Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [235]
Root sat silent, eyes downcast. In his seventeen months away from the government, he had attained happiness and wealth at the New York bar. His wife, who hated Washington, was re-established in Manhattan society, and Thomas Hastings was building them both a splendid town house on Park Avenue. Listening to the President’s words, Root felt nothing but an immense tiredness.
He exchanged glances with Roosevelt, then heard himself accepting.
ROOSEVELT WAS QUITE willing to ease Root’s return to service by relieving him of responsibility for the current peace negotiations. Apart from an emerging consensus that the conference might possibly be held in Washington, as more neutral than any other major world capital, Russia and Japan seemed more determined than ever to find reasons to go on fighting.
A sense gathered among scholars of foreign policy that more had passed than the last nineteenth-century Secretary of State, and more was coming than the mere settlement of a Far Eastern quarrel. Other current developments presaged ill for world peace: a sudden decline in French diplomatic prestige, triggered by Delcassé’s resignation; a reciprocal increase in the strategic power of Germany; mutiny aboard the battleship Potemkin at Odessa, along with enough riots and strikes elsewhere in Russia to convince George Meyer that the Tsar’s subjects were in a prerevolutionary state; a loss of imperial will in Britain, in the wake of the Boer War debacle (to Roosevelt’s exasperation, Lord Lansdowne would not even lean on Japan, his Far Eastern ally, to moderate her peace terms, as Delcassé had done on his ally, Russia). Flabby Sir Mortimer, with his disinclination to shin up large, steep obstacles in Rock Creek Park, struck Roosevelt as a pretty good symbol of a culture that had lost its force.
Wilhelm II seemed to feel differently. In a manipulative letter, dated 13 July, he warned Roosevelt that the British were opposed to “the great work that the President is so ardently pursuing for the benefit of the whole world.” They sought an indefinite prolongation of the war, in order to weaken both belligerents and ultimately bring about the partition of China.
Roosevelt was reinforced in his own opinion that Lord Lansdowne did not really want peace. Cecil Spring Rice tried to make him understand that the Foreign Minister could not force an ally into accepting peace terms contrary to that ally’s interest. Had Lansdowne done so, “we would have broken our word.” But this did not mean Britain looked for a settlement so humiliating for the Tsar that it would amount to a military defeat. “If Russia is excluded from the Pacific she must seek an exit for her energies elsewhere—in Persia, Afghanistan, or in the Near East.”
“Now, oh best beloved Springy,” Roosevelt replied, “don’t you think you go a little needlessly into heroics when you say that … ‘honor commands England to abstain from putting any pressure whatever on Japan to abstain from action which may eventually entail severe sacrifices on England’s part?’ ” He did not notice the French having any such shrinking scruples about their alliance with Russia, even though they had more to worry about in eastern Europe than the British in Asia Minor.
My feeling is that it is not to Japan’s real interest to spend another year of bloody and costly war in securing eastern Siberia, which her people assure me she does not want, and then to find out that she either has to keep it and get no money indemnity, or else exchange it for a money indemnity which, however large, would probably not more than pay for the extra year’s expenditure and loss of life.… Practically the only territorial concession they wish from Russia is Sakhalin [Island], to which in my judgment they are absolutely entitled.
Knowing he could rely on Spring Rice’s discretion, he wrote that Lord Lansdowne and Prime Minister Balfour “ought to know” that it had been Japan,