tion, are in no way
influenced by these later events.

CONTENTS

PAGE

FIRST LECTURE: THE AIMS OF THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS 1

I. The purpose of the three Lectures is to draw attention to
the links which connect the proposed League of Nations with
the past, to the difficulties involved in the proposal, and to
the way in which they can be overcome 4

II. The conception of a League of Nations is not new, but is
as old as International Law, because any kind of International
Law and some kind of a League of Nations are interdependent and
correlative 6

III. During antiquity no International Law in the modern
sense of the term was possible, because the common interests
which could force a number of independent States into a
Community of States were lacking 6

IV. But during the second part of the Middle Ages matters
began to change. During the fifteenth, sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries an International Law, and with it a kind
of League of Nations, became a necessity and therefore grew by
custom. At the same time arose the first schemes for a League
of Nations guaranteeing permanent peace, namely those of Pierre
Dubois (1305), Antoine Marini (1461), Sully (1603), and Emeric
Crucee (1623). Hugo Grotius' immortal work on 'The Law of War
and Peace' (1625) 7

V. The League of Nations thus evolved by custom could not
undertake to prevent war; the conditions prevailing up to the
outbreak of the French Revolution made it impossible; it was
only during the nineteenth century that the principle of
nationality made growth 9

VI. The outbreak of the present World War is epoch-making
because it is at bottom a fight between the principle of
democratic and constitutional government and the principle of
militarism and autocratic government. The three new points in
the present demand for a League of Nations 11

VII. How and why the peremptory demand for a new League of
Nations arose, and its connection with so-called
Internationalism 11

VIII. The League of Nations now aimed at is