Group,' published in the ' Manchester Guardian' of 12th April, and second the programme of the League of Nations Society. The first of these is in the main but an elaboration of the programme of the League to Enforce Peace, e.g. in defining the competence and functions of the Council of Conciliation. But it introduces two new principles of the most vital importance. In the case of justiciable disputes the obligation to submit them to an arbitral tribunal is made absolute, the 'limitations ' of treaties' being done away with, including the reservation of cases affecting 'honour and vital interests.' The 20th article provides for the eventual coercion by the League of any Power which shall fail to accept and give effect to the recommenda'tions contained in any report of the Council or in the award ' of the Arbitral Tribunal.'

The language of the programme of the League of Nations Society is more obscure, but it seems to uphold the same principle. There is an obligation on the signatory Powers not only to submit all justiciable disputes to the Hague Court of Arbitration or some other Judicial Tribunal, but also to accept their decisions as final and to carry them into effect. The third article provides' that the States who are members of the League shall unite in any action necessary for ensuring that every member shall abide by the terms of the Treaty.' This should mean not only that the obligation to submit justiciable disputes to arbitration is to be enforced, but that the decisions of the Arbitral Tribunal are to be backed by the collective power of the League. Unlike the programme of the 'British Group,' on the other hand, enforcement of the recommendations of the Council of Conciliation does not seem to be contemplated.

Other programmes go yet further, and in order to make the sanction of force effective propose the establishment of an international Executive and a standing international police force. These, according to Sir Frederick Pollock, are essential ' if a league to enforce peace is to be in a position to exercise 'timely and effective force at need and to nip offences in the 'bud.' He dismisses the contention that such a central organisation would merely be a revival of the Holy Alliance in

*The American Plan for Enforcing Peace,' Atlantic Monthly, May 1917, p. 653.

another form, but without giving any reasons why the process of nipping offences in the bud should be less dangerous to national liberties now than it was a hundred years ago. Clearly, it will remain a matter of opinion where the seeds of offences lie and at what particular stage of germination they are to be nipped. Sir Frederick Pollock does not shrink from the infringement on national sovereignty which the logical development of an international system would imply; and, certain premisses being granted, he is doubtless right. The main premiss he lays down with characteristic clearness in discussing the formation of an international general staff. Obviously,' he says, there are plenty of difficulties in this operation; but 'it seems no less obvious that they are of a kind that can be overcome if there is a general will to overcome them; and if there is not such a general will there cannot be any league ' at all.'

Here at last we come to the root of the whole matter. The groups into which men form themselves are effective only in so far as they grow out of a common need and are directed by a common will. This is as true of States as of trade unions, and of federations as of States. Moreover, when a body politic, whether State or federation of States, is made up of many groups, it is essential to its stability and permanence that the interests of its constituent groups should be subordinated, in all matters affecting the commonwealth, to those of the whole. There must, in brief, be a general will exercising in the last resort that absolute dominion which, as Sir William Temple pointed out long ago,* is of the very essence even of democratic government. Without this the body politic will simply break up into its elements-a truth made disquietingly clear by the developments of the Russian revolution. In view of the efforts, to which allusion has been made, to depose the State from its pre-eminence, this is a truth that needs re-statement. And if it be true of the State, it is true also of federations of States, and will be true of the universal union' if and when it comes into existence. The organised major force of mankind' is either an empty phrase, or it implies the effective supremacy or sovereignty of a general will over the wills of all the national and other groups within the world league.

Essay upon the Origin and Nature of Government, 1672.

This is a consummation which from the point of view of people with an international mind' is devoutly to be wished. The 'Nation,' which in England is perhaps the most distinguished representative of this mind, sees, or affects to see, the main obstacle to a world-federation in the clamour of some special interests for preferential treatment in Africa or Asia, or some misunderstanding of a phrase, like Freedom of the 'Seas.' But the obstacles to any organised international system, as even Mr. Bertrand Russell clearly sees and admits, lie very much deeper than any mere clamour of particular economic interests of individual persons or groups of persons within the nations. They lie in the fact of the existence of the nations themselves as they have developed during the last hundred years-that is to say, as intensely self-conscious groups bound together not only by carefully cultivated separate traditions, customs, and habits of life, but by jealously guarded economic interests. We may deplore this segregation, the fruits of which are only too visible in the present war; but it exists, and though the war may do much in the way of regrouping and of modifying the sentiments and relations of certain nations to each other in the direction of amity and co-operation, it will still more certainly intensify old antagonisms between the nations now opposed to each other. This is admitted by Mr. Bertrand Russell, who does not share the illusion of his brother pacifists that a system of international government can be presented ready-made to the peace congress with any hope that it will be effective, even if it be accepted. We have 'still,' he says, 'a very long road to travel before we arrive at 'the establishment of an international authority'; and the very first step in this long road is that people must rid themselves of their group morality '—that is to say, of that loyalty to their own nation which, for nine citizens out of ten,' carries a higher obligation than any considerations of abstract justice or the good of humanity.* The cosmopolitan ideal is thus conceived as the logical culmination of the long process by which the groups formed by men for certain common ends are again grouped in larger sovereign aggregations until, with the final realisation that the ties uniting human interests as a whole

National Independence and Internationalism,' Atlantic Monthly, May 1917.

are far more numerous than those which divide them, one group is made supreme over all.

The ideal that underlies this conception-that of the world as it ought to be, and perhaps might be but for the fault and 'corruption of the nature of every man'-must appeal to all people of good will. But it has very little to do with a League of Nations considered as an expedient of practical politics. The amount of mutual understanding, and of a general will to maintain peace, which Mr. Russell predicates as necessary for his international authority' would, in fact, make such an authority unnecessary. All that would be needed would be a purified diplomacy to conduct the necessary friendly business between harmonious groups inspired by community of sentiment and interests. The immediate question is, rather, how to preserve the peace in a world of narrow sympathies and conflicting interests, of slow or violent economic and social shrinkages and expansions, of racial, cultural, and religious antipathies-in short, of the world as it is and is likely yet to be. Would in such a world a League of Nations, with a central executive and an international police force, be a guarantee of peace? Would it indeed-to quote Mr. Asquith-mean the substitution for the reign of force, for the clash of competing 'ambition, and the groupings and alliances of a precarious equipoise, of a real European partnership?' To think so is to suppose that it will be possible to establish an international system in which the harmony of the general will is more pronounced than it is even in national States; for in these, too, it is force that in the last resort gives dominion; in these, too, there is a clash of competing ambitions; in these, too, there are groupings and alliances of organised interests and parties, and an equipoise which, so long as there is liberty and movement, must always be precarious.

Nor, if we descend from the regions of abstract speculation to the real world of politics, is it by any means clear that the formation of a general union would be the logical culmination of the processes that have led to the grouping of men in communities and junctions of communities. As Mr. Hammond has shown, the almost universal process in such groupings has been that of war and conquest. He gives, indeed, five examples of voluntary junctions of equal communities'-namely, in ancient Achaia, medieval Switzerland, the Dutch Netherlands,

North America, and Switzerland in 1848. But even of these he notes that in all cases before their junction they had been precluded by their position from conquering one another, i.e. ' either by geographical obstacles or, in the case of America and the Netherlands, by subjection to powerful foreign rulers who effectually prevented them from contending with one ' another.' *

Moreover, whatever causes may have brought about the formation of particular federal groups, their cohesion, in so far as it has been due to a common will, has always been the result of a sense of particular interests as opposed to those of other groups, and of the pressure exercised by these other groups. The league of the Swiss Cantons was originally formed against the oppressions and aggressions of German feudal neighbours ; it was enlarged and cemented by successful resistance to the Imperial ambitions of the House of Austria. Defence against Spain, and later against France, was a sufficient bond of union in the loosely-knit confederation of the United Netherlands. The thirteen original States of the American Union began by quarrelling among themselves to the point of war; and if, fourteen years after the Declaration of Independence, the Federal Constitution of the United States was at last ratified by all of them, this was because the interest of every State demanded that the central government should be strong enough to ensure the federated States against 'foreign enemies.' † Instances might be multiplied; but these will suffice to show that bodies politic, whether States or confederations of States, whatever the original sympathies which drew them together, are essentially combinations for the assertion and defence of their common interests against other competing groups outside.

There are examples enough in history to show that when this competition ceases to be keenly felt the group tends to lose its sense of community, freer play being given to the centrifugal forces of the conflicting interests within it. This is conspicuously true, of course, of that loosest of all forms of political group-the international alliance; and it is true in varying degrees of all others. In the days when Great Britain held the undisputed mastery of the seas, and some† Ibid. p. 487.

• Bodies Politic, p. 469.