of obtaining a supernatural ruling, indistinguishable in principle from the drawing of lots or tossing of a coin. But although men have always talked, and still talk, of ‘appealing to the God of Battles,' they have never shown any disposition to accept, save at the last gasp, a judgment which ran counter to their passions or their cupidities. Whatever may have been their professions, their practical belief has always been that 'God is on the side of the big battalions,' or, in other words, that war is a part of the natural order of things, the immeasurable network of cause and effect, and no more subject to special interventions of Providence than commerce, or navigation, or any other form of human activity. Nor is there any reason to suppose that they will ever believe otherwise. If it be difficult to conceive them, in their disputes, abiding by the awards of impartial reason, it is a hundred times more difficult to conceive them accepting the wholly unreasonable awards of artificially and arbitrarily restricted violence.

These truths are so obvious that it may seem idle to insist upon them. Nobody, it may be said, proposes that Paris and Berlin should in future settle their disputes, like Rome and Alba Longa, by selecting three champions apiece and setting them to cut each others' throats. In this crude and elementary form, indeed, the proposal does not appear; but disguised applications of the same principle are constantly commended in the writings of those who, holding war to be eternally inevitable, seek refuge from sheer despair in the belief that it is possible to subject it to rule and limit, and say to it, 'Thus far shalt thou go and no further.' They cannot or will not see that any conventional limitation is foreign to its very essence. It is perfectly possible and consonant with human nature that nations should agree not to appeal to force, and should hold to that agreement even when one or the other of them believes itself to have suffered injustice. But it is utterly impossible and inconsistent with human nature that, having appealed to force, they should agree to exercise it only within lim

its, and accept impoverishment, humiliation, servitude, — in a word, defeat, rather than transgress the stipulated boundaries. It may be objected that codes of law have in fact been devised for the partial humanization of war, and that not until the present time has any civilized belligerent made a practice of disregarding them. But these so-called laws of war have always been conventions of mutual advantage- rules which all parties held it to be, on the whole, to their own interest to observe. The German War Book quite frankly places the chief sanction of such trammels on military action, not in humanity, but in the fear of reprisals. We do not deny that man is an emotional being, and even in the midst of his fiercest fighting there are horrors from which the decent man, and even the decent multitude, instinctively recoils. Decent men do not as a rule want to hurt their wounded prisoners: they rather like to pet them; and they regard people who do otherwise as blackguards. And no doubt it is largely these emotional mercies and generosities which have brought about those rules of chivalry or scruples of religion which form the supposed 'redeeming features' of war. But the necessities of war completely override all such weaknesses as soon as they begin to endanger actual military interests. And the logic of war tolerates them only as cheap concessions to a foolish popular psychology. It must be remembered that undisguised atrocities on a stupendous scale such, for instance, as the massacre in cold blood of whole regiments of helpless prisoners - would be too strong for the stomach of even the most brutalized people, and would tend to bring war into discredit with all but its monomaniac votaries. If we look into the matter closely enough, we shall find that all Geneva Conventions and such palliative ordinances, though excellent in intention and good in their immediate effects, make ultimately for the persistence of war as an institution. They are sops to humanity, devices for rendering war barely tolerable to civilized mankind, and so staving off the inevitable rebellion against its abominations.

V

Criticisms of the project of a League of Nations have consisted hitherto very largely of the statement of difficulties and impediments, rather than of reasons for rejection of the project. All such criticisms are helpful in so far as they enable us to map out the task before us, but none are adequate as conclusive objections. Few of the advocates of an organized world-peace fail to recognize the magnitude of the task to which they invite men to set themselves. But their main contention is that there is really no alternative to the attempt but resignation to long years of human suffering and disaster, and therefore that, however difficult the enterprise may be, it has to be faced. The recital of the difficulties is, they say, a stimulus to thought and exertion rather than a deterrent. A man who has to leap on to a blanket from the upper story of a burning building is not likely to be restrained from jumping by being told of the possibilities of breaking his leg or doing himself a grave injury; a man who has to swim ashore from a sinking ship is not likely to give up his purpose because there may be sharks in the water. And such is the desperate position of mankind. If the warning should induce the man in the former case to jump carefully with bended knees, and if in the latter case it should induce him to scan the water shrewdly and swim more swiftly, then these comments are all to the good. But not if they paralyze his will.

The examination of how particular difficulties may be solved and how impediments may be overcome or circumvented belongs to the systematic study of the world-league project in detail, and will not be attempted in this general introduction to the subject. But there are certain objections to the undertaking as such that must be taken up and dealt with in a preliminary discussion.

There is, first, an objection which it will be convenient to speak of as the Biological Objection. It is stated in various forms, and it peeps out and manifests itself in the expressed thoughts and

activities of quite a number of people who do not seem to have formulated it completely. But what many of these objectors think, and what still more feel, may be expressed in some such phraseology as this:

Life is conflict and is begotten of conflict. All the good qualities of life are the result of the tragic necessities of survival. Life, stripped down to its fundamental fact, is the vehement urgency of individuals or groups of individuals to survive and reproduce and multiply their kind. The pressure of individual upon individual and of species upon species sharpens the face of life and is the continuing impetus and interest in life. The conception of life without war is a conception, therefore, not simply utopian, but millennial. It is a proposal that every kind and sort and type of humanity should expand and increase without limit in a small world of restricted resources. It is, in fact, absurd. It is an impossible attempt to arrest and stereoptype a transient phase of human life. It is inviting paralysis as a cure for epilepsy. It is a dream of fatigued minds. Terrible as the scope and nature of human warfare have become, it has to be faced. The more destructive it is, the more rapid the hardening and evolution of the species. Life and history move cyclically from phase to phase, and perhaps such an apparent retrogression as we mean when we talk of the breakdown of civilization, may be only part of a great rhythm in the development of the species. Let us gather together with our own kind, and discipline and harden ourselves, in an heroic resolve to survive in the unavoidable centuries of harsh conflict ahead of us.

Now, here is a system of objection not lightly to be brushed aside. True, the element of mutual conflict in life is often grossly overstated and the element of mutual help suppressed. Prince Kropotkin's book, Mutual Help, has shown how the successful survival of most gregarious species depends far more on the cooperation of individuals than on competition between them, and how the important struggle lies chiefly between the individual

and his environment. But, though overstated, there are valid criticisms here of any merely negative league-of-nations project, any mere proposal to end war without replacing it by some other collective process. There do seem to be advocates of the League whose advocacy is little more than a cry of terror at the disappearance of established wealth, the loss of wasted leisure, and the crumbling of accepted dignities. Those who have faith in the possibility of a world-league are bound- just as the Socialist is bound to produce some assurances of a control over the blind pressure of population, which may otherwise swamp the world with prolific low-grade races. They are bound to show that their schemes are compatible with a series of progressive readjustments, and not an attempt to restore and stereotype the boundaries, the futile institutions, and the manifest injustices of the world of 1914, with only armaments abolished. They are bound to show that exceptional ability and energy will have, not merely scope, but fuller scope for expression, achievement, and perpetuation, in the new world to which they point us, than in the old. In the years to come, as in the whole past history of life, individual must compete against individual and type against type.

But having made these admissions, we may then go on to point out two fundamental misconceptions which entirely vitiate the biological argument as an argument for the continuation of war as a method of human selection. It is falsely assumed, first, that modern war is a discriminatory process, selecting certain types as against certain other types, whereas it is largely a catastrophic and indiscriminate process; and secondly, that belligerent states are in the nature of biological units, super-individuals, which either triumph or are destroyed, whereas they are systems of political entanglement of the most fluid, confused, and transitory description. They neither reproduce their kind nor die; they change indefinitely: the children of the defeated state of today may become the dominant citizens of its victorious competitor in a generation or so. They do not even embody traditions or