TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS.
IT is no exaggeration to say that the fate of the civilized world and of all human progress hangs upon whether we take the right or the wrong path in dealing with the problem of the League of Nations. If we take the wrong one, and if once more the aspiration of organized peace ends in a fiasco, mankind will in despair abandon the hope of settling international disputes without recourse to arms, and the world must continue toujours en vedette, with an occasional thirty years' armistice for the Peoples to rest and lick their wounds. Remember, the vision of peace by agreement and of the federation of nations has haunted the minds of men in one shape or another for countless centuries. Greek statesmen had these ideas at the end of the Persian War, during the whole of the great Peloponnesian contest and after its conclusion, and though the cynics and the professors of Realpolitik smiled at their simplicity, thinkers and poets like Plato chose the larger hope. Once more the idea is in the ascendant, and minds and spirits are " finely touched " to these fine issues. Men of light and leading are wondering whether it may not be possible in a more enlightened and more democratic age actually to do what our progenitors could dream about but never accomplish.
The readers of the Spectator already know our view of all these hopes and fears. We most sincerely believe that if we are too idealistic, too hopeful, and attempt too much we shall achieve nothing. If, on the other hand, we are moderate, reasonable, and restrained, even in good deeds, in a word if we show ourselves Whigs rather than Bolsheviks, if we choose the apparently dull and toilsome via media rather than the glorious short cut, we may accomplish something of real benefit to mankind. If we do not banish war in name or in theory, we may make it so impossibly tedious for the ambitious demagogue or the cynical autocrat that he will not be able to lure the nation he deceives or compel the people he controls along the path of blood and iron.
Success or failure in this great venture must depend upon the prime object aimed at. We do not want, as we have explained before, to make the object of the League of Nations the abolition of war in the abstract, or the erection of some mixed Tribunal into whose hands men and nations shall entrust the dearest things which they possess—their liberties, their rights, and their independence. We do not want the object of the League of Nations to be the establishment of some Committee or Collectivist form of the Pax Ramona which will crush all national individuality, or will prove a kind of benignant upas-tree that will shelter everybody and yet shrivel while it shelters. We do not want the nations in their mood of humanity caused by the horrors they have witnessed and experienced, first to rush into the extreme belief that anything is better than war, and then to find that they were mistaken and revert to the old and hopeless regime of armed Peace. What we ask them to do, and it is all we believe it is safe for them to do, is to pledge themselves severally and jointly to insist that solemn Treaties between nations shall not be treated as " scraps of paper," but shall be strictly and honestly observed. We want to make contracts between nations, while they remain, the most solemn and essential things in the world—something a thousandfold more sacred than contracts between individuals, just as the interests of the nation are a thousandfold more sacred than those of the single individuals that compose it. But though the nations of the earth must agree to think no crime greater or more despicable than the illegal repudiation of a Treaty con- tract, whether made for some specific purpose or for general amity and goodwill, we must recognize that the world of nations can never be put into a strait-waistcoat, that there must always be the capacity for free change and free development within the international circle. Above all, we must never forget that freedom is essential to human happiness, and, further, that freedom to do right must involve freedom to do wrong, and that it is never possible to give man the benefi- cial power to choose the one path without taking the risk of his choosing the other. Therefore Treaties which are not to prove veritable swaddling-clothes, and to turn the nations into mummies rather than free-limbed human organisms, can never be perpetual. They must be revocable, and revocable within a -time that will not make men despair of seeing what they will regard as an essential improvement. Thus, though Treaty contracts as long as they are in existence must be maintained by the whole weight and power of mankind, the nations which entered into them must be able to free them- selves from their contractual bonds, if they deem it essential to their welfare to do so, without intolerable difficulty or delay.
We suggest that if mankind acting in unison shall be bound to uphold the sanctity of Treaties, a year's notice shall free any nation from its Diplomatic Instruments. Any recourse to arms before that year has expired, no matter what the alleged excuse, and no matter what the merits, must be dealt with with the utmost sternness. But it must not be dealt with by war, for that would mean some system of international armies and fleets and air squadrons, which, men being what they are, would open up a hopeless vista of intrigue. We must have recourse to non-intercourse as the weapon by which the sanctity of Treaties is to be upheld. Again, though nations may voluntarily agree to have questions like boundaries and other matters decided by an Arbitration Court, there must be no compulsory arbitration, for nations, like men, must be allowed to say that there are certain things so dear to them—as, for example, a man's honour or his re- lations with his family—that they cannot wisely or helpfully be decided by submission to a Court of Law. To put the matter quite shortly, we believe that compulsory disarmament, compulsory arbitration, compulsory entry into an international Federation, can only lead first of all to disappointment, tyranny, and intrigue, and ultimately either to the loss of that national individuality which the Peoples rightly cherish, or to the breaking up of the League as a hopeless failure. Instead of all these high-sounding aims, we desire to have the one clear obligation that nations must respect their Treaty pledges, and that the civilized Powers must as a matter of duty use all their strength, moral and physical, to maintain these agreements till they have been solemnly put an end to by an agreed procedure. As we have said before, we hold that one year's notice to abrogate a Treaty contract would be a convenient period. We hold, further, that in almost every case the necessity of giving a year's notice before the appeal to arms could take place would make it virtually impossible for nations to fight each other.
Remember that no nation which was restrained from fighting for one year would be able to say, as it might in the case of arbitration, that it must refuse to submit to the ruling of a Court of which the -Judges could be alleged to be foolish, inhuman, prejudiced, bribed, or capable of acting as politicians rather than as jurists. By our plan we avoid all these apparently good excuses for war. We avoid also the danger of the Great Powers being judges in their own cause, or else of having to submit issues of supreme import- ance to the legal representatives of the smaller nations, as the only persons procurable who could be regarded as wholly impartial.
We fully realize that this plan for confining the League of Nations to what looks like a narrow issue will be a deep disappointment to many persons. They will think that it is not worth while, and that the wide world is being asked to make great sacrifices to attain very small results. For that reason we have attempted to make a rough draft of our proposals, in order to show, as it were by a working model, of what nature the League of Nations created on our basis would be and how it would enforce its decrees. That this draft of the Constitution of the League could be very greatly improved by expert draftsmen goes without saying, though it may interest our readers to know that we have made the basis for the Constitution of the League the extraordinarily able, far-seeing, and well-drawn document which, to the great credit of the English-speaking race, was produced by the independent American Colonies directly after they had freed themselves from the control of the British Parliament. The peoples of the Colonies not only became independent, but each ex-Colony became an independent sovereign State, as inde- pendent in law as are any of the nations of Europe. They then, however, bound themselves in a League or Confederation inspired by very much the same ideas as are now inspiring the best hearts and brains throughout the civilized world.
While asking the nations to accept our plan, we are not, we must confess, hopeful of success. They are far more likely to " go snorting down the flowery meads " of Impracticable Idealism than to tread the dull little cinder- path of Common-Sense to which we invite them. Yet this prim pathway will give them seventy per cent. of what they desire, while the other will give them in the end nothing but old miseries remade. As Sir Thomas Browne warns us, nations are not governed by " Ergotisms," and to say that the world, if it is wise, should do this or that, however true, is, alas l very little to the purpose.
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