The treaty was ambiguous inasmuch as it did not specify whether the plebiscite should be held immediately after the expiry of the ten-year period, nor by which power and under whose laws it should be organized. The Chileans made use of this ambiguity to delay the holding of the plebiscite until such time as, by intimidating and expelling the Peruvian inhabitants and importing Chileans, they should be sure of securing a majority. Direct negotiations were tried and failed. An appeal to the League of Nations in 1920 proved abortive. Finally, arbitration by the President of the United States was accepted in 1925 and it was agreed that a plebiscite should be held under the auspices of a commission, presided over by General Pershing. But the Chileans still had no intention of allowing the machine to work. Pershing retired in 1926 and his successor, General Lassiter, had to declare that the commission must be dissolved without fulfilling its mission. Finally, in 1928, under friendly pressure from the United States, the two countries resumed diplomatic relations (they had been interrupted for nearly twenty years) and, in 1929, agreed to accept the arbitration of President Hoover, who finally settled the matter by assigning Tacna to Peru and Arica to Chile.
This international quarrel lasted for forty-six years. From the first both sides had agreed to make use of the machinery of peaceful change (a plebiscite and the payment of a monetary compensation). But from the first one of the parties refused to allow the machine to work as it should. In the end sheer boredom took the place of good will. The Chileans couldn’t be bothered to persist any longer in their intransigence. The machine was permitted to function and within a few months turned out the peaceful solution which it had been expressly contrived to produce.
The case of the Anglo-American dispute over the boundary between Maine and New Brunswick is very similar to that of the more recent dispute between Chile and Peru. After years of bickering, the arbitration of the King of the Netherlands was accepted in 1827; but when, in 1831, he made his award, the United States rejected it. The dispute dragged on, becoming progressively more acrimonious, for another eleven years. Then, growing weary of the whole matter, both sides decided that it was time to make a settlement. Lord Ashburton was sent to Washington to negotiate with the Secretary of State, Daniel Webster, and in a very short time the Maine boundary and a number of other outstanding differences between the two countries were amicably settled. Here again the machinery of peaceful change produced the results it was designed to produce only when the parties concerned were willing to use it as it was meant to be used. Another significant point is that the negotiations between the two countries were greatly facilitated by the fact that the two negotiators, Webster and Ashburton, were personal friends and enjoyed, in their respective countries, a high reputation for integrity and good sense.
Consequently the process of negotiation was easy and its results, though attacked by extremists on both sides of the Atlantic, were acceptable to the majority of ordinary, moderate men, who trusted in the judgment and honesty of the negotiators. For the arbitrator even more, perhaps, than for the negotiator, character is the supreme asset. Any suspicion that the judge in an international dispute is partial, corrupt or merely injudicious, is enough to imperil the success of the arbitration. Here again we see that the machine itself is of secondary importance; what matters is the will, the intelligence, and the moral character of the men who use the machine. That machinery should exist and that it should be the best that legal and administrative ingenuity can devise is essential. The mere fact that the machinery is there is a hint to the disputants that they ought to use it, rather than resort to armed violence. Opportunity helps to make the good man as well as the thief. It is important, as we have seen, to deliver men from evil by reducing the number of opportunities for behaving badly. It is equally important to create new opportunities for behaving well, to provide desirable alternatives to the evil courses prescribed by tradition.
Such institutions as the Hague Court and, in its arbitral and co-operative capacity, the League of Nations, are merely pieces of judicial and administrative machinery and can do nothing of themselves to preserve peace or cure the world of its militaristic insanity. Their existence, however, is an invitation and an opportunity to use peaceful instead of violent methods; and the better the machinery, the more effectively will men be able to exploit the opportunity, once it has been seized.
All the existing methods of preventing war are characterized by one or other of two principal defects. Either they are, like military sanctions, intrinsically bad and so incapable of producing any but bad results—(the results of using unlimited violence and cunning are exactly the same, whether you call the process plain war or employ such charming euphemisms as ‘Sanctions,’ ‘Collective Security,’ ‘International Police Action’)—or else they are merely pieces of more or less well-designed machinery, incapable by themselves of affecting the fundamental causes of war. This is true even of the special pieces of machinery set up from time to time since the War for the special purpose of eliminating some at least of the economic, political and military causes of war.
The Naval Conference of 1927 and the general Disarmament Conference of 1932-34 were excellent pieces of machinery. But unfortunately none of the parties concerned showed the smallest desire to make use of them. During the 1927 conference the Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corporation, the Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company, and the American Brown Boveri Corporation employed a Mr. Shearer to make anti-British propaganda both at Geneva and in the United States, with a view to preventing any agreement on a reduction in naval armaments from being reached. Mr. Shearer was extremely active, and, feeling that he had been inadequately remunerated, sued the three companies in 1929 for a quarter of a million dollars, ‘for services rendered.’ The companies could probably have saved their money.
Even without Mr. Shearer’s intervention, it is pretty certain that the negotiations would have resulted in no serious diminution of the British and American navies. At the general Disarmament Conference the determination not to use the machine was manifested even more clearly than in 1927. No government was willing so much as to consider unilateral disarmament, and even the Soviet suggestion of complete disarmament all round was ruled out of order before the Conference had begun. The discussions dragged on for two years—discussions concerned not with disarmament, but with the kind of weapons to be used in the next war. Finally the Conference was adjourned sine die and the various powers set to work to re-arm on a scale unprecedented in human history.
The same obstinate refusal to make use of intrinsically excellent machinery has been displayed at the various conferences on economic and monetary problems. All the economists are agreed that international trade cannot become normal unless tariff barriers are lowered, the quota system abolished, and some satisfactory medium of international exchange established. Nor is this all. Everyone knows that economic warfare, carried on by competitive currency devaluations, by tariffs, quotas and export bounties, is bound to lead sooner or later to military warfare. Nevertheless, no government has shown itself ready to make use of any of the excellent machinery specially designed for the purpose of solving the world’s economic problems.
It is the same with the Mandate System. The Mandate System is a machine which makes it possible for backward peoples to be placed under the control of an international authority, not under the exclusive rule of a single nation. In regard to colonies, the world is at present divided into two camps of Haves and Have-nots. The Haves adopt the motto of the British Navy League: What I have I hold. The Have-nots demand a place in the sun, or in more vulgar language, a share in the loot. In recent years these demands have become particularly insistent and menacing. The Haves have consequently found it necessary to re-arm, among other reasons, in order to defend their colonies. In the days when sea-power was all important, the defence of a ‘far-flung empire’ was relatively easy. To-day it is, to say the least of it, exceedingly difficult. It has been repeatedly suggested that the imperial powers
