The American Monkey Wrench
AMERICAN foreign policy has been defined endlessly since George Washington objected to entangling alliances except in the pursuit of commerce. Occasionally the definition invokes the artistry of the humorist, as when John Hay justified American imperialism on the Pacific; often it has sought a religious sanction, such as the prayers of President McKinley when he decided on the annexation of the Philippines and slept soundly for the rest of the night. Then again there was the Dollar Diplomacy of Philander Knox, who responded to the inspiration of railroads and concessions, or the high moral sanctions of Woodrow Wilson, who strove to make the world good by treaty.
Throughout the documentation of the American foreign policy runs the thread of Washington’s Farewell Address, the Monroe Doctrine, the MostFavored-Nation Clause, and the OpenDoor Policy in the Far East. But often the pattern of the thread is barely visible, for the policy changes as the world moves on. It is affected by all the accidental factors of economics and politics, by geographical conditions, by the outcome of wars, by the pursuit of trade, by the idiocy of politicians and the ignorance of the masses.
The American policy in the Pacific was refocused in 1905, for instance, not because Russia was defeated by Japan, but because Japan’s international position was altered after the United States had become an imperialistic power in the Pacific by the annexation of the Philippines. The American policy toward Russia was revised after the Communist Revolution, not because the Bolsheviks repudiated their debts (for who has not?), but because Americans dislike ‘Reds.’ These incidental concomitants of national policy, fundamental and far-reaching as their effects may be, do not appear in the official gloss, nor are they ever incorporated in the treaties. Yet they represent the facts in American policy much more, for instance, than an evasion of entanglements. For, curiously enough, this country was entangled even before it became a nation; it was indubitably entangled when Lafayette and his countrymen helped defeat King George and his Hessians.
I
The objectives of American policy are difficult to disinter from the verbiage of diplomacy. What is it that the American people seek in their intercourse with their neighbors? Surely not the protection of boundaries and the maintenance of territorial integrity. The boundaries of the United States are nowhere endangered by an unfriendly neighbor, nor are the outlying possessions — Alaska, the Canal Zone, the Virgin Islands, the Philippines, Samoa, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam — in peril of seizure and occupation. Nor is any part of the United States in rebellion so that a foreign foe might step in, as we have done in Central America, to guarantee the success of revolution. The boundaries are safe; the territory intact.
No policy of action is required to maintain permanently this blessed condition. The geography of the American continents has preserved the United States from the frontier problems which beset every European state and which are now asserting themselves in the East of Asia. That insistence upon security which actuates France and Japan and the secession states of Europe evokes no sympathetic response in the United States. For this country is secure by the grace of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
If, then, American foreign policy is not designed to make boundaries secure, is it not perhaps actuated by the pursuit of trade? Yet every fact of political conduct repudiates such a motive. High tariffs set up definitely to stop trade, a strict adhesion to the ‘most-favored-nation clause’ which makes reciprocal trade agreements impossible, an unwillingness to provide credit for specific trade purposes, an irritating, arbitrary procedure of imposing political limitations upon good customers in the interest of dubious ones — these attitudes are not consistent with a foreign policy designed to foster trade.
Take the Far East as an example. Mr. Stimson’s policy seems to have had the following purposes: —
1. To support China as against Japan in international councils.
2. To erect every possible impediment to Japan’s expansion in Manchuria.
3. To declare a permanent policy of non-recognition of any political change in Manchuria at any time under any circumstances.
Short of a declaration of war, this is the most aggressive and belligerent attitude adopted by one power toward another in recent diplomacy. Mr. Stimson’s position is by no means a temporary one, for the Republican platform has fully adopted it and has declared it to be continuous should Mr. Hoover be reëlected. In this platform appear the following paragraphs : —
The President and his Secretary of State have maintained throughout the controversy a just balance between Japan and China, taking always a firm position to avoid entanglement in the dispute, but consistently upholding the established international policies and the treaty rights and interests of the United States, and never condoning developments that endangered the obligation of treaties or the peace of the world. . . .
As a further step the Secretary of State, upon the instruction of the President, adopted the principle, later enlarged upon in his letter to the chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations of the Senate, that this government would not recognize any situation, treaty, or agreement brought about between Japan and China by force and in defiance of the covenants of the Kellogg Pact.
This principle, associated as it is with the name of President Hoover, was later adopted by the Assembly of the League of Nations at Geneva as a rule for the conduct of all those governments. The principle remains to-day as an important contribution to international law and a significant moral and material barrier to prevent a nation obtaining the fruits of aggressive warfare. It thus opens a new pathway to peace and order.
We favor enactment by Congress of a measure that will authorize our government to call or participate in an international conference in case of any threat of non-fulfillment of Article 2 of the Treaty of Paris (Kellogg-Briand Pact).
According to President Garfield of the Institute of Politics at Williamstown, the gist of this plank was planned by a group of gentlemen in Boston who had taken steps to facilitate its acceptance by both political parties. Every idea in this plank is a threat at Japan. From it one might suppose that the trade of Japan is worthless to the United States, while the trade of China is of paramount importance. Yet the fact is just the opposite: American investments in Japan amount to $450,000,000; in China, to $250,000,000. Japan’s trade with the United States amounted in 1931 to $318,589,000; China’s trade with the United States, to $188,000,000. If American foreign policy were even remotely influenced by trade considerations, Mr. Stimson’s attitude toward Japan should have been one of conciliation even when there was a difference of opinion, particularly as Japan’s imperialistic activities in Manchuria gave every indication of leading to a vast railroad construction policy in Manchuria from which the United States could profit by the sale of steel rails and railroad equipment.
It is quite obvious that these considerations weighed lightly with the American Government which adopted an out-and-out anti-Japanese policy come what may. In contrast with the United States the British, who do pursue in China a trade policy, sought throughout the Sino-Japanese controversy to conciliate both countries. Great Britain has actually succeeded in winning the good will of both countries, and as soon as the Japanese withdrew from the Shanghai area this good will was turned to account by organizing a cartel called Dorman, Long and Associates, Ltd., which represents the principal industrialists in Great Britain. This group will operate in China and Manchuria. They will reap the reward of a realistic pursuit of trade as a national policy. No such cartel was organized in the United States, in spite of the urgent need for the cultivation of Far Eastern markets as a measure for the relief of American industry.
II
If, then, it is not trade that moves the United States in its intercourse with foreign countries, what is it? As indefinable as any emotion, it might be described as a religious sense of the right. It might be called the spirit of puritanism. It might be called a pursuit of goodness. As uncertain as purely ethical concepts are, the United States yet adheres to them. Confusing as ‘justice,’ ‘right,’ and ‘propriety of conduct’ may be to the realistic, the United States nevertheless acknowledges its suitability to act both as enunciator and as interpreter of what is just and right and proper. The rôle of Mr. Stimson, for instance, is a combination of the schoolmaster and the censor. He has told Japan what the right thing to do is and announces that he will spank Japan if she does the right thing in the wrong way or the wrong thing in the wrong way.
Assistant Secretary of State Castle, speaking before the general conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, gave just the tone that actuates American policy when he said: —
To employ a bold simile, one might suggest that it is as silly to brand the Kellogg Pact as useless as it would be to brand the Ten Commandments as useless. Both have only the power of conscience to make them valid, but as no man would dare to say that the moral law, as transmitted to us by Moses, is useless, so no man has a right to say that this pledge of international peace is useless.
It is true that legal punishment has been enacted for infringement of some of the moral laws of the Bible, and that this, although it has not added one whit to their validity, has made men more fearful of transgression. So it may be that, granted the imperfection of human nature, there should be punishment for transgression of this international compact of peace.
One may be permitted to remember, as one catches his breath, that a Baptist college in China made it a rule that smoking cigarettes and stealing were equal crimes. This same spirit of the absolute right and wrong, even in violation of the mundane consequences of facts, events, statistics, moves American policy. In the pursuit of peace, we may smash countries; to achieve the right, we may drive millions to economic starvation and spiritual humiliation. One is tempted to recall Mr. Crisparkle’s lecture to that great philanthropist, Mr. Honeythunder, in Dickens’s Edwin Drood: —
‘I decline to believe it, and you fall back upon your platform resource of proclaiming that I believe nothing; that because I will not bow down to a false god of your making, I deny the true God! Another time you make the platform discovery that war is a calamity, and you propose to abolish it by a string of twisted resolutions tossed into the air like the tail of a kite. I do not admit the discovery to be yours in the least, and I have not a grain of faith in your remedy. Again, your platform resource of representing me as reveling in the horrors of a battle-field like a fiend incarnate! ’
It is the positiveness of this policy, which ignores everything but an arbitrary interpretation of ethics, that confuses other countries. Yet, if it were possible to know that the American interpretation of right would remain unchanged for a reasonable period, other countries might, from practical considerations, prepare their cases accordingly. But as there are in the United States a New England sense of right and a Middle-Western sense of right, a Wall Street sense of right and a Western Coast sense of right, who can know which of these will predominate at any given moment? Is Mr. Stimson right when he hooks us into the League, or Senator Borah when he keeps us out of it? Is Mr. Baker right when he would boycott Japan, or Mr. Lindsay Russell when he would trade with Japan? Is Mr. Hearst right when he would collect the last sou of the war debt, or Mr. Hoover, whose emissaries conversed with European diplomats in the hills and woods and paths of Lausanne informally about the prospects of cancellation ?
This is not mere difference of opinion among honorable gentlemen; it is the natural confusion arising from the pursuit of policy which has no grounding in fact, no relationship to reality, no specific and definable aim, which is concerned only with the philosophic and undiplomatic concept of the ‘good.’
III
It is this pursuit of the ‘good’ which has led American statesmen to surprise the world by sudden enunciations of policy. Breathlessly, stammering, the diplomats of the world have, since Wilson first hurled his League of Nations at Europe, fallen into line, for since the Great War they have been dependent upon American good will. Mr. Hoover’s disarmament proposal this year was no more astonishing than Mr. Hughes’s opening address at the Washington Conference. Invariably the tone is: ‘This is what we want done, and, by heck, you’ll do it.’
European and Asiatic diplomats often clearly see the outline of domestic policy in these sudden and perhaps whimsical proposals; yet, can they withstand American pressure openly? The proposal has been put on the cable wires; it has appeared in thousands of newspapers; it speaks to the masses. It invariably advocates peace, and who shall oppose peace?
What European statesman dares frankly to tell his people that he will not support the American proposal for peace? Immediately the militant pacifists are on the job. Their publications are scattered in all languages. Their publicists deliver addresses, hand out interviews, write letters to the editor. The world is agog with agitation. Then the thing dies the death of all impractical suggestions, just as Mr. Hoover’s Moratorium failed to save either Germany or reparations, just as Mr. Hoover’s disarmament proposal failed to save the Geneva Conference. Given time, each impractical proposal which fails to take into account economic, social, and psychological realities falls first into desuetude and then dies without the benefit of an obituary.
Take, for example, the American proposal incorporated in the Covenant of the League. Nobody wanted such a Covenant except the United States; yet everyone solemnly adheres to it except the United States and Soviet Russia. This American proposal is a substitute for the European interstate treaties and alliances making for a balance of power. The United States, in the pursuit of the ‘good,’ found that these agreements among states led to war, and it desired to substitute universal international adherence to a code of conduct rather than to working agreements among states based upon their special conditions.
Yet, what have we to-day? The League almost involved the world in a war just as the Triple Entente and Triple Alliance were always doing. That there is no world war to-day is not due to the successful diplomacy of the League, but rather to Japanese forbearance and to secret RussoJapanese and Franco-Japanese understandings, embodied not in secret treaties, which are illegal, but in secret conversations which are just as efficacious, perhaps even more so, since they can more easily be denied.
Soviet Russia is off entirely on her own, negotiating and signing nonaggression pacts. France, Germany, and Great Britain settle reparations among themselves, and France and Great Britain enter into a gentlemen’s agreement concerning American war debts which is not a secret treaty nor an open one. Perhaps no end will come to this confusion until Von Papen’s Franco-German Alliance shall be signed, bringing to an end forever the period of the Great War which oblique diplomacy has kept alive from 1920 to 1932.
Again, at the Washington Conference, no one faced facts except Sir Arthur Balfour. Here was a meeting to reduce the dangers of a JapaneseAmerican war which was then in the offing. When the conference was over, Japan had lost the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, was on the verge of losing the Lansing-Ishii Agreement, agreed to give up a domain in Shantung which she had taken from Germany as the spoils of war. The sacrifices of the United States were of a serious and important character from the American point of view. We sunk more ships than the others and we agreed not to fortify outlying possessions in the Pacific. In a word, we agreed not to fight Japan or to prepare for a war with Japan. From the point of view of the Japanese, these sacrifices were not astonishing, for they wondered why we ever wanted to fight Japan at all. Besides, they had witnessed the processes of American industrial efficiency during the Great War and realized that the United States can build ships and create fortifications with a speed and effectiveness which to the Oriental Japanese are little short of marvelous. Japan still continues to tremble before her American neighbor and his temper.
What actually was accomplished at the Washington Conference was that rising Japan was shoved down to second place, and the United States gave China assurances that China could go along, in perpetuity, in revolution and chaos and disorder, and, no matter how long it took her to become a modern state, the United States would protect her. In his letter to Senator Borah, Mr. Stimson accurately portrayed the American policy when he said: —
At the time this treaty was signed, it was known that China was engaged in an attempt to develop the free institutions of a self-governing republic after her recent revolution from an autocratic form of government; that she would require many years of both economic and political effort to that end; and that her progress would necessarily he slow. The treaty was thus a covenant of self-denial among the signatory powers in deliberate renunciation of any policy of aggression which might tend to interfere with that development.
Many countries in Central and South America have been attempting to ‘develop the free institutions of a self-governing republic,’ but no time was allowed them to make the slow progress that might be necessary for stability. Certainly Soviet Russia was seeking to ‘develop free institutions’ after ‘her recent revolution from an autocratic form of government,’ but no friendship was shown to Soviet Russia at any time during the ‘many years of both economic and political effort to that end.’ No consistency in policy is indicated by the Washington Conference treaties, no application of general principles which may be applied anywhere by any signatory to the Washington treaties. A special case is made out with regard to China and Japan, and a special treaty is signed by nine powers governing questions which could, quite properly, come within the purview of the Covenant of the League if the United States had not changed its mind about the League after it had imposed the League upon the world as an act of victory.
IV
The Kellogg-Briand Pact is an even better example of an unnecessary complication in the machinery of international intercourse. Though it is ballyhooed by the learned professors of world peace as a pronouncement from Heaven, it is difficult to see exactly what the excitement is about. Apparently it all started with an innocent pronouncement by M. Briand on the tenth anniversary of America’s entrance into the war. He said: —
If there were need for those two great democracies [France and the United States] to give high testimony to their desire for peace and to furnish to other peoples an example more solemn still, France would be willing to subscribe publicly with the United States to any mutual engagement tending ‘to outlaw war,’ to use an American expression, as between these two countries. The renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy is a conception already familiar to the signatories to the Covenant of the League of Nations and of the Treaties of Locarno.
France, in pursuit of security, wanted a treaty with the United States. Such a treaty seemed necessary to France only because the United States had not become a member of the League of Nations. In a word, it was France’s desire that the United States should become part of the world peace machinery in some manner, by some step, so that France might enjoy a greater security.
Mr. Kellogg seized upon the idea and immediately entered into correspondence with the principal powers. There was no conference, no discussion, no meeting to thrash out ideas. He addressed them a draft treaty and asked them to sign on the dotted line.
Immediately, questions arose which perhaps Mr. Kellogg had not anticipated. For instance, M. Claudel, the French Ambassador to Washington, said: —
The American Government cannot be unaware of the fact that the great majority of the powers of the world, and among them most of the principal powers, are making the organization and strengthening of peace the object of common efforts carried on within the framework of the League of Nations. They are already bound to one another by a Covenant placing them under reciprocal obligations, as well as by agreements such as those signed at Locarno in October 1925, or by international conventions relative to guaranties of neutrality, all of which engagements impose upon them duties which they cannot contravene.
The British raised the question of self-defense. They said: —
After studying the wording of Article I of the United States draft, His Majesty’s Government do not think that its terms exclude action which a state may be forced to take in self-defense. Mr. Kellogg has made it clear in the speech . . . that he regards the right of self-defense as inalienable.
Then the British announced a Monroe Doctrine of their own, quite unmistakable in its language, applying clearly to the possessions and areas held imperialistically by Great Britain. Professor Shotwell has written learnedly in War as an Instrument of National Policy that this British Monroe Doctrine was intended to apply only to Egypt. Nothing in the language of Austen Chamberlain’s note indicates Egypt or any other country. Professor Shotwell may, as the real author of the Pact, deduce Egypt, or he may have been told that Egypt was meant, but for the rest of the world there is only the frank paragraph which appears in the exchange of notes on the subject.
Japan made no reservations, except to repeat sentences from the French and British notes. Soviet Russia could not, however, avoid calling attention to the British Monroe Doctrine in caustic language: —
Among the reservations made in the diplomatic correspondence between the original participants of the compact, especial attention of the Soviet Government is drawn by the reservation of the British Government in Paragraph 10 of its notes of May 19, this year. By virtue of this reservation the British Government reserves a freedom of action toward a series of regions which it does not even enumerate. If it means provinces already belonging to the British Empire or its Dominions, they are already included in the compact in which are foreseen cases of their being attacked, so that the reservation of the British Government regarding them must seem at least superfluous.
However, if other regions are meant, the participants of the compact are entitled to know exactly where the freedom of action of the British Government begins and where it ends. But the British Government reserves freedom of action not only in case of military attack on these regions but even at any ‘unfriendly act’ of so-called ‘interference,’ while it obviously reserves the right to an arbitrary definition of what is considered an ‘unfriendly act’ of ‘interference,’ justifying commencement of military action on the part of the British Government.
Recognition of such a right of the British Government would mean justification of war and could be a contagious example also for the other participants to the compact who, in virtue of their equality, might take the same right regarding other regions, and in result perhaps there would be no such place on the terrestrial globe regarding which the compact could be applied. Indeed, the reservation of the British Government contains an invitation addressed to every other participant to act as exempt from this exaction here and in other regions.
This reservation the Soviet Government cannot but consider as an attempt to use the compact itself as an instrument of imperialistic policy.
Soviet Russia, while assenting, delicately rips the Pact to shreds, attacks each of its ideas, and criticizes the United States for not recognizing her.
To bring to a head all the objections to the Pact and to get the thing signed, on June 23, 1928, Mr. Kellogg addressed a note to a number of states in which he explained its meaning. The right of self-defense is neither restricted nor impaired. ‘Every nation is free at all times and regardless of treaty provisions to defend its territory from attack and invasion. . . .’ No definition of self-defense is offered lest ‘the unscrupulous mould events to accord with any agreed definition.’ Therefore self-defense is to be interpreted on each occasion by the powerful nations. Are we then not exactly where we were before we started?
The entire explanation — the six answers to six objections — does not explain how war is to be averted under the Kellogg-Briand Pact, why it is preferable to the Covenant of the League, why the United States should agree to sign it and not the Covenant, why the United States should be involved in determining whether Bulgaria is on the offensive and Greece on the defensive, why it was at all necessary to have such a document, except that Senator Borah objected to the League but would let such a Pact pass through his committee. In fact, when it is all over, the seventyeight words that form the body of the document do not amount to more than reiteration of principle which any signatory to the Covenant of the League could make at any time. The paragraphs which so many talk about but few have read say: —
The High Contracting Parties solemnly declare in the names of their respective peoples that they condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another.
The High Contracting Parties agree that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them, shall never be sought except by pacific means.
V
The Kellogg-Briand Pact is a nice document, a sentimental expression of a desire for peace. It provides no machinery to enforce peace. Mr. Castle, while speaking before the Methodists, said: —
There is no doubt that an aggressor should be restrained, but who shall decide the aggressor? And even if a just decision shall be reached, is the only possible way of restraint that we shall go out with guns to fight this aggressor? Even if a nation is guilty of theft of territory, is this a reason for the sacrifice of innocent neutral lives? Do our courts send out citizens with guns to shoot armed burglars who have been convicted of theft, risking the lives of the innocent and making possible the physical victory of the criminals? This opposition to the use of force to prevent force, of war to prevent war, has become, I think, almost the most potent argument in opposition to joining the League. This solution certainly will never be chosen to strengthen the Pact.
Yet, if no force is to be used to prevent war, what is the use of the Pact? General Araki of the Japanese army might be told to be ashamed of himself for using his army as an instrument of national policy, and he would reply that Japan was acting in self-defense. General Tsai Ting-kai might be told that he should have behaved more politely at Shanghai, and he would reply, ‘Self-defense.’ What does it all amount to?
Mr. Stimson’s note of January 7 to China and Japan announcing the famous Stimson policy of non-recognition may have been necessary from the point of view of American politics, and it may even have been advisable as a warning to Japan, but the reënforcement of the note by the letter to Senator Borah was unwise, unnecessary, startling, and in very bad taste. During Mr. Stimson’s absence in Europe this doctrine was rechristened the Hoover Policy by Mr. Castle. However, it should truthfully be called the Bryan Policy, for it was first enunciated on May 11, 1915, by none other than the silver-tongued orator at the time of the Twenty-One Demands. The idea is the same; the phraseology is identical; the purpose is similar. It was a risky business for a Republican Secretary of State to hark back to Bryan for wisdom; it was perhaps riskier to enunciate this doctrine at all. The League of Nations was handling the case. The United States had been supporting the League’s activities. An investigating commission, one member of which was an American, had been designated to find out what the trouble was all about. Yet, in goes the monkey wrench!
Mr. Stimson’s doctrine has since been supported by a milder statement from President Hoover and by Mr. Stimson’s address before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. To these pronouncements I shall not address myself in the present article. Here it suffices to indicate that, according to Mr. Stimson, the United States would not recognize any changes in Manchuria no matter who made them or how they were made. Even so confirmed a pacifist as Newton D. Baker was troubled by this policy of nonrecognition.
‘I am at a loss to know what the United States and the nations, members of the League, can do by mere non-recognition of an established situation,’ he wrote in reply to a summertime questionnaire addressed to him by Nicholas Murray Butler and George W. Wickersham. Mr. Baker hit it squarely on the head: if the situation in Manchuria becomes stabilized, nonrecognition makes little difference; if it does not become stabilized, recognition can make little difference. The determination of the future of Manchuria lies not at Washington or Geneva, but in Tokyo, Nanking, Changchun, and Moscow. Whether this doctrine of non-recognition is called the Bryan Doctrine or the Stimson Doctrine or the Hoover Doctrine, it is, in effectiveness, just spinach, as the small boy said when he was asked to call it broccoli.
The proof of this lies in the fact that China and Japan still maintain diplomatic relations in spite of all that has happened, so that, should Mr. Stimson’s efforts at peace fail, they may enter upon direct negotiations, and may even come to some workable arrangement; that Japan and Soviet Russia apparently have an understanding to which reference is constantly made by both countries when there is an infraction on either side. The Stimson doctrine, designed to stop Japan from consolidating her position in Manchuria, accomplished nothing, for Japan has actually succeeded in establishing a government there which does her bidding, and now that government notifies the United States that protests are to be addressed to it directly and not through the medium of Japan. That government will probably kidnap half a dozen Americans, as the Soviet Government in South China had been doing, for the jolly purpose of forcing American consular officers to negotiate with it directly.
VI
My purpose in this analysis of policy has not been to tear down sacred institutions, but to challenge the substitution of sentiment for reason, to put an end to what Freudians would call sublimation in international relations. The current Anglo-French understanding apparently has the same objective. The European and Asiatic response to Mr. Hoover’s disarmament proposals had the same objective.
The American foreign policy is designed to foster peace. So are all foreign policies. There is no particular virtue in desiring peace, which is less troublesome and expensive than war. Virtue lies in not employing methods, while fostering peace, which make for international confusion and possibly lead to war. The United States cannot assert that it alone is the arbiter of right and that Great Britain, France, Germany, and Japan must per se be wrong, because no one can, after the economic depression in the United States, take such an attitude seriously. When the United States was the only available market for the flotation of foreign loans, these countries had to listen to Uncle Sam and grin. To-day, they merrily go their own way.
The Anglo-French Entente is the first step in this direction. This will be followed by a Franco-Japanese understanding in the Pacific — which in some form or other already exists. This will be followed by an understanding between Japan and Russia, with the Peking meridian as a dividing line for their spheres of interest in East Asia.
The policy of sentiment has led to isolation — not voluntary isolation such as Washington counseled, but an isolation which is the result of being outmanœuvred in a game in which realities and reason alone can win the day. It is a dangerous form of isolation, for its objective, from the point of view of the other powers, is to gain exclusive markets at the expense of American industry and trade. The Ottawa Conference is not only a reply to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff; it is in effect similar to the anti-Japanese boycott in China. It is an attempt to force the United States by economic measures to deal with other nations in a manner which will not involve them in confused political and economic thinking.
The policy of producing a moral dictatorship may succeed, in the Far East, in giving Japan a closed market in Manchuria, Soviet Russia an annexed territory in Mongolia, France an exclusive sphere in southwestern China, and Great Britain a preference in the Yangtze. It will be interesting to read the trade statistics of China for 1932 and 1933 to study the actual effects of the policy of righteousness, to discover, perhaps, that the unrighteous have reaped the spoils. Isolated, alone, we may cling to our ideals of universal good — but what will that achieve when the task is to get the lathes turning again?