As an observer at the WASHINGTON CONFERENCE FOR THE LIMITATION OF ARMAMENTS held in 1921 and attended by the victorious nations of The Great War, the acclaimed author H. G. Wells wrote 29 short essays that were serialized in the New York World and other newspapers. This book is a collection of those essays. They are not a record or description of the Conference, but the impressions of one visitor. Wells noted that the failed League of Nations was the first American initiative toward an organized world peace, and in its absence “the American mind has produced this second experiment, which has been tried with the loosest of constitutions and the most severely defined and limited of aims. Instead of a world constitution we have had a world conversation.”
The essays relate “one observer’s conviction of how things can be done, and of how they need to be done, if our civilization is indeed to be rescued from the dangers that encompass it and set again upon the path of progress.” While history would not bear out all of Wells’ various expressions of optimism and pessimism, his vision of world peace nevertheless remains relevant today.
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These twenty-nine papers do not profess to be a record or description of the Washington Conference. They give merely the impressions and fluctuating ideas of one visitor to that conference. They show the reaction of that gathering upon a mind keenly set upon the idea of an organized world peace; they record phases of enthusiasm, hope, doubt, depression and irritation. They have scarcely been touched, except to correct a word or a phrase here or there; they are dated; in all essentials they are the articles just as they appeared in the New York World, the Chicago Tribune, and the other American and European papers which first gave them publicity. It is due to the enterprise and driving energy of the New York World, be it noted, that they were ever written at all. But in spite of the daily change and renewal of mood and attitude, inevitable under the circumstances, vithey do tell a consecutive story; they tell of the growth and elaboration of a conviction of how things can be done, and of how they need to be done, if our civilization is indeed to be rescued from the dangers that encompass it and set again upon the path of progress. They record—and in a very friendly and appreciative spirit—the birth and unfolding of the “Association of Nations” idea, the Harding idea, of world pacification, they note some of the peculiar circumstances of that birth, and they study the chief difficulties on its way to realization. It is, the writer believes, the most practical and hopeful method of attacking this riddle of the Sphinx that has hitherto been proposed.
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