will continue even when the miseries of the present time begin to be forgotten. They are happy who believe it; they will be foolish who trust to it.

At present the Allied statesmen have no definite scheme of a League of Nations in their mind. They hope to make a beginning on much the same lines as the co-operation of the nations in the Hague Conventions. The members will doubtless give pledges to one another that in case of dispute they will not draw the sword until after they have laid their case before some Court of Conciliation, but whether they will pledge themselves to wage war on any wilful aggressor is a far more doubtful proposition. We may expect, also, a widespread extension of the system of arbitration treaties, on the lines of the one already in existence between Great Britain and the United States. But the first searching test question will be disarmament, and the nations will not disarm until they feel that they are safe and can trust the new international machinery that is set up for their mutual protection. There can be no Security-to use Mr. Pitt's famous catchword-unless German militarism is completely destroyed, together with the whole German system of which it is the spirit and the life. On that the first beginnings of a permanent League of Nations depend, and even when so much has been accomplished, nationalism will still find itself stronger than internationalism. Extravagant hopes are being aroused which can only end in bitter disappointment.

A LEAGUE OF NATIONS1

"When the League of Nations," said Mr. Arthur Henderson, M.P., on January 22, 1918, "with its necessary machinery becomes an indispensable part of the national and international life, then, and then only, will it be possible for a world democracy to go forward to the full realization of its prosperity."

There is less in a League of Nations than is dreamed of in Mr. Henderson's philosophy, or even in that of President Wilson, as Sir F. E. Smith showed in his address to the New York Bar on January 11th. How is the question of military service to be settled, since if one Power has it and another has not, the weak

1 Living Age. p. 113. July 13, 1918.

will always be at the mercy of the strong? Or the freedom of the sea, when land powers might outvote sea powers? What of the alteration of frontiers and nationalities in the course of history? Or the problems of the air, when "peaceful" factories could turn out in secret unlimited quantities of war material? And if elementary questions such as these are unanswerable, what becomes of your League of Nations?

The League of Nations is no modern idea: it was tried nearly 2,500 years ago and found wanting. Go from Naples to Paestum, a Life of Piranesi in your hand, and you will see the most wonderful remains of Greek architecture extant with the exception of the temples at Athens. Among them are the remains of a Doric Basilica which Paranesi etched and called the House of the Amphictionic Council. That Council was the League of Nations of the democracies of the Ancient World, and its history is not without interest.

But, you say, those Ionians, Dorians, Phocians, Thessalonians, Magnesians and the rest who formed the League were not nations, but municipalities. In size, perhaps; but nations they were in days when it took as long to go from Athens to Messene or from Platea to Pella as it takes to go from London to New York. The world was smaller then, and analogies must be founded on position and not on population. Everything is relative. What happened when this Council tried to enforce its own rules? Look at its history, and remember that in the days of its greatest activity Demosthenes called it the shadow of a shade. Mr. Henderson will please note that.

The Council of the Amphictionic League was made up of representatives of twelve tribes, each with two votes. It met twice a year: at Delphi in the spring, at Anthela near Thermopylae in the autumn. Its duties were to watch over the interests of the Temple of Delphi and Sacred Land; to regulate the relations of the leagued states in peace and war; to act as arbitrator; to take charge of roads and bridges; to arrange loans from the Treasury—and a levy on capital was not an unheardof measure on its part; to supervise the Pythian Games; to erect public monuments, one to Gorgias the orator, for instance, one to the heroes of Thermopylae; to adjust quarrels between members of the League, as in the case of the complaint of the Plataeans about the boastful inscription set up by Sparta on the

monument at Delphi commemorating the battle of Plataea; to punish offenders against international law, as in the judgment passed on Ephialtes for his treachery in showing the Persians the secret path over the hills which enabled them to destroy Leonidas and his Immortals. It possessed the right of sanctuary, of which Orestes took advantage; it exempted religious bodies from military service. The Amphictionic oath bound each state not to level an offending city to the earth and not to cut off the water supply from a belligerent; the oath thus contemplated a state of war as anything but abnormal. And how was the oath carried out? Look at the history of the First Sacred War: the very name is an irony. The city of Crisa levied dues on the pilgrims who passed through its land to consult the Delphic Oracle, the Amphictionic Council declared a Holy War, and, after a favorable response from Apollo proceeded to divert the water supply, poison it with hellebore, and make a way into the weakened city, which was thereupon leveled with the ground: the Crisaean plain was laid waste with such "frightfulness" that it was still a scene of desolation in the days of Hadrian, six centuries later.

This Association of democratic neighboring states, with their representatives meeting at a common centre to transact business of the League and to celebrate religious rites, with its record of international law, its binding oaths, its claim to arbitrate, so as to ameliorate the horrors of war, its nominal equality of great and small, its plea for self-determination among smaller states, its guarantees against the abuse of power, presents an extraordinary parallel to the Hague Conference on the one hand and to the proposed League of Nations on the other. The result was just what might have been expected. Powerful democracies used the League for their own purpose, observed or ignored their obligations to suit themselves; there was no redress. Let those who hanker for a League of Nations recall the history of the democratic Amphictionic League; see it becoming the instrument of one powerful party after another, breaking its own laws, its own oaths; see Delphi itself taking vengeance on Crisa, Thebes on Phocis, Thespiae, and Plataea; Argos on Mycenae, and see what comes of it in the end. As the First Sacred War had disclosed one member-city poisoning the waters of another, so the Second Sacred War showed the same cynical Welt

politik, followed in this instance by the tragedy of Chaeronea and the rise of Macedon. In the middle of the fourth century B.C., Thebes, having been successful in getting the Spartans fined for their seizure of the Cadmea, saw an opportunity of using the League in the same way against the rival state of Phocis. A number of prominent Phocians were fined for alleged sacrilege, the League decreeing that if the fine were not paid within the time prescribed, their lands should be confiscated for the benefit of Delphi. Thereupon the Phocians seized Delphi itself; the League met at Thermopylae and decided that an Amphictionic army should rescue the sacred city, whose treasures were being used by the Phocians to purchase new allies in the North. Thessaly, threatened by this move, turned for help to Philip of Macedon, and thus changed the history of the world. While Demosthenes urged the cause of liberty and thundered out his Phillipics, warning the Athenians of the intention of Macedon to subjugate all Greece, the League went on as usual. The board of temple builders met at Delphi; the Amphictionic Council-with the trifling exception of the antiPhocian states-assembled as before; Dorians and Ionians sat side by side and talked and talked and talked in the peaceful Council Chamber, and held the Pythian Games; while the world outside was a welter of blood and confusion brought on it by the League.

The crazy Declaration of London was the fruit of the Hague Conference; the rise of Macedon the fruit of the Amphictionic League. By their fruits ye shall know them is as true of leagues and conferences as of men and states. Has the experience of the past no value for the future? Are we like the Bourbons, forever learning nothing, but, unlike them, forever forgetting? If so, we shall form and rely upon a League of Nations and talk and talk and talk, and cry out, when it is too late, for the regretted whips of independent states in place of the scorpions of “Allies” in a League of Nations who work in secret and reward us openly with the penalties of a stupidity born of sloppy sentimentality, the offspring of self-deception.

Fear God and learn to take your own part, said George Borrow of the ancient city of Norwich. Not bad advice! If followed it will be more likely to prevent wrongdoing than will reliance on the insincerities of a League of Nations.

THE LEAGUE TO ENFORCE PEACE1

We are not going to weary our readers by pointing out again, what we have so often pointed out in these columns, that the Holy Alliance, though started with the most genuine and sincere desire to form a League to Enforce Peace, ended in the erection of a reactionary tyranny, and that it took all the efforts of Castlereagh, Wellington, and Canning, together with enlightened Whig opinion in Britain, to prevent it from bringing about the destruction of liberalism throughout the world. How this happened is one of the most curious examples of the terrible nature of logic when working unrestrained in human affairs. If you have Leagues of Powers bound by a great common object which demands large sacrifices, the first thing that the constituent Powers must and will demand is a mutual guarantee of each other's national rights and interests. Before they can be sure of acting unanimously as a League they must be sure of not quarrelling among themselves. But they cannot be sure of doing this unless they are sure that there will be no interference-no attempt to curtail their own possessions and alter their own system of government. Hence any kind of international League is always bound to guarantee the status quo. But the status quo may in some particular country be the "negation of God erected into a system." This first stumbling-block the Holy Alliance tried to some extent to remove by means of periodic International Conferences which were to meet every three years and keep the various states of the world in good order. For example, the sixth article of the Holy Alliance bound the high contracting Powers to hold at fixed intervals "meetings consecrated to great common objects and the examination of such measures as at each one of these epochs shall be judged most salutary for the peace and prosperity of the nations and for the maintenance of the peace of Europe." The first of these meetings, the Conference held at Aix-la-Chapelle, can hardly be described as a success, except that it produced a perfectly admirable memorandum from Castlereagh in which he, like a true Briton, tried to find a sensible via media between the two extremes, and, while not attempting the impossible, to do something practical 1 Spectator, October 14, 1916.