League of Nations
IF a survey be taken of the various schemes for a league of nations, including the scheme actually embodied in the existing Covenant, three assumptions will be found uniformly present. By most propagandists they are treated as self-evident.The first assumption is that the necessary instruments through which the nations must establish their League are their existing political governments. It is as politically organized units that the nations enter the League, whose joint action then becomes political action, analogous to that of each of the units. In other words the governments, or their representatives, are the efficient agents to establish the League in the first instance, and to work it in the second. The possibility of acting through any other medium, for example the Church, is not contemplated, and in these days would probably be dismissed as absurd, though it would have seemed wholly reasonable in the fourteenth century. On what other terms, indeed, is the League possible? Can we conceive of our own, or of any nation, entering the League, and operating within it, except by the act of its political government, signed, sealed, and delivered by the political chiefs for the time being? Should we not feel a shock of surprise i . . .
That a freely elected government represents something significant cannot be disputed. A mere combination of political machinery, effected by joining up the official governments of all nations, would obviously be a useless contrivance. It may be noted in passing that this phenomenon of the double face is to be found only where civilization has taken a distinctly political or nationalistic turn. The beer is not turned into water by being poured into a common vat. Short of united action on the higher level of self-renunciation and heroic endeavor, of which the nations showed themselves capable in making the war, and their governments incapable in making the peace, nothing will be found adequate to the deliverance of civilization from the present entanglements. A league of nations is one thing. It is easy to construct imaginary entities bearing the names of the Great Powers -- 'America,' 'England,' 'France,' and the rest; to picture them as cured of their combative nationalism, and then to draw up schemes on paper (or in fancy) in which these powers are represented as acting together in the renunciation of their former practices, and in preventing their imitation by others. To them, indeed, we are debtors for many a wonderful escape from the peril of the moment; but in their total action through the years their arts increase the tension of the world, and tie the very knots which the sword has subsequently to cut. To extricate the fortunes of mankind from conditions so unstable will prove no easy task, for they are interwoven with the structure of the modern world -- part, almost, of its substance. In underestimating the difficulty, we postpone the fulfillment. Souls, and national souls most of all, are extremely difficult things to 'represent. There is a notion abroad that, if a people puts in enough votes at one end of the democratic machine, its soul will come out at the other. They negotiate on the field where their interests have least in common, and their relationships have become most dangerous. When, for example, the stipulation is laid down that the governments (or the 'States') shall agree to restrain their subjects from taking such or such internationally offensive action, it is invariably taken for granted that the governments in question have sufficient control over their subjects to ensure their submission to the stipulated restraint. A league of governments might be adequate for the purpose, were it possible so to arrange things that the combining units should always represent the best qualities in the nations behind them -- their generosity, their chivalry, their unselfishness, their willingness to serve mankind; for it is obviously on the side of these qualities only that nations will ever unite in work for the common good.
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Acceptance Essays
