fluence is force. It was the birth of the State within the meaning of International Law. States were, according to this doctrine, sovereign, independent, and equal entities. Implicit in this conception is the belief that in international relations might is right; but over its naked horror, which may be seen best revealed in the works of modern German writers, Grotius, whose great book on the Law of War and Peace was published in 1625, and his successors threw a cloak of decency to which the name of International Law has been given. Decked out by jurists and increasingly obscured by custom, this underlying notion has yet been accepted by the civilized world from the Reformation until the present war.

During the last four years the cloak has been torn away. The scales have fallen from our eyes. The civilized world has been in travail, and hopes are rising high that of that travail will be born a new system of State-relationship -the Rule of Law. The phrase now usually employed to express these hopes is a League of Nations. The conception expressed in this

2 Ibid, lectt. ix. and x.

phrase combines and reconciles that which is valuable and helpful in the idea of the sovereignty and independence of States with the existence of a common organ to act on behalf of those States for certain purposes.

The system of the Holy Roman Empire was a monarchy; the system of the last three hundred years was ill-disguised anarchy; the League of Nations will be a democracy, for it means the freedom and equality of States under the law. In a League of Nations every member will delegate to the League certain of the attributes of its sovereign power and its independence. The schemes for a League of Nations hitherto proposed for public consideration differ from one another in several respects; but this is a characteristic common to them all. It is admitted by most of those who place their hopes on such a League; it is raised as an objection by those who regard the notion of such a League with distrust or even repugnance.

So we find on the one side Mr. Wells' calling in aid the analogy of the indi

3 In the Fourth Year, ch. 3, p. 28.

vidual: 66 No man can join a partnership and remain an absolutely free man. You cannot bind yourself to do this and not to do that and consult and act with your associates in certain eventualities without a loss of your sovereign freedom"; and Sir Frederick Pollock admitting that the convention by which the League of Nations is organized must depend for its binding force "on the renouncement by every party to it, in some measure, of independent sovereign power, and in particular of the right to be judge in one's own cause.' On the other side, the curious may be referred to M. Seignobos' article in The New Europe of April 4th, 1918, and Mr. Hilaire Belloc's in The New Witness of July 12th, 1918, as in

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4 The League of Nations and the Coming Rule of Law. 5 Lord Bryce's Group, however, in their " Proposals for the Prevention of Future Wars" speak of the League as an association or union of independent and sovereign States," and definitely claim that existing States will retain their sovereignty. The articles of the Fabian Society's Draft Treaty invariably speak of the signatory States as “independent sovereign States, whilst in the introduction to the Draft Treaty it is claimed that no impairment of sovereignty and no sacrifice of independence are proposed." This, however, seems clearly inconsistent with the statement on the next page that the establishment of a supernational authority is involved. Particulars of the chief schemes for a League of Nations may be found in The Framework of a Lasting Peace, edited by Leonard S. Woolf.

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stances of the opposition to the League raised by its critics on this ground. We are told that no political community careful of its honour or its prestige can surrender to an external body the functions proper to its sovereignty or its independence.

It is the object of these pages to establish two propositions. First, that the doctrine of the absolute sovereignty and independence of States, whilst in its day it met a need of the times and was an instrument of progress, no longer serves a useful purpose, for it is not in conformity with fact; secondly, that whilst the League of Nations does undoubtedly involve a rupture with the theories which have dominated the last three centuries, it does not involve so great a departure from the practice of the recent past as is sometimes supposed.

Cf. J. B. Firth in The Fortnightly Review, September, 1918.

I. THE LOGICAL THEORY OF THE SOVEREIGN INDEPENDENT STATE

In the treaty made between Athens and Sparta in 421 B.C. one of the clauses provided that the Delphians should thenceforth "make their own laws, administer their own justice, and raise their own taxes."1 Grotius, the great Dutch jurist whose famous book already referred to has given him the reputation of being the Father of International Law, reminds us of the clause in the treaty of 421 B.C. when he is about to discuss the nature of sovereignty." Unfortunately the idea of sovereignty is not limited to those attributes of self-government which were given to the Delphians.

The Germans are a logical people: their premises are often wrong, but no race has ever deduced more accurately the correct conclu

1 Thucydides, History, v., 18.

2 De Jure Belli et Pacis, I., iii., 6, 1.