espectful Peace Congress. But there is a more natural way to a league
than that. Instead of being made like a machine, the League of Nations
may come about like a marriage. The Peace Congress that must sooner or
later meet may itself become, after a time, the Council of a League of
Nations. The League of Nations may come upon us by degrees, almost
imperceptibly. I am strongly obsessed by the idea that that Peace
Congress will necessarily become--and that it is highly desirable that
it should become--a most prolonged and persistent gathering. Why should
it not become at length a permanent gathering, inviting representatives
to aid its deliberations from the neutral states, and gradually
adjusting itself to conditions of permanency?

I can conceive no such Peace Congress as those that have settled up
after other wars, settling up after this war. Not only has the war been
enormously bigger than any other war, but it has struck deeper at the
foundations of social and economic life. I doubt if we begin to realize
how much of the old system is dead to-day, how much has to be remade.
Since the beginnings of history there has been a credible promise of
gold payments underneath our financial arrangements. It is now an
incredible promise. The value of a pound note waves about while you look
at it. What will happen to it when peace comes no man can tell. Nor what
will happen to the mark. The rouble has gone into the Abyss. Our giddy
money specialists clutch their handfuls of paper and watch it flying
down the steep. Much as we may hate the Germans, some of us will have to
sit down with some of the enemy to arrange a common scheme for the
preservation of credit in money. And I presume that it is not proposed
to end this war in a wild scramble of buyers for such food as remains in
the world. There is a shortage now, a greater shortage ahead of the
world, and there will be shortages of supply at the source and transport
in food and all raw materials for some years to come. The Peace Congress
will have to sit and organize a share-out and distribution and
reorganization of these shattered supplies. It will have to Rhondda the
nations. Probably, too, we shall have to deal collectively with a
pestilence before we are out of the mess. Then there are such little
jobs as the reconstruction of Belgium and Serbia. There are considerable
rectifications of boundaries to be made. There are fresh states to be
created, in Poland and Armenia for exa