d, and anxious public, and to be
sneered out of existence when that use is past. When the popular mind
now demands a League of Free Nations it demands a reality. The only way
to that reality is through the direct participation of the nation as a
whole in the settlement, and that is possible only through the direct
election for this particular issue of representative and responsible
men.

III

THE NECESSARY POWERS OF THE LEAGUE

If this phrase, "the League of Free Nations," is to signify anything
more than a rhetorical flourish, then certain consequences follow that
have to be faced now. No man can join a partnership and remain an
absolutely free man. You cannot bind yourself to do this and not to do
that and to consult and act with your associates in certain
eventualities without a loss of your sovereign freedom. People in this
country and in France do not seem to be sitting up manfully to these
necessary propositions.

If this League of Free Nations is really to be an effectual thing for
the preservation of the peace of the world it must possess power and
exercise power, powers must be delegated to it. Otherwise it will only
help, with all other half-hearted good resolutions, to pave the road of
mankind to hell. Nothing in all the world so strengthens evil as the
half-hearted attempts of good to make good.

It scarcely needs repeating here--it has been so generally said--that
no League of Free Nations can hope to keep the peace unless every member
of it is indeed a free member, represented by duly elected persons.
Nobody, of course, asks to "dictate the internal government" of any
country to that country. If Germans, for instance, like to wallow in
absolutism after the war they can do so. But if they or any other
peoples wish to take part in a permanent League of Free Nations it is
only reasonable to insist that so far as their representatives on the
council go they must be duly elected under conditions that are by the
standards of the general league satisfactorily democratic. That seems to
be only the common sense of the matter. Every court is a potential
conspiracy against freedom, and the League cannot tolerate merely court
appointments. If courts are to exist anywhere in the new world of the
future, they will be wise to stand aloof from international meddling. Of
course if a people, after due provision for electoral representation,
choose to elect dynastic candidates, that is an altogether different