ing to refuse to permit land armament to be considered would make a big hole in the Conference agenda. She knew, in short, that she was coming to a Conference of which the atmosphere must necessarily be, as to her, somewhat accusatory. However polite and considerate we might be, the French delegates would always be uneasily conscious that we would think of her as failing to help, as unwilling to play the game.

That state of mind, that expectancy of accusation, implied or expressed, is just the mood in which men and nations are sensitive to slights, and ready to feel them even where they are not.

However, all this is going rather deep into antecedent history. The facts of record which, on this point, are the essential part of the narrative of the Washington Conference, are: that the French delegates prevented the consideration of land armament; that the French delegates took a position about capital ships which would have made the Conference a complete failure, and only receded after Hughes "put it up" to the French premier that the action of that country would "determine the success or failure of this effort to reduce the heavy burden of naval armament;" that the French delegates made any limitation on the quantity of submarines impossible; and that the French delegates made

any limitation on the quantity of auxiliary craft impossible.

Those were the specific actions of the French delegates. One might say of all of them what Balfour said of the one action on submarines, that they "constituted a singular contribution to a conference called to limit armament."

The delegates of France never seemed to share the spirit of the Conference. In their self-centered intentness upon their amour propre they were cut off from the emotion of exaltation that gripped the Conference and the world. When the whole world was star-eyed in pursuit of the great adventure, the delegates of France were thinking of their place at the table.

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CHAPTER IX

THE FOUR-POWER TREATY

NE of the most competent reporters of

the Washington Conference, Miss Ida Tarbell, speaking of the four-power treaty, said that "watching this treaty emerge was like watching a ship come out of a thick fog." It is a fact that this portion of the Conference's work came to the observers as a surprise, and its dawning was attended by much rumour and surmise, and, at one period, by some public excitement. The reason for the atmosphere of surprise lay in the fact that the fourpower treaty was not on the agenda; nor was the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, which the four-power treaty was designed to terminate. The Conference was one of five powers as to naval matters; and, as to Far Eastern matters, one of nine powers. The Anglo-Japanese Alliance was a matter to which only two powers were directly parties; and such a subject could not well be put on the agenda of a conference of a larger number of powers. This is the chief reason why the four-power treaty came to most of the ob

servers as a surprise. Their minds were intent on the agenda. They were following it from subject to subject as the Conference took the various points up. Moreover, at the time, the Conference was busy with land armament, with naval armament, and with various matters affecting China. We were all following what the Conference was doing on these subjects, and did not realize that such a thing as the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, and the effort to find some way of terminating it, was "in the works." Every well-informed person knew that the AngloJapanese Alliance had been a matter of discussion between the British and Japanese governments, knew that the American Government had informed the British Government that we looked upon the termination of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance as a matter of importance. But no one knew the subject was coming to a head so soon. Our minds were intent upon what we regarded as the great adventure of the Conference, the immense, historic effort to agree upon self-imposed limitations on naval armament; and this four-power treaty was something a little aside from that.

In truth, while this treaty was "in the works," it was rather in the background. It was carried on by the heads of the delegations as something additional to the rest of the Conference's work.

It did not bulk so large in the work of the Conference as it later did in the Senate debate. The time put upon it was relatively small. It was completed and read to the world exactly four weeks to the hour after the Conference first met; and during those four weeks it had consumed relatively little of the time of the men who made it. Most of the time, and most of the delay which created an atmosphere of suspense between the first rumours and the final fulfilment -most of that was due to the delay in the necessary cabling to Japan and France. At this ticular time, the cable to Japan was so choked that it took almost a week for the Japanese delegates to cable their home government and get the answer.

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However, to try to picture the thing to the reader as it appeared to the observer at the time:

The first to get the clue was a Japanese reporter who cabled it to his paper in Tokio, whence it went round the other side of the world and came back to us via London. America received it as a rumour so surprising as to be dubious. A few days later, the American newspaper men learned that on December 4th a British correspondent had sent to his paper in London a confident prediction and more or less detailed description of what was then expected to be a three-power treaty. So closely had the