First we have to consider the possibility of some belligerent state achieving so much victory as to establish a world-hegemony and a peace based on force, and then relieving the pressure by an enforced and controlled world-disarmament. We should then have a sort of League of Nations project realized in a very different form and spirit indeed from that League of Everyman, but still realized, as the dictated peace of a subjugated world, rather after the pattern of the Roman Empire. Such was probably the hope- and a not altogether unreasonable hope, having regard to the self-confidence of the German people, the rottenness of Russia, the Irish disorders, and the unpreparedness of America of many far-seeing Germans in the early phases of the war. But the affairs of the world are now in a posture which enables us to dismiss this idea of a world-hegemony for Germany, or for any other single power, as a fantastic vanity.

We have to consider, however, the much greater probability of a group of the more powerful states, including perhaps a chastened Germany, agreeing among themselves to organize and enforce peace in the world for ever. This would give us still a third type of League, which we may call the League of the Senior States. It is, perhaps, the most probable of all the intermediate possibilities.

And on the other hand, we have assumed quite crudely in the first section that the forces of popular insurrection are altogether destructive of organization, whereas there may be as yet unmeasured constructive and organizing power in the popular mind. There is a middle way between a superstitious belief in unguided democracy and a frantic hatred of it. Concurrently, for example, with the earlier phases of Bolshevik anarchy in Petrograd and Moscow, there seems to have been for a time a considerable development of coöperative production and distribution throughout European and Asiatic Russia. Mingled with much merely destructive and vindictive insurrectionism, there may be a popular will to order, reaching out to coöperate with all

the sound and liberal forces of the old system of things. We can only guess as yet at the possibilities of a collective will in these peasant and labor masses of Europe which now read and write, and have new-born ideas of class-action and responsibility. They will be ill-informed, they may be emotional, but they may have vast reserves of common sense. Much may depend upon the unforeseeable accident of great leaders. Nearly every socialist and democratic organization in the world, it is to be noted, now demands the League of Nations in some form, and men may arise who will be able to give that still quite vague demand force and creative definition. A failure to achieve a world-guaranty of peace on the part of the diplomatists at a peace conference may lead, indeed, to a type of insurrection and revolution not merely destructive but preparatory. It is conceivable. The deliberate organization of peace, as distinguished from a mere silly clamor for peace, may break out at almost any social level and in the form either of a constructive, and adaptive, or a revolutionary project.

We have not, therefore, here, a case of a clear-cut choice of two ways: there is a multitude of roads which may converge on the permanent organization of world-peace, and an infinitude of thwarting and delaying digressions may occur. Complicating and mitigatory circumstances may, and probably will, make this antagonism of war and peace a lengthy and tortuous drama. The collapse of Russia tempted Germany to outrageous aggressions upon her Eastern frontier, and so brought out the opposition of a militarist and pacifist conception of life, with the acutest, most illuminating simplicity. But other such collapses may not have this effect of simplifying and enforcing the issue. They may merely encourage powers adjacent to the region of collapse, to adopt a partial disarmament, a mere resting phase, and so defer for scores of years, by this temporary mitigation, the necessity for securely ending war. There may be many such halts and setbacks in the inevitable development of war; belligerence may

pause and take breath on several occasions before its ultimate

death-flurry.

Such delays, such backwater phases and secondary aspects, must not confuse the issue and hide from us the essential fact of the disappearance of any real limitation upon the overgrowth of war in human life. That unlimited overgrowth is the probability which is driving more and more men to the study and advocacy of this project of a League of Nations, because they are convinced that only through a counter-organization of the peacewill in mankind can the world be saved from a great cycle of disasters, disorder, and retrogression.

And it does not follow, because the origins and motives of the will for such a world-league are various, that they involve a conflict over essentials, as to the character of the final result. It is the declared belief of many of the promoters of the world-league movement that a careful analysis of the main factors of its problems, a scientific examination of what is possible, what is impossible, what is necessary, and what is dangerous, must lead the mass of reasonable men in the world, whatever their class, origins, traditions and prejudices, to a practical agreement upon the main lines of this scheme for the salvation of mankind. It is believed that the clear, deliberate, and methodical working out of the broad problems and riddles of the world-league idea will have a sufficient compelling force to bring it within the realm of practical possibility.

IV

At this point it is advisable to take up and dispose of a group of suggestions which contradict our fundamental thesis, which is, that war is by its nature illimitable. War is, we hold here, a cessation of law, and in war, therefore, it is impossible to prevent permanently the use of every possible device for injury, killing, and compulsion which human ingenuity can devise or science produce. Our main argument for a League of Nations rests on that.

But there are people who do not accept as a fact the illimitable nature of war. They fall back upon the theory that the horrors of the Great War are due to a sort of accidental relapse into savagery on the part of the German people, and that future wars can and will be conducted under restrictions imposed by humanity and chivalry. They believe that war can become a conventional Ordeal by Battle, in which the nations shall deliberately refrain from putting forth their full strength, and shall agree to abide by the decision of a struggle between limited armies, operating, like the champions in a tournament or a prize-fight, under an accepted code of rules.

This is, we hold, a delusion. Our case is that the nations can agree far more easily to abolish war than to restrict war.

It is true that, in the Great War, Germany has carried her theories of ruthlessness to self-defeating extremes. She has done many deeds which recoiled upon herself - deeds inspired by a sort of ferocious pedantry, which inflicted comparatively small material damage upon the Allies, but hardened their resolution and brought thousands, nay, millions of recruits to their ranks. None the less must we face the fact that, individual stupidities apart, the German theory of war is the only logical one. The theory is laid down by Clausewitz at the very beginning of his classical treatise On Wars:

Philanthropists may think it possible that the disarmament or subjection of the enemy can be effected by some artificial means, without causing too many wounds, and that this is the true aim of all military science. Pretty as that looks, we must refute the error, for, in such dangerous matters as war, errors arising from good-nature are the worst of all. As the employment of physical force to its fullest extent in no wise excludes the coöperation of intelligence, it follows that he who makes use of this force ruthlessly, and without sparing blood, must obtain an ascendancy if the enemy does not do likewise. By so doing he frames a law for the other, and thus both strain every nerve, without finding any other limitation than their own natural counterpoise.

The same principle is restated by Von der Goltz in The Nation in Arms (English translation, page 22):

If, from humanitarian principles, a nation decided not to resort to extremities, but to employ its strength up to a given point only, it would soon find itself swept onward against its will. No enemy would consider itself bound to observe a similar limitation. So far from this being the case, each would avail itself of the voluntary moderation of the other to outstrip him at once in activity.

If it be said that, in past times, this was not true, that nations fought with comparatively small armies, and often accepted defeat without having thrown anything like their full strength into the struggle, — the objection is met by a twofold answer. Firstly, the logic of war, the law-as we have termed it—of the utmost effort, had not yet been thoroughly thought out. Primitive peoples in general — and the same applies to all but the most civilized and sophisticated of modern states — are guided in matters of war and peace more by their emotions than by their reason. They are lazy, as peoples, and muddle-headed. They fight because they are angry, they stop because they are tired; they cease pursuing the enemy because they want to attend to the harvest. It is the mark of a highly organized and intellectualized government to subordinate national emotions to the remorseless logic of the case. And the logic of war was reserved for Napoleon to express in practice and Clausewitz to formulate in theory.

But the second answer goes more to the root of the matter: namely, that the strength which a nation can put into the field is limited by many conditions, both material and psychological, and that, if we examine into these conditions, we shall often find that what may seem to us, on the face of it, an insignificant effort, was in very truth the greatest of which, at the given moment, the nation was capable. It is a quite new social fact, a creation of the last fifty years, to have a central government supplied with exact information about all its resources in men,