mple. About all these smaller
states, new and old, that the peace must call into being, there must be
a system of guarantees of the most difficult and complicated sort.

I do not see the Press Congress getting through such matters as these in
a session of weeks or months. The idea the Germans betrayed at Brest,
that things were going to be done in the Versailles fashion by great
moustached heroes frowning and drawing lines with a large black
soldierly thumbnail across maps, is--old-fashioned. They have made their
eastern treaties, it is true, in this mode, but they are still looking
for some really responsible government to keep them now that they are
made. From first to last clearly the main peace negotiations are going
to follow unprecedented courses. This preliminary discussion of war aims
by means of great public speeches, that has been getting more and more
explicit now for many months, is quite unprecedented. Apparently all the
broad preliminaries are to be stated and accepted in the sight of all
mankind before even an armistice occurs on the main, the western front.
The German diplomatists hate this process. So do a lot of ours. So do
some of the diplomatic Frenchmen. The German junkers are dodging and
lying, they are fighting desperately to keep back everything they
possibly can for the bargaining and bullying and table-banging of the
council chamber, but that way there is no peace. And when at last
Germany says snip sufficiently to the Allies' snap, and the Peace
Congress begins, it will almost certainly be as unprecedented as its
prelude. Before it meets, the broad lines of the settlement will have
been drawn plainly with the approval of the mass of mankind.

II

THE LEAGUE MUST BE REPRESENTATIVE

A Peace Congress, growing permanent, then, may prove to be the most
practical and convenient embodiment of this idea of a League of Nations
that has taken possession of the imagination of the world. A most
necessary preliminary to a Peace Congress, with such possibilities
inherent in it, must obviously be the meeting and organization of a
preliminary League of the Allied Nations. That point I would now
enlarge.

Half a world peace is better than none. There seems no reason whatever
why the world should wait for the Central Powers before it begins this
necessary work. Mr. McCurdy has been asking lately, "Why not the League
of Nations _now_?" That is a question a great number of people would
like to echo