Washington and the Riddle of Peace
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Conference on the Limitation of Armament (1921-1922 : Washington, D.C.); Peace; World politics
Suppose now that this present conference produces the first two
commissions I have sketched and gives way to a second conference, with
an ampler representation of the European powers, which will direct its
attention mainly to the reassurance and disarmament of France and
Germany and Britain, a second conference whose findings may be finally
embodied in this third commission I have suggested; and suppose,
further, that an International Debt and Currency Conference presently
gets to effective work, surely we may claim that the promised
Association of Nations is well on its way towards crystallization.
Simply and naturally, step by step, the President of the United States
will have become the official summoner of a rudimentary World
Parliament. By the time that stage is reached a series of important
questions of detailed organization will have arisen. Each executive
commission, as the successive conference brings these commissions into
being, will require in its several spheres agents, officials, a
secretariat, a home for its archives, a budget. These conferences cannot
go on meeting without the development of such a living and continuing
body of world administration through the commissions they must needs
create. Presumably that body of commissions will grow up mainly in and
about Washington. If it does, it will be the most amazing addition to
Congress conceivable; it will be the voluntary and gradual aggregation
of a sort of loose World Empire round the monument of George Washington.
But I do not see that all these commissions and Parliaments need sit in
Washington or that it is desirable that they should. A world commission
for land disarmament might function in Paris or Rome, a world commission
for finance in New York or London. And meanwhile, at Geneva or in
Vienna, to which place there is some project of removal, the League of
Nations, that first concrete realization of the American spirit, will be
going on in its own rather cramped, rather too strictly defined lines.
It also will have thrown out world organizations in connection with
health, with such world interests as the white slave traffic, and so
forth. It will be conducting European arbitrations and it will be
providing boundary commissions and the like. And somewhere there will
also be a sort of World Supreme Court getting to work upon judicial
international differences.
Now this, I submit, is the way that world unity is likely to arise out
of our dreams into reality, and this partial, dispersed, experimenting
way of growth is perhaps the only way in which it can come about. It is
not so splendid and impressive a vision as that of some World
Parliament, some perfected League, suddenly flashing into being and
assuming the leadership of the world. It will not be set up like a
pavilion but it will grow like a tree. But it is a reality and it comes.
The Association of Nations grows before our eyes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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