d
our list includes the British Empire, with a population of four hundred
millions, of which probably half can read and write some language or
other; Bogota with a population of a million, mostly poets; Hayti with a
population of a million and a third, almost entirely illiterate and
liable at any time to further political disruption; Andorra with a
population of four or five thousand souls. The mere suggestion of equal
representation between such "powers" is enough to make the British
Empire burst into a thousand (voting) fragments. A certain concession
to population, one must admit, was made by the theorists; a state of
over three millions got, if I remember rightly, two delegates, and if
over twenty, three, and some of the small states were given a kind of
intermittent appearance, they only came every other time or something of
that sort; but at The Hague things still remained in such a posture that
three or four minute and backward states could outvote the British
Empire or the United States. Therein lies the clue to the insignificance
of The Hague. Such projects as these are idle projects and we must put
them out of our heads; they are against nature; the great nations will
not suffer them for a moment.

But when we dismiss this idea of representation by states, we are left
with the problem of the proportion of representation and of relative
weight in the Council of the League on our hands. It is the sort of
problem that appeals terribly to the ingenious. We cannot solve it by
making population a basis, because that will give a monstrous importance
to the illiterate millions of India and China. Ingenious statistical
schemes have been framed in which the number of university graduates and
the steel output come in as multipliers, but for my own part I am not
greatly impressed by statistical schemes. At the risk of seeming
something of a Prussian, I would like to insist upon certain brute
facts. The business of the League of Nations is to keep the peace of the
world and nothing else. No power will ever dare to break the peace of
the world if the powers that are capable of making war under modern
conditions say "_No_." And there are only four powers certainly capable
at the present time of producing the men and materials needed for a
modern war in sufficient abundance to go on fighting: Britain, France,
Germany, and the United States. There are three others which are very
doubtfully capable: Italy, Japan, and Austria. R