attempt to bind up the wounds and restore the mangled and broken remains of its political body, where he has been and is daily being greeted with enthusiasm and kindness almost amounting to affection by the peoples of these nations and their statesmen and rulers, because he is the acknowledged enemy of individual nationalism and the spokesman of a collective nationalism which will prevent a return to the old order and thereby establishing a guarantee of peace.

It is but to look on one picture of Europe, and then upon the other of the United States, for even a wayfaring man to reach an intelligent conclusion. This League of Nations job has been done once successfully, why can it not be done again? The principle has been tried and has worked successfully here, why can it not be applied and made to work successfully elsewhere? The units to be assembled for the structure are the same elemental human traits of friendship, hope, love of peace, and yearning for ordered freedom which are the fundamentals, that when organized, will form the framework of a League of Nations.

Instead of holding back and speculating about whether and how this league can be formed we should "go to it" and tackle the job. If Columbus had tried first to fully satisfy himself of the success of his undertaking he would never have made the venture and discovered America. If the delegates from the Colonies which met in Philadelphia before the Revolutionary War had waited to satisfy themselves of the result, or work out the details, they would never have fought and won that war, would never have issued the Declaration of Independence. Nor would those other delegates who met after that war in the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia to consider a remedy for the deplorable conditions of anarchy then existing among the original States ever have constructed the Constitution of the United States.

Something had to be done, and done at once, and they did it. They backed their knowledge and judgment of the past, as well as the possibilities which inhered in the facts of human nature, and the ideals of the people, and went promptly and boldly forward to the accomplishment of the task that proved to be the greatest enterprise of all time. Civilization is born of the experience of men, and is perfected by experience, as are all human institutions.

These framers of our Constitution and first great league of nations have but a flickering light from out the past to guide their efforts. We, however, have for our guidance the great headlight of their example, and the success of their work, our own league of nations. We have only to apply and suitably adjust to the world the human principles which its founders used in building our Constitution. The word Constitution comes from two Latin words, con "together" and statuens "placing," meaning "placing together, setting up, as in a frame or body of essential parts."

"World Constitution" Needed

Let us examine the human principles in the Constitution, quoting its preamble. Read it with care, weighing each word: "We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and to our posterity, do hereby ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States."

With these human principles, supported by the yearnings for peace which come to us on winged voices from the uttermost parts of the earth, as an incentive, build your World Constitution, your League of Nations, as Washington, Franklin, Madison, Hamilton, Sherman, and the other great idealists, enemies of doubt and doers of deeds, built the Constitution of our country.

What is good for the whole is good for every part, the common good reacts, and each part is benefited by the welfare of the whole. Friendliness and goodness in person or nation are the immediate jewels of their souls. They grow with practice and nourish themselves. A nation without friendliness and goodness is a busy, mischievous, wretched thing, a thing for treason and spoils, and is already diseased and doomed.

There was never a change for the better in human affairs and government that good and wise men were not found to oppose it, and to prophesy disasters which never happened, for time is humorously reckless of the reputations of prophets. It is our limited vision and uncertain thoughts, controlled too often by words, that people our mental darkness with hobgoblins and spectres.

The real Government will not be permanent unless it rests upon ideals. The world must not compromise with this situation. Some one has said that compromise was "a good umbrella but a poor roof." It is a temporary expedient and almost sure to be unwise statesmanship. Government becomes more nearly perfect as it approaches Christianity.

In conclusion let me quote from Lincoln, who once said with his uncommon sanity: "I haven't much opinion of a man who isn't wiser today than he was yesterday."

TOWARDS THE NEW EUROPE1

Old Europe has lost its traditions. With the elimination of the pyramid monarchical state, the power idea, with its territorial or map policy, has become an anachronism, and can hardly be restored. With it there must necessarily go secret diplomacy, which is the handmaid of dynastic despotism, for republics and constitutional monarchies can never attain to any fixity of the pyramid condition, being themselves conditioned by consent. And this is Europe's new value. Out of the furnace there has come the voice of the people-democracy. The apex state is no more. There is no longer a reason for the balance of power, peoples being inherently pacific in their opportunities. In the prospective reign of parliaments, the power idea forfeits its panache. We have presented Europe with a new box of bricks with which to build towers not from the pinnacle but from the base.

To build upward, that is, instead of downward. We start afresh. We start internationally for the first time with a common equation. The map becomes a national sanctuary instead of an international potentiality, and with it man ceases to be a mere regimental number. He is to become a voice, and in his collectivity he is to be the sanction-the whole, the state. That clearly is the first step, the setting up in Europe of constitutional government.

When that work has been accomplished, when nation faces nation as a vocal reality and not as a competitive or rival dynasty,

1 By Austin Harrison. In the English Review for December, 1918. P. 448.

one at least of the main causes of war will have been removed, and we shall have won the greatest victory in the history of civilisation. Yet so much clearly is procurable. The next step towards the League of Nations, or removal of the causes of war, may seem for the moment more difficult precisely because, unlike the first condition, it is not a force value. The second step is the problem how far Europe can become international in interest; whether, in fact, we can pass nationally, or even peacefully, from the competitive to the co-operative order.

The durability of any idea of a League of Nations will depend upon that evolution, and this will be the quintessential task and test of the Peace Conference. I am hopeful, not only because the root causes of militarism have been destroyed, but because the motive force of democracy must be, economically and spiritually, international. The life idea of Socialism is internationalism now the major part of Europe has become Socialist. That is one very dependable reason. Continental Socialism, particularly in Germany, evaporated at the call of war because the pyramid state had been too powerful for it. As Germany became freer domestically, Socialism lost its international character in the delirium of a deliberately imposed national egoism which ultimately became a mania. It has returned as the justification of the people's sacrifice. One may describe it as the only blossom left in Central Europe. Its constructive creed is internationalism, and though in Russia government has passed into the chaos of extremism, that, we must remember, is largely due to the peculiar conditions of Russia plunged overnight from the darkness of mediaevalism into the Elysium of a freedom which already contained all the disabilities of wreckage and bankruptcy.

Bolshevism is only a transient condition almost inevitable in an illiterate people jerked free from centuries of oppression. Like all anarchy, it will pass probably into some form of Socialism, for the question in Russia is the land, and the land now will belong to the people. There is no escape from this completion of the Russian revolution. The land for the people. Already it is one of the cries of Europe, one of the life issues of the war. And it is well, for here we have the great principle, opportunity which strikes at the foundations of Feudalism, a demand which is vitally national, and in its incidence economically international.

It proclaims and affixes the national right. It smashes the pyramid structure. In the earth, the peasant of Europe will wield the pick of peace, and with his plough he will make history.

People may doubt and speak of the natural law of the fittest, and for the time power values will appear to dominate mankind; but in reality this is poor thinking. Not only has the personal system of government gone, but it is highly problematic whether the old economic system has not failed, as it unquestionably has failed in the major part of Europe, which is theoretically and actually bankrupt.

But out of this bankruptcy a live new thing has appeared— principle; the principle that empires and nations are no longer to have the right to acquire other nations' land and bodies, and this is what is meant by self-determination. It is the new European Charter. Incredibly strange as it is, this law or foundation of morality is an absolutely new code hitherto unrecognized and even scorned by politicians, writers and potentates of all peoples as mere academic utopianism. Old men, particularly, view this projected slice into the perspective of their history books with cynicism. They cannot think, as it were, off the map, for they do not realize that they stand at the end of an epoch.

Yet unquestionably we do so stand. The bier of feudal Europe is our charge. European chaos is our unmeasured responsibility, and it can only be redeemed by principle. War or destruction has thus worked down to a condition of positive negatism, which, if continued, must involve in its disintegration and ruin the whole fabric of society, or we build anew upon principle. Literally, this is the only alternative. As we did not make war on, but for, humanity, so to-day our mandate must be constructive. To bring about accord, in place of the old discord. To dispense the justice of harmony. To induce that harmony into a whole of satisfied co-operation.

The cynic and socialist may scoff, but the question here is the determinant. What is the propulsive force of the new order, for obviously there must be a new order, seeing that the old one is dead? If the spirit of monarchical antagonisms has disappeared, can we conceive of a spirit of co-operation under any order of society founded on the patriotism of the flag, whether dynastic or democratic? And if so, how are we to advance to it?