THE STRUCTURE OF LASTING PEACE 1

Why the constitution of a league of nations ought to be the first proposition in the agenda of the peace conference should be obvious enough. Once certain principles of public law are established, the adjudication of all specific racial, territorial, economic, and military issues will follow easily and smoothly enough from them. The converse is not true. Let these issues be taken up severally and separately, without regard to an international rule, and the peace conference will become a bargain counter between dickering diplomats representing, military forces. The specific adjudications will preclude a general principle which must necessarily contradict them. At best we shall have restored a precarious balance of power; at worst we shall resume fighting. If the peace conference be permitted to begin at the wrong end of the series of problems, there is little hope for a good end to the conference.

Whether or not it begins at the right end will depend on two factors. These are the pressure of enlightened public opinion upon it and the personnel of the conference itself. The former must be awakened by free discussions; the later will be determined by the manner of their choice and the considerations leading to it. In this regard the experience of the "sovereign and independent" American states is illuminating. At the Constitutional Convention the only statesman who had also been a member of the Continental Congress that had conducted the war against England, was James Madison. The rest were "demigods" who had won the confidence of the citizens of their states through very specific and signal service during the war or through intellectual leadership during and after it. So now. Diplomatists are by training, habit, and usage unfit for the particular service in hand. Servants of international conflict for exclusive national advantage, their skill is only in the arts of innuendo and dickering which such service demands. They would be as unsuited to a task requiring frankness and mutual accommodation as a pork-magnate to settle a strike in his own packing plant. The men needed are the men of international

1 By Horace Meyer Kallen, author of "The Structure of Lasting Peace," published by the Marshall Jones Co., Boston. 1918. Dial. p. 180. February 28, 1918.

mind, who have been studying these diplomatists in action, who are aware of the detects of present state system, and who have thought out alterations and improvements. Such men are Sidney Webb, Brailsford, Henderson, Lowes Dickinson, Norman Angell in England; Thomas and his fellow Socialists in France; the members of the present Russian government and innumerable others in Russia; John Dewey, Louis Brandeis, Secretary Baker, David Starr Jordan, and Thorsten Veblen in America. And so in every country. Representatives should be chosen from the effective leadership of that great body of sentiment and opinion which has for the last quarter of a century kept the creation of a league of nations and the establishment of lasting peace constantly before the minds of men, which has so taught these ideals that the present war is unique in that the democratic urge to see it through to victory is the community of sentiment and opinion against all war. In short, a league of nations can be most effectively established only by representatives who are for it by habit of mind, as well as desire, who have given it prolonged study, and have made themselves expert in the programme of its inauguration.

But there is yet a further necessity in the delimitation of personnel. "Self-determination" for nationalities, sincerely applied. would give place and voice in the conference to representatives of all nationalities whose fate and status the conference is to decide. An autonomous Poland, for example, is undoubtedly desirable, but the unspeakable Polish overlords maintain a vicious hegemony over Lithuanians, Letts and Jews, no less than over Polish peasants. Lithuanians, Letts and Jews as well as Poles should have voice and place at the peace conference. SerboCroats, Bohemians, Poles, Jews, Rumans should represent Austria no less than Magyars and Germans. Arabs, Armenians, Kurds, to mention just a few, should have voice and place equally with the Osmanli Turks for the Ottoman empire. How the representatives of the minorities are to be elected, what their proportionate weight should be, are questions to be solved by free discussion and public opinion. That the cases for their peoples must be put by the chosen representatives of these peoples, that they must necessarily have a voice in deciding their own fate in the community of nations, is beyond argument. So much so, indeed, that following the principle involved, Mr. Norman Angell suggests the representation not alone of nationalities

but also of political parties within nations, according to their numerical strength. Thus Germany would be represented by her Socialists as well as by the party in power, England by her Laborites as well as by her Liberals and Conservatives, and so on. In this way fundamental differences in political principle would get representation, no less than differences in national character and interest.

What the peace conference defining itself as such a congress would need to establish is the law of a minimum genuine international control. Now all political control consists in the exercise of two functions. One is limitation; the other, liberation. Limitation and liberation are distinct but not different, since every just and relevant limitation is a liberation-witness the traffic policeman. International limitation would apply to national armaments, to quarrels between states over the "stakes of diplomacy," to quarrels within states over national hegemonies. The limitation of armament is of course basic. For no matter what may be the provocation to a fight, the lack of weapons compels the substitution of persuasion for blows and fundamentally alters the focus of the "national honor," a figment for the defense of which most blows are struck. Hence the International Congress should determine for the nations of the world, as the Continental Congress was by the Articles of Confederation empowered to determine for the original thirteen American States, the extent of the armament of each state. The simplest way to do this would be to fix annually the amount of money each state might spend on armament. Control of expenditure would require the complete socialization of the manufacture of munitions, its subordination to the inspection and control of an international commission on armaments and absolute publicity of records and accounts. All uses of armament should require license from the International Congress, particularly such uses as go by the euphemism "puntive expedition." Failure to carry out these provisions or to submit to the rule of the International Congress should be regarded tantamount to a declaration of war. It should be regarded with respect to the other causes of quarrel between and within states. Interstate disputes of whatever nature should be submitted to the International Congress, which would be also the highest and final court. There has been a good deal of silly differentiation between “justiciable" and "non-justiciable" disputes, but there's nothing that's one or

the other but thinking makes it so. All group disputes are justiciable if public opinion says they are. When the International Congress has passed on them, they are settled. Failure to accept the decision of the Congress should automatically constitute a challenge of international power and be dealt with accordingly.

The devices for dealing with such failure are not exclusively military. The military machine, indeed, should be the last resort. Initially, there is the tremendous force of public opinion, which the Church wielded in the middle ages as the Excommunication and the Interdict. These should be revived. The economic, social, cultural, or total ostracism of states or portions of states involves tremendously less hardship and suffering than actual military assault and in the long run is bound in an industrial society like ours to attain the same end, far more than in earlier, less interdependent ones.

What degree of coercive power these provisions would have at the outset will depend of course on the will of the signatories to any international constitution not to turn it into a scrap of paper. The governmental organs of the public will can be regulated only by the public opinion of each state, and the public opinion of each state can be kept internationally-minded only by means of the completest publicity regarding all international relationship. Publicity and education are the cornerstone of any international system that shall be democratic. Hence the rule of publicity is a paramount limitative rule.

The foregoing provisions would, I believe, supply the coercive force the lack of which rendered the American Confederation so instructive a failure. That they will absolutely prevent war cannot be claimed. Even the Constitution of the United States failed to do that, and the interstate unity it provided for became a permament constituent of American political common-sense only with the Civil War. No doubt history on the terrestrial scale will repeat history on the continental. No doubt there will be, as in America, blocs and combinations within the combination, nullification and attempts at dissolution; but there will be in operation also, as in America, a definitely formulated, agreed to principle of unity, insuring mankind against a great many wars almost certain to come without it.

Yet the chief power of this insurance would reside in the function of liberation that the instruments of internationality would perform. Those turn on the satisfaction of the basic

wants of men, and the consequent release of their spontaneous energies in the creative activities their natures crave. Such satisfaction and release demand, as we have already seen, a free trade in material commodities at least equivalent to the free trade in things of the spirit-in science, for example, or art, or music. It would be fundamental for the International Congress to create international commissions concerning themselves with the coordination of efforts to increase and properly distribute the food supply, to maintain and improve international health, to maintain and keep internationally open the world's highways, to secure the equality of all men before the law of any land, to expand and intensify the world's sense of community by internationally coordinated education.

Most of these functions have already been forced on the allied democracies by the exigencies of war; they would need only to be made relevant to conditions of peace. Such are the food and fuel administrations, acting purely in view of international needs. Others existed long before the war. Such are the postal union, and Mr. David Lubin's indispensably serviceable agricultural institute, now living a starved life in Italy. Still others have gone on as voluntary and private enterprises. Such are the various learned societies, particularly the medical and the chemical societies. These would need endowment, endorsement, establishment under international rule. In none of these enterprises, please note, is a novel material necessary. All the institutions exist. Attention needs only to be shifted to their cooperative integration, expansion, and perfection by the conscious joint effort of the nations of the world to turn them into a genuine machinery of liberating international government.

The most important instrument of internationality is, however, education. Take care of education, Plato makes Socrates say in the "Republic," and education will take care of everything else. Internationally, education must rest on two principles; one, that it must be autonomous; the other, that it must be unprejudiced. Regarding the first: We have already seen how, in the case of Germany, the state's control of education laid the foundation for the present war. The school served the state's vested interest in the school. From the dark ages to the present day the Church has held a vested interest in the school, an interest from which events have more or less freed it, but which still makes itself felt. With the rise of private educational