litical obligation would be assumed. Each State would hold to its own idea, and in the competition of ideas the American Idea, by reason of its sound basis and its success as applied in the United States in bringing about peace and prosperity, would tend to prevail. By such a league of mutual counsel, under the lead of the United States, a new part of the law of nations, according to the American Idea, would gradually be evolved, based on the analogies drawn from the part of the private law which is concerned with the personal and confidential relations of men-the law of agency and trust, of copartnership, of cotenancy, of patron and apprentice, of guardian and ward. As the law was evolved, the relation of the States to each other and the relations of all States to the peoples not yet of full political capacity would tend to have less of a foreign and more of a domestic character, and the States would gradually provide themselves with organs of mutual correspondence with the union and with each of the other States, adapted to the new, difficult, and delicate, but highly desirable, relationship. When such a law of nations has been evolved and accepted, defining the social rights and duties of States; when such institutions of mutual correspondence shall have been established; when all the States have adopted written constitutions according to the American Idea, in which suitable and scientific provisions concerning the power of treaty and the power of union are inserted, a League of Nations in which each State would obligate itself to observe the law of nations might be possible. Such a league, though likely to be formed only in the distant future, would be according to the American Idea. When a formal constitution of such a league shall be drafted by a constitutional convention of all States, the United States may enter it without amending its Constitution; for the law of nations, based on the American Idea, is a part of the Constitution of the United States. |