eague of Nations and all
sorts of international controls. Which do we want?"

The answer, I think, is "Both." It is a matter of more or less, of
getting the best thing at the cost of the second-best. We may want to
relax an old association in order to make a newer and wider one. It is
quite understandable that peoples aware of a distinctive national
character and involved in some big existing political complex, should
wish to disentangle themselves from one group of associations in order
to enter more effectively into another, a greater, and more satisfactory
one. The Finn or the Pole, who has hitherto been a rather reluctant
member of the synthesis of the Russian empire, may well wish to end that
attachment in order to become a free member of a worldwide brotherhood.
The desire for free arrangement is not a desire for chaos. There is such
a thing as untying your parcels in order to pack them better, and I do
not see myself how we can possibly contemplate a great league of freedom
and reason in the world without a considerable amount of such
preliminary dissolution.

It happens, very fortunately for the world, that a century and a quarter
ago thirteen various and very jealous states worked out the problem of a
Union, and became--after an enormous, exhausting wrangle--the United
States of America. Now the way they solved their riddle was by
delegating and giving over jealously specified sovereign powers and
doing all that was possible to retain the residuum. They remained
essentially sovereign states. New York, Virginia, Massachusetts, for
example, remained legally independent. The practical fusion of these
peoples into one people outran the legal bargain. It was only after long
years of discussion that the point was conceded; it was indeed only
after the Civil War that the implications were fully established, that
there resided a sovereignty in the American people as a whole, as
distinguished from the peoples of the several states. This is a
precedent that every one who talks about the League of Nations should
bear in mind. These states set up a congress and president in Washington
with strictly delegated powers. That congress and president they
delegated to look after certain common interests, to deal with
interstate trade, to deal with foreign powers, to maintain a supreme
court of law. Everything else--education, militia, powers of life and
death--the states retained for themselves. To this day, for instance,
the f