SOCIALIST TERMS OF PEACE 33 32 THE CLASS STRUGGLE Nothing less will do. And the thing must be adopted in its entirety, or not at all. At least as far as disarmament is concerned. And it must be done now, at the end of this war, if there is to be no next one.
The practical man, particularly of the negotiator kind, will object, of course, that the remedy proposed is visionary. idealistic, etc. as anything complete must be by its nature according to ingrained compromisers. Limitation of armaments that he can understand; and, of course, some limitation will have to be placed on armaments either in the peace settlement itself or soon thereafter. But complete disarmament, impossible!
The very idea of, say, militaristic Germany disarming herself is preposterous. And so on, and so forth; to the end of the compromising negotiator chapter.
Upon careful reflection, however, we shall find that far from being impractical, complete disarmament is the only practical way out. It is not only sure of accomplishing the desired result, but has more chances of being accepted by any nation that has no desire or hope of dominating the world than limitation. In fact, there are such insuperable objections to limitation of armaments that Germany at least is sure to refuse to adopt it as one of the terms of peace at the conclusion of this war.
The Allies may perhaps be able to force limitation on Germany if they obtain a smashing victory, but then this limitation will have the same fate as the rest of the settlement of a peace by victory. it will last just as long as the victorious powers are able to keep the vanquished enemy down. It will vanish as soon as Germany shall have recuperated her powers, when she will simply disregard it; and if the other nations do not acquiesce in the disregard she will go to war in order to remove the humiliation thus imposed on her, as well as to avenge the defeat which made her accept it temporarily.
The reason why Germany cannot accept limitation of armaments at the end of this war is the same that prevented her from accepting or even considering it before this war. Germany regards all such proposals as schemes, conscious or unconscious, on the part of her competitors in the international game, to perpetuate the status quo under which she chafed, and to gain an undue advantage over her. When England proposed a general limitation of armaments, Germany answer was that the only proper limitation upon a nation armed force were her resources and the readiness of her people to make sacrifices. When analyzed this answer means the following: You gentlemen, Germany said, in effect, to her opponents, are satisfied with the status quo, and are therefore interested to maintain it with as little cost as possible; am not satisfied with it, and have therefore no such interest. You gentlemen have trouble with your people, who either cannot or will not make the sacrifices necessary to maintain a limit army. but my people are rich and growing richer, and as their riches grow so do their obedience and willingness to make any sacrifices for the perfection of my military establishment.
The arrangement which you propose, gentlemen, is therefore entirely one sided; you stand to lose nothing and to gain considerable, while have nothing to gain from it and considerable to lose.
Germany still feels about it the same way. Unless she gains all her objects in this war, so that she has nothing further to gain from the use of military force, she will look upon limitation of armaments as a curtailment of her military power, which she may accept temporarily but to which she will never be reconciled.
And an examination of the question of limitation will show that given a world in which armed force decides and that world is taken for granted by limitation Germany is undoubtedly right.
An attempt to find a standard of armaments under a limitation regime will show that we are up against the same problem of power, and the same irreconcilability between the claims of growth on the one hand and security on the other, that we have encountered in attempting to arrive at a settlement generally.
The finding of such a standard is an almost superhuman task, even when attempted by an impartial outsider. It becomes absolutely impossible among contending parties who have just concluded one of the bitterest struggles in history. If such a standard is found at all, under such circumstances, it will be, as already stated, either the result of force applied by one side to