Obstructing Disarmament
THE Anglo-French compromise—or to speak more strictly the way in which it has been handled— has done enough mischief already, and it must not be allowed to leave us after its death with a legacy of further trouble. The manner, however, in which Frenchmen are speaking of that part of the compromise which refers to the reserves of conscript armies fills us with anxiety. If Great Britain were ever put into the position of sanc- tioning the huge Continental armies which would be the corollary of a failure to exclude reservists from estimates of man-power, we should have to say good-bye to all hope of any satisfying scheme of disarmament. The Peace Pact, instead of being built up by care and forethought into a reality, would have to be added to that catalogue of rubbish which is the sad record of human perversity, suspicion and incompetence.
We have said from the first that we do not in the least blame the experts for the compromise they produced. They were invited, merely as experts, to produce the highest common factor of agreement between France and England, and no doubt the compromise as we know it is the best they could do. The highest common factor turned out to be a miserably low one. Still, the effort to produce a formula which could be laid before the Preparatory Commission of the Disarmament Conference was not only innocent but laudable in its origin. It is the function and the duty of experts to think in the terms of their craft, and they cannot be expected to expose themselves to the odium of making any mistake about the margins of safety. What is astonishing is that the formula they produced was not submitted to any of the correctives of statesmanship.
The British Government might have done either of two things. They might—which would have been the best course—have acted on the reasonable certainty that America would not dream of agreeing to a naval proposal upon which she had already turned a face of flint. They would then have said to the experts, " If this is the best you can do, we think it useless to submit it to America until we have added our own suggestions for making it more palatable." Alternatively, they might have explained to the American Government that the compromise was submitted to them as nothing more than the best bargain which the experts could make and have pointed out that if the compromise had no other value it was at least significant of the formidable difficulties of the problem. As it was, it has been generally understood that the British Government accepted responsibility for the compromise, and there followed the hurricane of innuendo and sus- picion which was quite unrelated to facts.
The most serious residue of this unhappy affair is the way in which the French are treating the undertaking of the British experts to agree to the exclusion of reservists from estimates` of strength. To the British experts this concession was just a bargaining counter. To us it is a supremely vital matter. And we are amazed that it did not seem to be so to our statesmen. We are confident that the Foreign Office never gave the least encourage- ment to the Quai d'Orsay when it tried to link Great Britain in a " common policy " with France. Neverthe- less, a great many French newspapers have been writing as though Great Britain had committed herself finally on the question of reservists and cannot now withdraw from a pledge which was in some sense independent of the rest of the compromise. M. Briand has used words which, though they are vague, have been interpreted as meaning that if no universal agreement can be reached Great Britain and France must face their difficulties together.
It cannot be made too clear that British public opinion, though it rejoiced in the Anglo-French attempt to draft a solution for the Preparatory Commission, will never be party to a policy which did not properly arise out of that attempt, and which in practice would give British support to a French hegemony of Europe, would drive Great Britain farther away from America, and would indefinitely postpone hopes of disarmament.
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