In The Fourth Year - Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) | Page 5

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