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A League of Nations 659vanquished country is the common spoil, or, let us say, meansof compensation of the victors and this one little rapacious allycannot be allowed to appropriate it all by main force to thedetriment of its greater fellow-administrators of a self-regardingjustice, — who may even as a result find Hungary thrown as astarving pauper on their hands instead of serving their will as asolvent debtor! If this realistic spirit is to be the spirit of the newinternational system and that is to persist, its success is likelyto be more formidable to humanity than its failure. For it maymean to the suffering portions of mankind the legalisation andperpetuation of intolerable existing injustices for which therecould have been a hope of more easy remedy and redress in theprevious looser conditions. If this league of nations is to serveand not merely to dominate mankind, if it is to raise and free, asit claims and professes, and not to bind and depress humanity, itmust be cast in another mould and animated by another spirit.This age is not like that in which the reign of law was establishedin individual nations; men are no longer inclined, as then theywere, to submit to existing conditions in the idea that they are aninevitable dispensation of nature. The idea of equity, of equality,of common rights has been generalised in the mind of the race,and human society must move henceforward steadily towardsits satisfaction on peril of constant unrest and a rising gradationof catastrophe.That means that the whole spirit and system of the leaguewill have to be remodelled, the initial mistakes of its compositionrectified and the defects inherent in its origin got rid of, beforeit can be brought into real consonance with the nobler hopesor even the pressing needs of the human race. At present it is,to reverse the old phrase, a pouring of an old and very mustywine into showy new bottles, — the old discredited spirit of thediplomacy of concert and balance and the government of thestrongest, of the few dominant kingdoms, states and empires.That must disappear in a more just and democratic internationalsystem. The evil legacy of the war with its distinctions between“enemy”, allied and friendly nations or more favoured or lessfavoured peoples, will have to be got out of the system of the