Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [62]
What Smuts said less loudly was that the League of Nations could also be useful to the British empire. In December 1918 he prepared one of his dazzling analyses of the world for his British colleagues. With Austria-Hungary gone, Russia in turmoil and Germany defeated, there were only three major powers left in the world: the British empire, the United States and France. The French could not be trusted. They were rivals to the British in Africa and in the Middle East. (The French returned Smuts’s antipathy, especially after he inadvertently left some of his confidential papers behind at a meeting in Paris.) It made perfect sense, Smuts argued, for the British to look to the United States for friendship and cooperation. “Language, interest, and ideals alike” had marked out their common path. The best way to get the Americans to realize this was to support the League. Wilson, everyone knew, thought the League his most important task; if he got British support, he would probably drop awkward issues such as his insistence on freedom of the seas.13
Smuts set himself to put what he described as Wilson’s “rather nebulous ideas” into coherent form. Working at great speed, he wrote what he modestly called “A Practical Suggestion.” A general assembly of all member nations, a smaller executive council, a permanent secretariat, steps to settle international disputes, mandates for peoples not yet ready to rule themselves: much of what later went into the League covenant was in his draft. But there was also much more: the horrors of the recent war, a Europe reduced to its atoms, ordinary people clinging to the hope of a better world, and the great opportunity lying before the peacemakers. “The very foundations have been shakened and loosened, and things are again fluid. The tents have been struck, and the great caravan of humanity is once more on the march.” Smuts wrote proudly to a friend: “My paper has made an enormous impression in high circles. I see from the Cabinet Minutes that the Prime Minister called it ‘one of the ablest state papers he had ever read.’ ” It was immediately published as a pamphlet.14
It was, commented an American legal expert, “very beautifully written” but rather vague in places. Smuts had carefully avoided, for example, discussing mandates for Germany’s former colonies in Africa. (This was deliberate; he was determined that his own country should hang on to German Southwest Africa.) Wilson, to whom Lloyd George gave a copy, liked it, not least because Smuts insisted that the making of the League must be the first business of the Peace Conference. Back in Paris after his tour of Europe, Wilson set himself to the task he had so long postponed, of getting his own ideas down on paper. The result, which he showed the British on January 19, borrowed many of Smuts’s ideas. He did not mind, Smuts told a friend: “I think there is a special satisfaction in knowing that your will is quietly finding out the current of the Great Will, so that in the end God will do what you ineffectively set out to do.” Wilson pronounced Smuts “a brick.”15
Wilson also came to approve of Robert Cecil, the other British expert on the League. Thin, stern, reserved, Cecil often reminded people of a monk. He rarely smiled, and when he did, said Clemenceau, it was like “a Chinese dragon.” He was a devout Anglican by conviction, a lawyer by training, a politician by profession and an English aristocrat by birth. His family, the Cecils, had served the country since the sixteenth century. Balfour was a cousin and his father was the great Lord Salisbury, Conservative prime minister for much of the 1880s