Hon. Litt.D.; Fellow of All Souls' College, Oxford; F.B.A.; Professor of
English History in the University of London; Chairman of the Institute
of Historical Research.
Professor Pollard said:--The usual alternative to the League of Nations,
put forward as a means of averting war by those who desire or profess to
desire permanent peace, but dislike or distrust the League of Nations,
is what they call the Balance of Power. It is a familiar phrase; but the
thing for which the words are supposed to stand, has, if it can save us
from war, so stupendous a virtue that it is worth while inquiring what
it means, if it has any meaning at all. For words are not the same as
things, and the more a phrase is used the less it tends to mean: verbal
currency, like the coinage, gets worn with use until in time it has to
be called in as bad. The time has come to recall the Balance of Power as
a phrase that has completely lost the value it possessed when originally
it was coined.
Recent events have made an examination of the doctrine of the Balance of
Power a matter of some urgency. The Allies who won the war concluded a
pact to preserve the peace, but in that pact they have not yet been able
to include Germany or Russia or the United States, three Powers which
are, potentially at any rate, among the greatest in the world. So, some
fifty years ago, Bismarck, who won three wars in the mid-Victorian age,
set himself to build up a pact of peace. But his Triple Alliance was not
only used to restrain, but abused to repress, the excluded Powers; and
that abuse of a pact of peace drove the excluded Powers, France and
Russia, into each other's arms. There resulted the Balance of Power
which produced the war we have barely survived. And hardly was the great
war fought and won than we saw the wheel beginning to revolve once more.
The excluded Powers, repressed or merely restrained, began to draw
together; others than Turkey might gravitate in the same direction,
while the United States stands in splendid isolation as much aloof as we
were from the Triple Alliance and the Dual Entente a generation ago.
Another Balance of Power loomed on the horizon. "Let us face the facts,"
declared the _Morning Post_ on 22nd April last, "we are back again to
the doctrine of the Balance of Power, whatever the visionaries and the
blind may say." I propose to deal, as faithfully as I can in the time at
my disposal, with the visionaries and the blind--when we have discovered
who they are.
By "visionaries" I suppose the _Morning Post_ means those who believe in
the League of Nations; and by the "blind" I suppose it means them, too,
though usually a distinction is drawn between those who see too much and
those who cannot see at all. Nor need we determine whether those who
believe in the Balance of Power belong rather to the visionaries or to
the blind. A man may be receiving less than his due when he is asked
whether he is a knave or a fool, because the form of the question seems
to preclude the proper answer, which may be "both." Believers in the
Balance of Power are visionaries if they see in it a guarantee of peace,
and blind if they fail to perceive that it naturally and almost
inevitably leads to war. The fundamental antithesis is between the
Balance of Power and the League of Nations.