interests in a single area, the Pacific, whereas the various participants in the Rome Conference were concerned with a number of local balances of naval power in the Baltic, the Black Sea, the Aegean, the Mediterranean, and the seas adjoining the southern parts of South America that is, in areas which had no connexion with one another. In these circumstances, substantial practical achievements were hardly to be expected in any case; but if any one factor was especially responsible for the failure of the Rome Conference, it was the attitude of the Russian delegate, Admiral Berens. A day or two after the Conference opened, Admiral Berens gave an interview to the Press1 in which he declared that, while for the time being Russia was not in a position to reconstitute a fleet on the modern standard, and while she willingly agreed to the limitation of naval armaments in principle, it must be borne in mind that political treaties were the indispensable premises of any decisions which different states might make on the subject of limitation. After pointing out that, at Washington, the Pacific Treaty had preceded the Treaty for the Limitation of Naval Armaments, he suggested that political agreements were only possible as between states which were maintaining normal relations with one another, and that, since this advantage was not enjoyed by Russia, it followed that she could only make a decision in regard to limitation if and when she, too, was given the opportunity of concluding political treaties of an equally pacific character with other countries. Admiral Berens then re-opened the controversy which had been carried on between Russia and the Principal Allied Powers at the Lausanne Conference over the naval régime of the Black Sea and the Black Sea Straits.2 This interview foreshadowed the attitude which the Russian representative was preparing to take up in the official discussions with his colleagues. While the Conference apparently proposed that Russia's maximum for 'capital ships' tonnage should be 110,000 tons, Admiral Berens demanded a maximum of 400,000 (a figure which, if ever realized, would have made Russia a stronger naval Power than Japan, and second only to the United States and Great Britain). The only terms upon which he was willing to consider an abatement of this demand were that the Baltic, as well as the Black Sea, should be closed to the warships of all Powers except the riverains, who were then, presumably, to come to a local agreement among themselves, 1 Interview with the representative of the Agence Havas, reported in Le Temps of the 17th February, 1924. 2 See Survey, 1920-3, pp. 374-6. including Russia, in either case. Since there was no possibility that these proposals would be accepted by the other parties, the work of the Conference was brought to a standstill as far as any agreed plan of action was concerned. All that the Conference did was to set up a sub-committee to prepare a report for the Council of the League, summarizing the opinions of the different parties represented on the questions at issue. After unanimously approving the text of this record for approval by the Council, the Conference terminated its proceedings on the 25th February. ᏢᎪᎡᎢ I WORLD AFFAIRS B. THE MOVEMENT OF POPULATION (i) Introductory Note. THE termMovement of Population' is commonly used by political economists in a technical sense to denote the fluctuations in the rate of increase or decrease of population within a given geographical area over a period of time, and not the spatial movement from one area to another through the processes of emigration and immigration. History, however, cannot deal with either form of movement in isolation; for local fluctuations in volume produce local differences of level, and population, like water, is perpetually seeking to find a uniform level by flowing from one place to another, wherever bodies situated at different levels are in communication. In the case of water, the pressure generated when the difference of level is very great is one of the most powerful natural forces in the physical universe-a force which lends itself equally readily to destruction or production on the grand scale, according to the particular channel along which the current flows spontaneously or is guided by art. The pressure of population is a force of equal potency in human affairs; and it, too, depends for its effect upon the channels at its disposal. Sometimes Fortune or statesmanship has so directed this force that its action has relieved the congestion of population in the homelands of a civilized society by carrying off streams of emigrants into empty lands, where they have founded communities of the same civilization and have thus broadened the material basis of the society to which they belonged without depopulating the parent countries. An effect of this kind was produced by the movement of European emigrants into empty countries of temperate climate overseas during the three or four centuries preceding the War of 1914. Sometimes, on the other hand, a congested population in one region has been debarred from overflowing into under-populated regions with which it has come into contact, because the existing G inhabitants of these other regions have refused admission to the intending immigrants for motives of an economic, political, cultural, or racial order. Under such conditions, the pressure of population tends to be converted into a destructive force. The thrust directed against the barrier constantly increases in intensity until something gives way and the pent-up waters pour out in a flood which devastates the world. During the years immediately preceding the War a tension of this nature was beginning to be set up by the resistance which the sparse European colonists of formerly unoccupied countries overseas were offering to the efforts of Indians, Malays, Chinese, Japanese, and other civilized inhabitants of congested countries in the Far East to secure a footing for themselves in the lands of promise which Western enterprise had opened up for human settlement. During the six years following the termination of the War of 1914-18, the various movements of emigration which had been temporarily arrested by the War began to resume their course; and at the same time a strong impulse to restrict immigration began to declare itself in the United States and in other overseas countries towards which these migratory movements were directed. In regard to Oriental immigration, the new restrictive impulse simply intensified the existing tendency (leading, for example, in the United States to the absolute exclusion, under the Act of 1924, of immigrants belonging to certain nationalities the admittance of which was already severely restricted by legislation or by international agreement). In regard to European immigration, on the other hand, the effect of the new impulse was to bring about a complete reversal of policy. Down to the outbreak of the War, the United States and-with one or two exceptions-the lesser overseas countries had continued to welcome European immigrants with open After the War, a hostility of the kind which the overseas peoples of European origin had always felt towards Oriental immigrants began to invade and transform their feelings towards immigrants from Europe, or at any rate from parts of Europe in which standards of living, political traditions, culture, and race differed perceptibly from the norm of the particular overseas country towards which the tide of immigration from that part of Europe was setting. For example, the people of the United States began to feel towards South-West and East European immigrants an antipathy of the same nature, though not yet of the same intensity, that which they felt towards Indians, Chinese, and Japanese. The arms. as lesser degree of intensity may be measured by the provisions of the Act of 1924, which merely differentiated against South-West and East European immigrants as compared with those from NorthWestern Europe, while it excluded Oriental immigrants altogether— notwithstanding the fact that latterly these Oriental immigrants had only been making their way into the United States at the rate of a few hundreds a year, whereas the South-West and East Europeans had been pouring into the country in their hundreds of thousands. Nevertheless, the essential tendency of the new legislation in respect of both these categories was the same, and this was a new fact of the utmost importance in international affairs. On the other hand, the two problems created by the increasing hostility of the overseas countries towards European and Oriental immigration respectively during this period were dissimilar. In the first place there was, as has been mentioned, a great difference in the scale of the two migratory movements. By the outbreak of the War of 1914, the cumulative effects of emigration from Europe overseas had actually displaced the centre of Western population and therewith the centre of Western society, so that the Atlantic had become for the Western World what the Mediterranean had been for the Roman Empire-a central sea uniting peoples of a single civilization distributed round its shores. On the eve of the War, the annual volume of trans-Atlantic emigration from Europe had risen above 1,200,000 to the United States alone and above 1,500,000 to the American Continent as a whole. It was evident that, in the general economy of Western society at that time, this movement was one of the governing factors, and that far slighter restrictions upon it than those which were imposed successively by the United States Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924 would have been bound to produce a profound effect upon the social and economic life of all Western communities on either side of the ocean. By comparison with this, the movement of population across the Pacific and the Indian Ocean hitherto had been almost negligible. In 1924 the total population of European origin or culture established by colonization round the shores of these vaster seas amounted to little more than 50,000,000, when the figures for South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, British Columbia, the Pacific States of the American Union, and the Latin-American Republics possessing a Pacific coastline 1 were added together. In these same countries, 1 Including, in their case, the aboriginal elements, which were being assimilated in culture to the elements of European origin. The mixed |