Mr. WELLS has also written the following novels:
LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAM
KIPPS
MR. POLLY
THE WHEELS OF CHANCE
THE NEW MACHIAVELLI
ANN VERONICA
TONO BUNGAY
MARRIAGE
BEALBY
THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS
THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HARMAN
THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT
MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH
THE SOUL OF A BISHOP
The following fantastic and imaginative romances:
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS
THE TIME MACHINE
THE WONDERFUL VISIT
THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU
THE SEA LADY
THE SLEEPER AWAKES
THE FOOD OF THE GODS
THE WAR IN THE AIR
THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON
IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET
THE WORLD SET FREE
And numerous Short Stories now collected in One
Volume under the title of
THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND
A Series of books upon Social, Religious and Political questions:
ANTICIPATIONS (1900)
MANKIND IN THE MAKING
FIRST AND LAST THINGS
NEW WORLDS FOR OLD
A MODERN UTOPIA
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS AT THE WORLD
WHAT IS COMING?
WAR AND THE FUTURE
GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
And two little books about children's play, called:
FLOOR GAMES and LITTLE WARS
IN THE FOURTH YEAR
ANTICIPATIONS OF A WORLD PEACE
BY
H. G. WELLS
AUTHOR OF "MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH,"
"THE WAR AND THE FUTURE," "WHAT IS COMING?" "THE WAR THAT WILL
END WAR," "THE WORLD SET FREE," "IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET," AND
"A MODERN UTOPIA"
1918
PREFACE
In the latter half of 1914 a few of us were writing that this war was a
"War of Ideas." A phrase, "The War to end War," got into circulation,
amidst much sceptical comment. It was a phrase powerful enough to sway
many men, essentially pacifists, towards taking an active part in the
war against German imperialism, but it was a phrase whose chief content
was its aspiration. People were already writing in those early days of
disarmament and of the abolition of the armament industry throughout the
world; they realized fully the element of industrial belligerency behind
the shining armour of imperialism, and they denounced the "Krupp-Kaiser"
alliance. But against such writing and such thought we had to count, in
those days, great and powerful realities. Even to those who expressed
these ideas there lay visibly upon them the shadow of impracticability;
they were very "advanced" ideas in 1914, very Utopian. Against them was
an unbroken mass of mental habit and public tradition. While we talked
of this "war to end war," the diplomatists of the Powers allied against
Germany were busily spinning a disastrous web of greedy secret treaties,
were answering aggression by schemes of aggression, were seeing in the
treacherous violence of Germany only the justification for
countervailing evil acts. To them it was only another war for
"ascendancy." That was three years and a half ago, and since then this
"war of ideas" has gone on to a phase few of us had dared hope for in
those opening days. The Russian revolution put a match to that pile of
secret treaties and indeed to all the imperialist plans of the Allies;
in the end it will burn them all. The greatest of the Western Allies is
now the United States of America, and the Americans have come into this
war simply for an idea. Three years and a half ago a few of us were
saying this was a war against the idea of imperialism, not German
imperialism merely, but British and French and Russian imperialism, and
we were saying this not because it was so, but because we hoped to see
it become so. To-day we can say so, because now it is so.
In those days, moreover, we said this is the "war to end war," and we
still did not know clearly how. We thought in terms of treaties and
alliances. It is largely the detachment and practical genius of the
great English-speaking nation across the Atlantic that has carried the
world on beyond and replaced that phrase by the phrase, "The League of
Nations," a phrase suggesting plainly the organization of a sufficient
instrument by which war may be ended for ever. In 1913 talk of a World
League of Nations would have seemed, to the extremest pitch, "Utopian."
To-day the project has an air not only of being so practicable, but of
being so urgent and necessary and so manifestly the sane thing before
mankind that not to be busied upon it, not to be making it more widely
known and better understood, not to be working out its problems and
bringing it about, is to be living outside of the contemporary life of
the world. For a book upon any other subject at the present time some
apology may be necessary, but a book upon this subject is as natural a
thing to produce now as a pair of skates in winter when the ice begins
to bear.
All we writers find ourselves engaged perforce in some part or other of
a world-wide propaganda of this the most creative and hopeful of
political ideas that has ever dawned upon the consciousness of mankind.
With no concerted plan we feel called upon to serve it. And in no
connection would one so like to think oneself un-original as in this
connection. It would be a dismaying thing to realize that one were
writing anything here which was not the possible thought of great
multitudes of other people, and capable of becoming the common thought
of mankind. One writes in such a book as this not to express oneself but
to swell a chorus. The idea of the League of Nations is so great a one
that it may well override the pretensions and command the allegiance of
kings; much more does it claim the self-subjugation of the journalistic
writer. Our innumerable books upon this great edifice of a World Peace
do not constitute a scramble for attention, but an attempt to express in
every variety of phrase and aspect this one system of ideas which now
possesses us all. In the same way the elementary facts and ideas of the
science of chemistry might conceivably be put completely and fully into
one text-book, but, as a matter of fact, it is far more convenient to
tell that same story over in a thousand different forms, in a text-book
for boys here, for a different sort or class of boy there, for adult
students, for reference, for people expert in mathematics, for people
unused to the scientific method, and so on. For the last year the writer
has been doing what he can--and a number of other writers have been
doing what they can--to bring about a united declaration of all the
Atlantic Allies in favour of a League of Nations, and to define the
necessary nature of that League. He has, in the course of this work,
written a series of articles upon the League and upon _the necessary
sacrifices of preconceptions_ that the idea involves in the London
press. He has also been trying to clear his own mind upon the real
meaning of that ambiguous word "democracy," for which the League is to
make the world "safe." The bulk of this book is made up of these
discussions. For a very considerable number of readers, it may be well
to admit here, it can have no possible interest; they will have come at
these questions themselves from different angles and they will have long
since got to their own conclusions. But there may be others whose angle
of approach may be similar to the writer's, who may have asked some or
most of the questions he has had to ask, and who may be actively
interested in the answers and the working out of the answers he has made
to these questions. For them this book is printed.
H. G. WELLS.
_May_, 1918.
It is a dangerous thing to recommend specific books out of so large and
various a literature as the "League of Nations" idea has already
produced, but the reader who wishes to reach beyond the range of this
book, or who does not like its tone and method, will probably find
something to meet his needs and tastes better in Marburg's "League of
Nations," a straightforward account of the American side of the movement
by the former United States Minister in Belgium, on the one hand, or in
the concluding parts of Mr. Fayle's "Great Settlement" (1915), a frankly
sceptical treatment from the British Imperialist point of view, on the
other. An illuminating discussion, advocating peace treaties rather than
a league, is Sir Walter Phillimore's "Three Centuries of Treaties." Two
excellent books from America, that chance to be on my table, are Mr.
Goldsmith's "League to Enforce Peace" and "A World in Ferment" by
President Nicholas Murray Butler. Mater's "Société des Nations" (Didier)
is an able presentation of a French point of view. Brailsford's "A
League of Nations" is already a classic of the movement in England, and
a very full and thorough book; and Hobson's "Towards International
Government" is a very sympathetic contribution from the English liberal
left; but the reader must understand that these two writers seem
disposed to welcome a peace with an unrevolutionized Germany, an idea to
which, in common with most British people, I am bitterly opposed.
Walsh's "World Rebuilt" is a good exhortation, and Mugge's "Parliament
of Man" is fresh and sane and able. The omnivorous reader will find good
sense and quaint English in Judge Mejdell's "_Jus Gentium_," published
in English by Olsen's of Christiania. There is an active League of
Nations Society in Dublin, as well as the London and Washington ones,
publishing pamphlets and conducting propaganda. All these books and
pamphlets I have named happen to lie upon my study table as I write, but
I have made no systematic effort to get together literature upon the
subject, and probably there are just as many books as good of which I
have never even heard. There must, I am sure, be statements of the
League of Nations idea forthcoming from various religious standpoints,
but I do not know any sufficiently well to recommend them. It is
incredible that neither the Roman Catholic Church, the English Episcopal
Church, nor any Nonconformist body has made any effort as an
organization to forward this essentially religious end of peace on
earth. And also there must be German writings upon this same topic. I
mention these diverse sources not in order to present a bibliography,
but because I should be sorry to have the reader think that this little
book pretends to state _the_ case rather than _a_ case for the League of
Nations.
CONTENTS
I. THE WAY TO CONCRETE REALIZATION
II. THE LEAGUE MUST BE REPRESENTATIVE
III. THE NECESSARY POWERS OF THE LEAGUE
IV. THE LABOUR VIEW OF MIDDLE AFRICA
V. GETTING THE LEAGUE IDEA CLEAR IN RELATION TO
IMPERIALISM
VI. THE WAR AIMS OF THE WESTERN ALLIES COMPACTLY STATED
VII. THE FUTURE OF MONARCHY
VIII. THE PLAIN NECESSITY FOR A LEAGUE
IX. DEMOCRACY
X. THE RECENT STRUGGLE FOR PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION
IN GREAT BRITAIN
XI. THE STUDY AND PROPAGANDA OF DEMOCRACY
IN THE FOURTH YEAR
THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS
I
THE WAY TO CONCRETE REALIZATION
More and more frequently does one hear this phrase, The League of
Nations, used to express the outline idea of the new world that will
come out of the war. There can be no doubt that the phrase has taken
hold of the imaginations of great multitudes of people: it is one of
those creative phrases that may alter the whole destiny of mankind. But
as yet it is still a very vague phrase, a cloudy promise of peace. I
make no apology therefore, for casting my discussion of it in the most
general terms. The idea is the idea of united human effort to put an end
to wars; the first practical question, that must precede all others, is
how far can we hope to get to a concrete realization of that?
But first let me note the fourth word in the second title of this book.
The common talk is of a "League of Nations" merely. I follow the man who
is, more than any other man, the leader of English political thought
throughout the world to-day, President Wilson, in inserting that
significant adjective "Free." We western allies know to-day what is
involved in making bargains with governments that do not stand for their
peoples; we have had all our Russian deal, for example, repudiated and
thrust back upon our hands; and it is clearly in his mind, as it must be
in the minds of all reasonable men, that no mere "scrap of paper," with
just a monarch's or a chancellor's endorsement, is a good enough earnest
of fellowship in the league. It cannot be a diplomatist's league. The
League of Nations, if it is to have any such effect as people seem to
hope from it, must be, in the first place, "understanded of the people."
It must be supported by sustained, deliberate explanation, and by
teaching in school and church and press of the whole mass of all the
peoples concerned. I underline the adjective "Free" here to set aside,
once for all, any possible misconception that this modern idea of a
League of Nations has any affinity to that Holy Alliance of the
diplomatists, which set out to keep the peace of Europe so disastrously
a century ago.
Later I will discuss the powers of the League. But before I come to
that I would like to say a little about the more general question of its
nature and authority. What sort of gathering will embody it? The
suggestions made range from a mere advisory body, rather like the Hague
convention, which will merely pronounce on the rights and wrongs of any
international conflict, to the idea of a sort of Super-State, a
Parliament of Mankind, a "Super National" Authority, practically taking
over the sovereignty of the existing states and empires of the world.
Most people's ideas of the League fall between these extremes. They want
the League to be something more than an ethical court, they want a
League that will act, but on the other hand they shrink from any loss of
"our independence." There seems to be a conflict here. There is a real
need for many people to tidy up their ideas at this point. We cannot
have our cake and eat it. If association is worth while, there must be
some sacrifice of freedom to association. As a very distinguished
colonial representative said to me the other day: "Here we are talking
of the freedom of small nations and the 'self-determination' of peoples,
and at the same time of the Council of the League of Nations and all
sorts of international controls. Which do we want?"
The answer, I think, is "Both." It is a matter of more or less, of
getting the best thing at the cost of the second-best. We may want to
relax an old association in order to make a newer and wider one. It is
quite understandable that peoples aware of a distinctive national
character and involved in some big existing political complex, should
wish to disentangle themselves from one group of associations in order
to enter more effectively into another, a greater, and more satisfactory
one. The Finn or the Pole, who has hitherto been a rather reluctant
member of the synthesis of the Russian empire, may well wish to end that
attachment in order to become a free member of a worldwide brotherhood.
The desire for free arrangement is not a desire for chaos. There is such
a thing as untying your parcels in order to pack them better, and I do
not see myself how we can possibly contemplate a great league of freedom
and reason in the world without a considerable amount of such
preliminary dissolution.
It happens, very fortunately for the world, that a century and a quarter
ago thirteen various and very jealous states worked out the problem of a
Union, and became--after an enormous, exhausting wrangle--the United
States of America. Now the way they solved their riddle was by
delegating and giving over jealously specified sovereign powers and
doing all that was possible to retain the residuum. They remained
essentially sovereign states. New York, Virginia, Massachusetts, for
example, remained legally independent. The practical fusion of these
peoples into one people outran the legal bargain. It was only after long
years of discussion that the point was conceded; it was indeed only
after the Civil War that the implications were fully established, that
there resided a sovereignty in the American people as a whole, as
distinguished from the peoples of the several states. This is a
precedent that every one who talks about the League of Nations should
bear in mind. These states set up a congress and president in Washington
with strictly delegated powers. That congress and president they
delegated to look after certain common interests, to deal with
interstate trade, to deal with foreign powers, to maintain a supreme
court of law. Everything else--education, militia, powers of life and
death--the states retained for themselves. To this day, for instance,
the federal courts and the federal officials have no power to interfere
to protect the lives or property of aliens in any part of the union
outside the district of Columbia. The state governments still see to
that. The federal government has the legal right perhaps to intervene,
but it is still chary of such intervention. And these states of the
American Union were at the outset so independent-spirited that they
would not even adopt a common name. To this day they have no common
name. We have to call them Americans, which is a ridiculous name when we
consider that Canada, Mexico, Peru, Brazil are all of them also in
America. Or else we have to call them Virginians, Californians, New
Englanders, and so forth. Their legal and nominal separateness weighs
nothing against the real fusion that their great league has now made
possible.
Now, that clearly is a precedent of the utmost value in our schemes for
this council of the League of Nations. We must begin by delegating, as
the States began by delegating. It is a far cry to the time when we
shall talk and think of the Sovereign People of the Earth. That council
of the League of Nations will be a tie as strong, we hope, but certainly
not so close and multiplex as the early tie of the States at Washington.
It will begin by having certain delegated powers and no others. It will
be an "_ad hoc_" body. Later its powers may grow as mankind becomes
accustomed to it. But at first it will have, directly or mediately, all
the powers that seem necessary to restrain the world from war--and
unless I know nothing of patriotic jealousies it will have not a scrap
of power more. The danger is much more that its powers will be
insufficient than that they will be excessive. Of that later. What I
want to discuss here now is the constitution of this delegated body. I
want to discuss that first in order to set aside out of the discussion
certain fantastic notions that will otherwise get very seriously in our
way. Fantastic as they are, they have played a large part in reducing
the Hague Tribunal to an ineffective squeak amidst the thunders of this
war.
A number of gentlemen scheming out world unity in studies have begun
their proposals with the simple suggestion that each sovereign power
should send one member to the projected parliament of mankind. This has
a pleasant democratic air; one sovereign state, one vote. Now let us run
over a list of sovereign states and see to what this leads us. We find
our list includes the British Empire, with a population of four hundred
millions, of which probably half can read and write some language or
other; Bogota with a population of a million, mostly poets; Hayti with a
population of a million and a third, almost entirely illiterate and
liable at any time to further political disruption; Andorra with a
population of four or five thousand souls. The mere suggestion of equal
representation between such "powers" is enough to make the British
Empire burst into a thousand (voting) fragments. A certain concession
to population, one must admit, was made by the theorists; a state of
over three millions got, if I remember rightly, two delegates, and if
over twenty, three, and some of the small states were given a kind of
intermittent appearance, they only came every other time or something of
that sort; but at The Hague things still remained in such a posture that
three or four minute and backward states could outvote the British
Empire or the United States. Therein lies the clue to the insignificance
of The Hague. Such projects as these are idle projects and we must put
them out of our heads; they are against nature; the great nations will
not suffer them for a moment.
But when we dismiss this idea of representation by states, we are left
with the problem of the proportion of representation and of relative
weight in the Council of the League on our hands. It is the sort of
problem that appeals terribly to the ingenious. We cannot solve it by
making population a basis, because that will give a monstrous importance
to the illiterate millions of India and China. Ingenious statistical
schemes have been framed in which the number of university graduates and
the steel output come in as multipliers, but for my own part I am not
greatly impressed by statistical schemes. At the risk of seeming
something of a Prussian, I would like to insist upon certain brute
facts. The business of the League of Nations is to keep the peace of the
world and nothing else. No power will ever dare to break the peace of
the world if the powers that are capable of making war under modern
conditions say "_No_." And there are only four powers certainly capable
at the present time of producing the men and materials needed for a
modern war in sufficient abundance to go on fighting: Britain, France,
Germany, and the United States. There are three others which are very
doubtfully capable: Italy, Japan, and Austria. Russia I will mark--it is
all that one can do with Russia just now--with a note of interrogation.
Some day China may be war capable--I hope never, but it is a
possibility. Personally I don't think that any other power on earth
would have a ghost of a chance to resist the will--if it could be an
honestly united will--of the first-named four. All the rest fight by the
sanction of and by association with these leaders. They can only fight
because of the split will of the war-complete powers. Some are forced to
fight by that very division.
No one can vie with me in my appreciation of the civilization of
Switzerland, Sweden, or Holland, but the plain fact of the case is that
such powers are absolutely incapable of uttering an effective protest
against war. Far less so are your Haytis and Liberias. The preservation
of the world-peace rests with the great powers and with the great powers
alone. If they have the will for peace, it is peace. If they have not,
it is conflict. The four powers I have named can now, if they see fit,
dictate the peace of the world for ever.
Let us keep our grip on that. Peace is the business of the great powers
primarily. Steel output, university graduates, and so forth may be
convenient secondary criteria, may be useful ways of measuring war
efficiency, but the meat and substance of the Council of the League of
Nations must embody the wills of those leading peoples. They can give an
enduring peace to the little nations and the whole of mankind. It can
arrive in no other way. So I take it that the Council of an ideal League
of Nations must consist chiefly of the representatives of the great
belligerent powers, and that the representatives of the minor allies and
of the neutrals--essential though their presence will be--must not be
allowed to swamp the voices of these larger masses of mankind.
And this state of affairs may come about more easily than logical,
statistical-minded people may be disposed to think. Our first impulse,
when we discuss the League of Nations idea, is to think of some very
elaborate and definite scheme of members on the model of existing
legislative bodies, called together one hardly knows how, and sitting
in a specially built League of Nations Congress House. All schemes are
more methodical than reality. We think of somebody, learned and
"expert," in spectacles, with a thin clear voice, reading over the
"Projected Constitution of a League of Nations" to an attentive and
respectful Peace Congress. But there is a more natural way to a league
than that. Instead of being made like a machine, the League of Nations
may come about like a marriage. The Peace Congress that must sooner or
later meet may itself become, after a time, the Council of a League of
Nations. The League of Nations may come upon us by degrees, almost
imperceptibly. I am strongly obsessed by the idea that that Peace
Congress will necessarily become--and that it is highly desirable that
it should become--a most prolonged and persistent gathering. Why should
it not become at length a permanent gathering, inviting representatives
to aid its deliberations from the neutral states, and gradually
adjusting itself to conditions of permanency?
I can conceive no such Peace Congress as those that have settled up
after other wars, settling up after this war. Not only has the war been
enormously bigger than any other war, but it has struck deeper at the
foundations of social and economic life. I doubt if we begin to realize
how much of the old system is dead to-day, how much has to be remade.
Since the beginnings of history there has been a credible promise of
gold payments underneath our financial arrangements. It is now an
incredible promise. The value of a pound note waves about while you look
at it. What will happen to it when peace comes no man can tell. Nor what
will happen to the mark. The rouble has gone into the Abyss. Our giddy
money specialists clutch their handfuls of paper and watch it flying
down the steep. Much as we may hate the Germans, some of us will have to
sit down with some of the enemy to arrange a common scheme for the
preservation of credit in money. And I presume that it is not proposed
to end this war in a wild scramble of buyers for such food as remains in
the world. There is a shortage now, a greater shortage ahead of the
world, and there will be shortages of supply at the source and transport
in food and all raw materials for some years to come. The Peace Congress
will have to sit and organize a share-out and distribution and
reorganization of these shattered supplies. It will have to Rhondda the
nations. Probably, too, we shall have to deal collectively with a
pestilence before we are out of the mess. Then there are such little
jobs as the reconstruction of Belgium and Serbia. There are considerable
rectifications of boundaries to be made. There are fresh states to be
created, in Poland and Armenia for example. About all these smaller
states, new and old, that the peace must call into being, there must be
a system of guarantees of the most difficult and complicated sort.
I do not see the Press Congress getting through such matters as these in
a session of weeks or months. The idea the Germans betrayed at Brest,
that things were going to be done in the Versailles fashion by great
moustached heroes frowning and drawing lines with a large black
soldierly thumbnail across maps, is--old-fashioned. They have made their
eastern treaties, it is true, in this mode, but they are still looking
for some really responsible government to keep them now that they are
made. From first to last clearly the main peace negotiations are going
to follow unprecedented courses. This preliminary discussion of war aims
by means of great public speeches, that has been getting more and more
explicit now for many months, is quite unprecedented. Apparently all the
broad preliminaries are to be stated and accepted in the sight of all
mankind before even an armistice occurs on the main, the western front.
The German diplomatists hate this process. So do a lot of ours. So do
some of the diplomatic Frenchmen. The German junkers are dodging and
lying, they are fighting desperately to keep back everything they
possibly can for the bargaining and bullying and table-banging of the
council chamber, but that way there is no peace. And when at last
Germany says snip sufficiently to the Allies' snap, and the Peace
Congress begins, it will almost certainly be as unprecedented as its
prelude. Before it meets, the broad lines of the settlement will have
been drawn plainly with the approval of the mass of mankind.
II
THE LEAGUE MUST BE REPRESENTATIVE
A Peace Congress, growing permanent, then, may prove to be the most
practical and convenient embodiment of this idea of a League of Nations
that has taken possession of the imagination of the world. A most
necessary preliminary to a Peace Congress, with such possibilities
inherent in it, must obviously be the meeting and organization of a
preliminary League of the Allied Nations. That point I would now
enlarge.
Half a world peace is better than none. There seems no reason whatever
why the world should wait for the Central Powers before it begins this
necessary work. Mr. McCurdy has been asking lately, "Why not the League
of Nations _now_?" That is a question a great number of people would
like to echo very heartily. The nearer the Allies can come to a League
of Free Nations before the Peace Congress the more prospect there is
that that body will approximate in nature to a League of Nations for the
whole world.
In one most unexpected quarter the same idea has been endorsed. The
King's Speech on the prorogation of Parliament this February was one of
the most remarkable royal utterances that have ever been made from the
British throne. There was less of the old-fashioned King and more of the
modern President about it than the most republican-minded of us could
have anticipated. For the first time in a King's Speech we heard of the
"democracies" of the world, and there was a clear claim that the Allies
at present fighting the Central Powers did themselves constitute a
League of Nations.
But we must admit that at present they do so only in a very rhetorical
sense. There is no real council of empowered representatives, and
nothing in the nature of a united front has been prepared. Unless we
provide beforehand for something more effective, Italy, France, the
United States, Japan, and this country will send separate groups of
representatives, with separate instructions, unequal status, and very
probably conflicting views upon many subjects, to the ultimate peace
discussions. It is quite conceivable--it is a very serious danger--that
at this discussion skilful diplomacy on the part of the Central Powers
may open a cleft among the Allies that has never appeared during the
actual war. Have the British settled, for example, with Italy and
France for the supply of metallurgical coal after the war? Those
countries must have it somehow. Across the board Germany can make some
tempting bids in that respect. Or take another question: Have the
British arrived at common views with France, Belgium, Portugal, and
South Africa about the administration of Central Africa? Suppose Germany
makes sudden proposals affecting native labour that win over the
Portuguese and the Boers? There are a score of such points upon which we
shall find the Allied representatives haggling with each other in the
presence of the enemy if they have not been settled beforehand.
It is the plainest common sense that we should be fixing up all such
matters with our Allies now, and knitting together a common front for
the final deal with German Imperialism. And these things are not to be
done effectively and bindingly nowadays by official gentlemen in
discreet undertones. They need to be done with the full knowledge and
authority of the participating peoples.
The Russian example has taught the world the instability of diplomatic
bargains in a time of such fundamental issues as the present. There is
little hope and little strength in hole-and-corner bargainings between
the officials or politicians who happen to be at the head of this or
that nation for the time being. Our Labour people will not stand this
sort of thing and they will not be bound by it. There will be the plain
danger of repudiation for all arrangements made in that fashion. A
gathering of somebody or other approved by the British Foreign Office
and of somebody or other approved by the French Foreign Office, of
somebody with vague powers from America, and so on and so on, will be an
entirely ineffective gathering. But that is the sort of gathering of the
Allies we have been having hitherto, and that is the sort of gathering
that is likely to continue unless there is a considerable expression of
opinion in favour of something more representative and responsible.
Even our Foreign Office must be aware that in every country in the world
there is now bitter suspicion of and keen hostility towards merely
diplomatic representatives. One of the most significant features of the
time is the evident desire of the Labour movement in every European
country to take part in a collateral conference of Labour that shall
meet when and where the Peace Congress does and deliberate and comment
on its proceedings. For a year now the demand of the masses for such a
Labour conference has been growing. It marks a distrust of officialdom
whose intensity officialdom would do well to ponder. But it is the
natural consequence of, it is the popular attempt at a corrective to,
the aloofness and obscurity that have hitherto been so evil a
characteristic of international negotiations. I do not think Labour and
intelligent people anywhere are going to be fobbed off with an
old-fashioned diplomatic gathering as being that League of Free Nations
they demand.
On the other hand, I do not contemplate this bi-cameral conference with
the diplomatists trying to best and humbug the Labour people as well as
each other and the Labour people getting more and more irritated,
suspicious, and extremist, with anything but dread. The Allied countries
must go into the conference _solid_, and they can only hope to do that
by heeding and incorporating Labour ideas before they come to the
conference. The only alternative that I can see to this unsatisfactory
prospect of a Peace Congress sitting side by side with a dissentient and
probably revolutionary Labour and Socialist convention--both gatherings
with unsatisfactory credentials contradicting one another and drifting
to opposite extremes--is that the delegates the Allied Powers send to
the Peace Conference (the same delegates which, if they are wise, they
will have previously sent to a preliminary League of Allied Nations to
discuss their common action at the Peace Congress), should be elected
_ad hoc_ upon democratic lines.
I know that this will be a very shocking proposal to all our able
specialists in foreign policy. They will talk at once about the
"ignorance" of people like the Labour leaders and myself about such
matters, and so on. What do we know of the treaty of so-and-so that was
signed in the year seventeen something?--and so on. To which the answer
is that we ought not to have been kept ignorant of these things. A day
will come when the Foreign Offices of all countries will have to
recognize that what the people do not know of international agreements
"ain't facts." A secret treaty is only binding upon the persons in the
secret. But what I, as a sample common person, am not ignorant of is
this: that the business that goes on at the Peace Congress will either
make or mar the lives of everyone I care for in the world, and that
somehow, by representative or what not, _I have to be there_. The Peace
Congress deals with the blood and happiness of my children and the
future of my world. Speaking as one of the hundreds of millions of "rank
outsiders" in public affairs, I do not mean to respect any peace treaty
that may end this war unless I am honestly represented at its making. I
think everywhere there is a tendency in people to follow the Russian
example to this extent and to repudiate bargains in which they have had
no voice.
I do not see that any genuine realization of the hopes with which all
this talk about the League of Nations is charged can be possible, unless
the two bodies which should naturally lead up to the League of
Nations--that is to say, firstly, the Conference of the Allies, and then
the Peace Congress--are elected bodies, speaking confidently for the
whole mass of the peoples behind them. It may be a troublesome thing to
elect them, but it will involve much more troublesome consequences if
they are not elected. This, I think, is one of the considerations for
which many people's minds are still unprepared. But unless we are to
have over again after all this bloodshed and effort some such "Peace
with Honour" foolery as we had performed by "Dizzy" and Salisbury at
that fatal Berlin Conference in which this present war was begotten, we
must sit up to this novel proposal of electoral representation in the
peace negotiations. Something more than common sense binds our statesmen
to this idea. They are morally pledged to it. President Wilson and our
British and French spokesmen alike have said over and over again that
they want to deal not with the Hohenzollerns but with the German people.
In other words, we have demanded elected representatives from the German
people with whom we may deal, and how can we make a demand of that sort
unless we on our part are already prepared to send our own elected
representatives to meet them? It is up to us to indicate by our own
practice how we on our side, professing as we do to act for democracies,
to make democracy safe on the earth, and so on, intend to meet this new
occasion.
Yet it has to be remarked that, so far, not one of the League of Nations
projects I have seen have included any practicable proposals for the
appointment of delegates either to that ultimate body or to its two
necessary predecessors, the Council of the Allies and the Peace
Congress. It is evident that here, again, we are neglecting to get on
with something of very urgent importance. I will venture, therefore, to
say a word or two here about the possible way in which a modern
community may appoint its international representatives.
And here, again, I turn from any European precedents to that political
outcome of the British mind, the Constitution of the United States.
(Because we must always remember that while our political institutions
in Britain are a patch-up of feudalism, Tudor, Stuart, and Hanoverian
monarchist traditions and urgent merely European necessities, a patch-up
that has been made quasi-democratic in a series of after-thoughts, the
American Constitution is a real, deliberate creation of the
English-speaking intelligence.) The President of the United States,
then, we have to note, is elected in a most extraordinary way, and in a
way that has now the justification of very great successes indeed. On
several occasions the United States has achieved indisputable greatness
in its Presidents, and very rarely has it failed to set up very leaderly
and distinguished men. It is worth while, therefore, to inquire how this
President is elected. He is neither elected directly by the people nor
appointed by any legislative body. He is chosen by a special college
elected by the people. This college exists to elect him; it meets,
elects him, and disperses. (I will not here go into the preliminary
complications that makes the election of a President follow upon a
preliminary election of two Presidential Candidates. The point I am
making here is that he is a specially selected man chosen _ad hoc_.) Is
there any reason why we should, not adopt this method in this new
necessity we are under of sending representatives, first, to the long
overdue and necessary Allied Council, then to the Peace Congress, and
then to the hoped-for Council of the League of Nations?
I am anxious here only to start for discussion the idea of an electoral
representation of the nations upon these three bodies that must in
succession set themselves to define, organize, and maintain the peace
of the world. I do not wish to complicate the question by any too
explicit advocacy of methods of election or the like. In the United
States this college which elects the President is elected on the same
register of voters as that which elects the Senate and Congress, and at
the same time. But I suppose if we are to give a popular mandate to the
three or five or twelve or twenty (or whatever number it is) men to whom
we are going to entrust our Empire's share in this great task of the
peace negotiations, it will be more decisive of the will of the whole
nation if the college that had to appoint them is elected at a special
election. I suppose that the great British common-weals over-seas, at
present not represented in Parliament, would also and separately at the
same time elect colleges to appoint their representatives. I suppose
there would be at least one Indian representative elected, perhaps by
some special electoral conference of Indian princes and leading men. The
chief defect of the American Presidential election is that as the old
single vote method of election is employed it has to be fought on purely
party lines. He is the select man of the Democratic half, or of the
Republican half of the nation. He is not the select man of the whole
nation. It would give a far more representative character to the
electoral college if it could be elected by fair modern methods, if for
this particular purpose parliamentary constituencies could be grouped
and the clean scientific method of proportional representation could be
used. But I suppose the party politician in this, as in most of our
affairs, must still have his pound of our flesh--and we must reckon with
him later for the bloodshed.
These are all, however, secondary considerations. The above paragraph
is, so to speak, in the nature of a footnote. The fundamental matter, if
we are to get towards any realization of this ideal of a world peace
sustained by a League of Nations, is to get straight away to the
conception of direct special electoral mandates in this matter. At
present all the political luncheon and dinner parties in London are busy
with smirking discussions of "Who is to go?" The titled ladies are
particularly busy. They are talking about it as if we poor, ignorant,
tax-paying, blood-paying common people did not exist. "L. G.," they say,
will of course "_insist_ on going," but there is much talk of the "Old
Man." People are getting quite nice again about "the Old Man's
feelings." It would be such a pretty thing to send him. But if "L. G."
goes we want him to go with something more than a backing of intrigues
and snatched authority. And I do not think the mass of people have any
enthusiasm for the Old Man. It is difficult again--by the dinner-party
standards--to know how Lord Curzon can be restrained. But we common
people do not care if he is restrained to the point of extinction.
Probably there will be nobody who talks or understands Russian among the
British representatives. But, of course, the British governing class has
washed its hands of the Russians. They were always very difficult, and
now they are "impossible, my dear, perfectly impossible."
No! That sort of thing will not do now. This Peace Congress is too big a
job for party politicians and society and county families. The bulk of
British opinion cannot go on being represented for ever by President
Wilson. We cannot always look to the Americans to express our ideas and
do our work for democracy. The foolery of the Berlin Treaty must not be
repeated. We cannot have another popular Prime Minister come triumphing
back to England with a gross of pink spectacles--through which we may
survey the prospect of the next great war. The League of Free Nations
means something very big and solid; it is not a rhetorical phrase to be
used to pacify a restless, distressed, and anxious public, and to be
sneered out of existence when that use is past. When the popular mind
now demands a League of Free Nations it demands a reality. The only way
to that reality is through the direct participation of the nation as a
whole in the settlement, and that is possible only through the direct
election for this particular issue of representative and responsible
men.
III
THE NECESSARY POWERS OF THE LEAGUE
If this phrase, "the League of Free Nations," is to signify anything
more than a rhetorical flourish, then certain consequences follow that
have to be faced now. No man can join a partnership and remain an
absolutely free man. You cannot bind yourself to do this and not to do
that and to consult and act with your associates in certain
eventualities without a loss of your sovereign freedom. People in this
country and in France do not seem to be sitting up manfully to these
necessary propositions.
If this League of Free Nations is really to be an effectual thing for
the preservation of the peace of the world it must possess power and
exercise power, powers must be delegated to it. Otherwise it will only
help, with all other half-hearted good resolutions, to pave the road of
mankind to hell. Nothing in all the world so strengthens evil as the
half-hearted attempts of good to make good.
It scarcely needs repeating here--it has been so generally said--that
no League of Free Nations can hope to keep the peace unless every member
of it is indeed a free member, represented by duly elected persons.
Nobody, of course, asks to "dictate the internal government" of any
country to that country. If Germans, for instance, like to wallow in
absolutism after the war they can do so. But if they or any other
peoples wish to take part in a permanent League of Free Nations it is
only reasonable to insist that so far as their representatives on the
council go they must be duly elected under conditions that are by the
standards of the general league satisfactorily democratic. That seems to
be only the common sense of the matter. Every court is a potential
conspiracy against freedom, and the League cannot tolerate merely court
appointments. If courts are to exist anywhere in the new world of the
future, they will be wise to stand aloof from international meddling. Of
course if a people, after due provision for electoral representation,
choose to elect dynastic candidates, that is an altogether different
matter.
And now let us consider what are the powers that must be delegated to
this proposed council of a League of Free Nations, if that is really
effectually to prevent war and to organize and establish and make peace
permanent in the world.
Firstly, then, it must be able to adjudicate upon all international
disputes whatever. Its first function must clearly be that. Before a war
can break out there must be the possibility of a world decision upon its
rights and wrongs. The League, therefore, will have as its primary
function to maintain a Supreme Court, whose decisions will be final,
before which every sovereign power may appear as plaintiff against any
other sovereign power or group of powers. The plea, I take it, will
always be in the form that the defendant power or powers is engaged in
proceedings "calculated to lead to a breach of the peace," and calling
upon the League for an injunction against such proceedings. I suppose
the proceedings that can be brought into court in this way fall under
such headings as these that follow; restraint of trade by injurious
tariffs or suchlike differentiations or by interference with through
traffic, improper treatment of the subjects _or their property_ (here I
put a query) of the plaintiff nation in the defendant state, aggressive
military or naval preparation, disorder spreading over the frontier,
trespass (as, for instance, by airships), propaganda of disorder,
espionage, permitting the organization of injurious activities, such as
raids or piracy. Clearly all such actions must come within the purview
of any world-supreme court organized to prevent war. But in addition
there is a more doubtful and delicate class of case, arising out of the
discontent of patches of one race or religion in the dominions of
another. How far may the supreme court of the world attend to grievances
between subject and sovereign?