ment is inalienable, that the people are the sovereign, and all the people. When, therefore, states have failed, they have done so invariably because the power of government has been used by and for a part, against the whole of a people: in autocracies and oligarchies, by minorities against majorities; in democracies, by majorities against minorities. In this way the function of government, which is like that of the traffic police, so to keep the ways of life open that each traveller may have equal opportunity with his fellows to journey unhampered to his goal, becomes perverted and the law substitutes favoritism for equity. Of the "law of nations" this has been particularly true. The system of state sovereignties is answerable for all the forms of imperialism that derive from nationalistic aggression - Germanification, Magyarization, Ottomanization, and so on, with all that such programmes imply in the economic and political orders. Unless an international is substituted for this national system, the world will never be safe for democracy. To speak of a few cases in Europe alone: there are Magyar and German minorities in Bohemia and in the Austrian territory claimed by Rumania, just as there is a great Slavic majority in the Hungarian dominion; two-thirds of the Macedonia claimed by Serbia is inhabited by men of Bulgarian nationality; Alsace is largely "German "; a proportion of Poland is Jewish, Lettish, Lithuanian, Ruthenian. A settlement according to "the principle of nationality" which would effect only a change in hegemony would have Europe at war again in less than a generation. Minorities must be safeguarded even as majorities must be freed if peace is to last, and minorities cannot be safeguarded without international guarantees that will once and for all divorce citizenship from nationality. Of course, such guarantees would constitute a comprehensive easement on the European system of state sovereignties and would require a simple and strong machinery to make them effective. |