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A League of Nations 639idealistic demands, but the practical necessities of any system ofyet loose unification such as now is contemplated, conditions itmust from the first and increasingly satisfy if it is to survive theenormous difficulties of an enterprise which, as it proceeds, willhave to work out of being most of the natural egoistic instinctsand rooted past habits of the international mentality of the race.This new gigantic bantling which has come into existencewith War for its father and an armed and enforced Peace for itsmother, with threatening and bloodily suppressed revolutions,a truncated internationalistic idealism and many half-curbed,just snaffled rearing national egoisms for its witnesses and godparents,has not, when looked at from this standpoint, in spiteof certain elements of promise, an altogether reassuring appearance.The circumstances of its inception were adverse and exceptby a tremendous effort of self-conquest in the minds of the rulersand statesmen of the victorious nations, a self-conquest rendereda thousand times more difficult by the stupendous magnitudeand the intoxicating completeness of their victory, any at all completeresult and auspicious new beginning could not be hopedfor. This league now in the last throes of formation has not beena spontaneous creation of a peaceful, equal and well-combinedwill towards unity of all the world’s peoples. It comes into beingovershadowed by the legacy of hatreds, reprisals, apprehensions,ambitions of a murderous world war chequered by revolutionswhich have opened a new and alarming vista of world-wideunrest and disturbance. It has grown out of a vague but strongaspiration, — more among the rank and file of the nations, andeven so not equally common to all of them, than among theirgoverning men or classes, — to find some means for the futureavoidance of violent catastrophes in the international life ofmankind. It has been precipitated into actual and immediatebeing by the determination of an eminent idealistic statesmanwith the modified and in some cases unwilling assent of otherswho shared only partially or not at all his idealism, one man ofstrong will who aided by a commanding position given to himby circumstances and a flexible obstinacy in his use of them,has been able to impose some shadow or some first incomplete