did ever suppress piracy, develop a railway system, or teach a whole population to read and write. If the individual objecter is carefully examined, it will be found at times that he is under the sway of some narrow and intense mental inhibition, based on personal habits or experiences. Some of these inhibitions, if they are traced to their source, will be found to be even absurdly narrow. The objecter dislikes the idea of a World-League of Nations because it is 'international,' or, worse, 'cosmopolitan,' and he has got into the habit of associating these words with shady finance or anarchist outrages or the white-slave traffic. Or he has had uncomfortable experiences in hotels abroad, or he has suffered in his business from foreign competition. Many of the objections that phrase themselves in some such formulas as 'people will never stand it' or 'you do not understand the intensity of feeling,' are, indeed, rather cases for Jung and Freud than for serious dialectics. But from such levels of unreasoned hostility we can ascend to much more reasoned and acceptable forms of prepossession, which must be met with a greater respect.

Most human beings are 'patriotic.' They have a pride, quite passionate in quality, in the race or nation to which they belong; an affection identical in nature with, and sometimes as intense as, that which they feel for family and home, for a certain atmosphere of thought and behavior, for a certain familiar landscape and atmosphere, for certain qualities none the less real because they are often exquisitely indefinable. And they are jealous of this 'national' quality of theirs at times almost as men are jealous for their wives. Now, how far does this group of feelings stand in the way of a league-of-nations project? A number of vigorous speakers and writers do certainly play upon this jealousy. They point out that the league-of-nations project, as it develops, involves controls, not merely of military, but of economic concerns — controls by councils or committees, upon which every country will see a majority of 'foreigners'; and they exaggerate and intensify to the utmost the suggestion of unlimited

interference on the part of these same 'foreigners' with the most intimate and sacred things.

One eloquent writer, for example (Mr. Belloc), declares that the League of Nations would place us all 'at the mercy of a worldpolice'; and another (Mr. I. D. Colvin) declares that the council of a League of Nations would 'own' all our property as the British now 'own' the empire; an unfortunate parallel, if we consider the amount of ownership exercised by the British Government over the life and affairs of a New Zealander or a Canadian.

Perhaps the most effective answer to this sort of thing is to be found in current instances. One might imagine from these critics that at present every government in the world was a national government; but in spite of such instances as Sweden and France, national governments are the exception rather than the rule. There are very few nationalities in the world now which are embodied in a sovereign government. There is no sovereign state of England, for example. The English, the Scotch, the Welsh, all strongly marked and contrasted nationalities, live in an atmosphere of mutual criticism and cordial coöperation. Consider again the numerous nations in the British Empire, which act in unison through the Imperial Government, imperfect and unrepresentative as it is; consider the dissolving nationalities in the American melting-pot; consider the Prussians and Saxons in the German Empire. What is there in common between an Australian native, a London freethinker, a Bengali villager, a Uganda gentleman, a Rand negro, an Egyptian merchant, and a Singapore Chinaman, that they should all be capable of living as they do under one rule and one peace and with a common collective policy and yet be incapable of a slightly larger coöperation with a Frenchman, a New Englander, or a Russian? The Welshman is perhaps the best instance of all, to show how completely participation in a great political synthesis is compatible with intense national peculiarity and self-respect.

But if one looks closely into the objections of these anti-foreign

alarmists, it will usually become clear that the real prejudice is not a genuine patriotism at all; the objection is, not to interference with the realities of national life, but to interference with national aggression and competition, which is quite a different thing. The 'British' ultra-patriot, who begins by warning us against the impossibility of having 'foreigners' interfering in our national life, is presently warning us against the interference of 'foreigners' with 'our' empire and 'our' predominant over-seas trade, which are altogether different matters.

It is curious to see in how many instances certain conventional ideas, never properly analyzed, dominate the minds of the critics of the league-of-nations project. Many publicists, it becomes evident, think of international relations in terms of 'Powers,' mysterious entities of a value entirely romantic and diplomatic. International politics are for them only thinkable as a competition of those powers; they see the lives of states as primarily systems of conflict. A 'power' to them means the sort of thing which was brought to perfection in Europe in the eighteenth century, in the courts of Versailles, Potsdam, St. Petersburg, and St. James's, and it means nothing else in the world to them. It is, in fact, a conspiracy against other and competing powers, centring round an aggressive Foreign Office, and availing itself of nationalist prejudice rather than of national self-respect. Patriotism is, indeed, not something that the power represents; it is something upon which the power trades. 'Germany,' 'Austria,' 'Britain,' and 'France,' to those under the power obsession, are not the names of peoples or regions but of powers personified. When they say 'Austria' will not like this, 'France' will insist upon that, they think not of a people, but of a Foreign Office with a tradition and a 'policy.' To this power idea the political life of the last two centuries has schooled many otherwise highly intelligent men, and by it their minds are now invincibly circumscribed and fixed. They can disregard the fact that the great majority of men in the world live out of relation to any

such government with astonishing ease. The United States, Canada, China, India, Australia, South America, for example, show us masses of mankind whose affairs are not incorporated in any 'power' as the word is understood in diplomatic jargon; and quite recently the people of Russia have violently broken away from such an idea of the state, and show small disposition to revert to it. These objecters are in fact thinking still in terms of the seventeenth and eighteenth century in Europe - a very special phase in history. The European power idea had a traceable and definable source, one finds its elementary conceptions clearly stated in Machiavelli's Prince and in his Art of War, and we may hope it draws near to the end of its influence. But the fixity of their minds upon this old and almost entirely European idea of international politics as an affair of competitive foreign offices has its value for those who are convinced of the need of a new order of human relationships, because it opens up so clearly the incompatibility with the pressing needs of the present time of the European conceptions of a foreign office and of diplomacy as a secretive chaffering for advantages.

We may illustrate this obsession by quoting a recent article by Lord Sydenham (Nineteenth Century, August, 1918) in which he combats the league-of-nations proposal by an exaggeration of the difficulties of disarmament and preposterous suggestions of secret preparation. His way of thinking of 'powers' as the irreducible nuclei of aggression is very typical. There can be no disarmed world because some power is suddenly to flash forth like Minerva, fully armed, from a dreaming peace.' And the Council of the League, for no conceivable reason, is to be caught napping.

An army composed of contingents from the whole of the States composing the League would never reach the scene of action, and would be an unmanageable menagerie if it did. It follows that a few great powers must always maintain large naval, military and air forces prepared for action.

A similar line of thought is followed by an anonymous writer in Blackwood's Magazine (August, 1918) who- suffering under this fixed idea of the invincible reality of these 'powers' and their inflexible mentality for conflict—either cannot imagine, or pretends an entire inability to imagine, that a power can be restrained from the most complete preparations for war under the very nose of a world council.

Even if revolution followed defeat, and a wave of Bolshevism broke suddenly over Germany; even if a provisional government were minded to come into a League of Nations, its accession would be but momentary. The old German spirit would revive: a Scharnhorst would be found to reconstitute the ancient army; and Germany, seeing a whole world-league for peace, would have a better chance than she had, even in 1914, of dominating the world.

And again:

Modern warfare depends, as we discovered in 1914, on readiness to strike. The nation which had made up its mind to break away from the hampering restraints of the League, would take care to be efficiently prepared. Unless the armies of the League guarded every frontier every day, unless these armies were large enough to keep in subjection any possible alliance, they would be useless for purposes of defence. And if they were kept at the highest standard of practical utility, then all the manhood of Europe would be in the ranks, and the whole world would be and would remain one vast armed camp. Viscount Grey sees plainly that anything less than military intervention is of no value. He does not realize what it would mean if the armies of the League were to stand ready always to intervene. If all the frontiers of Europe were not permanently guarded by indefinite series of pill-boxes, one State possibly, two assuredly, could tear the rules of the League to pieces, like scraps of paper, and grab from a sleeping world a defiant hegemony.

But as soon as one asks, why a sleeping world? this tirade dissolves into rubbish. Given a League of Nations with some sort of council, and we have the organ and authority to watch and protest against even the first rudiments of state rearmament. It was the absence of any such council or authority before 1914 which enabled Germany to prepare war openly in the sight of her