by the future. The League enters on a heritage that may well daunt its most confident apostles. Its strength, apart from the prestige and capacity of the men chosen to direct it, is that if the League of Nations fails the only visible hope of reknitting the world into unity will have vanished. And the attempt that has carried the League so far as it has gone on its journey can never be renewed if failure attends it now.

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CHAPTER XIII

AND NOW-?

ND now the hope of the future rests with the League of Nations. The war is over.

The Treaties so far signed are on record. Treaties were essential. Even treaties as imperfect as those signed at Versailles and St. Germain were better than a continuance either of the war itself or of the uncertainty and instability ruling during the Armistice.

But the treaties in themselves are no guarantees of peace. They have disarmed Germany and Austria, but they have left the struggle in Russia unaffected, and they have been the direct cause of sporadic outbreaks of hostilities all over SouthEastern Europe between countries or factions dissatisfied with the settlement they embodied. In September, 1919, ten months after the Armistice, a Paris paper published a map showing twentyfive several fronts where it was alleged wars were then in progress. Treaties alone, it was clear, could bring no peace.

More than that, there is a serious danger that the treaties may contain the actual seeds of war if they are to be regarded as the last word the statesmanship of the world can pronounce on the prob

lems of which they treat. No one who saw the Paris Conference as it was, who watched the new ideals of the White House being shelved tacitly and with hardly a protest in favour of the old theories of balance of power, of strategic frontiers and of territorial extension, could have hoped to find in the document that emerged from such discussions anything more than an instrument that would give the world a short breathing space, that would let the heats and fumes of war clear away, leaving a purer air in which dispassionate justice (President Wilson's "impartial justice," involving "no discrimination between those to whom we wish to be just and those to whom we do not wish to be just") could do its healing work.

That remedial process needs an effective instrument to carry it out. The treaties themselves provide no such instrument. The commissions they constitute are confined to particular functions-the exaction of reparation, the demarcation of boundaries, the administration of special areas like the Saar Valley-which leave the main purpose of the treaties unaffected. There is one institution alone, the League of Nations, capable of taking the world the treaties have left and remoulding it as changing political and economic needs may demand. The League as constituted to-day has grave defects, some inevitable, some remediable. Its success depends on the goodwill of its members. If each nation adhering to the League devotes its energies, as a number of re

putedly rational critics seem seriously to assume that it will, to seeking out any flaw or loophole that will enable it to evade its obligations and thwart the considered purpose of the League, nothing but disaster and failure can lie ahead. Even with the goodwill every member of the League is justified in expecting from every other, difficulties enough are certain to arise. The exclusion of the late enemy Powers will greatly curtail both the actual and the theoretical authority of the League till the omission is rectified, as there is ground for thinking it may be at an early date. The exclusion of Russia is a misfortune not less serious, and one with no immediate hope of remedy. The provision requiring the unanimous assent of the Assembly to all decisions of moment leaves room for infinite obstruction on the part of any member with no higher sense of purpose in the world than to obstruct. The demand of America, as presented by the Republican majority in the Senate, for what amounts in certain regards to a position of privilege within the League, is a disquieting omen.

But with all such defects, and others that could be added, the League of Nations is to-day the sole bulwark against chaos in world-relations. The single visible alternative is the Socialist International, but to assume the efficacy of the International in face of the problems that impend is to assume a Socialist revolution, constitutional or unconstitutional, throughout the world. The men who would represent their countries on the In

ternational do not in Britain or America or France or Italy or Japan control either foreign or domestic policy. They could give effect, to none of the reciprocal undertakings into which they would have to enter. The Socialist International is, and promises long to remain, sectional. It will have its peculiar work to perform, as it has to-day. It may do much to bind nations closer, by binding parts of each nation closer. But as an alternative to the League of Nations it is not relevant. The only international council that will serve the need of the world is a council of national representatives authorised to commit the governments for which they speak (subject to the provisions of national constitutions) to the decisions they take. That the League of Nations as its exists to-day does provide for, and it is a provision of vast moment in the evolution of the world.

One other alternative to the League is indeed envisaged in some quarters. There are cynics in abundance in every Allied country who dismiss the League of Nations as at best an amiable vision and call insistently for the perpetuation of the armed organisation represented by the Alliance that won the war. Germany is disarmed, but France must have a Franco-Anglo-American agreement to protect her from attack. French newspapers can demand the association in the same instrument of Italy and Belgium, and even discuss soberly the lightening for France of the burden of German occupation by establishing in the heart of Europe a black garrison from the