passions of men? Briefly, the ideal is to organize the intricate, interlacing activities of Mankind into a common covenant of power, supervised and regulated by a central authority that will relieve and regulate the economic and political pressure that now leads to war. Its chief aim is that nations may have an opportunity to change that most urgent law of life for which no international machinery is now provided without recourse to the backward method of war. It distinctly does not aim to control the internal mechanism of the State, but does aim to regulate its external relations. Each state must retain its characteristics and individual existence at the same time that it bows, in matters affecting the common welfare of the world, to the common good as New York retains her distinction but bows to Washington in matters that affect the Union. The League is to be centered in Geneva, Switzerland, and is to establish a permanent Court of International Justice. Dissatisfied Nations may take their growing needs to this World Court as corporations now take their difficulties to federal courts. If a state refuses to abide by the decision of the Court, it is to be subjected to economic segregations and sanctions. If it still be obdurate, considering its individual ambition rather than the collective advantage, and become militant, it may be moved upon and disciplined by the unified force of the world.

Before the great surrender, it was suggested in

certain quarters of the United States that until victory was actually won we should not allow ourselves time to think constructively of the future; but that was not the attitude of our Allies. In England it seemed to be understood that military victory itself depended largely upon underlying political sagacity. In England, there were over one hundred commissions working upon after-thewar problems. In London and Dublin there were active League of Nations societies, publishing pamphlets and conducting propaganda. But in America, except in the League to Enforce Peace, fostered by Mr. Taft, the American public was curiously indifferent. In time of war prepare for peace was treated as a sentiment almost of rank sedition. Fortunately, this was not Mr. Lloyd George's attitude. Repeatedly he expressed his opinion, unmistakably, as to the propriety of looking beyond the smoke of battle: "We have suffered in war, perhaps, through lack of preparation before we entered it. Do not let us make the same mistake in peace," he said in July. The things that we will do now will be more permanent, he told us. If the world is not poured into a right mould now, while it is in a molten state, "it will cool down very quickly, and the shape which you give it will remain. And if your mould is not the right one, you cannot possibly set things right without another convulsion that will break it."

To say that this great ideal of ending war is

too complex to succeed, should be dismissed as unworthy. It is far more complicated not to have it. All federations have been complex, so overwhelmingly difficult that only the direst necessity has brought them reluctantly to fruition, and the doubters have almost swamped the new craft before it set sail! Our fathers, for example, before the American federation, discussed for months one point alone the question of state rights. After one hundred years of success, the Senate has until recently been discussing this question of which measures belong to the state and which to the federated government on a principle that should be a fundamental of democracy: the enfranchisement of women. The question of swarming nationalities, of peoples upon various planes of development, truly complicates world organization, but is not necessarily insurmountable. A greater com

plexity will lie in the economic adjustment of commercial rivalries among the large nations and in the threatening of the sense of power. Yet here, above all else, economic necessity itself will compel some kind of orderly regulation. In any case, master works are seldom accomplished easily. Great efforts are wrought patiently and painfully, and succeed, often, only after innumerable failures. When the history of a federated world is written, its origin will be traced to the derided writings of the Abbé de Saint-Pierre and later to Rousseau and to Kant, through the gropings of Henry of

Navarre and Alexander of Russia, through the efforts of the Vienna Congress, the London Concert and the Berlin Conference, up to the sessions of the Hague Tribunal and the Versailles Congress, following the great Allied victory over the ancient autocracies of Central Europe. These events will be noted as historic failures, though essential stepping stones over many complexities and necessary preambles of ultimate success.

The first League of Nations-practically born when the major part of the world united, pooling its resources to overthrow German militarism may be crude in its form as the depleted war-worn nations that create it are weak. But it will grow strong as it becomes amended to meet human needs. Moreover, we must not expect too much of this first-born child of the Universe, sired by sorrow, baptized in blood, but nourished hungrily at the broad breast of a world-wide desire for justice. We must not expect that the machinery of a League of Free Peoples will spring into being a perfected, finished product. The first framework of a federated world has been likened to the first steam engine whose attenuated outlines may be seen in the Metropolitan Museum - a spindling model very different from the mammoth steel and iron structure that now hauls nations over their boundary lines and makes communication between states possible. The essential of even a first League of Nations, like the essential of the

crudest of engines, is that its principles work; that its machinery possess power to move the nations over the border line of their own hostilities toward a more mutual faith in each other and in an organized and abiding good will, and that the democracies of the world uphold it.

The mechanism of a League of Nations must be made to "go" no matter what difficulties it presents. Its ideal must be embodied in reality because no other plan to check imperialistic ambitions is feasible and because the alternative is altogether too terrifying.

Let women pause and consider what this alternative is. Either nations must be prepared individually, constantly and gigantically, against the power of a single state to destroy at will the equipoise of civilization; either they must be willing to have the millstone of a permanent and unprecedented militarism hung around their necks; either they must place bayonets in the hands of boys for generations to come and pile taxes without limit upon the backs of future toilers; either they must acknowledge that idealism utterly fails and that civilization must be frankly founded upon brute force or they must assist in organizing the common defense of society as a whole. For, unless we combine the resources of the world and control inventions of destruction, science tells us that the wars of the future, when vast armies of bird-men can fly over cities and wipe out whole communities