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 if the proposal were made to entrust the business to the Archbishop of Canterbury rather than to the Prime Minister? There would have been no surprise at this in the fourteenth century, when the Church was an acknowledged bond of union among mankind.
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             The second assumption is that the various contracting governments are all equally competent to carry out the obligations to which, under the terms of the League, they bind themselves or their subjects. When, for example, the stipulation is laid down that the governments (or the 'States') shall agree to restrain their subjects from taking suc...