Briand, Ambassador Jusserand, and the eloquent Viviani represented France. V. K. Wellington Koo and Alfred Sze, envoys to Great Britain and the United States respectively, were the Chinese delegates. Prince Tokugawa, Ambassador Shidehara, and Admiral Kato represented Japan, and Senator Schanzer and Ambassador Ricci represented Italy.

After a graceful address of welcome from President Harding, Secretary Hughes, chairman of the conference, came straight to the point with the proposal of a drastic cut in naval strength, in which the United States was willing to take the lead. The world had had enough of "investigations, statistics, reports, and the circumlocution of inquiry," he said; "it wants a practical program which shall at once be put into execution." He suggested a "naval holiday" for at least ten years, during which no new capital ships should be built, and proposed the scrapping of a number of older capital ships or ships under construction. The United States was to destroy 30 fighting ships with a tonnage of 845,740. Great Britain was asked to scrap 19 capital ships with a tonnage of 583,375, and Japan 17 ships with a tonnage of 448,928-a grand total of 66 fighting ships with a tonnage of 1,878,043.1 The ratio of naval strength of capital ships was fixed at 5:5:3:13:13 for Great Britain, the United States, Japan, France, and Italy respectively. Mr. Balfour wanted to have the submarine abolished entirely as "an inhuman agent of warfare," and Secretary Hughes proposed a reduction of submarine tonnage to 60,000 for the United States and Great Britain and 31,500 for France and Japan; but the French delegation, while agreeing to the capital-ship ratio, held out for 90,000 tons of submarines and 330,000 tons of cruisers and auxiliaries on account of her long line of coast to be defended. Secretary Hughes's attempt to include the reduction of land armaments in the discussion was also vetoed by the French

2

1 The treaty as finally signed provided for the scrapping of 68 ships with a tonnage of 1,876,432.

2 A capital ship was defined in the treaty (Part IV, sect. 1) as "a vessel of war whose displacement exceeds 10,000 tons, or which carries a gun with a caliber exceeding 8 inches."

...

delegation. Premier Briand made an impassioned plea for the necessity of a strong army for the defense of his country against the recuperation of a populous and vindictive Germany. A treaty was signed, however, binding the powers to observe the rule of visit and search in submarine warfare, and making it an act of piracy for a submarine commander to destroy a merchantman without placing the passengers and crew in a position of safety. The allocation of the former German colonies in the Pacific north of the equator to Japan, and those south of the equator to countries of the British Empire, as mandates, made it advisable for the naval powers to come to an understanding on their attitude toward one another in the Pacific region. And finally, a number of questions affecting the territorial, economic, and administrative independence of China were waiting solution.

Out of the three months' incessant labor of the conference there came a sheaf of nine treaties: (1) a five-power treaty abolishing competition in capital ships and limiting the size of guns and the tonnage of airplane carriers; (2) a five-power treaty prohibiting the use of the submarine as a commerce destroyer and of asphyxiating gases in warfare; (3) and (4) four-power treaties (Italy omitted) binding the signatories to respect one another's rights in their insular possessions in the Pacific, and to submit to the decision of a joint conference any question "likely to affect the harmonious accord and happiness subsisting between them"; (5) a nine-power treaty guaranteeing the integrity of the sovereignty of China and the "open door" for trade; (6) a nine-power treaty regulating the Chinese customs tariffs; (7) a treaty between China and Japan, by which the latter power agreed to restore the former German leasehold of Kiaochow and the Shantung province; (8) a treaty between the United States and Japan guaranteeing our rights in the important cable station of the island of Yap; and (9) a six-power treaty allocating the German cables in the Pacific. President Harding presented the treaties to the Senate on February 10, 1922, stating that they involved no alliances, "no narrowed liberty, no hampered independence, no shattered sovereignty," but that they dissipated apprehensions and anxieties that might have

led to war. The Yap treaty was ratified on March 1, and on the thirty-first of the month Secretary Hughes announced that all the conference treaties to which the United States was a party had been ratified. The two most important ones-the fivepower naval treaty and the four-power Pacific pact-became effective when ratifications were exchanged at Washington, August 17, 1923.1

The Washington conference has been criticized as a futile affair. It has failed to cut naval expenses or stop naval competition, say the critics, because only capital ships (and mostly old ones at that) were scrapped, while the competition in submarines, cruisers, destroyers, aircraft, and land armaments goes on. They point out that America spent 174 per cent more on its navy in 1922-1923 than in 1914, that the Hughes program cost us $70,000,000 in contracts for uncompleted ships which were destroyed, that we have been left with a navy inferior to that of Japan, and that it would cost us $800,000,000 to reach a parity in naval strength with Great Britain. The criticisms coming from those who complain that too much was done in the way of naval disarmament, combined with the criticisms of those who are dissatisfied because too little was done, show how much like squaring the circle is the problem of reconciling disarmament with preparedness. So long as national hates and rivalries last, so long will the nations "put their trust in reeking tube and iron shard." President Coolidge stated the dilemma clearly in his message to Congress on December 6, 1923: "We want no more compelling armaments. We want no more war. But we want no weakness that invites imposition. A people who neglect their national defense are putting in jeopardy their national honor." If the day ever comes when physical disarmament will be safe, it will be only because a moral disarmament has preceded. It is as a step toward such moral disarmament, rather than for any

1 The naval treaty and the Chinese treaties were ratified with only one dissenting vote in the Senate; the submarine and poison-gas treaty, unanimously. The only treaty on which there was a contest was the four-power Pacific pact, which was accepted on March 24 by the narrow margin of four votes (67 to 27). An important feature of this treaty was the abrogation of the Anglo-Japanese alliance which had existed since 1902.

specific reduction of naval tonnage, that the Washington conference has its chief significance. It was a contribution to a better understanding among the nations who took part. It revealed, along with some fears and mistrusts, a large amount of unrealized good will and readiness to make sacrifices for the sake of international harmony. "Its most important results," said Secretary Hughes in his speech before the American Historical Association at New Haven on December 29, 1922, "were those which were unwritten and imponderable, for where there is friendship and confidence, treaties to maintain peace are of least importance."

On June 30, 1923, President and Mrs. Harding, with a party of sixty-five, started for a tour across the country and a visit to the territory of Alaska. The President was far from a well man when he left Washington. His labor of the previous year in striving to compose the industrial unrest from which the country was suffering had impaired his splendid physique. He was taken ill in Alaska; and when he reached San Francisco, on his homeward trip, his condition became serious. Still, his countrymen were not prepared for the shock of the news of his death, which occurred in San Francisco in the evening of the second of August. As his body was borne across the country to lie in state at the Capitol before the interment at Marion, the scenes of respect and mourning recalled the honors paid twenty-two years before to President McKinley, whom Mr. Harding resembled closely in the tactful, congenial, unaffected amiability which endeared him to all who were associated with him in private life or in official station. Except for the Washington conference there was little of the dramatic in his administration. He was not a leader of the brilliant, aggressive type. He neither dominated Congress nor strove with it-though he showed by his veto of the bonus bill and his urgence of the ship-subsidy bill that he had his convictions and could stand by them. The greatest need of the country as he saw it was to return to old and tried paths. To many of his fellow countrymen this course seemed like the repudiation of the opportunity to make America a leader among the nations. But to him and to those who supported him

it seemed the very condition and guaranty of our peace at home and our helpfulness abroad. He worked diligently and conscientiously at the prosaic tasks of budget reform, economy and retrenchment, tax revision, and the mitigation of industrial strife. He was eager to coöperate with foreign nations, in every way that he deemed consistent with our constitutional duty and our political security, for the improvement of world relations. He coveted most the title of "the prophet of a better understanding."

THE TASK BEFORE US

In the year that Thomas Jefferson bought the wilderness of Louisiana between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains, when the population of our country was about equal to that of New York City today, when most of the people lived on farms or in villages, when the constitutions of the states limited the suffrage to a comparatively small percentage of the adult males, and when there was even less of social than of political democracy, Fisher Ames, a Federalist lawyer of Massachusetts, complained that our country was "too big for union, too sordid for patriotism, and too democratic for liberty." This lugubrious forecast, made sixscore years ago, has been repeated by the prophets of calamity in every generation since. The framers of the Omaha platform, like the men of the Essex Junto, saw the country tottering on the verge of ruin. The pages of the records of Congress are filled with impassioned pleas against measures whose passage would mean the downfall of the Republic and the end of American liberty. Still, the Republic endures; and the millions of its citizens, of whatever party, creed, or race, who go about their business daily are as devoted to their country as ever their fathers were. The apparently universal trait of human nature that makes calamity and evil so interesting tempts to the emphasis of sinister events in the press. No headlines feature the faithful administration of public office, the honest conduct of business, or conjugal fidelity. The poets and moralists since

1 Henry Adams, "The History of the United States in the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison," Vol. I, p. 84.