and initiate large enterprises in hitherto unused areas. With power to regulate the distribution of national surpluses it would be able to correlate destination with transportation, eliminating waste and reducing costs, and would be able to prevent famine by anticipatory measures of distribution. All this it would be able to do without interfering in the national economy of any state in the League of Nations or out. It, and the other subcommissions, would simply be doing in an intelligent, orderly and provident way, what is traditionally done blindly and confusedly. Unhappily, when it is done blindly and confusedly what happens is attributed to "economic law," but when the same processes are carried out with intelligent regard for their conditions and consequences it is called "governmental interference." The processes are the same in both instances, and they express the same “law." The difference is merely that in one case the result is left to accident, to grow like wild grain, while in the other it is under control, is cultivated into the forms that are best suited to the needs of man. The subcommissions on metals, textiles and fuel would simply restrict "economic law" to operate in ways best suited to the needs of men.

THE COMMISSION ON INTERNATIONAL WAYS

The International Commission on Airways

The airplane is a very new device, not yet incorporated into the transportation systems of nations. Its greatest development has come since the beginning of the war, and this development has been military. That peace will see an attempt to put the military gains in airplane construction and use to commercial

advantage is a foregone conclusion. Now the air is a relatively dark and still unexplored highway and airtraffic has yet to begin. There exist no national vested interests in air-traffic. There is nothing to "protect," nothing to compromise. On the other hand, the possibilities of international conflict over airplane movements are indefinitely numerous, as the existence of voluntary international organization to consider air-law, etc., attest. "Air routes that air transport will follow," writes Mr. H. G. Wells, "must go over a certain amount of land, for this reason, that every few hundred miles at the longest the machine must come down for petrol. A flying machine with a safe non-stop range of 1500 miles is still a long way off. It may indeed be permanently impracticable because there seems to be an upward limit to the size of an aeroplane engine. And now will the reader take the map of the world and study the air routes from London to the rest of the Empire? He will find them perplexing — if he wants them to be 'All Red.' Happily this is not a British difficulty only. Will he next study the air routes from Paris to the rest of the French possessions? And, finally, will he study the air routes of Germany to anywhere? The Germans are as badly off as any people. But we are all badly off. So far as world air transit goes any country can, if it chooses, choke any adjacent country. Directly any trade difficulty breaks out, any country can bring a vexatious campaign against its neighbor's air traffic. It can oblige it to alight at the frontier, to follow prescribed routes, to land at specified places on those routes and undergo examinations that will waste precious hours." It can possibly forbid traffic over its territory. It can main

tain an aerial police that could not, because of the character of its medium, possibly avoid illegal crossing of alien borders. All this would have to be adjusted. A confusion of regulations under separate treaties would ensue and the development of air traffic would on the one side be choked by artificial political limitations and on the other become a fruitful source of international trouble. The obvious way out is the formation ab initio of an international control. The study of the air as a medium for vehicles, the mapping of air roads, the establishment of petrol stations, the policing of the air and the stations, and all the other regulations of the traffic ought to be a single world-wide enterprise, conducted under a single responsible administration. This administration should be the charge of the International Commission on Airways.

If, in addition, aerial policing were the exclusive right of the international organization an independent sanction is provided for it rich with possibilities of secure international control.

The International Commission on Waterways

The duties of the International Commission on Waterways should be first of all the maintenance and upkeep of these ways. It should have in its charge the navigable international rivers; the various straits and canals like Gibraltar, the Bosphorus, Panama, Suez; the sea routes. It should be empowered to take all measures to keep them safe and open. Its second duty would be to police them, to make sure that the international traffic regulations, for which it would be responsible, are kept, and to drive unlicensed ships

from international waters. Its work should be coordinate with that of the other sub-commissions of the International Commerce Commission and should serve the common end.

The creation of such a commission presupposes, of course, an international supervision of England's control of Gibraltar and Suez; of the American control of Panama and the surrender by Turkey of the Dardanelles. Under the conditions of operation the ways now policed by the English and Americans are in fact already largely international. Keeping the final right to close these ways is merely insurance against an oppression or danger which would be possible if and only if the status quo ante bellum is restored. But neither the economic nor the political situation of the world after the war makes this likely, while the friction which would arise from a failure somehow to internationalize these ways would speedily lead to new war. This friction would derive from the tendency to use control of the waterways to the economic advantage of the controlling power. During the war, the battle for this control has brought inconceivable hardship upon neutrals, altogether contrary to international law. The naval power of England being the greater, England was the worst offender. Germany has been treacherous and brutal, but on the whole impotent. Between them, England and Germany effectively destroyed "the freedom of the seas." When President Wilson declared "the freedom of the seas" to be one of the terms of peace, he had in mind not what Germany had in mind, but what he sent Colonel House to Europe to urge - the security of all shipping under international law. So long as one power retains

control of the world's waterways such security is always under potential menace. The law is always in danger of violation. The only condition under which a genuine "freedom of the seas" can be established and maintained is the condition of international control. The International Commission on Waterways and "the freedom of the seas" are in effect synonymous terms.

The International Commission on Highways

The International Railway Union has an established organization and procedure which would be the natural basis for any expansion of function that the sub-commission on International Highways might be authorized to attempt. Its method of operation could obviously be modeled to best advantage on some American Public Utilities Board, and it should be endowed with similar powers. Broadly speaking these would be to hear and adjust disputes, to order changes for the public good and to regulate international traffic rates over land routes, so as to prevent discrimination in restraint of trade. Its existence would abolish the need of special commissions or special treatment for such disputed highways as the Bagdad Railway and other concessionary creations. It would provide one law and one supreme authority for all travelers and shippers, cutting under at a stroke the rich sources of disputes which any other form of adjustment would be bound to leave unmodified. It, also, of course, would be acting in coordination with the other sub-commissions of the International Commerce Commission.

The three subcommissions on Waterways, Highways,