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The small group of British publicists who have collaborated 
 in presenting "The Idea of the League of Nations" liave 
 long been working towards universal peace from an angle 
 of their own. Under the chairmanship of Mr. H. G. Wells, 
 they have formed The League of Free Nations Association, 
 and have divided among themselves the principal problems 
 connected with the formation of such a league, subject for 
 extended study, appraisal, and suggestions for solution. 
 The remarkable qualifications of this group assure to their 
 treatise a high place in the literature of World Peace. 
 
THE IDEA 
 
 OF A 
 
 LEAGUE OF NATIONS 
 
 H. G. WELLS 
 
 in eoUaboraiion wUh 
 
 VISCOUNT GREY 
 LIWNEL CURTIS 
 WELLIAM ARCHER 
 H.lwiCKHAM STEED 
 
 A. E. ZIMMERN 
 
 J. A. SPENDER 
 
 VISCOUNT BRYCE 
 
 GILBERT MURRAY 
 
 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS 
 BOSTON 
 

 .r, ' 
 
 ■.-.• ' 
 
 
 Copyright, 1919, by 
 
 The Atlantic Monthly Company 
 
 The Ati^ujtic Monthly Press, Inc. 
 
 All Rights Reserved 
 
 5. 7 7 7 /f 
 
THE IDEA OF A LEAGUE OF NATIONS 
 
 Unification of human affairs, to the extent at least of a 
 cessation of war and a world-w'ide rule of international law, is 
 no new idea; it can be traced through many centuries of history. 
 It is found as an acceptable commonplace in a fragment, De 
 Rejniblica, of Cicero. It has, indeed, appeared in, and passed 
 out of, the foreground of thought, and reapj>eared there, again 
 and again. 
 
 Hitherto, however, if only on account of the limitations of geo- 
 graphical knowledge, the project has rarely been truly world- 
 wide, though in some instances it has comprehended practically 
 all the known world. Almost always there has been an excluded 
 fringe of barbarians and races esteemed as less than men. 
 
 The Roman Empire realized the idea in a limited sphere and 
 in a mechanical, despotic fashion. It was inherent in the prop- 
 aganda of Islam — excluding the unbeliever. It was the dream 
 of the mediaeval Church — a dream which, partly in harmony, 
 partly in rivalry, with the medieeval Empire, it was constantly 
 trying to reahze, however inefFectuallj'. (But here again the line 
 was drawn against the infidel.) It may be said that the political 
 unity of Christendom, overriding states and nations, was the 
 orthodox and typical doctrine of the Middle Ages. The individ- 
 ual states were regarded as being, in the nature of things, mem- 
 bers of one great body politic, presided over by the Poj)e or the 
 Emperor or both. It was the idea of the world-supremacy of the 
 Empire which inspired Dante's De Monorchia; but, as Lord Bryce 
 has remarked, 'Dante's book was an epilogue instead of a pro- 
 phecy.' The Council of Constance (1414-1418) brought together 
 the Christian princes of all countries, the higher dignitaries of the 
 
4 THE IDEA OF A LEAGUE OF NATIONS 
 
 Church, the ambassadors of many cities, and the most celebra- 
 ted scholars of the age, with the Pope and the Emperor at their 
 head; it was, however, the last assemblage of the whole of West- 
 em Christendom. 
 
 It cannot be claimed that historj^ shows any continuouslj^ pro- 
 gressive movement of human affairs from a dispersed to a uni- 
 fied condition. Rather, it tells a story of the oscillating action of 
 separatist and unif\Tng forces. And the process of civilization 
 itself, if we use the word in its narrower and older sense of the 
 elaboration of citizenship in a political and social organization, 
 and exclude mechanical and scientific progress from it, has, on 
 the whole, been rather on the side of fragmentation. It was, for 
 example, much easier for loosely organized tribes and village 
 communities scattered over wide areas to coalesce into %^ague 
 and often very extensive 'nations,' like the Scythians and Thra- 
 cians, or to cooperate in 'amphictyonies,' or federations, like the 
 small peoples of central Greece, than for highly developed city- 
 states or fully organized monarchies, possessing a distinctive 
 culture and religion, and definite frontiers, to sink these things 
 in any larger union. For such higher forms of political organ- 
 ization, enlargement occurred mainly through conquest, which 
 created unstable empire-systems of subject and subordinate peo- 
 ples, under the sway — which might, of course, be the assimila- 
 tive sway — of a dominant nation, rather than real unifications. 
 
 The Renaissance presents a phase in history in which a large 
 vague unification (Christendom) is seen to be breaking up, simul- 
 taneously with the appearance of a higher grade of national 
 organization. Machiavelli, says Ter Meulen, maj^ be conven- 
 iently taken as the typical exponent of the new mental forces 
 which ultimately turned Europe toward the conception of more 
 or less absolute princes, with highly organized standing armies 
 (see his Art of War), national religions, and educational auton- 
 omy. Machiavelli, with his aspiration toward a united Italy, 
 involving a distintegration of the Empire, opened that phase of 
 
THE IDEA OF A LEAGUE OF NATIONS 5 
 
 the national state in Europe, which reached its fullest develop- 
 ment in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. 
 Before the Renaissance, Europe was far more of a unity than it 
 was at the close of the reign of Queen Victoria, when it consisted 
 mainly of a group of nations, with their national edges sharpened 
 and hardened almost to a maximum, each aspiring to empire, 
 and each acutely suspicious of and hostile to its neighbors. The 
 idea of international organization for jjeace seemed far more 
 Utopian to the normal European intelUgence in 1900 than it 
 would have done eight hundred years before. 
 
 But while these political and social developments which con- 
 stitute civilization in the narrower sense of the word were tend- 
 ing to make human societies, as they became more elaborately 
 organized, more heterogeneous and mutually unsympathetic, 
 there were also coming into play. throughout the eighteenth and 
 nineteenth centuries, for the first time, upon a quite unprece- 
 dented scale, another series of forces diametrically opposed to 
 human separations. They worked, however, mutely, because 
 the world of thought was unprepared for them. Unprecedented 
 advances in technical and scientific knowledge were occurring, 
 and human cooperation and the reaction of man upon man, not 
 only in material, but also in mental things, was being made 
 enormously more effective than it had ever been before. But 
 the phrases of international relationship were not altering to 
 correspond. Phrases usually follow after rather than anticipate 
 reality; and so it was that, at the outbreak of the Great War in 
 August, 1914, Europe and the world awoke out of a dream of 
 intensified nationaUty to a new system of realities entirely an- 
 tagonistic to the continuance of national separations. 
 
 It is necessary to state very plainly the nature of these new 
 forces. Up>on them rests the whole case for the League of Nations 
 as it is here presented. It is a new case. It is argued here that 
 these forces give us pwwers novel in history, and bring mankind 
 face to face with dangers such as it has never confronted before. 
 
6 THE IDEA or A LEAGUE OF NATIONS 
 
 It is maintained that, on the one hand, they renderjpossible such 
 a reasoned coordination of human affairs as has never hitherto 
 been conceivable, and that, on the other, they so enlarge and 
 intensify the scope and evil of war and of international hostility 
 as to give what was formerly a generous aspiration more and 
 more of the aspect of an impterative necessity. Under the lund 
 illumination of the world-war, the idea of world-unification has 
 passed rapidly from the sphere of the literary idealist into that 
 of the methodical, practical man; and the task of an examination 
 of its problems and possibilities, ujx)n the scale which the near 
 probability of an actual experiment demands, is thrust upton the 
 world. 
 
 All political and social institutions, all matters of human rela- , 
 tionship, are dependent upon the means by which mind may 
 react upon mind and life upon life^ — that is to say, upon the 
 intensity, rapidity, and reach of mental and physical communi- 
 cation. In the history of mankind, the great phases seem all to 
 be marked by the api>earance of some new invention, which 
 facilitates trade or intercourse and may be regarded as the 
 operating cause of the new phase. The inventions of writing, 
 of the wheel and the road, of the ship, of money, of printing, 
 of letters of exchange, of joint-stock undertakings and limited 
 liability, mark distinct steps in the enlargement of human inter- 
 course and cooperation from its original limitation within the 
 verbal and traditional range of the family or tribe. 
 
 A large part of the expansion of the Roman Empire, apart 
 from its over-seas development, may be considered, for example, 
 as a process of road-making and bridge-building. Even its trans- 
 Mediterranean development was a matter of road-making com- 
 bined with ship-building. The Roman Empire, like the Chinese, 
 expanded on land to an extremity determined by the new method 
 of road-communication, and sought to wall itself in at last at the 
 limits of its range from its centres of strength. The new chapter 
 of the human story, again, which began with the entry of America 
 
THE IDEA OF A LEAGUE OF NATIONS 7 
 
 and the Oceanic lands upon the stage of history, was the direct 
 outcome of that bold sailing out upon the oceans which the mar- 
 iner's compass, and the supersession of the galley by the develop- 
 ment of sails and rigging, rendered possible. The art of printing 
 from movable types released new powers of suggestion, docu- 
 mentation, and criticism, which shattered the old religious or- 
 ganization of Christendom, made the systematic investigations 
 and records of modern science possible, and created the vast 
 newspaper-reading democracies of to-day. The whole of history 
 could, indeed, be written as a drama of human nature reacting 
 to invention. 
 
 And we live to-day in a time of accelerated inventiveness and 
 innovation, when a decade modifies the material of intercom- 
 munication, in range, swiftness, and intensity alike, far more 
 extensively than did any century before. Within the present 
 century, since 1900, there have been far more extensive changes 
 in these things than occurred in the ten centuries before Christ. 
 The automobile has raised the limit of possible road travel from 
 ten or twelve to forty or fifty miles an hour, wireless telegraphy 
 and the aeroplane have abolished such things as inaccessible 
 regions, and instead of regarding Around the World in Eighty 
 Days (first published in 1872) as an amazing feat of hurry, we 
 can now regard a flight about the globe in fifteen or sixteen days 
 as a reasonable and moderate performance. The teaching of his- 
 tory compels us to recognize in these new faciUties factors which 
 v/ill necessarily work out into equally revolutionary social and 
 political consequences. It is the most obvious wisdom to set 
 ourselves to anticipate as far as we can, so as to mitigate and 
 control, the inevitable collisions and repercussions of mankind 
 that are coming upon us. Even if we were to suppose that this 
 rush of novel accelerating contrivances would be presently 
 checked, — and there is little justification for any such supfxjsi- 
 tion, — it would still behoove us to work out the influence which 
 the things already achieved will have upon our kind. 
 
O THE IDEA OF A LEAGUE OF NATIONS 
 
 And it is not simply an increase of range and swiftness that we 
 have to consider here, though these are the aspects that leap 
 immediately to the eye. There has also been, for example, a 
 very great increase in the possible vividness of mental impact. 
 In education and in the agencies of journalism and propaganda, 
 there has been an increase of power at present incalculable, ow- 
 ing to vast strides in the printing of pictures, and to the cinema- 
 tograph, the gramophone, and similar means of intense world- 
 wide information and suggestion. 
 
 II 
 
 While all these things, on the one hand, point plainly now to 
 such possibilities of human unification and world-unanimity as 
 no one could have dreamed of a hundred years ago, there has 
 been on the other hand, a change, an intensification, of the de- 
 structive processes of war, which opens up a black alternative to 
 this pacific settlement of human affairs. The case, as it is com- 
 monly stated in the propaganda literature for a League of Na- 
 tions, is a choice between, on the one hand, a general agreement 
 on the part of mankind to organize a permanent peace, and, on 
 the other, a progressive development of the preparation for war 
 and the means of conducting war which must ultimately eat 
 up human freedom and all human effort, and, as the phrase goes, 
 destroy ci\'ilization. We shall find as we proceed that these 
 simple oppositions do not by any means state all the possibilities 
 of the case; but for a moment or so it will be convenient to con- 
 fine our attention to this enhancement of the cost, burden, and 
 destructiveness of belligerenceAvhrch scientific and technical pro- 
 gress has made inevitable. 
 
 What has happened is essentially this: that the natural limita- 
 tions upon warfare which have existed hitherto appear to have 
 broken down. Hitherto there has been a certain proportion be- 
 tween the utmost exertion of a nation at war and the rest of its 
 
THE IDEA OF A LEAGUE OF NATIONS 9 
 
 activities. The art and methods of war have had a measurable 
 relation to the resources of the community as a whole, so that it 
 has been possible for nations to be well armed by the standards 
 of the time and yet to remain vigorous and healthy communities 
 and to wage successful, and even unsuccessful, wars without ex- 
 haustion. To take a primitive example, it was possible for the 
 Zulu people, under King Chaka, to carry warfare as it was then 
 understood in South Africa — a business of spearmen fighting on 
 foot — to its utmost perfection, and to remain prosperous and 
 happy themselves, whatever might be the fate they inflicted upon 
 their neighbors. And even the armies of Continental Europe, 
 as they existed before the Great War, were manifestly bearable 
 burdens, because they were borne. But the outbreak of that 
 struggle forced upon the belligerents, in spite of the natural con- 
 servatism of all professional soldiers, a rapid and logical utiliza- 
 tion of the still largely neglected resources of mechanical and 
 chemical science; they were compelled to take up every device 
 that offered, however costly it might be; they could not resist the 
 ■drive toward scientific war which they had themselves released. 
 In warfare the law of the utmost immediate exertion rules; the 
 ■combatant who does not put in all his possible energy is lost. In 
 four brief years," therefore, Europe was compelled to develop a 
 warfare monstrously out of proportion to any conceivable good 
 which the completest victory could possibly achieve for either 
 ,jside. 
 
 We may take, as a typical instance of this logical and neces- 
 sarx exaggeration which warfare has undergone, the case of the 
 ' tank.*^ The idea of a land ironclad was an old and very ob- 
 ^VToiis one, which had been disFiEed and resisted by military 
 people for many years. The substantial basis of the European 
 armies of 1914 was still a comparatively inexpensive infantry, 
 assisted by machine-guns and field-guns and cavalry. By 19i8_ 
 the infantry line is sustained by enormous batteries of guns of 
 every calibre, firing away an incredible wealth of ammunition; 
 
10 THE IDEA OF A LEAGUE OF NATIONS 
 
 its Structure includes the most complicated system of machine- 
 gun nests and strong posts conceivable; and every impKjrtant ad- 
 vance is preceded by lines of aeroplanes and sustained by fleets 
 of these new and still developiag weapons, the tanks. Every bat- 
 tle sees scores of these latter monsters put out of action. Now, 
 even the primitive tank of 1917 cost, quite apart from the very 
 high running expenses, something between thirty-five and fifty 
 thousand dollars. At that stage it was still an expedient on trial 
 and in the rough. But its obvious corollary in movable big-gun 
 forts with ammunition tenders — forts which will probably be- 
 made in parts and built near the point of use, however costly 
 they may be — is practically dictated if war is to continue. So,, 
 too, is a production of Ught and swift types of tank that will 
 serve many of the purposes of cavalry. They will be a mechani- 
 cal cavalry, more effective but vastly more costly. If war is to- 
 continue as a human possibility, this elaboration of the tank in 
 scale and species follows inevitably. A mere p>eace of the old 
 type is likely to accelerate rather than check this elaboration. 
 Only a peace that will abolish the probability of war from human, 
 affairs can release the nations from the manifest necessity of cul- 
 tivating the tank, multiplying the tank, and maintaining a great 
 manufacture and store of tanks, over and above all the other 
 belligerent plants that they had to keep going before 1914. And 
 these tanks will supersede nothing — unless, perhaps, to a cer- 
 tain extent, cavalry. The tank, growing greater and greater and 
 more numerous and various, is manifestly, therefore, one new 
 burden — one of many new burdens — which must rest upon the 
 shoulders of mankind henceforth, until the prospect of war can 
 be shut off from international affairs. It is foolish to ignore these 
 grimly budding possibilities of the tank. There they are, and 
 they cannot be avoided if war is to go on. 
 
 il But the tank is only one of quite a multitude of developments, 
 which are bound to be followed up if the modem war-process 
 continues. There is no help for it. In every direction there is the 
 
•fAfi'j 
 
 THE IDEA OF A LEAGUE OF NATIONS 11 
 
 same story to be told, of an unavoidable elaboration of the means 
 of war beyond the scale of any conceivable war-end. 
 
 As a second instance, let us take the growth in size, range, and 
 destructiveness of air-war. Few people realize fully what a vast 
 thing the a ir-se rvice has become. A big aeroplane of the raider 
 type may cost anything up to a hundred thousand dollars; the 
 smallest costs not much less than five thousand; the pilot and the 
 observer are of the very flower of the youth of the country; they 
 have probably cost society: many thousands of dollars worth of 
 upbringing and education, and they have made little or no pro- 
 ductive contribution to human resources. And these costly units 
 have been multiplied enormously. From a poor hundred or so of 
 aeroplanes at the outset of the war. Great Britain alone has ex- 
 panded her air forces imtil she has an output of thousands of 
 new machines a month; aerodromes abound throughout the coun- 
 try, and there is scarcely a comer of England where the hum of 
 the passing aeroplane is not to be heard. Now, all this vast plant 
 of aeroplane factories and instruction aerodromes must be kept 
 up, once it has been started, war or no war, imtil war is practi- 
 cally impossible. It may be argued, perhaps, that during a peace- 
 spell some portion of this material may be applied to civil air- 
 transport; but the manufacturers have made it abundantly clear 
 that this project does not strike them as reasonable or desirable; 
 their industry hasjb^n created as an armament industry, and an 
 armament industry they wish it to remain. And besides this 
 opposition of the interested profiteer, we have to remember that 
 the aeroplane has imported into warfare possibilities of surprise 
 hitherto undreamed of. So long as a sudden declaration of war, 
 or an attack preceding a declaration of war, is possible, it is now 
 imperative, not only that the air force of a country should be 
 kept always in striking_cOTdition, but that the whole vast oigan- 
 ization of coaiSl aiid frontier anti-aircraft defenses should be 
 equally ready. Tens of thousands of men, most of them eco- 
 nomically very valuable, will have to keep watch day and 
 
12 THE IDEA OF A LEAGUE OF NATIONS 
 
 night, prepared at any moment to flash into warfare again. 
 
 The same story of a tremendous permanent exjmnsion of war- 
 equipment could be repeated in a score of parallel instances 
 drawn from the land war and sea war. Enormous new organ- 
 izations of anti-submarine flotillas, of mine-field material and its 
 production, of poison-gas manufacture and the like, have, for 
 instance, been called into existence, and must now remam as 
 going concerns so long as war is likely to be renewed. But enough 
 examples have been cited here to establish the reality of this 
 present unrestricted, illimitable, disproportionate growth of the 
 war-process in comparison with all other human processes. Mars 
 has become the young cuckoo in the nest of hmnan possibilities, 
 and it is — to state the extreme alternatives — a choice before 
 mankind, whether we wiU drift on toward a catastrophe due to 
 that overgrowth, or so organize the world as effectually to re- 
 strain and reduce warfare. 
 
 It is not impossible to adumbrate the general nature of the 
 catastrophe which threatens mankind if war-making goes on. 
 Modern warfare is nptcongeniaLtQ the working masses anywhere. 
 No'HouEt the primitive form of warfare, a murderous biicRering 
 with adjacent tribes, is natural enough to uneducated men; but 
 modern warfare, and still more the preparation for it, involves 
 distresses, strains, and a continuity of base and narrow purpose, 
 quite beyond the patience and interest of the millions of ordinary 
 men who find no other profit in it but suffering. The natural man 
 is more apt for chaotic local fighting than for large-scale syste- 
 matic fighting. Hatred campaigns and a sustained propaganda 
 are needed to keep up the combatant spirit in a large modern 
 state, even during actual hostilities; and in the case of Russia we 
 have a striking example of the distaste a whole population may 
 develop for the war-strain, even during the war and with the 
 enemy at its gates. 
 
 What is likely to happen, then, when the working masses of 
 Central and Western Europe, no longer sustained by the imme- 
 
THE IDEA OF A LEAGUE OF NATIONS 13 
 
 diate excitement of actual 'war, find themselves still obliged to go 
 on, year after year, producing vast masses of war-material, 
 pledged to carry a heavy burden of war-loan rentiers on their 
 backs, and subjected to an exacerbated conscription? Possibly 
 so far as the rentier burden upon the worker goes, a great rise in 
 prices and wages will relieve the worker to some extent, but only 
 at the cost of acute disappointment arid distress at another social 
 level. There is a dangerously narrowing limit now to the confi- 
 dence of the common man in the intelligence and good faith of 
 tjiose who direct his afiairs; and the probability of a cruel, con- 
 fused class-war throughout Europe, roughly parallel in its meth- 
 ods to the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, and released by a 
 similar loss of faith in leaders and governments, appears at the 
 end of the vista of waste of directive energy and natural resources, 
 completing that waste of energy and resources into which the 
 belligerent systems of Europe, the German Empire being the 
 chief and foremost, have led mankind. Systematic force, over- 
 strained and exhausted, will then give place to chaotic force, and 
 general disorganization will ensue. Thereafter the world may 
 welter in confusion for many generations, through such ruinous 
 and impoverished centuries as close the Soman Imperial story, 
 before it develops the vitality for an efi"ective reorganization. 
 
 That, roughly, is the idea of the phrase 'downfall of civilization' 
 as used in discussions like these. It is a vision of the world as a 
 social system collapsing chaotically, not under the assault of 
 outer barbarians, but beneath the pressure of this inevitable 
 hypertrophy of war. 
 
 in 
 
 Let us now look a little more closely between the two extremes 
 of possibility we have stated in the preceding section, between 
 a world-unanimity for peace, on the one hand, — Everyman's 
 World-L^gue of Nations, — and a world-collapse under the 
 overgrowth^fjwaj^wgajuzation and material, on the other 
 
14 THE IDEA OF A LEAGUE OF NATIONS 
 
 First we have to consider the possibility of some belligerent 
 state achieving so much victory as to establish a world-hegemony 
 and a peace based on force, and then relieving the pressure by an 
 enforced and controlled world-disarmament. We should then 
 have a sort of League of Nations project realized in a very dif- 
 ferent form and spirit indeed from that League of Everyman, 
 but still realized, as the dictated peace of a subjugated world, 
 rather after the pattern of the Roman Empire. Such was prob- 
 ably the hope — and a not altogether unreasonable hope, havmg 
 regard to the self-confidence of the German people, the rcftten- 
 ness of Russia, the Irish disorders, and the unprejMiredness of 
 America — of many far-seeing Germans in the early phases of the 
 war. But the affairs of the world are now in a posture which en- 
 ables us to dismiss this idea of a world-hegemony for Germany, 
 or for any other single power, as a fantastic vanity. 
 
 We have to consider, however, the much greater probability 
 of a group of the more powerful states, including perhaps a chas- 
 tened Germany, agreeing among themselves to organize and 
 enforce peace in the world for ever. This would give us still a 
 third type of League, which we may call the League of the Senior 
 States. It is, perhaps, the most probable of all the intermediate 
 f)ossibilities. 
 
 And on the other hand, we have assumed quite crudely in the 
 first section that the forces of popular insurrection are altogether 
 destructive of organization, whereas there may be as yet un- 
 measured constructive and organizing power in the popular 
 mind. There is a middle way between a superstitious belief in 
 unguided democracy and a frantic hatred of it. Concurrently 
 for example, with the earlier phases of Bolshevik anarchy in 
 Petrograd and Moscow, there seems to have been for a time a 
 considerable development of cooperative production and distri- 
 bution throughout European and Asiatic Russia. Mingled with 
 much merely destructive and vindictive insurrectionism, there 
 may be a popular will to order, reaching out to cooperate with all 
 
THE IDEA OF A LEAGUE OF NATIONS 15 
 
 the sound and liberal forces of the old system of things. We can 
 only guess as yet at the possibilities of a collective will in these 
 peasant and labor masses of Europe which now read and write, 
 and have new-bom ideas of class-action and responsibility. They 
 will be ill-informed, they may be emotional, but they may have 
 vast reserves of common sense. Much may depend upon the un- 
 foreseeable accident of great leaders. Nearly every socialist and 
 democratic organization in the world, it is to be noted, now de- 
 mands the League of Nations in some form, and men may arise 
 who will be able to give that stiQ quite vague demand force and 
 creative definition. A failure to achieve a world-guaranty of 
 peace on the part of the diplomatists at a peace conference may 
 lead, indeed, to a type of insurrection and revolution not merely 
 destructive but preparatory. It is conceivable. The deliberate 
 organization of peace, as distinguished from a mere silly clamor 
 for peace, may break out at almost any social level and in the 
 form either of a constructive, and adaptive, or a revolutionary 
 project. 
 
 We have not, therefore, here, a case of a clear-cut choice of 
 two ways: there is a inultitude of roads which may converge 
 on the permanent organization of world-peace, and an infinitude 
 of thwarting and delaying digressions may occur. Complicating 
 and mitigatory circumstances may, and probably will, make this 
 antagonism of war and peace a lengthy and tortuous drama. The 
 collapse of Russia tempted Germany to outrageous aggressions 
 upon her Eastern frontier, and so brought out the opposition of a 
 militarist and pacifist conception of life, with the acutest, most 
 illuminating simplicity. But other such collapses may not have 
 this eflFect of simplifying and enforcing the issue. They may mere- 
 ly encourage powers adjacent to the region of collapse, to adopt 
 a partial disarmament, a mere resting phase, and so defer for 
 scores of years, by this temporary mitigation, the necessity for 
 securely ending war. There may be many such halts and set- 
 backs in the inevitable development of war; belligerence may 
 
16 THE IDEA OF A LEAGUE OF NATIONS 
 
 pause and take breath on several occasions before its ultimate 
 death-flurry. 
 
 Such delays, such backwater phases and secondary aspects, 
 must not confuse the issue and hide from us the essential fact of 
 the disappearance of any real limitation upon the overgrowth 
 of war in human life. That unlimited overgrowth is the proba- 
 bility which is driving more and more men to the study and ad- 
 vocacy of this project of a League of Nations, because they are 
 convinced that only through a counter-organization of the peace- 
 will in mankind can the world be saved from a great cycle of dis- 
 asters, disorder, and retrogression. 
 
 And it does not follow, because the origins and motives of the 
 will for such a world-league are various, that they involve a con- 
 flict over essentials, as to the character of the final result. It is 
 the declared belief of many of the promoters of the world-league 
 movement that a careful analysis of the main factors of its prob- 
 lems, a scientific examination of what is possible, what is impos- 
 sible, what is necessary, and what is dangerous, must lead the 
 mass of reasonable men in the world, whatever their class, origins, 
 traditions and prejudices, to a practical agreement upon the 
 main lines of this scheme for the salvation of mankind. It is be- 
 lieved that the clear, deliberate, and methodical working out of 
 the broad problems and riddles of the world-league idea will have 
 a sufficient compelling force to bring it within the realm of prac- 
 tical possibility. 
 
 IV 
 
 At this point it is advisable to take up and dispose of a group 
 of suggestions which contradict our fundamental thesis, which 
 is, that war is by its nature illimitable. War is, we hold here, a 
 cessation of law, and in war, therefore, it is impossible to prevent 
 permanently the use of every possible device for injury, killing, 
 and compulsion which human ingenuity can devise or science 
 produce. Our main argument for a League of Nations rests on 
 that. 
 
THE IDEA OF A LEAGUE OF NATIONS 17 
 
 But there are people who do not accept as a fact the illimitable 
 nature of war. They fall back upon the theory that the horrors 
 of the Great War are due to a sort of accidental relapse into sav- 
 agery on the part of the German people, and that future wars can 
 and will be conducted under restrictions imposed by humanity 
 and chivalry. They believe that war can become a conventional 
 Ordeal by Battle, in which the nations shall deliberately refrain 
 from putting forth their full strength, and shall agree to abide 
 by the decision of a struggle between limited armies, operating, 
 Uke the champions in a tournament or a prize-fight, under an 
 accepted code of rules. 
 
 This is, we hold, a delusion. Our case is that the nations can 
 agree far more easily to abolish war than to restrict war. 
 
 It is true that, in the Great War, Germany has carried her 
 theories of ruthlessness to self-defeating extremes. She has done 
 many deeds which recoiled upon herself — deeds inspired by a 
 sort of ferocious pedantry, which inflicted comparatively small 
 material damage upon the Allies, but hardened their resolution 
 and brought thousands, nay, millions of recruits to their ranks. 
 None the less must we face the fact that, individual stupidities 
 apart, the German theory of war is the only logical one. The 
 theory is laid down by Clausewitz at the very beginning of his 
 classical treatise On Wars: — 
 
 Philanthropists may think it possible that the disarmament or sub- 
 jection of the enemy can be effected by some artificial means, without 
 causing too many woimds, and that this is the true aim of all military 
 science. Pretty as that looks, we must refute the error, for, in such 
 dangerous matters as war, errors arising from good-nature are the worst 
 of all. As the employment of physical force to its fullest extent in no 
 wise excludes the cooperation of intelligence,, it follows that he who 
 makes use of this force ruthlessly, and without sparing blood, must 
 obtain an ascendancy if the enemy does not do likewise. By so doing 
 he frames a law for the other, and thus both strain every nerve, with- ' 
 out finding any other limitation than their own natural counterpoise. ■ 
 
18 THE IDEA OF A LEAGUE OF NATIONS 
 
 The same principle is restated by Von der Goltz in The Nation 
 in Arms (English translation, page 22) : — 
 
 n, from humanitarian principles, a nation decided not to resort to 
 extremities, but to employ its strength up to a given point only, it 
 would soon find itself swept onward against its will. No enemy would 
 consider itself bound to observe a similar limitation. So far from this 
 being the case, each would avail itself of the voluntary moderation of the 
 other to outstrip him at once in activity. 
 
 If it be said that, in past times, this was not true, — that na- 
 tions fought with comparatively small armies, and often accepted 
 defeat without having thrown anything like their full strength 
 into the struggle, — the objection is met by a twofold answer. 
 Firstly, the logic of war, the law — as we have termed it — of the 
 utmost effort, had not j''et been thoroughly thought out. Primi- 
 tive peoples in general — and the same applies to all but the 
 most civilized and sophisticated of modern states — are guided 
 in matters of war and peace more by their emotions than by 
 their reason. They are lazy, as peoples, and muddle-headed. 
 They fight because they are angry, they stop because they are 
 tired; they cease pursuing the enemy because they want to attend 
 to the harvest. It is the mark of a highly organized and intellec- 
 tualized government to subordinate national emotions to the 
 remorseless logic of the case. And the logic of war was reserved 
 for Napoleon to express in practice and Clausewitz to formulate 
 in theory. 
 
 But the second answer goes more to the root of the matter: 
 namely, that the strength which a nation can put into the field 
 is limited by many conditions, both material and psychological, 
 and that, if we examine into these conditions, we shall often find 
 that what may seem to us, on the face of it, an insignificant 
 effort, was in very truth the greatest of which, at the given 
 moment, the nation was capable. It is a quite new social fact, 
 a creation of the last fifty years, to have a central government 
 supplied with exact information about all its resources in men. 
 
THE IDEA OF A LEAGUE OF NATIONS 19 
 
 money, and material, and with means of organization and con- 
 trol which enable it, at the cost of some delay and friction, to 
 exploit those resources to the last inch. When Babylon was cap- 
 tured by the Medes, "we are told, there were parts of the city 
 itself which were unaware of the fact for several days; and there 
 must have been vast islands of population in the country which, 
 so far as their personal experience went, never knew. But that 
 sort of thing has passed. 
 
 If we look into the history of warfare, we find that it has com- 
 pleted a cycle and is now returning to its starting-pwint. A 
 nomadic horde of the barbarous ages was 'a nation in arms' in 
 the full sense of the word. Having no fixed place of abode, it had 
 no civil — as distinct from military — population. The whole peo- 
 ple — old men, women, and children included — took part in the 
 toils and perils of war. There were no places of security in which 
 the weak and the defenseless could take refuge. Everyone's life 
 was forfeit in case of disaster; therefore everyone took part in 
 the common defense. Modem warfare, with its air-fleets, its 
 submarines, and its 'big Berthas,' is more and more restricting 
 the area of immtmity from military peril, and reverting to these 
 primitive conditions. 
 
 Agricultural life and city settlements brought with them the 
 distinction between combatants and non-combatants; but still, 
 in the normal state, every able-bodied citizen w£is a soldier. The 
 citizen took his place as a matter of course in the militia of his 
 country, leaving to old men and women, or to slaves and cap- 
 tives, the guardianship of field and vineyard, flock and herd. 
 Only when wealth and luxury had reached a certain pitch, did the 
 habit of employing denationalized mercenaries creep in. Then 
 came the time when the mercenaries encountered nomadic or 
 thoroughly mobilized 'nations in arms,' and civilization went to 
 the wall. 
 
 In the Middle Ages, the feudal chief, the dominant, soldierly, 
 often predatory personality, gathered his vassals ('Gesellen,' 
 
20 THE IDEA OF A LEAGUE OF KATIONS 
 
 companions) around him for purposes of offense and defense, 
 while the cultivation of the soil devolved on the villeins or serfs. 
 Thus, war became the sjiecial function of a military caste, and, as 
 in the Wars of the Boses, campaigns were often carried on with 
 comparatively little disturbance to the normal life of the country. 
 When the royal power crushed or absorbed that of the barons, 
 the centralized monarchy everywhere recruited a standing army, 
 often consisting largely of foreign mercenaries, as the bulwark of 
 its security and the instrument of its will. It was quite natural 
 that djmastic wars, and wars in which the common people of the 
 contending nations had little or no interest, should be fought out 
 on a restricted scale by these specialized military machines. 
 Frederick the Great employed a mercenary army as the nucleus 
 for a national militia; and so lately as the beginning of the last 
 century, this system was celebrated as ideal by a noted military 
 authority, Friedrich von der Decken, the immediate predecessor 
 of Clausewitz. 
 
 With Napoleon came the nation in arms; and the military 
 history of the intervening years has consisted of the ever com- 
 pleter concentration uf)on warlike purposes of the whole powers 
 and resources of the great European peoples. 
 
 If it be asked why this logical evolution of the idea of war has 
 taken so many centuries to work itself out, the main reason — 
 among many others — may be stated in two words: munitions 
 and transport. Before the age of machines, it was impossible to 
 arm and clothe immense multitudes of men: before the days of 
 McAdam and Stephenson, it was impossible to move such mul- 
 titudes, and still more to keep them supplied with food and 
 mimitions. Again we find ourselves insisting upon the vital im- 
 portance of transit methods in this, as in nearly all questions of 
 human interaction. The size of armies has steadily grown with 
 the growth of means of communication. The German wars of 
 1863-70 were the first European wars in which railways played 
 any considerable part, and the scale of operations in 1870-71 
 
THE IDEA OF A LEAGUE OF NATIONS 21 
 
 was quite unprecedented. What is the chief new factor since the 
 days of St. Privat and Sedan? The aeroplane, most people would 
 reply; possibly it may become so, but thus far a less picturesque 
 iavention has been of even greater influence — the motor-lorry. 
 No one can go anywhere near the Western Front without realiz- 
 ing that the gigantic scale of this struggle is almost wholly de- 
 pendent upon motor-traction. Had not the internal-combustion 
 engine been invented, the war would probably have been over 
 long ago, and, at all events, millions of men would still be alive 
 and well who now lie dead, or crawl mutilated over the face of the 
 earth. 
 
 Seen in this light, the invention of the motor may appear to 
 have been due to a special interference of Satan in human affairs. 
 But that is an unphilosophical view to take. Our race must per- 
 fect its power over matter before it can wisely select the ends to 
 which it will apply that power. The idea of war had to work it- 
 self out to the full and demonstrate its own impossibility, before 
 man could find the insight and the energy to put it behind him 
 and have done with it. Thanks to Prussian ambition and Prus- 
 sian philosophy, the demonstration has now been completed. The 
 idea of war has revealed itself in its full hideousness. All the 
 world has come to look upon it as a sort of mythological monster 
 which, if left to itself, will periodically reemerge from hell, to 
 devour the whole youth and the whole wealth of civilized man- 
 kind. It is useless to dream of clipping the wings or paring the 
 claws of the dragon. It must be slain outright if it is not to play 
 unthinkable havoc with civilization; and to that end the inteUi- 
 gence and the moral enthusiasm of the world are now, as we see, 
 addressing themselves. 
 
 The idea of p>aring the claws of the dragon and rendering him 
 comparatively innocuous has long hovered before simple and 
 idealistic minds. Many people have said to themselves, like 
 Jeannette in the touching old ballad, — 
 
22 THE IDEA OF A LEAGUE OF NATIONS 
 
 If I were King of France, or, still better. Pope of Rome, 
 I'd have no fighting men abroad, no weeping maids at home; 
 AH the world should be at peace, or, if kings must show their might. 
 Then let those who make the quarrels be the only men to fight. 
 
 But even Jeannette evidently realized that the idea of making 
 the fate of a tribe or a nation depend upon the fortunes of one or 
 two selected champions was but a pious aspiration, which not 
 even the King of France or the Pope of Rome could translate into 
 practical politics. Though the nations may not, until recent 
 times, have learned how to bring their full strength to bear for pur- 
 poses either of aggression or defense, the idea of a deliberate re- 
 striction of military effort, by mutual consent, with a view to 
 minimizing the horrors of war, belongs rather to legend than to 
 sober history. It is true that the story of the Horatii and the 
 Curiatii rneets every schoolboy in the first pages of his Livy; but 
 it is manifestly a fable. On the other hand, the. tale told by 
 Herodotus concerning the Lacedaemonians and the Argives at 
 Thyrea, seems to be accepted as historical; but it only shows us 
 the breakdown of such an experiment. Thus it runs: — 
 
 The Argives collected troops to resist the seizure of Thyrea, but be- 
 fore any battle was fought, the two parties came to terms and it was 
 agreed that three hundred Spartans and three hundred Argives should 
 meet and fight for the place, which should belong to the nation with 
 whom the victory rested. It was stipulated also that the other troops 
 on each side should return home to their respective countries, and not 
 remain to witness the combat, as there was danger, if the armies stayed, 
 that either the one or the other, on seeing their countrymen undergo- 
 ing defeat, might hasten to their assistance. These terms being agreed 
 upon, the two armies marched off, leaving three hundred picked men 
 on each side to fight for the territory. The battle began, and so equal 
 were the combatants that at the close of the day, when night put a stop 
 to the fight, of the whole six hundred only three men remained alive, 
 two Argives, Alcanor and Chromius, and a single Spartan, Othryadas. 
 The two Argives, regarding themselves as the victors, hiu-ried to Argos. 
 Othryadas, the Spartan, remained upon the field, and, stripping the 
 bodies of the Argives who had fallen, carried their armor to the Spartan 
 camp. Next day the two armies returned to learn the result. At 
 
THE IDEA OF A LEAGUE OF NATIONS 23 
 
 first they disputed, both parties claiming the victory, the one because 
 they had the greater number of survivors; the other, because their man 
 remained on the field, and stripped the bodies of the slain, whereas the 
 two men of the other side ran away. But at last they fell from words 
 to blows, and a battle was fought, in which both parties suffered great 
 loss, but at the end the Lacedaemonians gained the victory. 
 
 Whether true or not, this story is illuminating. It shows that 
 the Prussian theory of war, as a form of activity which cannot be 
 subjected to contractual limits, is based on fundamental facts of 
 human nature. Where the matter at stake is, or is conceived to 
 be, of vital moment, no nation or tribe will ever accept a defeat 
 which it knows, or hopes, that it can repair. EflFort, no doubt, 
 will generally be proportioned to the real or fancied importance 
 of the fKjint at issue. If England had been unable to live without 
 her American colonies, she would probably have put forth her 
 strength and quelled the revolt. She did not do so because her 
 conscience was uneasy, her purjjose infirm, and her interests not 
 vitally involved — she could get on very well without the thir- 
 teen commonwealths. But it is one thing to sit down under a de- 
 feat because victory would not be worth its price; quite another 
 thing to do so because the nation has contracted in advance to 
 restrict its effort within certain definite limits. And the principle 
 is the same whether the selected champions are three, or three 
 hundred, or three hundred thousand. If the procedure were rea- 
 sonable at all, it would be the more reasonable the smaller the 
 force employed. 
 
 There is one theory, indeed, which, if we accept its initial pos- 
 tulate, would make limited warfare logical. If battle be regarded 
 as the trial of a cause before the judgment-seat of God, there is 
 no sound reason for pouring huge armies into it. It is manifest 
 that God can deliver his verdict in the result of a duel of one 
 against one, quite as well as in the result of a war between whole 
 nations in arms. On this theory, war would be an extension to 
 politics of the 'wager of battle' between individuals — a method 
 
24 THE IDEA OF A LEAGUE OF NATIONS 
 
 of obtaining a supernatural ruling, indistinguishable in principle 
 from the drawing of lots or tossing of a coin. But although men 
 have always talked, and still talk, of 'appealing to the God of 
 Battles,' they have never shown any disposition to accept, save 
 at the last gasp, a judgment which ran counter to their passions 
 or their cupidities. Whatever may have been their professions, 
 their practical belief has always been that 'God is on the side of 
 the big battalions,' or, in other words, that war is a part of the 
 natural order of things, the immeasurable network of cause and 
 effect, and no more subject to special interventions of Providence 
 than commerce, or navigation, or any other form of human ac- 
 tivity. Nor is there any reason to suppose that they will ever 
 believe otherwise. If it be difficult to conceive them, in their 
 disputes, abiding by the awards of impartial reason, it is a hun- 
 dred times more difficult to conceive them accepting the wholly 
 unreasonable awards of artificially and arbitrarily restricted 
 violence. 
 
 These truths are so obvious that it may seem idle to insist upon 
 them. Nobody, it may be said, proposes that Paris and Berlin 
 should in future settle their disputes, like Rome and Alba Longa, 
 by selecting three champions apiece and setting them to cut each 
 others' throats. In this crude and elementary form, indeed, the 
 proposal does not app>ear; but disguised applications of the same 
 principle are constantly commended in the writings of those who, 
 holding war to be eternally inevitable, seek refuge from sheer 
 despair in the belief that it is possible to subject it to rule and 
 limit, and say to it, ' Thus far shalt thou go and no further.' They 
 cannot or will not see that any conventional limitation is foreign 
 to its very essence. It is perfectly possible and consonant with 
 human nature that nations should agree not to appeal to force, 
 and should hold to that agreement even when one or the other of 
 them believes itself to have suffered injustice. But it is utterly 
 impossible and inconsistent with human nature that, having ap- 
 pealed to force, they should agree to exercise it only within lim- 
 
THE IDEA OF A LEAGUE OF NATIONS 25 
 
 its, and accept impoverishment, humiliation, servitude, — in a 
 ~word, defeat, — rather than transgress the stipulated boundaries. 
 It may be objected that codes of law have in fact been devised 
 for the partial humanization of war, and that not until the present 
 time has any civilized belligerent made a practice of disregarding 
 them. But these so-called laws of war have always been conven- 
 tions of mutual advantage — rules which all parties held it to be, 
 on the whole, to their own interest to observe. The Grerman War 
 Book quite frankly places the chief sanction of such trammels 
 on military action, not in humanity, but in the fear of reprisals. 
 We do not deny that man is an emotional being, and even in the 
 midst of his fiercest fighting there are horrors from which the de- 
 cent man, and even the decent multitude, instinctively recoils. 
 Decent men do not as a rule want to hurt their wounded prison- 
 ers: they rather like to pet them; and they regard people who do 
 otherwise as blackguards. And no doubt it is largely these emo- 
 tional mercies and generosities which have brought about those 
 rules of chivalry or scruples of religion which form the supposed 
 "redeeming features' of wan But the necessities of war com- 
 pletely override all such weaknesses as soon as they begin to en- 
 danger actual military interests. And the logic of war tolerates 
 them only as cheap concessions to a foolish popular psychology. 
 It must be remembered that undisguised atrocities on a stupen- 
 dous scale — such, for instance, as the massacre in cold blood of 
 whole regiments of helpless prisoners — would be too strong for 
 the stomach of even the most brutalized people, and would tend 
 to bring war into discredit with all but its monomaniac votaries. 
 If we look into the matter closely enough, we shall find that all 
 Geneva Conventions and such palliative ordinances, though ex- 
 cellent in intention and good in their immediate efiects, make 
 uUimatdyfoT the persistence of war as an institution. They are sops 
 to humanity, devices for rendering war barely tolerable to civil- 
 ized mankind, and so staving off the inevitable rebellion against 
 its abominations. 
 
26 THE IDEA OF A L.EAGUE OF NATIONS 
 
 V 
 
 Criticisms of the project of a League of Nations have consisted 
 hitherto very largely of the statement of difficulties and impedi- 
 ments, rather than of reasons for rejection of the project. All 
 such criticisms are helpful in so far as they enable us to map out 
 the task before us, but none are adequate as conclusive objections^ 
 Few of the advocates of an organized world-peace fail to recog- 
 nize the magnitude of the task to which they invite men to set 
 themselves. But their main contention is that there is really no 
 alternative to the attempt but resignation to long years of human 
 suffering and disaster, and therefore that, however difficult the 
 enterprise may be, it has to be faced. The recital of the difficul- 
 ties is, they say, a stimulus to thought and exertion rather than a 
 deterrent. A man who has to leap on to a blanket from the upper 
 story ofaburning building is not likely to be restrained from j ump- 
 ing by being told of the possibilities of breaking his leg or doing 
 himself a grave injury; a man who has to swim ashore from a 
 sinking ship is not likely to give up his purpose because there 
 may be sharks in the water. And such is the desperate position of 
 mankind. If the warning should induce the man in the former 
 case to jump carefully with bended knees, and if in the latter case 
 it should induce him to scan the water shrewdly and swim more 
 swiftly, then these comments are all to the good. But not if they 
 paralyze his will. 
 
 The examination of how particular difficulties may be solved 
 and how impediments may be overcome or circumvented belongs 
 to the systematic study of the world-league project in detail, and 
 will not be attempted in this general introduction to the subject. 
 But there are certain objections to the undertaking as such that 
 must be taken up and dealt with in a preliminary discussion. 
 
 There is, first, an objection which it will be convenient to speak 
 of as the Biological Objection. It is stated in various forms, and it 
 peeps out and manifests itself in the expressed thoughts and 
 
THE IDE^A. OF A MlAGtrE OF NATIONS 27 
 
 activities of quite a number of people who do not seem to have 
 formulated it completely. But what many of these objectors 
 think, and what still more feel, may be «xpressed in some such 
 phraseology as this: — 
 
 Life is conflict and is begotten of conflict. All the good quali- 
 ties of life are the result of the tragic necessities of survival. Life, 
 stripped down to its fundamental fact, is the vehement urgency 
 of individuals or groups of individuals to survive and reproduce 
 and multiply their kind. The pressure of individual upon indi- 
 vidual and of species upon species sharpens the face of life and 
 is the continuing impetus and interest in life. The conception 
 of life without war is a conc^tion, therefore, not simply Utopian, 
 but milleimial. It is a proposal that every kind and sort and type 
 of hvunanity should expand and increase without limit in a small 
 world of restricted resources. It is, in fact, absurd. It is an im- 
 possible attempt to arrest and ^tereoptype a transient phase of 
 human life. It is inviting paralysis as a cure for epilepsy. It is 
 a dream of fatigued minds. Terrible as the scope and nature of 
 human warfare have become, it has to be faced. The more de- 
 structive it is, the more rapid the hardening and evolution of the 
 species. Life and history move cyclically from phase to phase, 
 and perhaps such an apparent retrogression as we mean when we 
 talk of the breakdown of civilization, may be only part of a great 
 rhythm in the development of the species. Let us gather together 
 with our own kind, and discipline and harden ourselves, in an 
 heroic resolve to survive in the unavoidable centuries of harsh 
 conflict ahead of us. 
 
 Now, here is a system of objection not lightly to be brushed 
 aside. True, the element of mutual conflict in life is often grossly 
 overstated and the ^element of mutual help suppressed. Prince 
 Kropotkin's book, Mvtvxd Help, has shown how the successful 
 survival of most ^egarioas species depends far more on the co- 
 operation of individuals than on competition between them, and 
 how the important struggle lies chiefly between the individual 
 
ZO THE IDEA OF A LEAGUE OF NATIONS 
 
 and his environment. But, though overstated, there are vaUd 
 criticisms here of any merely negative league-of-nations project, 
 any mere proposal to end war without replacing it by some other 
 collective process. There do seem to be advocates of the League 
 whose advocacy is little more than a cry of terror at the disap- 
 pearance of established wealth, the loss of wasted leisure, and the 
 crumbling of accepted dignities. Those who have faith in the 
 possibiUty of a world-league are bound — just as the Socialist is 
 bound • — ■ to produce some assurances of a control over the blind 
 pressure of population, which may otherwise swamp the world 
 with prolific low-grade races. They are bound to show that their 
 schemes are compatible with a series of progressive readjust- 
 ments, and not an attempt to restore and stereotype the bound- 
 aries, the futile institutions, and the manifest injustices of the- 
 world of 1914, with only armaments abolished. They are bound 
 to show that exceptional ability and energy will have, not merely 
 scope, but fuUer scope for expression, achievement, and perpetu- 
 ation, in the new world to which they point us, than in the old. 
 In the years to come, as in the whole p)ast history of life, individ- 
 ual must compete against individual and type against type. 
 
 But having made these admissions, we may then go on to point 
 out two fundamental misconceptions which entirely vitiate the- 
 biological argument as an argument for the continuation of war 
 as a method of himian selection. It is falsely assumed, first, that 
 modem war is a discriminatory process, selecting certain typ>es- 
 as against certain other types, whereas it is largely a catastrophic 
 and indiscriminate process; and secondly, that belligerent states 
 are in the nature of biological units, super-individuals, which 
 either triumph or are destroyed, whereas they are systems of 
 political entanglement of the most fluid, confused, and transi- 
 tory description. They neither reproduce their kind nor die; 
 they change indefinitely: the children of the defeated state of to- 
 day may become the dominant citizens of its victorious competi- 
 tor in a generation or so. They do not even embody traditions or 
 
THE IDEA OF A LEAGtTE OF NATIONS 29 
 
 ideas: France, which went into the Revolutionary wars at the 
 end of the eighteenth century to establish the republican idea 
 throughout Europe, emerged as an empire; and the defeat of the 
 Russian by the German imperialism led to Lenin's 'dictatorship 
 of the proletariat.' The essence of success in the biological strug- 
 gle for existence is preferential reproduction; whereas the modern 
 war-process takes all the sturdier males to kill and be killed hap- 
 hazard, while it sends all the more intelligent and energetic girls 
 into munition factories, substitute work, and such like sterilizing 
 occupations. If it prefers any type for prosperity and multipli- 
 cation, it is the alert shirker, the able tax-dodger, and the war 
 profiteer; if it breeds anything, it breeds parasites. The vital 
 statistics of Germany, which is certainly the most perfect as a 
 belligerent of all the belligerent states engaged, show already tre- 
 mendous biological injuries. Germany in the first four years of 
 the war had lost by the fall in her birthrate alone nearly 2,600,000 
 lives, approximately 40,000 per million of the population; Hun- 
 gary in the same period lost 1,500,000 (about 70,000 j>er million) ; 
 the United Kingdom 50,000 (or about 10,000 per million). Add 
 to this loss of lives the imder-nutrition of the millions who were 
 born, and their impoverished upbringing. These things strike at 
 the victors as well as at the vanquished. They are entirely indis- 
 criminate as among good types and bad, while on the whole the 
 battlefield destroys rather the good than the 'unfit for service,' 
 who remain at home to breed. 
 
 The whole process which, on a vaster scale, has brought Europe 
 to its present plight may be seen in miniature among the tribes 
 of the Indian frontier. Go up the Khyber Pass and stand on the 
 ridge above Ali Masjid. In front lies a desolate valley, flanked 
 by barren mountains under a blistering sun. On the slopes to 
 right and left, at intervals of about a thousand yards, are oblong 
 inclosures, each with brown walls and a little loopholed tower at 
 one corner. These inclosures are the villages of the Pathan tribes 
 which inhabit the valley, and in the towers are men with rifles. 
 
30 THE IDEA OF A LEAGUE OF NATIONS 
 
 waiting their chance to shoot man or boy who may rashly exjwse 
 himself outside a neighboring village. For all or nearly all of 
 them are at feud with each other, and though the causes of their 
 warfare are forgotten, it is a point of honor and pride with them 
 never to become reconciled. Every Pathan believes, or until 
 quite recently did believe, that manliness, patriotism, and chiv- 
 alry would perish if there were no feuds. There have been, 
 roughly, three stages in the history of these feuds. In the first, 
 men fought with knives, daggers, and other primitive weapons, 
 and the result may have been, as a German would argue, ' biolog- 
 ically good.' The fittest survived, the population was kept from 
 increasing beyond the number which an inhospitable soil would 
 support, the arts of peace, such as they were, could be pursued 
 without serious interruption. The second stage was reached 
 when the flint-lock rifle came on the scene and took the place of 
 knife and dagger. With this the vendetta necessarily became 
 more of a national industry; but the weapon was short of range 
 and irregular in its killing jxjwer, and there was still a fair chance 
 of survival, and a certain presumption that the better or more 
 skillful man would escajje. But before the end of the nineteenth 
 century the village marksmen had possessed themselves of the 
 Martini-Henrj' and other long-range high- velocity rifles, brought 
 from Europe by the gun-runners of the Persian Gulf. At this, the 
 third stage, the biological merits of village warfare manifestly 
 began to disappear. The village marksman in his mud-tower now 
 makes the whole valley his zone of fire. Cultivation becomes 
 impossible in the no-man's land between village and village; only 
 behind the cover of the village wall can men sow or plough or 
 reap, tether their cattle, or graze their sheep. Every village must 
 be provided with a communication-trench, so that its inhabi- 
 tants may pass under cover to the sanctuary — guaranteed 
 twice in the week — of the government-protected road which 
 runs down the centre of the valley. The question now is, not 
 whether the vendetta is biologically good, but whether the tribes 
 
THE IDEA OF A LEAGUE OF NATIONS 31 
 
 can at all survive under it; and weary officials, at a loss to solve 
 the vexed problem which they offer to the government of India, 
 have been heard to suggest that, if a few machine-guns could be 
 conveyed to the village marksmen and installed in the mud- 
 towers, there would soon be no frontier problem at all. 
 
 The question which the civilized world has now to consider is, 
 whether it can survive, or its life be more tolerable than that of 
 these tribesmen under a vendetta of high explosives. 
 
 So that when the biological critic says, 'Life is Conflict,' we 
 reply, without traversing his premises, that war, having ceased 
 to be conflict in any discruninatLag sense, has become indiscrim- 
 inate catastrophe, and that the selective processes which enlarge 
 and enrich life can go on far more freely and effectively in a 
 world from which this blundering, disastrous, non-selective, and 
 even possibly dysgenic form of wastage is banished. But we 
 have to bear in mind that this reply puts upon those who are 
 preparing schemes for a League of Nations the onus of provid- 
 ing for progress, competition, and liberty under the restraints of 
 such a scheme. 
 
 It may be worth while to take up and consider here a group of 
 facts that are sometimes appealed to as a justification of war. 
 It is alleged that there has been an extraordinarily rapid devel- 
 opment of mechanical, chemical, and medical science since 1914, 
 and a vast and valuable accumulation of experience in social 
 and industrial organization. There has been great mental stim- 
 ulation everywhere; people have been forced out of grooves and 
 idle and dull ways of living, into energetic exertion; there has 
 been in particular a great release and invigoration of feminine 
 spirit and effort. The barriers set up by the monopolization of 
 land and material by private owners for selfish ends have been 
 broken down in many cases. 
 
 There can be no denying the substantial truth in these allega- 
 tions. Indisputably there has been such a release and stimula- 
 tion. But this is a question of proportion between benefits and 
 
32 THE IDEA OF A lEAGTJE OF NATIONS 
 
 losses. And all this stir, we argue, has been bought at too great 
 a cost. It is like accelerating the speed of a ship by burning its 
 cargo and timbers as fuel. At best, it is the feverish and wasteful 
 reaping of a long-accumulated harvest. 
 
 We must remember that a process may be evil as a whole while 
 in part it is beneficial. It would be stupid to deny that for count- 
 less minds the Great War has provided an enlightening excite- 
 ment which could have been provided in no other way. To deny 
 that would be to assert the absolute aimlessness and incoherence 
 of being. But while this harvest of beneficial bye-products of the 
 war is undeniable, there is no evidence of any fresh sowing, or, if 
 the process of belligerence and warlike preparation is to continue, 
 of any possibility of an adequate fresh sowing of further achieve- 
 ments. The root from which all the shining triumphs of technical 
 and social science spring, we must remember, is the quiet and 
 steadfast pursuit of pure science and philosophy and literature by 
 those best endowed for these employments. And if the greedy 
 expansion of the war-process is to continue, — and we have 
 shown that without an organized world-peace it must continue, 
 — there is nothing to reassure us of the continuance of that soil 
 of educated public opinion, that supply of free and vigorous 
 educated intelligence, in which alone that root can flourish. On 
 the contrary, it is one of the most obvious and most alarming 
 aspects of the war-process that university education has practi- 
 cally ceased in Europe; Europe is now producing only schoolboys, 
 and the very schools are understaffed and depleted. The labora- 
 tories of the English public schools are no longer making the 
 scientific men of the future, they are making munitions. It is all 
 very well for the scientific man of fifty to say that at last he has 
 got his opportunity; but that is only a momentary triumph for 
 science. Where now is the great scientific man for the year 1930? 
 Smashed to pieces in an aeroplane, acting as a stretcher-bearer, 
 or digging a trench. And what, unless we can secure the peace of 
 the world, will become of the potential scientific men of 1950? 
 
THE IDEA OF A LEAGUE OF NATIONS 33 
 
 Suppose it to be possible to carry on this present top-heavy mili- 
 tarist system for so long a period as that, what will have happened 
 then to our potential Faradays, Newtons, and Darwins? They 
 will be at best half educated; ^^ley will be highly trained soldiers, 
 robbed of their intellectual inheritance and incapable of render- 
 ing their gifts to the world. The progress of knowledge will be 
 slowing down toward stagnation. 
 
 VI 
 
 A considerable anjount of opposition to the League of Nations 
 movement may be classified under the heading of Objections from 
 precedent and prepossession. The mind is already occupied by the 
 idea of attachment to some political system which stands in the 
 way of a world-league. These objections vary very much in in- 
 tellectual quality. Nevertheless, even the most unintelligent de- 
 mand some attention, because numerically these antagonists 
 form considerable masses. Collectively, in their unorganized way, 
 they produce a general discouragement and hostility far more 
 formidable than any soundly reasoned case against an organ- 
 ized world-peace. 
 
 The objection from prepossession is necessarily protean: it 
 takes various forms because men's preposessions are various; 
 but 'There never has been a League of Nations, and there never 
 will be,' may be regarded as the underlying idea of most of these 
 forms. And the objector relapses upon his prepossession as the 
 only possible thing. A few years ago people were saying, 'Men 
 have never succeeded in flying, and they never will.' And we are 
 told, particularly by people who have obviously never given 
 human nature ten minutes' thought in their lives, that world- 
 unity is 'against hiunan nature.' To substantiate these sweeping 
 negatives, the objecter will adduce a heterogeneous collection of 
 instances to show the confusions and contradictions of the human 
 will, and a thousand cases of successful mass-cooperations will be 
 ignored. We are moved to doubt at last whether human beings 
 
34 THE IDEA OF A LEAGUE OF NATIONS 
 
 did ever suppress piracy, develop a railway system, or teach a 
 whole population to read and write. If the individual objecter is 
 carefully examined, it will be found at times that he is under the 
 sway of some narrow and intense mental inhibition, based on 
 personal habits or experiences. Some of these inhibitions, if they 
 are traced to their source, will be found to be even absurdly nar- 
 row. The objecter dislikes the idea of a World-League of Nations 
 because it is 'international,' or, worse, 'cosmopolitan,' and he has 
 got into the habit of associating these words with shady finance 
 or anarchist outrages or the white-slave traffic. Or he has had 
 uncomfortable experiences in hotels abroad, or he has suffered 
 in his business from foreign competition. Many of the objections 
 that phrase themselves in some such formulcis as 'people will 
 never stand it' or 'you do not understand the intensity of feel- 
 ing,' are, indeed, rather cases for Jung and Freud than for serious 
 dialectics. But from such levels of unreasoned hostility we can 
 ascend to much more reasoned and acceptable forms of preposses- 
 sion, which must be met with a greater respect. 
 
 Most human beings are 'patriotic' They have a pride, quite 
 passionate in quality, in the race or nation to which they belong; 
 an affection identical in nature with, and sometimes as intense as, 
 that which they feel for family' and home, for a certain atmos- 
 phere of thought and behavior, for a certain familiar landscape 
 and atmosphere, for certain qualities none the less real because 
 they are often exquisitely indefinable. And they are jealous of 
 this 'national' quality of theirs — at times almost as men are 
 jealous for their wives. Now, how far does this group of feelings 
 stand in the way of a league-of-nations project? A number of 
 vigorous speakers and writers do certainly play upon this jeal- 
 ousy. They point out that the league-of-nations project, as it 
 develops, involves controls, not merely of military, but of econo- 
 mic concerns — controls by councils or committees, upon which 
 every country will see a majority of ' foreigners ' ; and they exag- 
 gerate and intensify to the utmost the suggestion of unlimited 
 
THE IDEA OF A LEAGtJE OF NATIONS 35 
 
 interference on the part of these same 'foreigners' with the most 
 intimate and sacred things. 
 
 One eloquent writer, for example (Mr. Belloc), declares that 
 the League of Nations would place us all 'at the mercy of a world- 
 police'; and another (Mr. I. D. Colvin) declares that the council 
 of a League of Nations would 'own' all our property as the Brit- 
 ish now ' own ' the empire; an unfortunate parallel, if we consider 
 the amount of ownership exercised by the British Government 
 over the life and affairs of a New Zealander or a Canadian. 
 
 Perhaps the most effective answer to this sort of thing is to be 
 found in current instances. One might imagine from these crit- 
 ics that at present every government in the world was a national 
 government; but in spite of such instances as Sweden and France, 
 national governments are the exception rather than the rule. 
 There are very few nationalities in the world now which are em- 
 bodied in a sovereign government. There is no sovereign state 
 of England, for example. The English, the Scotch, the Welsh, 
 all strongly marked and contrasted nationalities, Kve in an at- 
 mosphere of mutual criticism and cordial cooperation. Consider 
 again the numerous nations in the British Empire, which act in 
 unison through the Imperial Government, imperfect and unrepre- 
 sentative as it is; consider the dissolving nationalities in the 
 American melting-pot; consider the Prussians and Saxons in the 
 German Empire. WbaL^JhCTem common between an Austra- 
 lian native, a London freethinker, a BengaKvillager, a Uganda 
 gentleman, a Rand negro, an Egyptian merchant, and a Singa- 
 pore Chinaman, that they should all be capable of living as they 
 do under one rule and one peace and with a common collective 
 policy — and yet be incapable of a slightly larger cooperation 
 with a Frenchman, a New Englander, or a Russian? The Welsh- 
 man is perhaps the best instance of all, to show how completely 
 participation in a great political synthesis is compatible with 
 intense national peculiarity and self-respect. 
 
 But if one looks closely into the objections of these anti-foreign 
 
36 THE IDEA OF A LEAGUE OF NATIONS 
 
 alarmists, it will usually become clear that the real prejudice is 
 not a genuine patriotism at all; the objection is, not to interfer- 
 ence with the realities of national life, but to interference with 
 national aggression and competition, which is quite a diflFerent 
 thing. The 'British' ultra-patriot, who begins by warning us 
 against the impossibility of having ' foreigners ' interfering in our 
 national life, is presently warning us against the interference of 
 'foreigners' with 'our' empire and 'our' predominant over-seas 
 trade, which are altogether different matters. 
 
 It is curious to see in how many instances certain conventional 
 ideas, never properly analyzed, dominate the minds of the critics 
 of the league-of-nations project. Many publicists, it becomes 
 evident, think of international relations in terms of 'Powers,' 
 mysterious entities of a value entirely romantic and diplomatic. 
 International politics are for them only thinkable as a competi- 
 tion of those powers; the}' see the lives of states as primarily 
 systems of conflict. A ' power ' to them means the sort of thing 
 which was brought to perfection in Europe in the eighteenth 
 century, in the courts of Versailles, Potsdam, St. Petersburg, 
 and St. James's, and it means nothing else in the world to them. 
 It is, in fact, a conspiracy against other and competing powers, 
 centring round an aggressive Foreign OfRce, and availing itself 
 of nationalist prejudice rather than of national self-respect. 
 Patriotism is, indeed, not something that the power represents; 
 it is something upon which the power trades. 'Germany,' 
 'Austria,' 'Britain,' and 'France,' to those under the power ob- 
 session, are not the names of peoples or regions but of powers 
 personified. When they say 'Austria' will not like this, 'France' 
 will insist upon that, they think not of a people, but of a Foreign 
 Office with a tradition and a 'policy.' To this power idea the 
 political life of the Isist two centuries has schooled many other- 
 wise highly intelligent men, and by it their minds are now invin- 
 cibly circumscribed and fixed. They can disregard the fact that 
 the great majority of men in the world live out of relation to any 
 
THE IDEA OF A LEAGUE OF NATIONS 37 
 
 such government with astonishing ease. The United States, 
 Canada, China, India, Australia, South America, for example, 
 show us masses of mankind whose aflFairs are not incorporated in 
 any 'power' as the word is understood in diplomatic jargon; and 
 quite recently the people of Russia have violently broken away 
 from such an idea of the state, and show small disposition to re- 
 vert to it. These objecters are in fact thinking still in terms of the 
 seventeenth and eighteenth century in Europe — a very special 
 phase in history. The European power idea had a traceable 
 and definable source, — one finds its elementary conceptions 
 clearly stated in Machiavelli's Prince and in his Art of War, — 
 and we may hope it draws near to the end of its influence. But 
 the fixity of their minds upon this old and almost entirely 
 European idea of international politics as an affair of competitive 
 foreign offices has its value for those who are convinced of the 
 need of a new order of human relationships, because it opens up 
 so clearly the incompatibility with the pressing needs of the pres- 
 ent time of the European conceptions of a foreign office and of 
 diplomacy as a secretive chaffering for advantages. 
 
 We may illustrate this obsession by quoting a recent article by 
 Lord Sydenham (Nineteenth Century, August, 1918) in which 
 he combats the league-of-nations proposal bj' an exaggeration 
 of the difficulties of disarmament and preposterous suggestions 
 of secret preparation. His way of thinking of 'powers' as the 
 irreducible nuclei of aggression is very typical. There can be 
 no disarmed world because some power is suddenly to flash 
 forth Uke Minerva, fully armed, from ' a dreaming peace.' And 
 the Council of the League, for no conceivable reason, is to be 
 caught napping. 
 
 An army composed of contingents from the whole of the States 
 composing the League would never reach the scene of action, and would 
 be an unmanageable menagerie if it did. It follows that a few great 
 powers must always maintain large naval, military and air forces pre- 
 pared for action. 
 
38 THE IDEA OF A LEAGUE OF NATIONS 
 
 A similar line of thought is followed by an anonymous writer 
 in Blackwood's Magazine (August, 1918) who — suffering under 
 this fixed idea of the invincible reality of these * powers ' and their 
 inflexible mentality for conflict — either cannot imagine, or 
 pretends an entire inability to imagine, that a power can be 
 restrained from the most complete preparations for war under 
 the very nose of a world council. 
 
 Even if revolution followed defeat, and a wave of Bolshevism 
 broke suddenly over Germany; even if a provisional government were 
 minded to come into a League of Nations, its accession would be but mo- 
 mentary. The old German spirit would revive: a Scharnhorst would 
 be found to reconstitute the ancient army; and Germany, seeing a whole 
 world-league for peace, would have a better chance than she had, even 
 in 1914, of dominating the world. 
 
 And again : — 
 
 Modern warfare depends, as we discovered in 1914, on readiness to 
 strike. The nation which had made up its mind to break away from 
 the hampering restraints of the League, would take care to be efficiently 
 prepared. Unless the armies of the League guarded every frontier 
 every day, unless these armies were large enough to keep in subjection 
 any possible alliance, they would be useless for purposes of defence. 
 And if they were kept at the highest standard of practical utiUty, then 
 all the manhood of Eiu-ope would be in the ranks, and the whole world 
 would be and would remain one vast armed camp. Viscoiint Grey sees 
 plainly that anything less than military intervention is of no value. He 
 does not realize what it would mean if the armies of the League were 
 to stand ready always to intervene. If all the frontiers of Europe were 
 not permanently guarded by indefinite series of pill-boxes, one State 
 possibly, two assuredly, could tear the rules of the League to pieces, 
 like scraps of paper, and grab from a sleeping world a defiant hegemony. 
 
 But as soon as one asks, why a sleeping world ? this tirade dis- 
 solves into rubbish. Given a League of Nations with some sort 
 of council, and we have the organ and authority to watch and 
 protest against even the first rudiments of state rearmament. It 
 was the absence of any such council or authority before 1914 
 which enabled Germany to prepare war openly in the sight of her 
 
THE IDEA OF A LEAGUE OF NATIONS 39 
 
 destined victims — to build obviously strategic railways to the 
 very boundary of Belgium, for example. There was nothing in 
 the world which had the authority to challenge her. But the 
 primary purpose of any efficient league of nations will be to nip 
 mihtarist preparation in the bud. Instead of killing dragons, its 
 simpler task will be to boil their eggs. There may be many strug- 
 gles and crises under a world-league of nations, but the as- 
 sumption that they will be on anything like the scale of the 
 Great War is beyond the limits of possibility. 
 
 Upon this point we cannot be too clear; it is not nationality 
 that is threatened by the League of Nations, it is this 'power' 
 obsession, this product of the competitive European courts of 
 the eighteenth century, which used national feeling in an entirely 
 Machiavellian spirit. And this power idea carries with it much 
 more mischief than the threat of sudden war and the attendant 
 necessities of armament. It is about the nuclei of the European 
 power systems that the current conceptions of economic warfare 
 and territorial exploitation have grown. It is to them that we 
 owe the conception of peace as a phase of military preparation 
 during which there is a systematic attempt to put rivals at an 
 economic disadvantage. And it will be clear that an abandon- 
 ment of the idea of the world as a conflict of powers involves, 
 not merely the abandonment of ideas essentially militarist, but 
 also the abandonment of the idea of the world as a conflict of 
 economic systems. 
 
 As we penetrate these common prepossessions of an age which 
 is now drawing to a close, the positive as compared with the 
 negative side of the project of a league of nations opens out. 
 Behind the primarily negative project of 'no war upon earth,' 
 appears as a necessary corollary a new economic phase in his- 
 tory, in which there will be a collective regard for the common 
 weal of mankind. The examination and elaboration of the possi- 
 bilities of economic world-control, already immensely foreshad- 
 owed by the gigantic 'poolings' that have been forced upon the 
 
40 THE IDEA OF A LEAGUE OF NATIONS 
 
 powers allied against Germany, is one of the most rapidly ex- 
 panding chapters in the study of the project. 
 
 This power prepossession is held by many writers to be the 
 primary and central antagonist of the project. 'The Great 
 Power idea,' they say, 'that is the enemy.' They point out — 
 and the instances we have quoted enforce the contention — that 
 most of our statesmen, a large part of our historical and political 
 literature, and the general mind, are so saturated with power 
 ideas, as to be totally unable to imagine the League of Nations 
 as anything but a league of powers, still with a 'strong undertow 
 of Machiavellian interpretation. And this school of opinion 
 urges a strenuous attack upon this power idea which still rules 
 the intellectual world of Europe, as the main task of a league- 
 of-nations propaganda. 
 
 VII 
 
 Another considerable body of criticism hostile to the project of 
 a league of nations is grouped about certain moral facts. Before 
 concluding these introductory remarks, it is advisable to discuss 
 this, not merely in order to answer so much of it as amounts to 
 an argument against the world-league project, but also because 
 it opens out before us the real scope of the league-of-nations 
 project. There seems to be a disposition in certain quarters to 
 underestimate the scale upon which such a project can be plan- 
 ned. It is dealt with as if it were a little legal scheme detached 
 from the main body of human life. It seems to be assumed that 
 some little group of 'jurists,' sitting together in a permanent 
 conference at The Hague or in New York, will be able to divert 
 the whole process of humanity into new channels, to overcome 
 the massive, multitudinous, and tremendous forces that make 
 for armed conflict and warfare among men, and to inaugurate a 
 new era of peace throughout the world. 
 
 The change we contemplate here is not to be so easily achieved. 
 It is a project of world-poUtics, and there is no modest way of 
 
THE IDEA OF A LEAGUE OF NATIONS 41 
 
 treating such a project. It would be better left alone than treated 
 timidly. It is a change in which nations and political and educa- 
 tional systems are the counters, and about which we must think, 
 if we are to think effectively, in terms of the wealth of nations 
 and millions of men. It is a proposal to change the life and 
 mentality of everyone on earth. 
 
 Now, the thought of those who direct their attention to the 
 moral probabilities of a world-peace turns largely upon the idea 
 of ' loyalty.' They apprehend man as a creature of intense, essen- 
 tial egotism, who has to be taught and trained very painfully 
 ■and laboriously to unselfishness, and the substitution of great 
 ■and noble ends for base and narrow ones. They argue that he 
 was in his origins a not very social creature who has been forced 
 by his own inventions into a larger circle of intercourse. He had 
 learned his first unselfishness from his mother in the family group; 
 he had been tamed into devotion by the tribe and his tribal re- 
 ligion; the greater dangers of a solitary life had enforced these 
 subjugations upon him. But he still relapses very readily into 
 base self-seeking. His loyalty to his nation may easily become a 
 mere extension of his personal vanity; his religious faith a cloak 
 for hatred of, and base behavior toward, unbelievers. In times of 
 peace and security, the great forms in which he lives do so tend 
 to degenerate. And the great justification of war from this jwint 
 of view is that it creates a phase of national life in which a certain 
 community of sacrifice to a common end, a certain common faith- 
 fulness and helpfulness, are exacted as a matter of course from 
 every citizen. Many are called upon to die, and all are called 
 upon to give help and suffer privations. War gives reality to 
 loyalty. It is the fire that makes fine the clay of solidarity. The 
 war-phase has been liitherto a binding and confirming phase in 
 the life of communities, while peace has been a releasing and re- 
 laxing phase. And if we are to contemplate a state of the world in 
 which there is to be no warfare, we must be prepared also, these 
 critics argue, for a process of moral disintegration. 
 
42 THE IDEA OF A LEAGUE OF NATIONS 
 
 A well-known passage in The Crown of Wild Olive may be- 
 quoted in this connection. It occurs in a lecture which Ruskin 
 delivered to Woolwich cadets, and runs as follows: — 
 
 When I tell you that war is the foundation of all the Arts, I mean 
 also that it is the foundation of all the high virtues and faculties of 
 men. . . . The common notion that peace and the virtues of civil- 
 ised life flom-ished together I found to be wholly untenable. Peace and 
 the vices of civilised life only flourish together. We talk of peace and 
 learning, and of peace and plenty, and of peace and civilisation; but 
 I found that those were not the words which the muse of history cou- 
 pled together; that on her lips the words were — peace, and sensuaUty 
 — peace, and selfishness — peace, and death. I found, in brief, that all 
 great nations learned their truth of word, and strength of thought, in 
 war; that they were notu-ished in war and wasted in peace; taught by 
 war and deceived by peace; trained by war and betrayed by peace; in 
 a word, that they were born in war and expired in peace. 
 
 The late Professor William James found enough validity in 
 this line of thought to discuss it very seriously. In his essay on 
 'The Moral Equivalent of War'' he deals very illuminatingly 
 with this question. He agrees that to relieve the consciousness of 
 ordinary men from the probability of war, without substituting 
 any other incentive to devotion, may be a very grave social loss. 
 His own suggestion for giving every citizen a sense of obligation 
 and ownership in the commonwealth, for weaving the ideas of 
 loyalty and service, that is, into every life, is to substitute the 
 collective war of mankind against ignorance, confusion, and 
 natural hardships, for the war between man and man; to teach 
 this, not only theoretically, but by the very practical expedient of 
 insisting upon a period of compulsory state service for every citi- 
 zen, male or female. He proposes to solve at the same time this 
 moral problem and an equally grave social problem, by making 
 the unskilled or semi-skiUed part of the labor in the (national- 
 ized) mines, in the (nationalized) fisheries, in hospitals, many 
 
 • Memories and Studies (Longmans, Green & Co., London, 1911), Chapter xi. 
 'The Mora] Equivalent of War' was written for and first published by the 
 Assodation for International Conciliation. 
 
THE IDEA OF A LEAGUE OF NATIONS 43 
 
 types of factory, and so forth, a public service. Personal free- 
 dom, he insists, has invariably been bought, and must always 
 be bought, by responsible participation in the toils and cares of 
 that system of law and service which constitutes the framework 
 •of human liberty. 
 
 It would be idle to deny the substantial truth in this type of 
 criticism of peace. But it applies only to that crude conception 
 of peace which makes it a negative thing, a mere cessation of war, 
 a state in which you can go where you will and not be shot at. 
 We must reaUze clearly that such negative peace is not our per- 
 manent aim. It is something, of course, to have a rest from suffer- 
 ing and the infliction of suffering; but it is a greater thing to be 
 set free, and peace sets people free. It sets them free to live, to 
 think, to work at the work that is best worth doing, to build in- 
 stead of destroying, to devote themselves to the pursuit or the 
 creation of the things that seem highest, instead of having to 
 spend aU their time in trying to avoid being kiUed. Peace is an 
 empty cup which we can fill as we please; it is an opportunity 
 which we can seize or neglect. To recognize this is to sweep out 
 of one's mind all dreams of a world-peace contrived by a few 
 jurists and influential people in some odd corner of the world's ad- 
 ministrative bureaus. As well might the Three Tailors of Tooley 
 Street declare the millennium in being. Permanent world-peace 
 must necessarily be a great process and state of affairs, greater, 
 indeed, than any war-process, because it must anticipate, com- 
 prehend, and prevent any war-process, and demand the under- 
 standing, the willing and conscious participation, of the great 
 majority of human beings. We, who look to it as a possible thing, 
 are bound not to blind ourselves to, or conceal from others, the 
 gigantic and laborious system of labors, the immense tangle of 
 cooperations, which its establishment involves. If political insti- 
 tutions or social methods stand in the way of this great good for 
 mankind, it is fatuous to dream of compromises with them. A 
 world-peace organization cannot evade universal relationships. 
 
44 THE IDEA OF A LEAGUE OF NATIONS 
 
 It is clear that if a world-league is to be living and enduring^ 
 the idea of it, and the need and righteousness of its service, must 
 be taught by every educational system in the world. It must 
 either be served by, or be in conflict with, every religious organ- 
 ization; it must come into the life of everyone, not to release men 
 and women from loyalty, but to demand it for itself. 
 
 The answer to this criticism that the world-peace will release 
 men from service is, therefore, that the world-peace is itself a ser- 
 vice. It calls, not as war does for the deaths, but for that greater 
 gift, the lives, of men. The League of Nations cannot be a little 
 thing: it is either to be a great thing in the world, an overriding 
 idea of a greater state, or nothing. Every state aims ultimately at 
 the production of a sort of man, and it is an idle and a wasteful 
 diplomacy, a pandering to timidities and shams, to pretend that 
 the World-League of Nations is not ultimately a state aiming at 
 that ennobled individual whose city is the world. 
 
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