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without a league of nations. These gentlemen may well be challenged to tell us what arrangements they would suggest to the five nations engaged in forming this treaty for peace and in making it work, unless it be a continuing league of those five nations to maintain it.

How can the objects and purposes of the fourteen points, especially those directed to rearranging the map of Eastern and Central Europe and Asia Minor, be achieved and carried to peaceful realization except through a league of nations embracing the five great powers? No one opposed to the league of nations idea has essayed to answer this very practical question. The Paris conference is confronted with it and must answer it suggestively by making the League of Nations the first subject for discussion. Premier Clémenceau said:

"The League of Nations is here. It is for you to make it live." Senator Lodge in his speech fully recognized the existence of the League of great nations in the war and the necessity for its continuance. Indeed it is probable that if Senator Knox and Mr. Beck were cross-examined, their admissions would show them to be not very far removed from the view that something substantially equivalent to a league of great nations must be definitely formed by this Congress. with agreed-upon means of enforcing the stipulated peace.

The Associated Press informs us that a league of nations is in the forming, but that the super-sovereignty of an international police force is to be rejected as part of it. This negation is not very helpful. Except in Tennyson's poetic vision and in the plans of impracticables, no such suggestion as super-sovereignty has been advanced.

Most opponents of the League idea have assumed that the

so-called international police is to be a permanent body under an international commander and subject to orders without invoking consent of the nations contributing to the force. This is a misconception. A potential international police force will be erected by an agreement of the Great Nations to furnish forces when necessary to accomplish a legitimate purpose of the League. In most instances, no actual force will need to be raised. The existence of an agreement and confidence that the nations will comply with it is all that will be needed. Nations who have judgments against them in a court of the nations will generally perform them. It will only be where defiances of such judgments will lead to a dangerous war that the League force need be raised.

Of course, during the interval after the conclusion of peace, the possibility of differences and the danger of Bolshevism may require a retention of some of the war army strength of the Allies to see the treaty through to its effective execution. But after the return of normal times the strength of the League to secure compliance with the treaty obligations and justice will not be in its serried columns, but in its potential power under the joint agreement.

In the convenient division of the world into zones, in which the respective Great Powers shall undertake the responsibility of seeing to it that members of the League conform to the rules laid down by the treaty, it will be unnecessary for any nation to send forces to a distant quarter. The United States can properly take care of the Western Hemisphere and need not maintain in normal times a military establishment more extensive than she ought to maintain for domestic use and the proper maintenance of the Monroe Doctrine without such a league. They may be well supplied, not by a professional army, but by a system

of universal training on democratic principles like that in Switzerland or New Zealand. If this be conscription, its opponents may make the most of it. It will help our boys in discipline of character and in a most useful educational way. It will provide for the prompt display of democratic power to achieve justice. The picture painted by Senator Borah of the army of the United States needed for the purposes of the League is the result of a lively imagination, but does not find support in the real need of the League.

After the League of the Great Powers has been established for the purpose of executing the plans of the new treaty, it will be time enough to take in all other responsible Powers. The lesser League will grow naturally into a larger League. Experience will test the practical character of the lesser League and in this wise and in due course the world League will come into being. But meanwhile as a necessary condition precedent to the success of the treaty of peace, it must provide for a League of the Great Nations.

THE LEAGUE'S "BITE "1

Those who are looking for something real in a league of Nations to preserve peace, in creating sanctions for international law, justice and equity, may well feel concerned over the developments in Paris. Such persons have based their hopes on the psychological effect of the horrors of the war upon all nations, which should make them willing to concede much to achieve the main object of the war. They have counted on securing a covenant between the members 1 Article in Public Ledger, Jan. 29, 1919.

of the League to unite, whenever necessity may arise, with the powerful members of the League to compel compliance with judgments of the League and to suppress recalcitrant members faithless to the principles of the League and to their obligations. They can hardly be blamed for so doing, in view of President Wilson's words, as follows:

"I pray God that if this contest have no other result, it will at least have the result of creating an international tribunal and producing some sort of joint guaranty of peace on the part of the great nations of the world." . . . “Now, let us suppose that we have formed a family of nations and that family of nations says: 'The world is not going to have any more wars of this sort without at least first going through certain processes to show whether there is anything in the case or not.' If you say, 'We shall not have any war,' you have got to have the force to make the shall' bite. And the rest of the world, if America takes part in this thing, will have the right to expect from her that she can contribute her element of force to the general understanding. Surely that is not a militaristic idea. That is a very practical ideal."

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The indorsement of these views by Mr. Lloyd George was as follows:

"The best security for peace will be that nations will band themselves together to punish the peace-breaker."

Mr. Asquith's comment on the President's views was as follows:

"The President held out to his hearers the prospect of an era when the civilization of mankind, banded together for the purpose, will make it their joint and several duty to repress by their united authority and, if need be, by their combined naval and military forces, any wanton or aggressive invasion

of the peace of the world. It is a fine ideal, which must arouse all our sympathies."

From these statements of this ideal it is a descending climax now to hear that no member of the League is to bind itself to unite its forces with any other in enforcing the judgments of the league court or in punishing the peacebreaker. We are now to depend on moral force or the exercise of an economic boycott, it may be, and on the general public opinion of the world. If a nation which is interested in a judgment in its behalf desires, it is to be given the right to go to war to enforce it. We have still the wonderful and eloquent preaching of the ideal of a League of Nations while we see its strength and "bite," to use Mr. Wilson's expression, fading into merely moral aspirations and moral sanctions.

This is doubtless in part due to the difficulties that the nations now sitting around the council board in Paris are having in maintaining their armies. After four years of war the pressure of the men engaged in it to be released from their military duty is so strong that the nations cannot resist it. That is probably the explanation of the very weak policy adopted in respect to the Bolsheviki. The Congress certainly would not have run the risk of exposing its members to just criticism had they not felt deeply the difficulty confronting them in sending an adequate force to Russia to stamp out the contagion, to rescue the Czecho-Slavs and to give Russia a chance. The error that our administration made during the war was in resisting the urgent appeal of our Allies to send a large force into Russia, through Vladivostok and Archangel, to create an eastern front. Such a force would have largely obviated the Bolsheviki complication. The The Czecho-Slovaks, whom we have

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