PDF-file (The same edition. Another cover. 2.2 Mb)

A League of Nations 655not really of nations but of governments, and of governmentscommitted to the maintenance of the old order and using theircloser association as a means for combating the new idea whichis hostile to their own form of existence, be likely to fare in thisearth-shaking or this tornado? It is more likely to disappear thanto undergo a gentle transformation, and if it disappears, anothersystem of international comity may replace it, but it will not bea League of Nations.We will suppose, however, or even trust, that the League,embodying in spite of appearances the best combined statesmanshipof the world, circumvents all these perils, weathers everystorm and leads forward the destinies of mankind in the paths ofan at first more or less uneasy, but eventually firmer increasingpeace and mutual accommodation. What is it then that it willhave at the beginning or in the end actually accomplished? Itwill have made some beginning of the substitution of a stateof law for the older international status which alternated andoscillated between outbreaks of war and an armed peace. That,no doubt, if at all firmly done, will be a great step forward inthe known history of human civilisation. For it will mean thatwhat was founded in the unit of the nation centuries ago, will benow at last founded in the society of the nations. But let us notleap too easily at what may well be an unsound parallel. Whatcivilised society has done most effectively from the beginning isto substitute some kind of legalised relation, legalised offenceand defence, legalised compensation or revenge for injuries inplace of the state of insecure peace and frequent private or tribalwarfare in which each man had to claim what he consideredto be justice by the aid of his kin or the strength of his ownhand. At present the persistent survival of crime is the onlyremnant of that earlier pre-legal state of natural violence. Butfor an organised society to deal with the refractory individualis a comparatively facile task; here the units are nations with acomplex corporate personality, great masses of men themselvestoo organised, representing the vital interests, claims, passionsof millions of men divided by corporate, powerful and persistentexclusivenesses, hatreds, jealousies, antipathies which the