AND THE TRIVIALITY OF MEN
Washington, Nov 7
THE conference nominally for the limitation of armaments that now gathers at Washington may become a cardinal event in the history of mankind. It may mark a turning point in human affairs or it may go on record as one of the last failures to stave off the disasters and destruction that gather about our race.
In August, 1914, an age of insecure progress and accumulation came to an end. When at last, on the most momentous summer night in history, the long preparations of militarism burst their bounds and the little Belgian village Visé went up in flames, men said: “This is a catastrophe.” But they found it hard to anticipate the nature of the catastrophe. They thought for the most part of the wounds and killing and burning of war and imagined that when at last the war was over we should count our losses and go on again much as we did before 1914.
As well might a little shopkeeper murder his wife in the night and expect to carry on “business as usual” in the morning. “Business as usual”—that was the catchword in Britain in 1914; of all the catchwords of the world it carries now the heaviest charge of irony.
The catastrophe of 1914 is still going on. It does not end; it increases and spreads. This winter more people will suffer dreadful things and more people will die untimely through the clash of 1914 than suffered and died in the first year of the war. It is true that the social collapse of Russia in 1917 and the exhaustion of food and munitions in Central Europe in 1918 produced a sort of degradation and enfeeble-ment of the combatant efforts of our race and that a futile conference at Versailles settled nothing, with an air of settling everything, but that was no more an end to disaster than it would be if a man who was standing up and receiving horrible wounds were to fall down and writhe and bleed in the dust. It would be merely a new phase of disaster. Since 1919 this world has not so much healed its wounds as realized its injuries.
Chief among these injuries is the progressive economic breakdown, the magnitude of which we are only beginning to apprehend. The breakdown is a real decay that spreads and spreads. In a time of universal shortage there is an increasing paralysis in production; and there is a paralysis of production because the monetary system of the world, which was sustained by the honest co-operation of Governments, is breaking down. The fluctuations in the real value of money become greater and greater and they shake and shatter the entire fabric of social co-operation.
Our civilization is, materially, a cash and credit system, dependent on men’s confidence in the value of money. But now money fails us and cheats us; we work for wages and they give us uncertain paper. No one now dare make contracts ahead; no one can fix up a stable wages agreement; no one knows what one hundred dollars or francs or pounds will mean in two years’ time.
What is the good of saving? “What is the good of foresight? Business and employment become impossible. Unless money can be steadied and restored, our economic and social life will go on disintegrating, and it can be restored only by a world effort.
But such a world effort to restore business and prosperity is only possible between govern-ments sincerely at peace, and because of the failure of Versailles there is no such sincere peace. Everywhere the Governments, and notably Japan and France, arm. Amidst the steady disintegration of the present system of things, they prepare for fresh wars, wars that can have only one end—an extension of the famine and social collapse that have already engulfed Russia to the rest of the world.
In Russia, in Austria, in many parts of Germany, this social decay is visible in actual ruins, in broken down railways and suchlike machinery falling out of use. But even in Western Europe, in France and England, there is a shabbiness, there is a decline visible to any one with a keen memory.
The other day my friend Mr. Charlie Chaplin brought his keen observant eyes back to London, after an absence of ten years.
“People are not laughing and careless here as they used to be,” he told me. “It isn ‘t the London I remember. They are anxious. Something hangs over them.”
Coming as I do from Europe to America, I am amazed at the apparent buoyancy and abundance of New York. The place seems to possess an inexhaustible vitality. But this towering, thundering, congested city, with such a torrent of traffic and such a concourse of people as I have never seen before, is, after all, the European door of America; it draws this superabundant and astounding life from trade, from a trade whose roots are dying.
When one looks at New York its assurance is amazing; when one reflects we realize its tremendous peril. It is going on—as London is going on—by accumulated inertia. With the possible exception of London, the position of New York seems to me the most perilous of that of any city in the world. What is to happen to this immense crowd of people if the trade that feeds it ebbs? As assuredly it will ebb unless the decline of European money and business can be arrested, unless, that is, the world problem of trade and credit can be grappled with as a world affair.
The world’s economic life, its civilization, embodied in its great towns, is disintegrating and collapsing through the strains of the modern war threat and of the disunited control of modern affairs.
This in general terms is the situation of mankind today; this is the situation, the tremendous and crucial situation, that President Harding, the head and spokesman of what is now the most powerful and influential state in the world, has called representatives from most of the states in the world to Washington to discuss.
Whatever little modifications and limitations the small cunning of diplomatists may impose upon the terms of reference of the conference, the plain common sense of mankind will insist that its essential inquiry is, “What are we to do, if anything can possibly be done, to arrest and reverse the slide toward continuing war preparation and war and final social collapse?” And you would imagine that this momentous conference would gather in a mood of exalted responsibility, with every conceivable help and every conceivable preparation to grasp the enormous issues involved.
Let us dismiss any such delusion from our minds.
Let us face a reality too often ignored in the dignfied discussion of such business as this Washington Conference, and that is this: that the human mind takes hold of such very big questions as the common peace of the earth and the general security of mankind with very great reluctance and that it leaves go with extreme alacrity.
We are all naturally trivial creatures. We do not live from year to year; we live from day to day. Our minds naturally take short views and are distracted by little, immediate issues. We forget with astonishing facility. And this is as true of the high political persons who will gather at Washington as it is of any overworked clerk who will read about the conference in a street car or on the way home to supper and bed. These big questions affect everybody, and also they are too big for anybody. A great intellectual and moral effect is required if they are to be dealt with in any effectual manner.
I find the best illustration of this incurable drift toward triviality in myself. In the world of science the microscope helps the telescope and the infinitely little illuminates the infinitely great.
Let me put myself under the lens: Exhibit 1—If any one has reason to focus the whole of his mental being upon this Washington Conference it is I. It is my job to attend to it and to think of it and of nothing else. Whatever I write about it, wise or foolish, will be conspicuously published in a great number of newspapers and will do much to make or mar my reputation. Intellectually, I am convinced of the supreme possibilities
