In The Fourth Year - Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) | Page 6

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