Bolsheviki still a military danger, and with President Wilson having refused the invitation to coöperate, the lack of results is not surprising. Nevertheless, what little has been done in the world for disarmament has been done by the League. The Brussels Conference immensely stimulated the financial pressure for reduction; the Assembly laid down a series of modest proposals covering the maximum the nations were willing to accept at the time; and shortly a very powerful committee consisting of financial, economic, labor, military and political leaders will meet to see whether a more complete program can not be evolved.

It will be asked, what has the League done to prevent wars? In the case of Poland's invasion of Russia a year ago, it did nothing, largely because none of its members requested it to do anything. Nowhere has this inaction been more bitterly criticised than in the Assembly itself, where it became apparent that Poland's policy had had at least the silent approval of the western governments. So long as a great power like Russia remains an international outcast, such occurrences are almost inevitable.

Apart from this, however, five cases of threatened war have already come before the League, two of them very directly and three slightly. The first, Persia's appeal in the face of a Bolshevist invasion, may be briefly dismissed as direct negotiations between the two parties effected a settlement and left the case without importance except as showing for the first time how the League's machinery for conciliation could be set in motion. Far more serious is the Aland Islands case. Here Great Britain, a third party without interest except that of preserving peace, asked the League to intercede in a dispute between Sweden and Finland over these important strategic

islands, which, though inherited by Finland from the former Russian Duchy of Finland, are predominantly inhabited by Swedes. The Council at a special meeting heard the statements of both nations, secured a solemn promise from each not to break the peace, and appointed an international commission, of which Mr. Abraham Elkus of New York was a member, which immediately visited the islands, as well as Finland and Sweden, to take testimony on the spot. During all these months the peace has been kept because both parties knew that the case was being handled in a fair and impartial way, and there is every reason to hope that the final outcome may be to remove once and for all this most serious source of friction.

Less satisfactory has been the PolishLithuanian mediation, largely because of the intransigeant and hostile feelings shown by both parties. The League had already been called in between the two countries and had an international military commission on the spot when General Zeligowski made his theatrical coup d'etat against Vilna. As the Polish government immediately disclaimed him as a rebel, the League proposed a plebiscite based on Zeligowski's withdrawal and his replacement by an international force.

In response to a special request, not only France, Great Britain and Belgium, former belligerents, but also Spain, Norway, Sweden and Denmark, former neutrals, agreed to send small contingents of troops for this police work. Meanwhile, however, both Poland and Lithuania raised difficulties, until finally the Council decided that, as neither of the parties was prepared to take the action required to make a just plebiscite possible, the plan must be abandoned and direct negotiations at Brussels under a League chairman substituted. Whether there

will result a peaceful solution between two nations who seem little disposed to one, is still uncertain, but at least hostilities have long been averted which without the League would have been almost inevitable, and the healthful moral opinion of the outside world has had opportunity to bring pressure on both parties.

The other two cases are South and Central America. Bolivia and Peru desired to present their Tacna-Arica dispute with Chile to the first Assembly, but Peru shortly withdrew it and Bolivia postponed the request to the next meeting. Similarly Panama immediately notified the League of her friction with Costa Rica, and then as a result of a direct invitation from the Council, both nations submitted their views, without, however, invoking League action because of the mediation already undertaken by the United States.

These two cases have been disturbing to the League. On the one hand is the certainty that League opponents in the United States will stretch the situation into an invasion of the Monroe Doctrine. On the other is the undoubted fact that all these nations as members of the League have accepted the obligation not to go to war without arbitration or conciliation; that as sovereign states they have the right to call upon an outside body to mediate; and that in fact they are largely appealing to their fellow South Americans who constitute sixteen of the forty-eight states in the League. Were America a member of the League, she would undoubtedly be entrusted with mediation in such cases.

Such, then, is the varied rôle of the League, a maze of widely different activities all leading to the one central goal of better international relations and the abolition of war. If the outline sounds formidable, it can not be

too often stressed that practically all this work is purely advisory and consultative; that the League lives only because it is a useful channel for coöperation and conference, and because, above all, it does not attack the sovereignty of its members.

There indeed lies its central truth. It has found the narrow, difficult channel between a mere debating society without influence and an organization having the attributes of a super-state. It has no power of legislation; no power of enforcing its findings; no power to move a single soldier or raise a single dollar without the consent of the nations concerned. is rather a central clearing-house for coöperative action, ready to function in a dispute like the Aland Islands, to relieve a human tragedy such as the half million derelict war prisoners, or to bring the experts of the world together before a world financial crisis.

It

Nor is the League a separate personality. It acts not on its own initiative, but on that of its members; it comes to decisions not out of some detached, super-judgment of its own, but through the free consent of the nations in it; it acts or fails to act as its members see fit. This should be appreciated because ofttimes the League is blamed for inaction which is due solely to the inaction of its members, especially of the small states which, protesting the power of the big states, seem to lack courage to use the machinery before them.

Nor, again, is the League an instrument for enforcing the peace treaties. The Allied governments have preferred to preserve absolute freedom of movement, while the Germans have even appealed to the League on several occasions against Allied action. Indeed, apart from certain instances such as the Saar Valley and Danzig where it has been called in not so much to

enforce as to ameliorate the peace conditions, the League is anxious to keep free of treaty complications and confine itself to the field of world organization and readjustment. This is all the more necessary because its membership is far bigger than the Allied group, including as it does all the six European neutrals, the two ex-enemy states of Austria and Bulgaria, and nearly the whole of South America.

What the future holds no man can say. Slowly the League is finding its sphere of usefulness and bringing down early exaggerations to the realm of reality. It is neither a perfect nor a final organization, but it is a beginning. Even as this is being written, its covenant is being examined by an

amendments committee, and other committees are studying treaty registration, the economic blockade and the efficiency of the Secretariat.

The fact of a coöperative international association seems, however, now firmly embedded in world relations, be its power greater or less, and its name what you will. The present organization, entirely apart from the many and great incidental benefits which it has conferred along its line of progress, has proved an idea which, whatever its outward form and symbols, represents the fundamental conviction of mankind that conference and conciliation will eventually lead the world to the final goal of preventing armed strife between nations.

BOUT twenty-five years ago, as

the Venezuelan boundary question was looming large on the horizon, a man then eminent in the business world asked me to tell him in five minutes what the Monroe Doctrine meant. He explained that he made his inquiry in that precise form because he had just five minutes to give to the subject, and no more. I promptly replied that I probably could answer his question more effectively in five seconds than I could in five minutes. since, if I really began to talk on the subject, I might consume five hours; but that I would at once say, without further loss of time, that the Monroe Doctrine meant 'America for the Americans." Perhaps I also added that this sententious phrase was to be interpreted in a political and not in an economic sense.

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The so-called doctrine enunciated by Monroe was a rule of policy growing out of the fundamental principles which the founders of the government of the

United States laid down for the guidance of its foreign policy. The first of these principles was that of nonintervention in the political affairs of other governments and particularly of the governments of Europe. John Adams, while engaged in negotiating the treaty that acknowledged our independence, recorded in his diary that Mr. Oswald, the British commissioner, rather taunted him one day with being "afraid of being made the tools of the powers of Europe." Adams bluntly answered, "Indeed I am." "What powers?" asked Oswald. "All of them," declared Adams, and in explanation added:

It is obvious that all the powers of Europe will be continually maneuvering with us to work us into their real or imaginary balances of power. They will all wish to make of us a make-weight candle, when they are weighing out their pounds. Indeed, it is not surprising; for we shall very often, if not always, be able to turn the scale. But I think it ought to be our rule not to meddle.

Of all the sages of the American Revolution, John Adams, with the single exception of Benjamin Franklin, had the most comprehensive diplomatic experience. The prophetic words above quoted were uttered in 1782. More than a quarter of a century later, Adams, in his Patriot Letters, reaffirmed the principle which he had expounded to Oswald. Speaking of the "public negotiations and secret intrigues' which the principal powers, and particularly the English and the French, had, as he said, for centuries employed in every court and country of Europe to influence and sway the course of governments, he declared that, so long as

they might hope to seduce the United

States to engage in their conflicts, the country would be "torn and convulsed by their maneuvers"; and, with the

wreck of the French alliance still fresh

in his mind, he further declared that the United States should make no treaties of alliance with any European power but should separate itself so far as possible and so long as possible from all European politics and wars.

Washington, in his Farewell Address, and Jefferson, in various utterances, official and unofficial, enjoined upon their fellow-countrymen the observance of the same rule. But these

injunctions were but the solemn testamentary affirmations, by the chief builder of American independence and the author of its Declaration, of their profound conviction that abstention from interference in European politics was the very life of the American system of non-intervention and neutrality, the foundations of which they felt that they had, as President and as Secretary of State, in 1793, securely laid.

Monroe's famous declaration, which was directly occasioned by a movement on the part of a league of European powers called the Holy Alliance, to extend its activities to the Western Hemisphere, was conceived to be justified by the then firmly established American policy of non-interference in the affairs of Europe. "Our first and fundamental maxim," said Jefferson, "should be never to entangle ourselves in the broils of Europe; our second, never to suffer Europe to intermeddle with cis-Atlantic affairs." These rules were understood to be not only correlative but interdependent.

The Monroe Doctrine was announced by the United States as a rule of policy, and not as an international understanding. The European powers were not asked to agree to it. Had it been incorporated in a treaty, the terms of the agreement evidently would have been to the effect that, in consideration of the abstention of the United States from interference in the politics of Europe, the powers of Europe would engage to abstain from interference in the politics of America. But it was never protocolized. The fact that on certain occasions, such as that of the signing of the Hague Conventions, the United States has made the Monroe Doctrine the subject of a reservation, merely denotes that the United States in becoming a party to certain non-political engagements, has done so with the express understand

ing that it was not to be regarded as having yielded its traditional policy and that the engagements were not to be interpreted as having that effect.

Among the many vague and indefinite suggestions to which the excitements of the past few years have given rise, none is more elusive than the proposal to extend the Monroe Doctrine to the world. In only one sense can this phrase have any meaning whatsoever. John Quincy Adams, in his musings on the Monroe Doctrine, speaks, in his diary, of the right of the independent countries of America to work out their political destiny in their own way. Had Adams been proposing generally to safeguard the rights of al' nations, and not simply to safeguard the Americas against threate d oldworld aggression, this might have been taken as an affirmation of the general right of national self-determination. But to say that the United States, because it undertook to safeguard the Americas, should, either singly or in combination with other powers, undertake to secure the enjoyment of the right of self-determination to all nations, including those of Europe, would be not only to pervert Adam's meaning but to discard the Monroe Doctrine altogether and to substitute for an American policy a world policy.

Nor is the fact to be overlooked that the Monroe Doctrine never was regarded by its authors as guaranteeing the independence and sovereignty of American nations as among themselves. On the contrary, the principle of nonintervention and neutrality, in association with the principle of the legal equality of independent states was proclaimed and practiced by the United States as furnishing its rule of conduct in its relations with other independent American countries as well as with the rest of the world. This, again, serves but to demonstrate that no matter