merits, not habitually via a precedent, nor sentimentally through a rootless aspiration. What is needed to make a peace that shall endure is not a development of preexisting relationships and conditions; these make as easily for war. What is needed is a revision of the principle on which they rest. The corpus of practices and treaties and precedents that goes by the euphemism "international law " rests in effect upon principles the exact opposite of those necessary to constitute a real international comity. There is not one of them which does not incarnate a precarious equilibrium of opposed and inimical interests, desires, and forces. War has been only the upsetting of such unsteady balances, and peace their Sisyphean restoration. To establish lasting peace there is required, therefore, the apprehension and stressing of a constitutive principle as immanent in human behavior as that which the international lawyer exploits, but making for an interlocking of powers instead of a balancing, for an international organization whose existence will not repress but set free, not frustrate but

reënforce, the instinctive spontaneities and normal purposes of the so various groups of mankind.

International law has no precedent for such a means to such an end, nor can it have. What international organization existed prior to the war or now exists among the embattled alliances, has no organs to exercise such a function, nor can it have. Unities conditioned upon the menace of a common enemy can bear only an inimical relation to peace, and the alliances and combinations of powers have derived exclusively from such conditions. But there is a more basic reason for the futility of merely international precedent. States, natural though they be, none the less consist of many elements of artifice. The parts of a state are very like the parts of a machine. Their outstanding trait is rigidity. Often they perform excellently what they have been ordained to perform, but never anything more. The maiming or destruction of one part cripples the whole; no other part is able to take over its functions or to perform its services. There is no com

pensation, as there is in the organization of a living body. Unprecedented situations consequently tend to throw governments out of gear, to disintegrate them: their old organs cannot get adjusted to the new conditions; the governments either go to pieces, or their bureaus and departments go on doing what they have always done, and the governments are compelled to create new organs adequate to master and control the novel situation. As frequently as not the creation of new organs of government is tantamount to a revolution in the structure of the state. The Great War offers illustration of all these effects: of disintegration and revolution in the history of government in Russia; of industrial and political reconstruction in the history of government in England; of the beginning of analogous and far-reaching radical changes in the United States, of which the visible signs are the creation of the Advisory Commission of the Council of National Defence, of the offices of food and fuel production and administration, of the nationalization of railways, and of the other offices of control.

Germany, it is true, has undergone very little change, but precisely because war has brought very little news to Germany.

If these phenomena mean anything for the right definition of conditions of lasting peace, they mean that those are not conditions subject to the judgment of statesmen and diplomats, whose habits of mind and body make them inexorably deferent to precedent, tradition, and vested interests. These phenomena mean that the deciding judgment of conditions of lasting peace must be made by an enlightened public opinion, at the conclusion of the openest and freest possible discussion, in deference to the simple aspiration of the collectivities of mankind for freedom and self-expression, and with regard to the actualities that favor peace in the system of relationships into which regard for precedent has thrown the hapless rank and file of Europe. They pay the cost, theirs should be the choice. Considerations neither of precedent nor of vested interest, nor of prestige nor of honor can grasp the principle that must underly the constitution of lasting

peace, and create the organs of an international polity such that the longer they function the surer peace will be.

The alliance of democratic commonwealths lays claim to the discovery and defence of this principle. With varying stress and much confusion of counsel its members are unanimous in declaring that they are fighting this civil war to vindicate it. They call it the "Principle of Nationality."