as before they come to the
conference. The only alternative that I can see to this unsatisfactory
prospect of a Peace Congress sitting side by side with a dissentient and
probably revolutionary Labour and Socialist convention--both gatherings
with unsatisfactory credentials contradicting one another and drifting
to opposite extremes--is that the delegates the Allied Powers send to
the Peace Conference (the same delegates which, if they are wise, they
will have previously sent to a preliminary League of Allied Nations to
discuss their common action at the Peace Congress), should be elected
_ad hoc_ upon democratic lines.

I know that this will be a very shocking proposal to all our able
specialists in foreign policy. They will talk at once about the
"ignorance" of people like the Labour leaders and myself about such
matters, and so on. What do we know of the treaty of so-and-so that was
signed in the year seventeen something?--and so on. To which the answer
is that we ought not to have been kept ignorant of these things. A day
will come when the Foreign Offices of all countries will have to
recognize that what the people do not know of international agreements
"ain't facts." A secret treaty is only binding upon the persons in the
secret. But what I, as a sample common person, am not ignorant of is
this: that the business that goes on at the Peace Congress will either
make or mar the lives of everyone I care for in the world, and that
somehow, by representative or what not, _I have to be there_. The Peace
Congress deals with the blood and happiness of my children and the
future of my world. Speaking as one of the hundreds of millions of "rank
outsiders" in public affairs, I do not mean to respect any peace treaty
that may end this war unless I am honestly represented at its making. I
think everywhere there is a tendency in people to follow the Russian
example to this extent and to repudiate bargains in which they have had
no voice.

I do not see that any genuine realization of the hopes with which all
this talk about the League of Nations is charged can be possible, unless
the two bodies which should naturally lead up to the League of
Nations--that is to say, firstly, the Conference of the Allies, and then
the Peace Congress--are elected bodies, speaking confidently for the
whole mass of the peoples behind them. It may be a troublesome thing to
elect them, but it will involve much more troublesome consequences if
they a