Essays in Liberalism | Page 8

all something may be done by political
action, and something by international organisation. In modern
medicine doctors are constantly telling us they cannot cure any
disease--all they can do is to give nature a chance. No Covenant will
teach men to be moral or peace-loving, but you can remove, diminish,
or modify the conditions which make for war, and take obstacles out of
the way of peace. We advocate partnership in industry and social life.
We advocate self-government, international co-operation. We
recognise that these are no ends in themselves; they are means to the
end; they are the influences which will facilitate the triumph of the
right and impede the success of the wrong.
But looking deeper into the matter, to the very foundations, we
recognise, all of us, the most devoted adherents of the League, and all
men of goodwill, that in the end we must strive for the brotherhood of
man. We admit we can do comparatively little to help it forward. We
recognise that our efforts, whether by covenant or other means, must
necessarily be imperfect; but we say, and say rightly, that we have been
told that perfect love casteth out fear, and that any step towards that
love, however imperfect, will at any rate mitigate the terrors of
mankind.

THE BALANCE OF POWER
BY PROFESSOR A.F. POLLARD

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