In the Fourth Year eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 121 pages of information about In the Fourth Year.

In the Fourth Year eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 121 pages of information about In the Fourth Year.
to sit down with some of the enemy to arrange a common scheme for the preservation of credit in money.  And I presume that it is not proposed to end this war in a wild scramble of buyers for such food as remains in the world.  There is a shortage now, a greater shortage ahead of the world, and there will be shortages of supply at the source and transport in food and all raw materials for some years to come.  The Peace Congress will have to sit and organize a share-out and distribution and reorganization of these shattered supplies.  It will have to Rhondda the nations.  Probably, too, we shall have to deal collectively with a pestilence before we are out of the mess.  Then there are such little jobs as the reconstruction of Belgium and Serbia.  There are considerable rectifications of boundaries to be made.  There are fresh states to be created, in Poland and Armenia for example.  About all these smaller states, new and old, that the peace must call into being, there must be a system of guarantees of the most difficult and complicated sort.

I do not see the Press Congress getting through such matters as these in a session of weeks or months.  The idea the Germans betrayed at Brest, that things were going to be done in the Versailles fashion by great moustached heroes frowning and drawing lines with a large black soldierly thumbnail across maps, is—­old-fashioned.  They have made their eastern treaties, it is true, in this mode, but they are still looking for some really responsible government to keep them now that they are made.  From first to last clearly the main peace negotiations are going to follow unprecedented courses.  This preliminary discussion of war aims by means of great public speeches, that has been getting more and more explicit now for many months, is quite unprecedented.  Apparently all the broad preliminaries are to be stated and accepted in the sight of all mankind before even an armistice occurs on the main, the western front.  The German diplomatists hate this process.  So do a lot of ours.  So do some of the diplomatic Frenchmen.  The German junkers are dodging and lying, they are fighting desperately to keep back everything they possibly can for the bargaining and bullying and table-banging of the council chamber, but that way there is no peace.  And when at last Germany says snip sufficiently to the Allies’ snap, and the Peace Congress begins, it will almost certainly be as unprecedented as its prelude.  Before it meets, the broad lines of the settlement will have been drawn plainly with the approval of the mass of mankind.

II

THE LEAGUE MUST BE REPRESENTATIVE

A Peace Congress, growing permanent, then, may prove to be the most practical and convenient embodiment of this idea of a League of Nations that has taken possession of the imagination of the world.  A most necessary preliminary to a Peace Congress, with such possibilities inherent in it, must obviously be the meeting and organization of a preliminary League of the Allied Nations.  That point I would now enlarge.

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In the Fourth Year from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.