French colonies. The Austrian navy is dead, the Jugo-Slav navy not born, but Italy can be satisfied with nothing less than the strategic mastery of the Adriatic. Agreements for the reduction of fleets and armies are in the air, but Lord Jellicoe can recommend the expenditure of £20,000,000 a year on the provision of naval defence for Australia.

Between those ideals and the ideals of the League of Nations the world has to choose. The peril is that every country will shrink from the act of faith required of it, will preach, as it has preached in the past, the gospel of peace, and organise, as it has organised in the past, in preparation for war. To halt for ever between those two ideals will mean either paralysis or war, and of the two much more probably war. Full trust in the League there cannot be till the League has proved itself worthy of trust. But as soon as its active work begins, as and when the nations that signed the Covenant show themselves ready to make their pledge good, according to the League that practical support and that loyal confidence they have undertaken to accord, there will be mobilised behind the League of Nations a force capable of carrying to a peaceful solution even the intractable problems it will fall to it to attack.

It has been made a ground of criticism that the League of Nations will have no international army, nor even an international General Staff, to lend the sanction of force to its decisions. The

objection is reasonable, though it involves thrusting into undue prominence what if hopes are fulfilled should be anything but a primary function of the League. The League's first duty will be not to wage, nor even to suppress wars, but to take away the occasion of wars. Its ultimate, and at the same time its immediate, task will be to bring to light a world-purpose, as opposed to merely national purposes, and concentrate the motive power of the world behind it; not to submerge, or even to subordinate, national traits, but to make them distinctive instead of divisive; to foster every form of international co-operation and to break down all barriers, whether political or racial or economic, to the free intercourse of nations.

Above all, in relation to the present treaties, the task of the League will to suggest, and in the last resort to enforce, such changes and readjustments as more mature study of the situation, the gradual evaporation of war-prejudice, or the emergence of new factors in the political or economic field, may dictate. It is manifest, for example, that the succession of customs barriers raised by the series of states now occupying the area between the Adriatic and the Black Sea, must at the same time hinder trade and promote international friction. It may be that a satisfactory arrangement will be effected by the states themselves, whether along the lines of a Danubian federation or not, but it is certain that in initiating or co-operating in such a change the League of

Nations would make effectively for the general welfare of all the nations concerned.

By Article XI. of the Covenant-declaring it to be "the friendly right of each member of the League to bring to the attention of the Assembly or of the Council any circumstance whatever affecting international relations which threatens to disturb international peace or the good understanding between nations on which peace depends"-the League is given a locus standi which confers on it wide powers of judicious intervention without any suggestion of trespassing beyond its sphere.

It has been said that the League may have in certain contingencies to support its decisions by force. But it would be a complete mistake to assume that that means of necessity armed force. Unless the League is to fall fatally short of the hopes of its first architects its sanctions will be less and less military and more and more economic. The threat of blockade against a recalcitrant power promises to be hardly less potent than a declaration of war. Since 1917 the world has had a new vision, and Germany a new and shattering experience, of what a blockade can mean. I was told by Lord Robert Cecil, who as former Minister of Blockade could speak with unique authority, that during the last twelve months of the war the blockade of Germany was carried on practically without the active intervention of the navy at all. The navy, he was careful to explain, was always there, keeping the seas

in all weathers, scrutinising, catechising, checking, making every assurance doubly sure. But when once America was in the war every step necessary to make the blockade of Central Europe watertight was taken on the mainland of the United States or South America. The master of every vessel declared his cargo and his destination and gave all undertakings required, knowing well that if he departed from his pledges he would never run another voyage while the war lasted. Under the League of Nations those safeguards would be materially easier to impose, for in a League of Nations blockade there would be no neutrals. All the world would concentrate for so long as need be on ostracising the nation that set itself against the common will of the world.

It may be objected that after the experience of this war the blockade must be regarded as too barbarous a weapon for civilised nations to use. That argument is not really valid. In the first place, it took months or years for the blockade to reduce Germany to physical distress, and it is reasonable to anticipate that in a League blockade the spectacle of the rest of the world carrying on its commercial pursuits would act as an effective suasion to the nation blockaded long before any question of physical suffering had begun to arise. But there is a more decisive consideration than that. One of the greatest assets of the League of Nations would be the accurate information its statistical and economic sections would possess on the actual and potential resources of

any individual country. It would be a perfectly simple matter to allocate to any blockaded nation a bare subsistence ration, and no more than a subsistence ration, without seriously impairing the pressure loss of trade and the breach of all communications and external intercourse would effect.

But the economic power of the League of Nations promises to figure far more largely in promoting the welfare than in repressing the ambitions or obduracies of nations. Something of what a world organisation for the purchase and distribution of necessities, and the consequent stabilisation of price and supply, can effect has been seen in the operations of the Supreme Economic Council in the later months of the armistice period. That Council has developed from an Allied into an International body, and it is inevitable that it should become rapidly, if not immediately, an integral part of the League of Nations. The field is already more than ripe for its labours. The outstanding feature of the European situation to-day is famine. That is the direct outcome of war and blockade, but it may be years before the situation is normal. There is too much truth in the representations of Count Brockdorff-Rantzau to M. Clemenceau, and of Dr. Renner at St. Germain, to justify the hope of any return to conditions of sufficiency in Germany and Austria. That is as true of coal and other raw materials as of the prime necessity of corn. Unless the world as a whole is content to stand by and