• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1029 0

not reducing, armaments and had called the Conference only to retrieve the initiative from the United States. As far as Izvolsky, the current Russian Foreign Minister, was concerned, disarmament was “a craze of Jews, Socialists and hysterical women.” Since the advent of the Liberals in England, however, the question of disarmament could not be escaped. To put it on the agenda after the burial of 1899 was like propping up a dead man; not to put it on was to admit hopelessness and invite public condemnation. At a meeting of the Interparliamentary Union in London in April, 1906, C.-B. urged the delegates to insist at home “in the name of humanity” on their governments going to The Hague with serious intent to decrease military and naval budgets. The meeting was hardly a happy one, for on opening day, as delegates crowded around to congratulate the proud members of the youngest parliament, word came that the Czar had dissolved the Duma. C.-B., who was to give the address of welcome, was so shocked that he challenged the Imperial decision with the words, “Under one form or another the Duma will revive. In all sincerity, we can say, ‘The Duma is dead; long live the Duma!’ ” His outspokenness earned an official Russian protest.

As to disarmament the Kaiser let it be known that if it was brought up for discussion in any form, his delegates would leave the Conference which in any case he “devoutly hoped would not take place.” He was already being blamed at home by the militant Pan-Germans and Crown Prince’s party for yielding at Algeciras instead of fighting, and German diplomats hinted to other ambassadors that he might even be deposed if Germany were forced to agree to any form of arms limitation arising from the Conference. During one of the periodic visits of King Edward required by royal relations, with usually disastrous results, uncle and nephew discussed the forthcoming Conference while remaining for once reasonably amiable, perhaps because on this subject they were not far apart. The King “entirely disapproved” of the Conference, the Kaiser wrote to Roosevelt, “and himself took the initiative of telling me that he considered it a ‘humbug.’ ” According to his report, King Edward said it was not only useless, since in case of need nobody would feel bound by its decisions, but even dangerous as likely to produce more friction than harmony.

To Roosevelt it was apparent that modern Germany, “alert, aggressive, military and industrial,… despises the Hague Conference and the whole Hague idea.” His anxiety at the time was lest the British Liberal Government would “go to any maudlin extreme at the Hague Conference.” He told the new British military attaché, Count Gleichen, a cousin of the King, that he hoped Haldane and Grey would not let themselves be “carried away by sentimental ideas.” He was afraid they might be “swayed by their party in that direction … but don’t let them do it.” He talked fully to Gleichen of his current idea for a limitation on the size of battleships rather than on naval budgets. Unaware that his proposed top limit of 15,000 tons was already outdated by the monstrous hulk then lying in Portsmouth dockyard, Roosevelt explained that he wanted to see the British Navy remain in the same relative position vis-à-vis the navies of Europe and Japan as at present. Conveying the message to the King, Gleichen added that he had found lunch at Roosevelt’s home in Oyster Bay “extremely meagre,” and with only two Negro servants in attendance and no one to meet him at the station, arrangements rather primitive altogether.

Once the Dreadnought was commissioned, the United States Navy could not lag behind and two of the new class were authorized by Congress at Roosevelt’s request in January, 1907. The Navy, he wrote to President Eliot, was an “infinitely more potent factor for peace than all the peace societies” and the Panama Canal far more important than The Hague. With regard to the Conference he added, “My chief trouble will come from the fantastic visionaries who are crazy to do the impossible.”

One of these was Andrew