In The Fourth Year - Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) | Page 4

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,