Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [180]
He was now busily engaged between the White House and Whitehall in an effort to promote the cause of the Conference, but Roosevelt had lost interest after the British refused to consider his proposal of a limit on the size of battleships. However, Roosevelt managed to avoid commitments by telling highly placed correspondents what they wanted to hear. He was in correspondence with the sovereigns of both Germany and England, whom he addressed easily as “My Dear Emperor William” and “My Dear King Edward.”
By now scarcely any public official except C.-B. and Secretary Root wanted disarmament on the agenda. Root thought it should be discussed even if nothing were accomplished, because, he said, results are never achieved without a number of failures: “failures are necessary steps toward success.” C.-B. too felt the world must keep on trying. Though a childless man whose wife, his closest companion, had just died and who himself was within a year of his death, he continued his own efforts. In March, 1907, he took the unusual course for a Prime Minister of publishing an article on a current question of policy. Under the title “The Hague Conference and the Limitation of Armaments,” it appeared in the first issue of a new liberal weekly, the Nation (of London). Although armaments and engines of war had increased since the First Conference, he wrote, so had the peace movement, which was now “incomparably stronger and more constant.” He thought disarmament should be given a chance to make the same progress as arbitration, which now had acquired a “moral authority undreamt of in 1898.” Britain, he pointed out, had already reduced military and naval expenditures (which was true if the program for the new dreadnoughts was left out of account) and would be willing to go further if other nations would do likewise. Admittedly this would not affect Britain’s naval supremacy, since it would freeze the status quo, but the Prime Minister insisted on the thesis that the British Navy was not a challenge to any state or group of states. The argument was narrow steering between the rocks of conscience and the shoals of political reality and it pleased nobody. The Germans took it as proof of a British plot in concert with France and Russia to force the issue at The Hague before Germany could make good H.M.S. Dreadnought’s lead. Bülow announced publicly in the Reichstag that Germany would refuse to discuss disarmament at the Conference. King Edward was equally irritated by the Prime Minister’s espousal of disarmament, as bad as his support of women’s suffrage. “I suppose he will support the Channel Tunnel Bill next week!” he said in disgust, but from that particular horror C.-B. refrained.
As Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey professed himself ready at all times to talk budgetary limitation at The Hague. Haldane talked earnestly to the American diplomat, Henry White, of the need for reducing armaments and had gone to Germany in 1906 to feel out possible ground for an agreement. But the hard fact behind the talk was that neither the British Government nor any other had any intention of limiting its freedom to arm as it pleased. The only person to mention the role of the munitions manufacturers was the King of Italy, who suggested that disarmament would cause “an outburst of opposition” among them and he was sure the Kaiser would never consent to “clipping the wings of Krupp.” When, on behalf of Russia, Professor de Martens toured the capitals to gather opinions as Muraviev, now dead, had done before, the American Ambassador in Berlin summarized