Pagina-afbeeldingen
PDF
ePub
[merged small][merged small][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][ocr errors][graphic][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][ocr errors][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][ocr errors][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][ocr errors][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][ocr errors][subsumed][merged small][merged small][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed]

"The Leading FIRE INSURANCE Co. of America"

[blocks in formation]
[graphic]

$5,000,000.00

32,074,778.15

18,170,745.46

8,904,032.69

13,904,032.69

174,703,814.16

Total Liabilities

Net Surplus.

Surplus for Policy-Holders

Losses Paid in 100 Years

NOTE-The Security Valuations on which this Statement is based are those fixed by the Insurance Commissioners.

WM. B. CLARK, President

[merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][graphic][merged small][merged small]

BROWN'S

BRONCHIAL

TROCHES

for the Sure Relief of Coughs Hoarseness. Throat Troubles. Ask for a 15c Trial Size Box Regular Sizes, 35c, 75c and $1.25 JOHN I.BROWN & SON, Boston, Mass.

Statement of the ownership, management, etc., of THE LIVING AGE, published weekly at Boston, Mass., for April 1, 1919. Name of Publisher, The Living Age Company, 41 Mt. Vernon St., Boston, Mass.; Editor, Henry B. Sheahan, Topsfield, Mass.; Business Manager, M. L. Brundage, Malden, Mass.; Stockholders, The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass.; Ellery Sedgwick, Boston, Mass.; MacGregor Jenkins, Boston, Mass.; Nelson J. Peabody, Boston, Mass. Sworn to by M. L. Brundage, Business Manager, before Alfred Shore, Notary, April 3, 1919.

THE LIVING AGE

Founded by E. LITTELL in 1844

NO. 3901

APRIL 12, 1919

THE TASK AT PARIS

BY ARTHUR JAMES BALFOUR

We have just reached the end of our. seventh week of labors, and a feeling undoubtedly exists, I think in all countries, that the world would like to have seen some more concrete and tangible results than, unfortunately, we are in a position to put before it. I do not think that either the delegates of the Great Powers or the gentlemen who are serving on the innumerable committees which are aiding the delegates to arrive at conclusions can justly be accused of having spared themselves. The labors of those seven weeks have been intensive. Part of those labors have no doubt been indirectly connected with the arrangement of the peace terms. You cannot keep the world as it is at present being kept, in a state of suspense betwixt war on the one side and peace on the other, without having great practical difficulties of an immediate kind to deal with, and those difficulties have been partly connected with the renewal of the armistice terms with Germany, and partly with the difficulties which have inevitably arisen in the young and nascent countries which are springing up before our eyes in the territories that once belonged to the Central Powers or to their allies.

VOL 14-NO. 685

A great deal of work has necessarily had to be done on subjects which, from the nature of the case, are ephemeral, but while it is undoubtedly disappointing to feel that we have as yet nothing to show in the way of a concluded peace with any part of the world, yet when we come to consider it I think that what has been accomplished is really a very great, though I admit only a preliminary, work.

Our task is not the sort of task which the statesmen of 1814 and 1815 were faced with. It is not to restore more or less on the old lines the Europe which had been shattered in the course of the Napoleonic wars. What is that compared with the task of the carving out of what was once the Austrian Empire the new States which are to take its place, and that of dealing with the new nationalities which have arisen on the eastern frontier of Germany, with the prodigious task of dealing with the whole Turkish Empire? It is inevitable also that when you are dealing with the frontiers of new States you have to consider the economic future of those States, and it would be a very poor policy so to arrange their frontiers that they were economically strangled from

their birth. When you add to these problems, which may roughly be described as territorial problems, the new set of considerations which we have to bear in mind in all these discussions, and which centre around the central idea of a League of Nations, you will see at once that no task comparable to that in which we are engaged has ever been undertaken by mankind before.

I think that thoughtful men are more and more beginning to see that this is not merely a dream of dreamers, but that it is a serious endeavor of the responsible representatives of the great democratic countries so to reconstitute the national fabric of the world as to prevent the recurrence of any such calamities as those under which we are groaning. I think it would be a mistake to look at the League of Nations as merely a body which has to spend an idle and dignified existence between widely separated European crises and when these crises occur to restore the threatened peace of the world. I think to the League of Nations will have to be entrusted many responsibilities involving day-to-day work. It will have to be made responsible for matters which have ever been improperly but inevitably left to single powers or else which have been entrusted to one power by some kind of condominium which has proved difficult to work. I think we shall be able to create machinery which shall not be open to all the objections so justly urged in the past against the 'working of the principle of a condominium, and which shall have all the advantages which those who believe in the principle of a condominium hope to extract from it. Too often a condominium in the past has meant an opportunity for making international intrigue. Apart from the great issues of peace and war I hope that under the new system the League of Nations will undertake duties of the utmost impor

tance for the international working of civilized mankind, and may operate not merely as a practical working business machine, but as a method by which small causes of international friction may be largely brought to an end.

As to the unique magnitude of the task with which we have to deal. In the past wars have impoverished mankind and devastated great areas, and yet I doubt whether any war since the end of the Thirty Years' War has ever had the effect upon industry comparable to that which we are witnessing at the present moment. I am not talking now of the outrages committed by Germans in Belgium and Northern France. I am talking of an even more deep-seated and far-reaching effect of this war. This war has had the result that everything that was British, French, German, Austrian, and Italian, which had to do with Turkey, Bulgaria, Russia, Greece all the industrial efforts of these countries have been diverted from work on which mankind lives to work by which mankind perishes. And that has been going on for four and a half years.

But Great Britain has, broadly speaking, ceased to produce anything for four and a half years except that which ministered to the cause of the war directly or indirectly. The loss of wealth produced by that state of things is difficult to compute, but the loss we have suffered is not merely the loss of wealth. We talk of the unrest which prevails more or less everywhere and give it various names. But how on earth can men go through what we have been going through since August, 1914, without suffering from aftereffects, which may be almost described as pathological, after-effects from which it will take time to recover? I do not say it is within the power of this Conference to remedy that state of things, and I don't say if the statesmen had

exhausted their collective wisdom they would have been able adequately to deal with it. What I do say is that the state of things I have endeavored to describe, whether you look at it from the economic or the psychological side, has left behind it colossal economic questions which find their echo in the labors of the Conference.

No wonder there are committees considering problems of incalculable difficulty, and that they are working at high pressure. No wonder that the delegates in the Central Conference are pressing them on with their work, and that we are forcing their decisions on questions of most far-reaching complexity-not with the delay of which we are sometimes accused, but with a speed which I now and then fear may leave behind it signs in some cases of imperfect consideration. All concerned in the labors of the Conference may look back and say that, whether they have done well or ill, they have, at all events, done their best to perform the most gigantic task ever set the collective energies of mankind.

I can venture upon no even approximate prophecy as to when the labors of the Conference will come to an end, but, as you are doubtless aware, the policy of the Congress is not to wait to have any peace until peace is universal

not to say that that problem is to be solved and the whole map of the world is to be arranged, and that questions of commercial interest are to be solved before the completed work is shown to an expectant world. Our view is that we ought rather to press on as fast as is practicable, and at all events get as soon as may be a preliminary peace with the greatest of our enemies Germany. However we look on this war and apportion the blame for the inception of it among the Central Powers, among the criminals Germany no doubt stands first. There can

be no doubt that a preliminary peace with Germany would have a psychological effect upon the world, and would tend more than anything else to bring the ordinary man back to normal life, and to make the communities resume as far as possible the even tenor of their way.

While peace with Germany is the most important installment of universal peace, it ought to be, as far as I am able to judge, one of the simplest to make because Germany has not been dissolved into its constituent atoms in the way Austria has been. It is not like the Turkish Empire - a body which must be cut up beyond all recognition if you are to give free play to the principle of nationality and self-determination. Nor yet is it going through that unhappy trial which is causing us such deep anxiety when we look further east to the great Russian peoples. While I think, therefore, the task is simpler, I also think it is more important, and I hope that before the month now begun has run its course we shall be in sight at last, I wish to use the most moderate language, and not to raise expectations higher than they ought to be raised, I think we shall at least be within sight of that preliminary peace which I think is so great a stride toward universal peace.

If the account I have given of the task we have undertaken has any relation to the facts of the case, one of the most important questions which will have to be decided - though not by the British delegation-is the share which our brothers across the Atlantic are going to take in these new worldresponsibilities. I think it would be impertinence for me to offer the advice or to discuss the particular aspect which these world-problems necessarily bear to the great American Republic. But I may be permitted to say—and feel it so strongly that I should not like to hold my peace upon it that I think

« VorigeDoorgaan »