Washington, the guide books say, was planned by Major Pierre Charles L’Enfant in imitation of Versailles. If so, it has broken away from his intentions. I know Versailles pretty well, and I have gone about Washington looking vainly for anything more than the remotest resemblance. There is something European about Washington, I admit, an Italianate largeness, as though a Roman design has been given oxygen and limitless space. It is a capital in the expanded Latin style. It has none of the vertical uplift of a real American city. But Versailles!

Versailles was the home and embodiment of the old French Grand Monarchy and of a Foreign Policy that sought to dominate, Frenchify and “Versaillize” the world. A visit to Versailles is part of one’s world education, a visit to the rather faded, rather pretentious magnificence of its terraces, to that Hall of Mirrors, all plastered over with little oblongs of looking-glass, which was once considered so wonderful, to the stuffy, secretive royal apartments with their convenient back stairs, to the poor foolishness of the Queen’s toy village, the Little Trianon. A century and a half ago the people of France, wasted and worn by incessant wars of aggression, weary of a Government that was an intolerable burden to them and a nuisance to all Europe, went to Versailles in a passion and dragged French Policy out of Versailles for a time.

Unhappily it went back there.

In 1871, when Germany struck down the tawdry imperialism of Napoleon III (who was also for setting up Emperors in the New World) the Germans had the excessive bad taste to proclaim a New German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors. So that Versailles became more than ever the symbol of the age-long, dreary, pitiful quarrel of the French and Germans for the inheritance of “the Empire” that has gone on ever since the death of Charlemagne. There the glory of France had shone; there the glory of France had been eclipsed. I visited Versailles one autumnal day in 1912, and it was then a rather mouldy, disheartened, empty, picturesque show place, pervaded by memories of flounces, furbelows, wigs and red heels and also by the stronger, less pleasant flavor of that later Prussian triumph.

It was surely the least propitious place in the whole world for the making of a world peace in 1919. It was inevitable that there the Rhine frontier should loom larger than all Asia and that the German people should be kept waiting outside to learn what vindictive punishment victorious France designed for them.

The Peace of Versailles was not a settlement of the world, it was the crowning of the French revanche. And since Russia had always been below the horizon of Versailles it was as inevitable that the Russian people, who had saved France from utter defeat in 1914, who had given far more dead to the war than France and America put together, and who had collapsed at last, utterly exhausted by their stupendous war efforts, should be considered merely as the defaulting debtors of France. Their Government had incurred vast liabilities chiefly in preparation for this very war which had restored France to her former glorious ascendancy over Germany. And now a new, ungracious Government in Russia not only declared it could not pay up but refused to pretend that it had ever meant to perform this impossible feat. There could be no dealing with such a Government. The German people and the Russian people alike had no voice at Versailles, and the affairs of the world were settled with a majestic disregard of these outcast and fallen powers.

They were settled so magnificently and badly that now the Washington Conference, whatever limitations it may propose to set upon itself, has in effect to review and, if it can, mend or replace that appalling settlement. The Washington conference has practically to revise the verdicts of Versailles, in a fresher air and with a wider outlook.

I do not know how near future historians may come to saying that the Washington conference was planned in imitation of that Versailles conference, but it certainly does start out with one most unfortunate resemblance. There seems to be the same tacit assumption that it is possible to come to some permanent settlement of the world’s affairs with no representation of either the German or the Russian people at the conference. The Japanese, the Italians, the French, the Americans and the British, assisted by modest suggestions from such small sections of humanity as China and Spanish America, are sitting down to arrangements that will amount practically to a settlement of the world’s affairs, and they are doing so without consulting these two great peoples, and quite without their consent and assistance. This surely runs counter to the fundamental principle of both American and British political life—that is to say, the principle of government with the consent of the governed—and it is indeed an altogether deplorable intention. In some form these two great peoples will have to be associated with any permanent settlement, and it will be much more difficult to secure their assent to any arrangement arrived at without even their formal co-operation.

It is necessary to remind ourselves of certain elementary facts about Germany and Russia and their position in the world today. They are facts within the knowledge of all, and yet they seem to be astonishingly forgotten in very much of the discussion of the Washington conference.

First, let us recall certain points about Germany. The German people occupy the most central position in Europe; they exceed in numbers any other European people except the Russians; their educational level has been as high or higher than any other people in the world; they are, as a people, honest, industrious, and intelligent; upon their social and political well-being and economic prosperity the prosperity of Britain, Scandinavia, Russia, Italy—and in a lesser degree France—depends. It is impossible to destroy such a people, it is impossible to wipe them off the map, but it is possible to ruin them economically and socially. And if Germany is ruined most of Europe is ruined.

Germany has been overthrown in a great war and it will be well to recall here certain elementary facts about that war. Under a particularly aggressive and offensive imperialism system the Germans were plunged into conflict with most of the rest of the civilized world. But it was repeatedly declared by the British and by the Americans, if not by others of the combatants, that they fought not against the German people but against this German imperialism. The British war propaganda in particular did its utmost to saturate Germany with that assurance and to hold out the promise of generous treatment and a complete restoration of friendship provided there was a German renunciation of imperialism and militarism.

Germany, exhausted and beaten, surrendered in 1918 upon the strength of these promises and upon the similar promises implied in President Wilson’s Fourteen Points. The declared ends of the war had been achieved. The Kaiser bolted, and Germany repented of him publicly and unequivocally.

But the conference at Versailles treated these promises that had been made to Germany as mere “scraps of paper.” The peace imposed upon the young German republic was a punitive peace, exactly as punitive as though there were still a Kaiser in Berlin; it was a vindictive reversal of the Franco-German treaty of 1871 without a shred of recognition or tolerance for the chastened Germany that faced her conquerors. The Germans were dealt with as a race of moral monsters, though no one in his senses really believes they are very different, man for man, from English, French or American people; every German was held to be individually responsible for the war, though every Frenchman, Englishman and American knows that when one’s country fights one has to fight, and it is quite natural to fight for it whether it is in the right or not; and a sustained attack of oppressive occupations, dismemberment, and impossible demands was begun and still goes on upon the shattered German civilization—which is at least as vitally necessary to the world as the French. The British and French nationalist press openly confess that they do not intend to give Germany a chance of recovery. The European Allies have now been kicking the prostrate body of Germany for three years; in a little while they will be kicking a dead body; and since they are linked geographically to their victim almost as closely as the Siamese twins were linked together, they will share that victim’s decay.

It is high time that this barbaric insanity, this prolongation of the combat after surrender, should cease and that the best minds and wills of Germany and the very reasonable republican government she has set up for herself should be called into consultation. I could wish that Washington could so far rise above Versailles as presently to make that invitation. Sooner or later it will have to be made if the peace of the world is to be secured.

The absence of Russia from the Washington conference is an even graver weakness. People seem to have forgotten altogether how the Russians bore the brunt of the opening years of the great war. Their rapid offensive in 1914 saved Paris and saved the little British Army from a disastrous retreat to the sea. The debt of gratitude Britain and France owe to Russia’s “Unknown Warrior,” that poor unhonored hero and martyr, is incalculable. But for Russia Germany would probably have won the war outright before the end of 1916. It was the blood and suffering of the Russian people saved victory for the Allies; those incredible soldiers fought often without artillery support, without rifle ammunition, without boots or food, under conditions almost inconceivable to the well-supplied French and British and Americans of the western front. And their tale of killed and wounded exceeds enormously that of any other combatant. In 1917 Russia collapsed; she was bled white, and she remained collapsed in spite of the sedulous kicking of her allies to rouse her to further efforts. The intolerable Rasputin-Czarism went down in the disaster. After a phase of extreme disorder, and very largely because of the British hesitation to support the Kerensky Government by bold naval action in the Baltic, the hard, tyrannous, doctrinaire government of the Bolsheviki took control.

That government is a bad government; its faults are indeed of a different order but on the whole, I will admit, it is almost as bad as the former Czarist Government it superseded. Yet let us remember certain plain facts about it. It has remained in power to this day because it is a Russian-speaking government standing for a whole and undivided Russia, and the Russian people support it because it has defended Russia against the subsidized raiders of France and Britain, against the Poles and against the Esthonians and against the Japanese and against every sort of outside interference with their prostrate country. They prefer fanatics to foreigners and Bolsheviks to brigands. Frenchmen or Americans in the same horrible position would probably make the same choice. The Entente, the Poles, a miscellany of adventurers, have given the Russians no breathing time to deal with their own Government in their own fashion. And now, caught by the misadventure of an unprecedented drought, millions of Russians in the regions disorganized by Kolchak, Denikene and Wrangel, are starving to death—while Canada and America have wheat and corn to burn. There is even food to spare in some parts of Russia, but no adequate means of getting it to the starving provinces without outside assistance. And the Western World is letting these Russian millions starve because of the argumentative obstinacy of the Moscow Government, which hesitated for a time to acknowledge debts incurred by Russia—very largely for the military preparations which saved Europe—debts it is now inconceivable that Russia can ever under any circumstances pay, because of the pitiless resentment of the creditors of Russia. Yet the suffering of Russia cannot help the western money lender; they merely give him his revenge.

But even if some millions of Russian men, women and children die this winter and are added to the count of those who have already perished through the war—the war that saved Paris from Berlin—it does not follow that Russia will die. Peoples are not killed in this fashion. These distresses will not alter the fact that the Russians are the most numerous people in Europe, and a people of unexampled gifts and tenacity. Their magnificent resistance to outside interference since 1914 and their toleration of the Bolshevik Government when division would have been as fatal to them as it has been in China, is a proof of their solidarity and instinctive political wisdom. There are as many Russians as there are people in the United States of America, and they occupy an area as great and far richer in undeveloped resources. In spite of the monstrous Czarist Government which treated elementary education as an offense against the State, the prose literature, the drama, the music, the pictorial art—even the science of the Russians during the last hundred years—all this compares favorably with that of the United States. These Russians are indeed one of the very greatest of people and they have survived tragic experiences that might well have destroyed any other race. And Washington, I gather, proposes to settle the peace of Europe, Asia and the Pacific without them.

There is, I know, a very strong case to excuse Washington from sending an invitation to the existing Russian Government. I would be the last person in the world to minimize the difficulties the Bolshevik Government puts in the way of any fair dealings with the western powers; it is bound by its Communist theory not to recognize them fairly and to make gestures of preparation for their overthrow. In addition to its general theoretical obduracy Moscow is also afflicted with a particularly obdurate, pedantic, argumentative and disastrous Foreign Minister, Chicherin. But practical necessity knows no theories and the Bolshevik Government, if only it can save its face, is now extraordinarily anxious for recognition from and dealings with the western Governments.

I do not see why the western Governments, having regard to the needs of Russia, should try to outdo the Bolsheviks in obstinacy, pedantry and cruelty, nor why they should not make an honest attempt to get along with the de facto government until it develops naturally into something else. For such a development only a rough working peace is wanted. Given that, and a release from impossible debts, Russia, relieved forever from the black curse of Czarism, will go right on to become a land of restored cultivation, of resuscitated mines and presently of reawakening towns, a democratic land of common people more like the free, poor, farming, prospecting and developing United States of 1840 than anything else in history.

So long as Russia suffers the Bolshevik Government I think Washington ought to suffer it, but perhaps in that opinion I go beyond the possibilities of the case. Then I suggest that at least Washington ought to set up some well-informed lawyer, some bureau, to play the part of the Russian advocate at the conference. If Russia is not to be allowed a vote in the decision of things, let her at least be heard.

Consider what the future must hold for this great people, and mark the amazing folly of the insults and evils we heap upon their land. Look it up in an atlas or encyclopaedia. Measure what it is we ignore. In a score of years Russia may be a renascent land as vigorous as the United States in 1840. In a century she may be as great and powerful and civilized as any state on earth. For such powers as France and Britain and Japan to sit in council upon the fate of the world without her is as if, in the dark years of 1863 and 1864, they had sat in council upon the future of America without the United States. Indeed, something of the sort did happen in those dark years; France, I recall, sent troops and munitions into Mexico, as recently she has sent them into Poland and South Russia. And somewhere in the world there is a grave, the grave of a “white hope,” a reactionary puppet who was to have restored Mexico to the European system—the friend of the Emperor Napoleon the Third, the Emperor Maximilian.

When I was a small boy learning the rudiments of geography, the earth was presented to me in two hemispheres, the Old World and the new. Not once or twice only has America vindicated her right to that title. Will Washington confirm that great tradition and open a way of escape now from the tangled narrowness of Versailles? Are Germany and Russia to perish amid the incurable quarrels of the Old World or find their salvation in the New?