ambassadors of France and Russia to attend the Diet was admitted. This ingerence of foreign Powers, as Treitschke scornfully points out, was supported by the lesser German States in their distrust and suspicion of Prussia and Austria. But it was supported also for more ideal reasons. The historian Heeren hailed the Confederation as the nucleus of a European League of Peace.* The statistician, Professor August F. W. Crome of Giessen, proclaimed that the interests of Europe and of Germany would only be secured when every European Power should have a right to a voice in the German Federal Diet.†

This view, however offensive to German patriotic sentiment, seems to have had some justification and support in the acknowledged objects of the Confederation, which was, within its limits, of the nature of a league to enforce peace. Article LXIII. of the Federal Act ran as follows:

'The Confederated Courts engage . . . not to make war against each other, on any pretext, nor to pursue their differences by force of arms; but to submit them to the Diet, which will attempt a mediation by means of a Commission. If this should not succeed, and a juridical sentence become necessary, recourse shall be had to a well-organised Arbitral Court (Austragalinstanz), to the decision of which the contending parties are to submit without appeal.'

In the Federal Act itself no provision was made for enforcing such decisions: this was among the constitutional questions left for future settlement by the Diet. The result is instructive. In view of the mutual jealousy of Prussia and Austria, and of the distrust inspired in the lesser States by both, it was three years before even a provisional arrangement could be made as to the organisation of the common army and the quotas to be supplied by each State; and provisional the arrangement remained to the end. How feeble was the sanction of federal execution,' unless backed by the weight of one or other of the Great Powers, the sequel was to prove ;

Der Deutsche Bund in seinem Verhältniss zu dem Europäischen Staatensystem.

+ Ueber Deutschland's und Europa's Staats- und NationalInteresse bei und nach dem Congresse zu Wien. (1814, 2nd ed. 1817.)

VOL. 226, NO. 461,

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and for the Great Powers, from the first, the Confederation and its organs were only valuable in so far as they could be made to subserve their own particular ends.

It is unnecessary for our purpose even to outline the history of the German Confederation during the fifty years of its existence. Stated briefly, it was that of the struggle of Austria and Prussia for supremacy, and of the lesser States to maintain their independence by holding the balance between them. So far as the influence of the two Great Powers in the Diet was concerned, the struggle was brief enough. The indiscreet zeal of the Prussian envoy Hänlein, by a premature revelation of Prussia's claim to military hegemony at least in the North, gave Metternich the opportunity he desired for winning over the lesser States to the interests of Austria. Secure of their votes, Austria became supreme in the Diet, and used her supremacy to prevent its ever becoming anything more than a congress of envoys, powerless to come to any decision of the least importance without special instructions from their Courts, and therefore in practice powerless to come to any decision at all. The Federal Diet,' wrote Treitschke, had ' already the reputation, which it preserved till its dissolution, of being the great exchange for the subaltern diplomatic gossip of Europe.'

As for Prussia, she virtually ceased to take any interest in the proceedings of the Diet, which was useful to her mainly as a diplomatic-military observation post. Humboldt, who succeeded Hänlein at Frankfurt, reported that nothing was to be expected of the Diet, and that institutions for the common good could only be established by means of separate intercourse with the individual German States themselves. The policy of Prussia, he said, must aim at weaving these neighbour States more or less into the web of her own political and administrative system. In these words,' comments Treitschke, lay the whole programme of the Prussian 'Bundespolitik.' The hegemony of Prussia was thus prepared by the Zollverein, which bound the German States to her by ties of self-interest; it was consummated by Bismarck's policy of blood and iron, and under the hammer-blows of Prussia the Confederation of Sovereign States was welded into a national unity more self-conscious and self-assertive than any that the world had yet seen. The net result, then, of the

experiment in the organisation of peace inaugurated by the Bundesakte was that it disguised from the world, behind the 'camouflage of an international system, the preparations of Prussia for continuing her advance towards the mastery of Europe.

To fear a similar result from a more general system may seem to many the very reductio ad absurdum of alarmist pessimism. It may be admitted at once, indeed, that the analogy between the German Confederation and any proposed world-federation is not perfect, and that the strong development of nationalism in Germany paved the way for the domination of the State in which this national consciousness seemed to be most effectively embodied. In a world-confederation it is improbable that any one Power would be able to profit by any such general sentiment. But at the outset, and indeed for many years, there was really no strong unitary sentiment in Germany, and the factors which from the first vitiated the federal experiment were precisely those which are recognised as most difficult of adjustment in wider schemes of international federation. Of these the most important was the want of proportion between the constitutional powers of the constituent States of the Confederation and their actual force and power. By Article LV. of the Bundesakte the members of the Confederation were declared to be, as such, equal in respect of their rights, and for the purposes of the normal business of the Diet this equality was all but absolutely recognised. In the plenary assembly, which alone was competent to make or to alter fundamental laws,' the distribution of the votes was, to quote the language of the Act, 'calculated according to the respective extent of the individual States. Of such a calculation there is, however, little enough sign, and actually the voting power of Austria or of Prussia was only four times that of the tiny principality of Liechtenstein. Under these circumstances it was inevitable that the Great Powers would rely on their separate force for the attainment of their ends, and use or neglect the organs of the Confederation as it might suit their convenience of the moment.

If this happened in the case of the German Confederation, which had at least some sort of common national and cultural tradition, it would be far more likely to happen in so artificial a construction as an organised general league of nations.

The stability of such a league, in the absence of a common group-consciousness, would depend on the establishment within it of a balance of power based on the actual force of its constituent States, and of a mechanism for the readjustment of this balance from time to time without violent conflict. The problem of devising such a mechanism has exercised the minds of some of the supporters of the idea of a universal union. Of the suggested solutions that of Signor Eugenio Rignano, editor of the international reviewScientia,' is for our present purposes of particular interest. He takes as his model the Federal Council of the present German Empire, in which Prussia now has twenty votes, Bavaria six, and the other States in proportion, down to the small principalities and city republics, which have one each. This represents an attempt to approximate the voting power of the States to the actual force at their command, and so to avoid the most crying anomaly of the old German federal system. To apply this principle to the Federal Council of Europe' would, Signor Rignano admits, not be easy. In judging the effective power of States many factors have to be considered besides population, and since these factors (e.g. wealth) fluctuate, the balance would have from time to time to be adjusted. Since, however, if the principle of representation were once established, this readjustment would be a purely technical operation, Signor Rignano thinks that it might be safely left to the Hague Tribunal.

This may serve as an example of proposals which, however ingenious, do not carry conviction. As for the German Bundesrat, the moral to be drawn from its character is hardly that which Signor Rignano teaches; for, whatever the attempted balance of power in its formal constitution, in effect its dominant factor is the immense preponderance of Prussia. It is true that Prussia commands only twenty votes out of fifty-eight; but, as Signor Rignano himself points out, she has only to secure ten additional votes to obtain a majority. In the absence of any other Power in the Confederation comparable to her in force and influence, this is no

See, eg, the Avant-projet d'un traité général relatif au règlement pacifique des conflits internationaux, par la Commission néerlandais d'Etudes,' in Recueil de Rapports,' p. 241.

difficult matter; it would be otherwise were another Great Power, Austria for instance, included in the Confederation and competing with her for supreme influence within it. The establishment of an approximate balance of power in the central organ of the world-federation might modify, but would not remove, the objections to it as an effective instrument for securing international harmony.

It is doubtless the extreme difficulty of solving this particular problem that accounts for the fact that the programmes of peace most widely accepted avoid all mention of it. In commenting on the first article of the programme of the League to Enforce Peace, Sir Frederick Pollock commends this reticence. The constitution of the Tribunal,' he says, 'is wisely not specified in detail.' The wisdom is indeed obvious, if the object of the League be merely to obtain the general endorsement of a principle by disguising its dangerous implications. For the question of the constitution of the Arbitral Tribunal and of the Council of Conciliation is, as a matter of fact, the most important and critical which the framers of an international system have to face. The decisions of these bodies would carry enormous weight, even were they backed by no more than a moral sanction. Were they to be enforced by the collective power of the League, they would be acts of sovereign authority, and the organs of the League would constitute an international government in a true sense. It has been recognised by serious and not unsympathetic students of pacifist programmes that it is all but impossible to set up a tribunal to try international causes that shall in itself inspire complete confidence; the factor of national bias is too persistent. Nor does the question of the possible corruption of the judges seem ever to have been raised; and yet the possibility of such corruption in an international court, consisting of somewhat heterogeneous elements, has to be considered. If the court were really to receive effective general powers, there would practically be no limit to the amounts it might be worth while for a litigant Power to offer in order to secure a favourable decision. This being so, the question of the measure of representation to be given to each of the constituent States in the governing organs of the League becomes of vital importance. Is this representation to be based on the actual size and power of the nations, or on the