These were all good reasons for expecting that the Conference might do something of what it started out for. How much of it it would do and how permanent that which it did would be would depend in no small degree upon the attitude of mind of this country, whether the backing that we gave the Conference was one of emotionalism or intelligence. We were starting out with a will to succeed; we were going to spend our first day praying for success. It would be well if we injected into those prayers a supplication for self-control, clearness of judgment, and willingness to use our minds as well as our hearts in the struggles that were sure to come.
Alarms went along with these hopes. There were certain very definite things that might get in the way of the success of the Conference—things that often frustrate the best intentions of men, still they were matters over which the public and the press would have at least a certain control, if they took a high and intelligent view of their own responsibility.
First, there were the scapegoats. There are bound to be periods in all human undertakings when the way is obscure, when failure threatens, when it is obvious that certain things on which we have set our hearts are unobtainable. Irritation and discouragement always characterize these periods. It is here that we fall back on a scapegoat. An international conference usually picks one or more before it gets through—a nation which everybody combines to call obstinate, unreasonable, greedy, a spoke in the wheel. Then comes a hue and cry, a union of forces—not to persuade but to overwhelm the recalcitrant, to displace it, drive it out of court. The spirit of adjustment, and of accommodation which is of the very essence of success in an undertaking like the Conference on the Limitation of Armaments is always imperiled and frequently ruined by fixing on a scapegoat. Would this happen at Washington?
Of course the nation on which irritation and suspicion were concentrated might be in the wrong. It might be deep in evil intrigue. It might be shockingly greedy. But it was a member of the Conference and the problem must be worked out _with_ it. You work nothing out with scapegoats. Abraham Lincoln once laid down a principle of statesmanship which applies. “_Honest statesmanship_,” he said, “_is the employment of individual meanness for the public good_.”