cluding myself, I may say that there is a universal feeling that the world cannot rest satisfied with merely official guidance. There has reached us through many channels the feeling that if the deliberating body of the League of Nations was merely to be a body of officials representing the various Governments, the peoples of the world would not be sure that some of the mistakes which preoccupied officials had admittedly made might not be repeated.

"It was impossible to conceive a method or an assembly so large and various as to be really representative of the great body of the peoples of the world, because as I roughly reckon it, we represent, as we sit around this table, more than twelve hundred million people. You cannot have a representative assembly of twelve hundred million people, but if you leave it to each Government to have, if it pleases, one or two or three representatives, though only with a single vote, it may vary its representation from time to time, not only, but it may [originate] the choice of its several representatives. [Wireless here unintelligible.]

"Therefore, we thought that this was a proper and a very prudent concession to the practically universal opinion of plain men everywhere that they wanted the door left open to a variety of representation, instead of being confined to a single official body with which they could or might not find themselves in sympathy.

"And you will notice that this body has unlimited rights of discussion-I mean of discussion of anything that falls within the field of international relations-and that it is especially agreed that war or international misunderstandings, or anything that may lead to friction or trouble, is everybody's business, because it may affect the peace of the world.

"And in order to safeguard the popular power so far as we could of this representative body, it is provided, you will notice, that when a subject is submitted, it is not to arbitration, but to discussion by the Executive Council. It can,

upon the initiative of either of the parties to the dispute, L drawn out of the Executive Council into the larger foruv of the general body of delegates, because through this in strument we are depending' primarily and chiefly upon on great force, and this is the moral force of the public opinion of the world—the pleasing and clarifying and compelling influences of publicity, so that intrigues can no longer have their coverts, so that designs that are sinister can at any time be drawn into the open, so that those things that are destroyed by the light may be promptly destroyed by the overwhelming light of the universal expression of the condemnation of the world.

"Armed force is in the background in this program, but it is in the background, and if the moral force of the world will not suffice, the physical force of the world shall. But that is the last resort, because this is intended as a constitution of peace, not as a league of war.

"The simplicity of the document seems to me to be one of its chief virtues, because, speaking for myself, I was unable to see the variety of circumstances with which this League would have to deal. I was unable, therefore, to plan all the machinery that might be necessary to meet the differing and unexpected contingencies. Therefore, I should say of this document that it is not a straitjacket, but a vehicle of life.

"A living thing is born, and we must see to it what clothes we put on it. It is not a vehicle of power, but a vehicle in which power may be varied at the discretion of those who exercise it and in accordance with the changing circumstances of the time. And yet, while it is elastic, while it is general in its terms, it is definite in the one thing that we were called upon to make definite: It is a definite guarantee of peace. It is a definite guarantee by word against aggression. It is a definite guarantee against the things which have just come near bringing the whole structure of civilization into ruin.

pute, "Its purposes do not for a moment lie vague. Its purrforuses are declared, and its powers are unmistakable. It is this tot in contemplation that this should be merely a league to pon oecure the peace of the world. It is a league which can be opinicised for co-operation in any international matter. That pells the significance of the provision introduced concerning er hatabor. There are many ameliorations of labor conditions at which can be effected by conference and discussion. I anticihat apate that there will be a very great usefulness in the Bureau by of Labor which it is contemplated shall be set up by the e League. Men and women and children who work have been in the background through long ages, and sometimes seemed but to be forgotten, while Governments have had their watchful rld and suspicious eyes upon the manœuvres of one another, tt while the thought of statesmen has been about structural tion action and the larger transactions of commerce and finance.

CO

"Now, if I may believe the picture which I see, there becomes into the foreground the great body of the laboring as people of the world, the men and women and children upon h whom the great burden of sustaining the world must from o day to day fall, whether we wish it to do so or not, people who go to bed tired and wake up without the stimulation of lively hope. These people will be drawn into the field of international consultation and help, and will be among the wards of the combined Governments of the world. There is, I take leave to say, a very great step in advance in the mere conception of that.

"Then, as you will notice, there is an imperative article concerning the publicity of all international agreements. Henceforth no member of the League can claim any agreement valid which it has not registered with the SecretaryGeneral, in whose office, of course, it will be subject to the examination of anybody representing a member of the League. And the duty is laid upon the Secretary-General to publish every document of that sort at the earliest possible time.

"I suppose most persons who have not been conversant with the business of foreign affairs do not realize how many hundreds of these agreements are made in a single year, and how difficult it might be to publish the more unimportant of them immediately, how uninteresting it would be to most of the world to publish them immediately, but even they must be published just as soon as it is possible for the SecretaryGeneral to publish them.

"Then there is a feature about this covenant which, to my mind, is one of the greatest and most satisfactory advances that has been made. We are done with annexations of helpless peoples, meant in some instances by some powers to be used merely for exploitation. We recognize in the most solemn manner that the helpless and undeveloped peoples of the world, being in that condition, put an obligation upon us to look after their interests primarily before we use them for our interests, and that in all cases of this sort hereafter it shall be the duty of the League to see that the nations who are assigned as the tutors and advisers and directors of these peoples shall look to their interests and their development before they look to the interests and desires of the mandatory nation itself.

"There has been no greater advance than this, gentlemen. If you look back upon the history of the world you will see how helpless peoples have too often been a prey to powers that had no conscience in the matter. It has been one of the many distressing revelations of recent years that the great power which has just been, happily, defeated, put intolerable burdens and injustices upon the helpless people of some of the colonies which it annexed to itself, that its interest was rather their extermination than their development, that the desire was to possess their land for European purposes and not to enjoy their confidence in order that mankind might be lifted in these places to the next higher level.

"Now, the world, expressing its conscience in law, says

there is an end of that, that our consciences shall be settled to this thing. States will be picked out which have already shown that they can exercise a conscience in this matter, and under their tutelage the helpless peoples of the world will come into a new light and into a new hope.

"So I think I can say of this document that it is at one and the same time a practical document and a human document. There is a pulse of sympathy in it. There is a compulsion of conscience throughout it. It is practical, and yet it is intended to purify, to rectify, to elevate. And I want to say that so far as my observation instructs me, this is in one sense a belated document. I believe that the conscience of the world has long been prepared to express itself in some such way. We are not just now discovering our sympathy for these people and our interest in them. We are simply expressing it, for it has long been felt, and in the administration of the affairs of more than one of the great States represented here—so far as I know, all of the great States that are represented here—that humane impulse has already expressed itself in their dealings with their colonies, whose peoples were yet at a low stage of civilization.

"We have had many instances of colonies lifted into the sphere of complete self-government. This is not the discovery of a principle. It is the universal application of a principle. It is the agreement of the great nations which have tried to live by these standards in their separate administrations to unite in seeing that their common force and their common thought and intelligence are lent to this great and humane enterprise. I think it is an occasion, therefore, for the most profound satisfaction that this humane decision should have been reached in a matter for which the world has long been waiting and until a very recent period thought that it was still too early to hope.

"Many terrible things have come out of this war, gentlemen, but some very beautiful things have come out of it. Wrong has been defeated, but the rest of the world has been