The Story of Mankind/Appendix 1

by Hendrik Willem van Loon

 

AFTER SEVEN YEARS

 

The treaty of Versailles was writ with the point of a bayonet. And however useful the invention of Colonel Fuysegur may have been in a close scrimmage, as an instrument of peace it has never been considered a success.

To make matters worse, the people who handled this deadly weapon were all of them old men. It is one thing when a band of young fellows get into a scrap. They will fight each other with a deadly hatred. But once they have got rid of their pent-up anger, they can return to the affairs of the day without any great personal resentment toward those who only a short while before were their enemies. But it is something very different when half a dozen smooth-shaven graybeards, filled with the futile rage of a lifetime of frustrated ambitions, sit down around a green table and make ready to judge half a dozen defenseless opponents who in the heyday of their victory disregarded every principle of law and international decency.

On such an occasion may Heaven have mercy upon us!

Alas! the Good Lord, whose name had been so terribly abused during the previous four years, was in no mood to extend his merciful hand to his undeserving children.

The carnage was of their own making. Now let them settle their difficulties as best they could!

What that "best" was, we have since then had occasion to learn. And the story of the last seven years is an almost uninterrupted recital of ignominious blunders, of greed, of cruelty and short-sighted meanness—an epoch of such hair-raising imbecility that it stands unique among the dreary annals of human stupidity, which (if I may be permitted this aside) is saying a great deal.

It is of course quite impossible to predict what the people of the year 2500 will have to say about the underlying causes of the great upheaval that destroyed the civilization of Europe and bestowed upon the unsuspecting American people the leadership of the human race. But in the light of what had gone before, ever since nations had become highly organized business organizations, they will probably come to the conclusion that an outbreak of some sort between the two great contending commercial factions was absolutely unavoidable, and was bound to occur sooner or later. In plain English, they will recognize that Germany had become too much of a menace to the prosperity of the British Empire to be allowed any further development as the general purveyor of the world's manifold wants and needs.

We who lived through the struggle find it much more difficult to estimate the events of the last decade at their true light, but now after seven years it is possible to draw a few fairly definite conclusions without causing too much commotion among our peaceful neighbors and friends.

The history of the last five hundred years is really the record of a gigantic struggle between the so-called “leading powers” and those who hoped to deprive them of their fortunate position and become their successors as the recognized masters of the seas. Spain came to glory across the dead bodies of the great Italian commercial republics and of Portugal. As soon as Spain had established that far-famed empire upon which the sun (for reasons of geography or honesty) was never known to set, Holland tried to rob her of her riches and in view of the difference in size of the two countries, the Dutch Republic achieved a very remarkable success. But no sooner had Holland acquired those parts of the world which then seemed to offer the biggest chance of immediate profit than France and England appeared upon the scene to despoil the Dutch people of their newly acquired possessions. When this had been accomplished, France and England fought for the spoils and after a long and costly struggle, England came out on top. Thereafter England dominated the world for more than a century. She brooked no rivalry. Small nations that came in her path were run under foot. Large ones which could not be tackled single handedly suddenly found themselves confronted by one of those mysterious political alliances of which the rulers of England (past masters in the craft of foreign politics) seemed to possess the secret.

In view of these well-known economic developments (faithfully described in every primary textbook of history) the policies which the rulers of Germany followed during the first two decades of the twentieth century seem little short of naïve.

Some people claim that the former Kaiser was to blame and their argument deserves our close attention. William II was an honest man, of very restricted ability and a victim of that strange form of self-delusion which is so common among those who are by birth lifted into the seats of the mighty and who contemplate the rest of the world from such a high pinnacle of anointed superiority that they soon lose all touch with the ordinary run of humanity. This much is certain; that no man ever tried so hard to gain the good will of the British people and that no foreigner ever failed quite so ignominiously to understand the true nature of the English character.

That curious island on the other side of the North Sea lives by and of and for just one thing-trade. Those who do not interfere with British commerce are, if not exactly “friends,” at least “tolerated strangers.” Those on the other hand who, however remotely, might become a menace to the imperial hegemony are “enemies” and they must be destroyed at the first possible opportunity. And all the lovely speeches and all the obvious manifestations of good-will and friendship on the part of the anglophile Teuton emperor never even for a single moment made the average Englishman forget that the Germans were his most dangerous competitors and would sooner or later try to dump their own cheaper wares upon every part of the civilized and uncivilized world.

But that was only one side of the question. A most important one but not sufficient to account for the wholesale slaughter that was so characteristic of the late war.

In the happy days before the railroad and the telegraph, when each country was more or less of a definite entity which proceeded upon its own career with the plodding determination of an elephant pushing a circus truck, the quarrel between the two contending candidates for commercial supremacy would have proceeded slowly and the wily diplomats of the old school would probably have succeeded in localizing the quarrel. Unfortunately in the year 1914 the whole world was one large international workshop. A strike in the Argentine was apt to cause suffering in Berlin. A raise in the price of certain raw materials in London might spell disaster to tens of thousands of long-suffering Chinese coolies who never even had heard of the existence of the big city on the Thames. The invention of some obscure Privat-Dozent in a third-rate German university would often force dozens of Chilean banks to close their doors, while bad management on the part of an old commercial house in Gothenburg might deprive hundreds of little boys and girls in Australia of a chance to go to college. Of course, not all nations had reached the same stage of industrial development. A few of them were still wholly agricultural and others were only just emerging from a state of almost medieval feudalism. This, however, did not make them undesirable allies in the eyes of their industrialized neighbors. On the contrary. Such states, as a rule, are possessed of almost unlimited reservoirs of man-power and as sheer cannon fodder the Russian peasant had never had a rival.

How and in what way all these different and conflicting interests were marshaled into one gigantic group of associated nations and why for more than four years they consented to fight for a common purpose—these are questions the solution of which we had better leave to our grandchildren. The world will have to know a great deal more about the preliminaries of the war than it does to-day before it can pass judgment upon those misguided patriots who turned the continent of Europe into one vast shambles.

All we can hope to do this hot day of August in the year of Grace 1926 is to draw attention to one salient fact which is almost invariably overlooked by those who call themselves historians, to wit: that the great European conflict which began as a world-wide war ended as a world-wide revolution and that it did not mean a short interruption of the normal development of affairs (as all the wars of the last three hundred years had done) but marked the beginning of an entirely new social and economic epoch. The old men who were responsible for the peace treaty of Versailles were too much a product of their own original surroundings to be able to recognize this.

They thought and talked and acted in terms of a bygone age.

That probably is the reason why their labors proved such a curse to the rest of humanity. But still one other element which contributed greatly to the disastrous outcome of the war for democracy and the rights of small nations was the belated participation in the struggle on the part of the United States of America.

As a nation the American people, feeling themselves safely entrenched behind three thousand miles of ocean, had never taken any deep interest in foreign politics. Accustomed to think in terms of slogans and captions and headlines and cheerfully ignorant of the historical development of Europe (or for that matter of any other part of the world) during the last two thousand years, the majority of President Wilson's fellow-citizens were obliged to get their historical information second-hand. Aided and abetted by certain colossal crimes on the part of the German military and naval leaders, it was an easy task for the manufacturers of allied propaganda to make their American friends see the war as a definite struggle between right and wrong, a clash between white and black, a duel to the death between the angels of Anglo-Saxon self-determination and the devils of Teutonic autocracy, until the American people, kind-hearted and sentimental (and therefore apt to run to certain curious extremes of emotionalism and cruelty) felt that they could not possibly keep out of the struggle without becoming unfaithful to all that was good and decent in their own manhood. A hot wave of a crusadelike zeal and eagerness swept across the country. Slowly but steadily the gigantio. mills of American industry began to grind and ere long two million men were hastening to the battlefields of Europe to put a stop to the intolerable depravities of the Hun.

Now it was only natural that these millions of serious-minded and earnest young men should try and revaluate their fighting ideals into terms that should be comprehensible to all of their fellow countrymen. Hence the slogan of “a war to end war.” Hence the famous fourteen points of President Wilson—the new decalogue of international righteousness. Hence the enthusiasm for the self-determination of small nations, the hilariously expressed desire to “make the world safe for democracy.”

To the Balfours and the Poincarés and the Churchills (not to mention the exiled leaders of the old Russian régime) such words must have sounded like rank heresy. If any of their own people had undertaken to parade such battle-cries they would have been sent before a firing-squad at very short notice. But the commander-in-chief of two million men, the trusted gatekeeper of all the treasures of the world, must be listened to with an outward semblance of respect. Hence the leaders of the different European nations, during the last year and a half of the war, fought for certain ideals for which they had no more use than for those fantastic economic innovations which were now being shouted in a hundred different tongues from the battlements of the old Kremlin. And as soon as the Ge mans, agreeably surprised by the reasonable terms of their much feared American antagonists, had thrown their emperor overboard, had changed the name of their country from an “Empire” to that of a “Republic,” and adorned with red cockades and singing the popular song of international brotherhood had started upon their famous backward march to the Rhine, the allied chieftains hastened to rid themselves of those foolish and embarrassing American ideals and made ready to conclude a peace upon that well-known principle of "woe to the loser” which ever since the days of the caveman had been accepted as the logical conclusion to a well-regulated physical encounter.

Their task would have been a great deal less complicated if President Wilson had not hit upon the unfortunate plan of taking a direct and personal part in the diplomatic negotiations of the year 1919. Had he remained at home, the European powers would have concluded peace according to their own terms of right and wrong. From an American point of view, they would have been wrong, but right or wrong, their decisions would have been an honest expression of a definite school of thought. How, however, American and European ideals (which never have mixed) got so horribly interwoven that nothing was definitely settled, that every one of the allies was left with a grievance, and that the peace proved infinitely more costly than the war.

But there was still another element which contributed greatly to the chaos caused by the Treaty of Versailles. President Wilson, himself the head of a federation of semi-independent nations, had visions of a federated world-state. The thing had proved possible on the American continent. For more than a century it had given an ever-increasing number of sovereign states a degree of political liberty and economic well-being which had made the nation as a whole the most prosperous and the richest country on the entire planet. Why should not the people of Europe learn the lesson which Virginia and Pennsylvania and Massachusetts had taken to heart in the year 1776?

Why not, indeed?

And so the allied leaders bowed low and listened respectfully when Mr. Wilson explained his scheme for a League of Nations. Under the press of circumstances they even agreed to incorporate the principles of a United States of the World into their treaty of peace. But just as soon as the Presidential ship had hoisted anchor and had set course for the western hemisphere, they began to undo the work that had been closest to the heart of the great president and returned to the old diplomatic ideals of secret treaties and surreptitious alliances.

Meanwhile a very definite revulsion of feeling had taken place in America itself. It is, of course, very easy to blame certain personal characteristics of Mr. Wilson for this changed attitude towards the League of Nations on the part of so many of his contemporaries. But other forces, infinitely more subtle, were at work.

In the first place, the soldiers who had taken part in the fight were returning to their homes. Their first-hand acquaintance with European conditions had not made them over-anxious to continue the close intimacy of the last two years.

In the second place, the people at large were beginning to recover from the mad fury of the war. They were no longer in fear for the lives of their beloved sons and daughters and once more were able to think soberly. The traditional distrust of Europe began to reassert itself. Soon it became clear that George Washington's ominous warning against “entangliing alliances” had as much of a hold upon the mass of the people of the year 1918 as it had had a century before.

In the third place, after two years of parades and four-minute speeches and liberty loans, it was very pleasant to go back to the quiet routine of a profitable business career.

In short, the infant League of Nations which President Wilson had dumped so unceremoniously upon the threshold of Europe was now repudiated by its own spiritual parents. The child did not die. But it lived a precarious existence and grew up to be a weak and emaciated creature, too feeble to make its influence felt in any decisive way and merely irritating those who were its friends by an occasional futile scolding and the waving of a naughty, naughty finger.

Once more we are confronted by an ominous historical "if."

"If the League of Nations had really turned the whole of the civilized world into a successful United States of the World...."

I don't know, but even under the most favorable circumstances, the plan of President Wilson had only a slender chance of success.

For the war, as we are now beginning to understand, was not so much a war as a revolution and it was a revolution in which the victory was carried away by an unsuspected third party, who since then has been identified as the grandson of one, James Watt, and who is coming to be known in wider and wider circles as “the Iron Man.”

Originally the steam engine (like his younger brother, the electric engine) had been a welcome addition to the family of civilized human beings because he was a willing slave and ever ready to lighten the tasks of man and beast.

But soon it became clear that this inanimate factotum was full of cunning and devilment and the war with its temporary suspension of all the decencies of life gave the iron contraption a chance to enslave those who in reality were meant to be his masters.

Here and there some wise men ofscience may have foreseen the danger that threatened the race from the side of this unruly servant but as soon as such an unfortunate prophet opened his mouth and issued a word of warning, he was denounced as an enemy of society, as a rank Bolshevik and a seditious radical and he was bade to hold his tongue or take the consequences. For the politicians and the diplomats who had been responsible for the war were now engaged upon the serious task of fabricating a suitable peace and they must not be interrupted in these holy endeavors. Unfortunately, as a class such worthies are almost always completely ignorant of those elementary principles of natural science and political economy which happen to dominate our present industrialized and mechanical form of society and they are less fit to handle complicated modern problems than any other group of men of whom I can think at the present moment. The plenipotentiaries of Paris were no exception. They met in the shadow of the Iron Man, they talked of a world that was dominated by the Iron Man, yet never became aware of his presence and until the very end talked in words and symbols that represented the mentality of the eighteenth century but not that of the twentieth.

The result was inevitable. It is impossible to think in terms of the year 1719 and prosper in terms of the year 1919. But that, it is becoming increasingly evident, is exactly what the old men of Versailles did.

Now behold the world as it has been left in the wake of this orgy of hatred and unreason--a crazy quilt of phantastic new nationalities that may possess some value as historical curiosities but that will never be able to hold their own in a world dominated by coal and oil and water-power and wholesale credits—a continent divided by artificial frontiers which look pretty enough upon a children's atlas but bear no relation whatsoever to the urgent necessities of modern civilization—a vast armed camp of people in yellow and green and purple uniforms masquerading as feeble imitations of their mythical ancestors but of less practical use to our contemporary society than any little cash-girl that works in the basement of a ten-cent store.

This may sound like a brutal condemnation of a state of affairs that still fills the souls of millions of honest European patriots with gratitude and pride.

I am sorry but not until the statesmen of Europe shall be willing to leave the solution of modern problems to people with modern minds can there be any lasting improvement. Meanwhile in their agony and distress the people will turn to the cure-alls offered by Bolshevism and Fascism.

Incidentally this outburst of rhetoric will explain the most dangerous and regrettable of all recent political developments —the rapidly increasing dislike between the people of Europe and those of America. Since I am trying to write for the children of all races and not merely for those who live on the fortunate patch of land that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, this apparent waving of the stars and stripes may be considered as an exhibition of very doubtful taste. But this is a time for plain speech and even at the risk of being mistaken for a hundred per cent patriot (the very last honor to which I aspire) I shall try to make my point clear.

I do not for a moment claim that man for man and woman for woman the Americans as a nation are superior to any of their cousins of the old world. But fortunately for themselves they have little consciousness of the past and therefore they are more able to approach the problems of the present with an open eye towards the future than the members of almost any other race. As a result they have accepted the modern world without any reservations and having accepted it with all its good and all its evil, they are rapidly reaching a “modus vivendi” whereby animate man and his inanimate servant shall be able to exist on terms of peace and mutual respect. It sounds absurd yet it is true that the country which has achieved the greatest mechanical perfection is also the first to bring the Iron Man to terms. In order to do this the American people have been forced to throw overboard a great deal of ancestral ballast. They have sacrificed hundreds of ideas and prejudices and ideals that served a highly useful purpose two hundred or „ two thousand years ago but which to-day are of no more value than a stagecoach or a miracle-working image. As far as I can see there will be no hope for Europe until the mass of Germans and Englishmen and Spaniards and Heaven-only-knows-what-they-are-called do likewise.

In a chapter like this it would be so easy to deliver noble harangues upon the accomplishments of Locarno; the unfeasibility of a Marxian program of applied economics; to discuss the follies of those small-town French politicians who have not yet learned that the days of Louis XIV and Napoleon have long since been relegated to the era of the Stone Age. But it would be a waste of energy and printer's ink.

The misery that has come over the world during the last ten years (hastened along by the Great War but by no means caused by that sanguinary conflict) is in reality due to a profound change in the economic and social structure of the entire world. But Europe, steeped in the lore of the past, has thus far been unwilling or unable to realize this fact.

The peace of Versailles, the last great gesture of the old régime, was meant as a final stronghold against the inevitable approach of the modern era. In less than eight years it has become an obsolete ruin. It would have been considered a sublime piece of statecraft in the year of Grace 1700. To-day not one out of ten thousand people has ever bothered to read it. For the twentieth century is dominated by certain economic and industrial principles which recognize no political boundaries and tend with absolute inevitableness to turn the entire world into a single large and prosperous workshop regardless of language, race or previous condition of ancestral glory.

What eventually will come out of this workshop, what form of civilization will be developed by an intelligent and willing co-operation between man and his machines—that I do not know and it really does not matter so very much. Life means change and this is not the first time that the human race has been faced by a similar emergency.

Our remote and our less-distant ancestors have lived through such crises.

No doubt our children and grandchildren will do the same.

But for us, who are alive to-day, the one and only serious problem is a world-wide reorganization along economic rather than worn-out political lines.

Seven years ago, our ears deafened by the noise of the big guns, our eyes blinded by the flash of the searchlights, we were still too dazed to understand whither the great upheaval had carried us. At that moment any fairly honorable and sincere man who pretended that he could guide us back to the happy days of 1914 was welcomed as a leader and was assured of our willing loyalty.

To-day we know better.

We have begun to understand that the comfortable old world in which we dwelled so unsuspectingly until the outbreak of the war had in reality outlived its usefulness by several decades.

This does not mean that we are absolutely certain about the road that now lies before us. Most likely we will follow a dozen wrong tracks before we find the right direction. And in the meantime we are fast learning one very important lesson — that the future belongs to the living and that the dead ought to mind their own business.