ed territories, such as Nigeria or Madagascar. There will be
nothing stable about a world settlement that does not destroy in these
"possessions" the national preference of the countries that own them and
that does not prepare for the immediate or eventual accession of these
subject peoples to State rank. Most certainly, however, thousands of
intelligent people in those great European countries who believe
themselves ardent for a world peace will be staggered at any proposal to
place any part of "our Empire" under a world administration on the
footing of a United States territory. Until they cease to be staggered
by anything of the sort, their aspirations for a permanent peace will
remain disconnected from the main current of their lives. And that
current will flow, sluggishly or rapidly, towards war. For essentially
these "possessions" are like tariffs, like the strategic occupation of
neutral countries or secret treaties; they are forms of the conflict
between nations to oust and prevail over other nations.

Going on with such things and yet deprecating war is really not an
attempt to abolish conflict; it is an attempt to retain conflict and
limit its intensity; it is like trying to play hockey on the
understanding that the ball shall never travel faster than eight miles
an hour.

Now it not only stands in our way to a permanent peace of the world that
the great mass of men are not prepared for even the most obvious
implications of such an idea, but there is also a second invincible
difficulty--that there is nowhere in the world anybody, any type of men,
any organisation, any idea, any nucleus or germ, that could possibly
develop into the necessary over-Government. We are asking for something
out of the air, out of nothingness, that will necessarily array against
itself the resistance of all those who are in control, or interested in
the control, of the affairs of sovereign States of the world as they are
at present; the resistance of a gigantic network of Government
organisations, interests, privileges, assumptions.

Against this a headless, vague aspiration, however universal, is likely
to prove quite ineffective. Of course, it is possible to suggest that
the Hague Tribunal is conceivably the germ of such an overriding
direction and supreme court as the peace of the world demands, but in
reality the Hague Tribunal is a mere legal automatic machine. It does
nothing unless you set it in motion. It has no initiative.