The Disarmament Illusion

THIS is not a tract, but an honest historical study. “Disarmament is not a moral . . . but a political problem.” In a workmanlike fashion the author has approached the matter from this realistic point of view, and her book becomes timely (in the most practical sense) from the return of a mood which contemplates disarmament as a desirable aspiration. It can offer very useful lessons from past experience. The lesson is all the more useful in that the author does not unduly make scapegoats of the “Militarists” — and pays her readers the compliment of not dragging in the munitions industries as the father of all evil.

After a survey of nineteenth century attitudes toward the matter, the author centers her attention on the Tsar’s disarmament proposal of 1898, and the tentative approaches made later on in the Hague Conference. These efforts were undertaken without any preparatory consultations between the governments concerned; without any effort to define clearly the specific aims in view; and, to tell the truth, without any preliminary examination of the practical elements of the matter in hand. “Disarmament,” ipso facto, was a phrase without meaning: the practical aspiration now a limitation, or a planned restriction, of the existing basis of armaments.

These essential beginnings were not even tried. The author faces very frankly the fact that public opinion in the countries concerned was not widely favorable, and often thoroughly suspicious. She avoids the common device of contrasting “governments” and “peoples.”

For our present purpose, the lesson is that the issues and rivalries making for increased armaments were not even touched on. It was simple enough for Sweden and Norway to agree on a modus vivendi — but it was a different matter for Germany and Russia to find a common ground in respect to the future of the Ottoman Empire. Also, the practical and technical elements which entered into the general balance of military strength were not even considered.

So far, we are guilty of the same lapses in our easygoing assurances as to the disarmament in the postwar world of the Second World War. T.H.T.