Moreover, Article 8 of the Covenant, in fixing the reduction of armaments at the minimum compatible with national safety, has coupled the two questions. Limitation of armaments and security are the two sides of one and the same problem. In reality, by limiting armaments, the wish is simply to spend less than has been spent upon intimidating the enemy. Everything can be bought in this world; the difficulty is to fix the price.
However that may be, and in spite of the deceptions sometimes suffered by statesmen who have sought to solve these problems, it must be recognized that, little by little, the question has ripened. At Geneva, the persevering efforts of the representatives of nearly all the nations have ended in certain results, which are the pre cursors of others. Despite national rivalries, the desire for peace is gaining strength. Any man, who, to-day, would dare to proclaim the idea of solving European difficulties by war, would be an an achronism, and a scandal.
In reality, that patriotic anxiety which gave birth to this problem of security goes back to 1919. The United States and England had rejected the suggestion of Clemenceau, who pro posed to constitute an independent State, between Germany and France, on the left bank of the Rhine. Instead, these two Powers proposed to him a real alliance treaty. This treaty was signed, but the Washington Senate refused to ratify it, and with that, the undertakings which the British Government had made conjointly with the United States fell to the ground. President Wilson must have neglected to submit this treaty to the Senate at Washington. Only about a fortnight after that Assembly had been informed of the Treaty of Versailles, did Wilson communicate to them the Treaty of Alliance. It is possible that this negligence, at which the Senate took offence, may have been the cause of the trouble from which we are still suffering.
Mr. H. Cabot Lodge, chairman of the commission for foreign affairs in the Senate, wrote to Jules Cambon on the subject, on July 6, 1921: "If there had been no League of Nations presented to the Senate, I think it might have been possible to ratify the triple agreement between France, England and the United States, but the League of Nations and the opposition to it in the Senate pushed everything else aside and in the contest which ensued and which resulted in the defeat of the treaty of Versailles, the tradi tional feeling, which is very strong in this country, against any treaties of alliance became constantly more intense. By over
whelming majorities such as had never been seen before in any election, the people of the United States declared not merely for the Republican candidate for President, but against the League of Nations, which was the leading issue in the campaign and dis cussed on every platform." Negotiations between Great Britain and France.—The British Government, none the less, felt that France might justly be disturbed by the refusal of the American Senate and by its consequences. It seemed desirable to endeavour to attain by other means the object which was the aim of this treaty. It was thus that in 1921 negotiations were opened between Lloyd George, Lord Curzon and Briand, with a view to concluding a security pact which would reinforce the guarantees already offered by the League of Nations. Lloyd George suggested to France a close political and economic union, but he asked her to renounce the building of submarines and all tendency towards maritime rivalry. Briand, on his side, wanted the undertakings of the two Gov ernments to be bilateral, and insisted on a military convention be ing concluded between the general staffs of the two countries. He consented to the meeting of a conference at Genoa where all the nations, even Soviet Russia, were represented ; but disagreeing on some points with his own Government, he had to retire.
Poincare, who succeeded him, revived the proposal for a mili tary agreement between France and England, but it was soon apparent that the two Governments did not look at it from the same point of view. At the same time, Great Britain refused to conclude a defensive agreement with Belgium. Thus, the private "pourparlers" between the cabinets came to nothing. From that time on, it seemed as if the League of Nations alone was in a position to contrive a solution for the problem of security. We shall see that the League, too, came up against considerable diffi culties.