hole world is interdependent, and you
cannot injure one member of the international body without injuring all
the rest."]

5. _The League of Nations Failure_

The principal scheme recently advanced as a means of co-ordinating the
life of the world--the League of Nations Covenant--violates all three of
these essential principles. In the first place, the League Covenant,
with certain minor exceptions, is a political and not an economic
document, devoting its attention to territorial integrity and the
preservation of sovereignty, and passing over such economic problems as
resource control, and the competition for raw materials, markets and
investment opportunities as though they were non-existent. In the second
place instead of concerning itself with all of the integral parts of the
world, it treats nations other than the "big five" (Britain, France,
Italy, Japan and the United States) as though they were of second or of
third rate importance. China, India, Germany, Russia and Latin America,
with considerably more than half of the world's population, and with at
least half of the world's essential resources, were slighted or
ignored. In the third place, the League Covenant is not based on world
thinking. On the contrary, it was designed to set up one part of the
world, the victorious Allies, against four other parts of the world: the
enemy countries, Soviet Russia, the undeveloped (unexploited) countries,
and the small and powerless countries. Political, sectional and
provincial in its point of view, the League, as a means of world
organization, was destined, from its inception, to pathetic failure.
World economic life is an established fact of such moment that it must
be reckoned with in any scheme for social rebuilding.

A capacity for organization and for conscious improvement distinguishes
man from most of the animals. In the past, men have organized the army,
the church, the city, the nation, the school. The events surrounding the
industrial revolution have placed a new task on their shoulders--the
task of organizing world economic life.

Without doubt this is the largest and the most intricate problem in
organization that the human race has ever faced. On the other hand, the
interdependence of economic life invites co-ordination, while the
advances in organization methods, particularly among the masses of the
people, render the transition from local to world organization quite
logical and relatively easy--fa