“Why does no one write over the door of the Conference, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin?” asked the anonymous correspondent of Le Temps who left such a vivid record of that summer. Watching Dutch fishermen’s children playing in the streets and pairs of smiling girls who strolled by coquettishly, he wrote, “If this great assembly does not achieve its purpose, the stupid rivalries of states may one day mow down these young people and lay their corpses by millions on the battlefields.”
Hope for the Conference now lay in the Arbitration Commission. The chief delegates of the major powers, Pauncefote, White, Bourgeois, Munster, de Staal, all sat on this commission; its labours were the center of attention; its members, drawn forward by the pull of public opinion, really worked; discussions were animated and strong feelings generated. The British, Russians and Americans had each come with a draft proposal for a permanent tribunal; Pauncefote’s plan, which did not require obligatory submission of disputes, was accepted as the basis for discussion. Count Münster, flanked by his two professors, declared from the start that Germany was utterly opposed to arbitration of any kind in any form. The whole idea was nothing but “humbug,” he told White, and “injurious” to Germany because his country, as he was not shy in explaining, “is prepared for war as no other country is or can be” and could mobilize in ten days, faster than France or Russia or any other power. To submit to arbitration a dispute which might lead finally to war would simply give rival powers time to catch up and cancel Germany’s advantage of rapid mobilization. “Exactly,” noted the Kaiser in the margin of Münster’s report, “that’s the object of this whole hoax.”
The Kaiser invariably became frenetic at the mere mention of arbitration, which he saw an incursion on his personal sovereignty and as a plot to deprive Germany of the gains achieved by her matchless military organization. Nevertheless, with Pauncefote, White and Bourgeois determined to achieve something, the Commission persisted in the effort to hammer out some form of tribunal. The civilian delegates laboured against the heavy resistance of their own governments and military colleagues, who were deeply disturbed at the least hint of the compulsory principle. No one wanted to give up an inch of sovereignty or an hour of military advantage and at times the outlook seemed hopeless. On a day when the wind blew from the sea, Baroness von Suttner wrote in her diary, “Cold, cold are all hearts—cold as the draft that penetrates the rattling windows. I feel chilled to the bone.”
But the necessity of presenting some result to the public was overriding, and tentatively, bit by bit, a tribunal, though puny, began to take shape. Any suggestion of giving it authority over disputes involving “honor or vital interest” caused it to totter toward collapse. The Austrian delegate saw no objection to a tribunal which could decide on minor matters of dispute “such as for instance the interpretation of a Postal or Sanitary commission,” but he resolutely rejected anything more. The Balkan delegates in a group—Rumania, Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece—created a crisis when they threatened to walk out if a provision for “investigating commissions” was retained. With utmost difficulty, one agreement at a time, the tribunal’s powers and procedures were defined—but not unanimously.
Germany would agree to nothing. The other nations who equally disliked the idea without wishing to say so could rely on Münster’s daily negative vote to do their work for them. A tribunal without Germany’s adhesion, White wrote despairingly, would seem to the world “a failure and perhaps a farce.” He argued earnestly and daily with the German delegates to convince them that their obstruction would only result in the Czar becoming the idol of the plain people of the world and the Kaiser the object of its hatred. They had no right to allow their “noble and gifted” sovereign to be put in this position. He repeated D’Estournelles’ story of what Jaurès had said, and when this seemed to make an impression he repeated it in a letter to Bülow and sought out Stead and told him to use it “in every way.” Stead complied with such zest that Professor Zorn complained of the “terrorism of the Stead-Suttner press” and warned his government that to abstain from all collaboration raised the danger of Germany being denounced as the “sole troubler of peace.” From St. Petersburg the German Ambassador warned Bülow that if the Conference brought forth nothing the Czar would be personally insulted and the world would ascribe the “responsibility and odium of failure to us.”
Pressure began to tell. Münster was wavering when a despatch arrived from Berlin stating that the Kaiser had declared himself “strongly and finally” against arbitration. In desperation White persuaded Münster to send Zorn to Berlin and he himself sent Frederick Holls, secretary of the American delegation, to present the issue in person to the Kaiser and his ministers. Friday’s scheduled meeting of the Arbitration Commission was postponed until they could report back on Monday. Returning to his hotel White found a visitor, “of all men in the world,” Thomas B. Reed, whose “bigness, heartiness, shrewdness” and fascinating conversation helped him to pass the anxious weekend.
In Berlin the Kaiser eluded the interviewers but not a report from Bülow which regretfully advised that the “very popular” idea of arbitration had taken hold of the Conference, won the support of the English, Italians, Americans and even the Russians, leaving Germany in isolated opposition.The margin grew lurid with the Kaiser’s disgust. “I consented to all this nonsense only in order that the Czar should not lose face before Europe,” he scribbled. “In practice however I shall rely on God and my sharp sword! And I shit on all their decisions.”
This evidently being recognized as His Majesty’s gracious consent, word that Germany would sign the arbitration agreement was received at The Hague two days later. At last something would come of the Conference and the awful spectre of nullity and a Socialist triumph receded. Delegates worked mightily to draw up a convention of sixty-one articles, while applying “a zeal almost macabre” to removing any trace of compulsory character. They were ready for a final vote in the closing week of the Conference when it was suddenly frustrated by, of all people, the Americans. Delegates were stunned. Deeply embarrassed, White announced that his delegation could not sign Article 27, the particular contribution of the French, which required signatories to consider it their “duty” to remind parties to a dispute of the existence of the tribunal.
White’s painful predicament was the work of Captain Mahan, who was in turn reacting indirectly to Stead. Under the influence of Stead’s over-enthusiastic reports, the Manchester Guardian had hailed the draft of the Arbitration Convention as a great pacific instrument which if it had been operative in 1898 would have required the European powers to bring Spain and the United States to arbitration and would have prevented the war between them. Reading the article, Mahan was appalled. The “honest collision” might have been missed. For the future he saw a net of entanglements spreading before America’s unwary feet. Summoning his fellow delegates he insisted that Article 27 would commit the United States to interfere in European affairs and vice versa, and if signed, would lead the Senate to refuse to ratify the tribunal. Mesmerized and convinced by his implacable logic, White and the others on the delegation submitted, although all their careful work was risked. If the Americans refused to sign a part of the agreement, other nations might back out and the whole delicately assembled structure fall apart. Urgently White tried to persuade the French to drop Article 27 or at least qualify the word “duty.” Bourgeois and D’Estournelles refused to change so much as a comma. Fiasco loomed. Closing ceremonies were scheduled for the following day, July 29. In desperate maneuvers White sought a compromise. At the last minute the Americans arranged to sign under a qualifying phrase disclaiming any obligation to “intrude, mingle or entangle” themselves in European politics. By forceps and barely breathing, Arbitration was pulled into the world.
Total results of the Hague Conference were three Conventions: on Arbitration; Laws and Customs of War on Land; and Extension of the Geneva Rules to Maritime Warfare; three Declarations: on Projectiles from Balloons, Asphyxiating Gase
s, and Expanding Bullets; six “Wishes” for future accomplishment; and a Resolution. The last expressed the opinion of the Conference that limitation of military expenditures and of new types of weapons was “highly desirable for the moral and material benefit of humanity” and should be the subject of “further study” by the states. It was a pious dirge for all that was left of the original Russian purpose, yet the delegates did not seem ready to bury the Hague idea. However cynically they had come and however stunted their product, most of them could not but feel a sense of having participated in something important and a desire that the foundations they had laid should not be lost. They registered the feeling in a “Wish” for a Second Conference at some future date—although the idea did not please everyone. Count Münster crustily departed saying he had no desire to see international conferences perpetuate themselves like “bad weeds.”
Three months after the Peace Conference, Britain went to war in South Africa. The Dreyfus Affair had distracted attention from the Conference, one ex-delegate commented sadly, and now the Boer War seemed to contradict it. Its unconscious epitaph was left to Andrew White in the form of a reluctant tribute paid to his difficult colleague, Captain Mahan: “When he speaks, the millennium fades.”
By the time the Second Conference met in 1907, again at The Hague, war, revolution, new alliances, new governments, new leaders and most notably a new century had intervened. The Twentieth was already unmistakably modern, which is to say it was absorbed in pursuit of the material with maximum vigor and diminished self-assurance; it had forgotten decadence and acquired doubt. Mechanical energy and material goods were redoubling and dominant, but whether beneficent had somehow become a question. Progress, the great certainty of the Nineteenth, no longer appeared so sure.
People felt awe at the turn of the century, as if the hand of God were turning a page in human fate. Cannons were fired at midnight in Berlin to mark the moment and one listener heard the sound “with a kind of shiver: one knew all that the Nineteenth Century had carried away; one did not know what the Twentieth would bring.”
To begin with, it brought violence. The new century was born brawling, in the Boxer Rebellion, in the Philippines, in South Africa, although the brawls were still on the periphery. In 1900 France was restless and so filled with frustrated rage that Punch predicted her first act on the day after the International Exposition closed would be to declare war on England, “for they have been held in for so long it will be necessary to do something desperate at once.” In 1900 the Kaiser exhorted German troops embarking on the punitive expedition to Pekin to emulate Huns in ruthlessness. In the course of the Boxer Rebellion he experienced the inconvenience of too much zeal in the munitions business. Learning that a German gunboat had suffered seventeen hits in a duel with Chinese forts equipped with the latest Krupp cannon, he sent Fritz Krupp an angry telegram: “This is no time when I am sending my soldiers to battle against the yellow beasts to try to make money out of so serious a situation.”
Money and bigness governed. Morgan in 1900 bought out Carnegie to form with Rockefeller and a hundred other firms the corporate colossus, U. S. Steel, the world’s first billion-dollar holding company. King Leopold of Belgium, the Morgan of Europe, a builder too big for his country, created a moneymaking empire out of the Congo while British and Americans, busy killing Boers and Filipinos, loudly deplored his methods. Three hundred men, it was said, “all acquainted with each other, controlled the economic destiny of the Continent.”
In 1900 Oscar Wilde, a bloated ruin at forty-four, died in Paris, and Nietzsche, aged fifty-five and mad, died at Weimar. “Then in 1900,” wrote W. B. Yeats, “everybody got down off his stilts; henceforth no one went mad; nobody committed suicide; nobody joined the Catholic Church or if they did I have forgotten. Victorianism had been defeated.” Some welcomed, some regretted the defeat but the fact was clear. As if to mark the event, the Queen herself incredibly was no more.
The year 1900 conveyed a sense of forces and energy running away with the world. Henry Adams felt moved to evolve a “Law of Acceleration” in history. He felt as if he could never drive down the Champs Elysées without expecting an accident or stand near an official without expecting a bomb. “So long as the rate of progress held good, these bombs would double in force and number every ten years.… Power leaped from every atom.… Man could no longer hold it off. Forces grasped his wrists and flung him about as though he had hold of a live wire or a runaway automobile.”
Adams’ choice of simile was apt, for the automobile was one of the century’s two most potent factors of future social change; the other was man’s unconscious. Although unrecognized in potential, it too was formulated in 1900, in a book, The Interpretation of Dreams, by a Viennese doctor, Sigmund Freud. Although the book attracted little attention and it took eight years to sell out the edition of six hundred copies, its appearance was the signal that Victorianism indeed was dead.
The International Exposition of 1900 covering 277 acres in the heart of Paris displayed the new century’s energies to fifty million visitors from April to November. If they could not for this Exposition equal the Eiffel Tower of the last, the French built with the same élan a new miracle of engineering and beauty in the Pont Alexandre III, whose low graceful arch spanned the Seine in a single leap. It was considered “peerless in all the world” and the two new permanent exhibition buildings on the right bank, the Grand and Petit Palais, were unanimously acknowledged to be “suitable and grand.” Not so the Porte Monumentale, or main gate, in the Place de la Concorde, built of what appeared to one observer to be lath, plaster, broken glass, putty, old lace curtains and glue. At its top, instead of a traditional goddess of Progress or Enlightenment, a plaster Parisienne in evening gown welcomed the world with open arms. Although considered gay and chic by some, the gate was generally deplored as the epitome of the new vulgarity of the new century. Multicolored electric lights played on towering electrically powered fountains at night; the new Metro was opened in time; a track for automobile testing and racing was built at the Expo annex at Vincennes. Of all the wonders the public’s favorite was the trottoir roulant, a double moving sidewalk circling the grounds, one half of which moved twice as fast as the other. In the temporary buildings, the architects, striving for sensation, had achieved what seemed exciting originality to some and “a debauch of stucco” to others. Industrial exhibits in the Palaces of Machinery, Electricity, Civil Engineering and Transportation, Mining and Metallurgy, Chemical Industries and Textiles, displayed all the extraordinary advances of the past decade.
Of the national pavilions the most popular was the Russian, an exotic Byzantine palace with a Trans-Siberian Railway exhibit in which the visitor could sit in a sumptuous railway carriage and enjoy a moving panorama of the scenery. The Viennese was a fantasy of Art Nouveau with fretwork balconies in the form of curling vines and the sinuous lines of the new style curving through ceramics and furniture. The United States had the greatest number of exhibits but Germany’s show was the most imposing, clearly superior in quality and arrangement. It affirmed an intense will to surpass every other exhibitor. Germany’s dynamos were the largest, the spire of her pavilion the tallest, its searchlight the brightest, its restaurant the most expensive. The Kaiser himself, it was rumored, had commanded the finest china and silver, the most delicate glassware, the most luxurious service, so that one felt in the presence, as one visitor said, of a real style “William the Second.”
In all the Exposition the two largest single exhibits were Schneider-Creusot’s long-range cannon and Vickers-Maxim’s collection of ferocious, quick-firing machine guns. Beholders gazed at them with solemn thoughts. An English correspondent in particular was moved to philosophize on the real meaning of the Exposition for the new era it introduced. Schneider’s great gun seemed to him to hold the world collected in Paris under its threat and to mark the passage of war from a realm of sport to a realm of science in which the making of weapons absorbed the ingenuity of mankind. If
a lull ever came, he wrote, the arts of peace might revive, “but meanwhile the Paris Exhibition has taught us that the triumph of the modern world is purely mechanical.”
The triumphs continued. In 1900 Max Planck broke the chains of classical Newtonian physics to formulate the quantum theory of energy. In Switzerland in 1905 Albert Einstein obtained his doctorate at the University of Zurich with a dissertation on a new theory of relativity. In 1901 wireless telegraphy spanned the Atlantic and Daimler supplanted the horseless carriage with a vehicle distinctly a motorcar. In 1903 a motorized dirigible flying machine flew at Kitty Hawk. But no epoch is all of a piece. To some the almost daily new miracles accomplished by science and mechanics still carried, not a threat as to Henry Adams, but a promise of progress in social justice. “It seemed merely a matter of decades,” thought Stefan Zweig, a young intellectual of Vienna, “before the last vestiges of evil and violence would finally be conquered.”
In 1900 the German Naval Law precipitated the abandonment of isolation by England. Providing for nineteen new battleships and twenty-three cruisers in the next twenty years, it made explicit Germany’s challenge to British supremacy at sea, the fulcrum of Britain’s existence. It convinced Britain that she needed friends. In 1901 the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty put a bottom under good relations with the United States. In 1902 the isolation of self-sufficient strength, once so splendid and confident, was ended forever by a formal alliance with Japan. In 1903 the new King of England, Edward VII, prepared the ground for reconciliation with France by a visit of ceremony to Paris carried out with tact and aplomb. In 1904 the new policy culminated in an Anglo-French Entente, disposing of old quarrels, establishing a new friendship and fundamentally defining the balance of Europe.
The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914 Page 37