are out of the way, may overcome in a moment of sentimental relief even a congress of professional diplomats. But in greater measure it is due to the fact that as affairs now stand-that is, without a permanent international executive body-the attempt to enforce such guarantees might indirectly threaten the peace of the world. An earnest effort from any quarter would be regarded as having back of it some interested nationalistic motive, and would array against it all of the nations on the other side of the Balance of Powers, even if their own national interests were in no way involved. It is much safer to treat the guarantee written into the treaty of peace as a scrap of paper than to run the risk of dropping a spark into a heap of inflamable international material.

Take the case of Roumania and the problem of a guarantee of civil rights to the Jews. On the face of it, it is a simple matter. But then we discover that it is a question of internal political constitution. The great landowners control the politics of Roumania through controlling the franchise. The cities and industrial centers are discriminated against. The Jews are mainly in the latter places. To give them the necessary rights would involve giving political rights to others who are now disenfranchised so as to secure the supremacy of the landed aristocracy. It is hard to see how an adequate guarantee for the Jews is to be secured short of a shift of the center of internal gravity in the whole country. When one considers the medley of nationalities in eastern Europe and the inheritance of exacerbations along with religious differences and economic rivalries, it is harder yet to avoid the conclusion that it will remain the tinderbox of Europe unless a comprehensive and impartial international government undertakes for a considerable time the supervision of the development of institutions which shall insure an adequate adjustment of rights in this enormously delicate situation.

The strong prejudice against external intervention in domestic affairs is justified as long as the theory of isolated and independent sovereign states prevails in practice. But the United States, at least, has been largely in the war precisely because it realized that the dividing line between domestic institutions and foreign policies has become wholly artificial. It was precisely the autocratic domestic institutions of Germany which drew us

into what, in its origin, was a purely European war. So far as concerns the United States, the war was either an evil job which had to be undertaken from stern necessity, or it was a war for such intervention in the "internal" affairs of Germany as will guarantee us against the recurrence of any such catastrophe. The logic of this situation demands such friendly oversight of the affairs of other states from which world-wide conflagration might spring as will forestall wars in the future. And since the United States has no intention of becoming a crusading Don Quixote of nations, this demand means precisely a permanent international government whose powers shall be even more executive and administrative than judicial.

It remains to speak of those two articles among the fourteen which imply, in the most open fashion, a League for economic purposes that is concerned with permanent regulation of those economic affairs which cause wars. These are the third and fifth articles, dealing respectively with the removal of trade barriers and the establishment of an equality of trade conditions, and with the impartial adjustment of all colonial problems. It is possible for opponents of the President to interpret the third article as an academic proclamation of the abstract principle of free trade, and to interpret the fifth as applying merely to the German colonies which have been seized during the war. But no such limitations will acccord with the principles of the declaration of February 11 regarding the adjustments most likely to bring a peace that will be permanent and that shall not "perpetuate old elements of discord and antagonism that would in time be likely to break the peace of Europe and consequently of the world."

A LEAGUE OF NATIONS 1

The ideal of European unity is an old one, but its development into the present proposals for a world-wide League of Nations is essentially modern. The older plans serve more as evidence of the beginnings of cosmopolitanism, or have suggestions of imperial ambitions or desires to interfere in the internal af

1 In "America's War Aims and Peace Program," by Carl L. Becker. War Information Series. Issued by the Committee of Public Information. No. 21, November, 1918.

fairs of certain nations, not for the good of the world order of the people most concerned, but rather for the good of the interfering powers, as in the case of the so-called Holy Alliance. The recent movement toward a better international order has had a sounder basis, in the best interests of all peoples; and it has come forward logically in the nineteenth century, side by side with the development of nationality. This internationalism presupposes the continuance of national states, and arises out of their contacts and common interests. It is the more evidently needed as the number of nations, and especially of struggling nations, increases. Strong nations can no longer exist in isolation, much less weak ones.

The complete breaking down of national isolation, so that every nation is now part of the whole world order, is due to a new economic and social order, with which our political organization has kept pace. The chief agencies in drawing nations together are railroads, steamships, telegraph lines, and other means of communication, and those aspects of industry and commerce which make for interdependence. The last sixty years has seen an increasing multiplication of agencies for international expression and action. They have acted in the main intermittently and in separate fields, but the net result has been to create a marked tendency towards internationalism of thought and action. Since the holding of the first International Sanitary Conference in 1850, gatherings or congresses have been held, with varying frequency, to deal with such matters as statistics, sugar duties, fisheries, weights and measures, monetary standards, international posts and telegraphs, the navigation of rivers, submarine cables, private international law, the protection of copyright, suppression of the liquor traffic in Africa, the abolition of traffic in slaves, promotion of the interests of the working classes, the advancement of international arbitration, promotion of woman suffrage, and various topics of a purely scientific, literary, or historical interest. A list which makes no pretence to completeness shows 116 such official international conferences, held under government sanction or initiative, between the years 1850 and 1907, while the list of unofficial congresses must be very much greater. It is said that in the year 1907 alone there were over 160 such gatherings, official and unofficial.

A number of these gatherings have resulted in permanently

organized international bureaus, with administrative and quasilegislative powers. Examples of these are the International Postal Union, organized in 1874; the Union for the Protection of Industrial Property (patents, trademarks, etc.), organized in 1883; the European Union of Railway Freight Transportation, organized in 1890, etc. At the same time there came to be an increased reliance for the preservation of peace between Governments on the so-called "Concert of Europe"-that is to say, the attempt to settle international questions by means of concerted action of the five or six great powers, acting not so much through public treaties as through joint understandings embodied in diplomatic notes and other communications. At the close of the nineteenth century, when it was clear that the Concert of Europe was giving way to two rival alliances, the ideal of a definite federation of Europe, such as earlier had been advanced, again revived. Societies, of which the League to Enforce Peace, the American Association for International Conciliation, and the World Peace Foundation are examples, were formed and were active in the promotion of schemes for preventing war. The Czar's proposal of disarmament in 1899, the Hague Conferences, and the establishment of the Hague Tribunal, are all indications of the widespread interest in the subject.

REASONS FOR HAVING LEAGUE
OF NATIONS 1

What is the minimum that we have to insist on in order that the League of Nations shall be a reality and not merely the use of an expression to disguise one of the old-fashioned limited and hostile alliances?

We must obtain two things at least. We must obtain security for all nations, whether they are big or little, highly organized or industrial, and we must obtain equality of economic opportunity. No logic can be more funny than that which talks about safety lying in the highest kind of military preparedness only. Such preparedness might conceivably make China to a certain extent safe, unless there was a big combination against

1 By Norman Hapgood, President of the League of Free Nations Association. From the New York Times, January 12, 1919.

her, but what such a race in armaments could do for the peace, comfort, and security of Belgium, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Jugoslavia, Armenia, and Palestine is not particularly easy to figure

out.

Two great considerations brought on the world war, along with minor causes that need not detain us just now. One was jealousy about the sources of raw material all over the world, that jealousy expressing itself in the Bagdad controversy, the Morocco controversy, and a dozen different scrambles for control of undeveloped fields. The other was the attempt to mect this menace by constantly increasing armaments, so that the Germans, seeing the balance of power tending against them with the growth of Russian railroads, decided to touch the match to the magazine in 1914. A child may be led to account for the war exclusively by the villainy of a few men, and so may the mob, but the intellectual simplicity of such a view is a hopeless basis for any solution of the present world agony that will give us any promise of a better and safer civilization.

Let it not be supposed that equality of economic opportunity prevents such tariffs as any country may feel requisite for the completing of its essential industries. The League of Nations, including its economic plank, is being defended by intelligent Protectionists, just as it is being defended by intelligent Free Traders. Indeed, the personnel of the League of Free Nations Association is sufficient to indicate that the necessity for such a league can be seen by many contrasting types of free minds.

They are gathered together in that cause here and abroadConservatives, Liberals, Socialists, Free Traders, and Protectionists; people who believe that Italy should control the Adriatic and people whose sympathies are with the Jugoslavs; people who believe in extreme nationalistic divisions, and people who believe that it is only a short time before the Czechoslovaks, the Jugo-slavs, and the Poles will have some kind of a federation with free Russia; people who sympathize with Liebknecht and those who sympathize with Scheidemann; those who wish us to take a hand in the destiny of Russia and those who wish us to leave it alone. The League of Nations, in short, is to exist not for the sake of expounding or defending any doctrine, but for the sake of having a mechanism by which all these questions, sure to remain extremely difficult, can be thought out, instead