Amphictyonic League

“ Why are your eight score Oneidas absent—the eight score who still remain in the Long House? Surely, brothers, there are sachems among them? Why are they not here? Do you fear they might not agree to the punishment of the Oneida nation?"
I folded my arms and stared at the Mohawks.
"Clan ties are close, national ties closer, but strongest and closest of all, the six iron links that form the Great League! Why do you punish now? How can you punish now? Is it well to break the oldest League law to punish those who have broken the law of the League?" ”

“ This League was formed for the purpose of crystallizing the fetters upon conquered people; of driving the nails into the coffin of the hopes of conquered masses upon penalty of being set upon, not by one nation but by the united powers of the earth. ”

“ Impossible, therefore, to exaggerate the importance of this League, therefore impossible to exaggerate the importance of this meeting, of every man and woman who has come here to-night. And when you rise from your seats and step up to this platform to enroll your names as members of the National League of Liberty, I want you to feel, every one of you, that you will be doing an important thing, a thing necessary to the nation, a thing in its way every bit as necessary and important as the thing the soldier does when he rises up out of his trench and goes over the top. ”

“ Most people’s ideas of the League fall between these extremes. They want the League to be something more than an ethical court, they want a League that will act, but on the other hand they shrink from any loss of “our independence.” ”

“ It is at present quite impossible to work out a practical scheme according to which a more detailed organisation of the League of Nations could be realised. But so much is certain that every attempt at organising this League must start from, and must keep intact, the independence and the equality of all civilised States. It is for this reason that a Central Political Authority above the sovereign States can never be thought of. Every attempt to organise a League of Nations on the model of a Federal State is futile. ”

“ I think, too, it justifies my reiterated assertion that the constitution of the League is so hopeless, so childish, so diplomatically conceived and useless, that nothing but reorganisation from the ground upward can give us a proper organ for the expression of the real need and desire for unity in the world. ”

“ As far as I can make out, the League was founded by an American millionaire, Ezekiah Hopkins, who was very peculiar in his ways. He was himself red-headed, and he had a great sympathy for all red-headed men; so, when he died, it was found that he had left his enormous fortune in the hands of trustees, with instructions to apply the interest to the providing of easy berths to men whose hair is of that colour. From all I hear it is splendid pay, and very little to do.'
"The League has a vacancy." ”

“ But as the world is some thousands of years yet from rational collective conduct we have the treaty of the Victors, the Demi-League of Nations, and all the post-war disorder, waste, and misery that still unfold upon us. The League is unsoundly planned; it stands on rotten foundations; it is poisoned by the delusion that sovereign States are real enduring human things instead of being arrangements entirely provisional and largely hallucinatory, and it does not represent more than a portion of mankind. ”

“ If Peel's measure should become law, then the Council will be compelled to face the question, 'What shall the League do during the three years?' It has struck me that under such circumstances we might absolve the large subscribers from all further calls, put the staff of the League on a peace footing, and merely keep alive a nominal organization to prevent any attempt to undo the good work we have effected. ”

“ But a league would in all probability be flouted by the states as often as their interests seemed to them to make it advisable. Reverting to the analogy of our own formative period in national government, a league would be like our articles of confederation, weak and insufficient because they did not authorize the central government to coërce a recalcitrant state. As a step toward a more desirable end the articles of federation were worth while: as a similar step a league of nations might be better than nothing, but it would not lead to the end to which the world is looking. ”

“ If the League is only a makeshift, a coalition into which we enter to restore order, then it is only a description of existing fact, and the idea should be treated as such. But if it is an actually prospective outcome of the settlement, the keystone of American policy, it is neither realizable nor desirable. For the programme of such a League contains no provision for dynamic national growth or for international economic justice. ”

“ It is convenient to describe the former group as advocating a league of peace, since we are generally agreed that a league is a form of concert from which the constituent members may withdraw at will, and in which does not reside power to force them to do what they do not find reasonable. The second group wish to have a federation, if by that term we understand a united group in which exists power sufficient to preserve the common cause against any possible disobedient member. To form a league is easier than to form a federation. ”

“ In his annual address of 1886 he declared:
“This League is the only organized and authentic national representative of the reform sentiment. I challenge any man to show that it has in any degree, or at any time, betrayed the trust voluntarily assumed by it, with the approval of the locally organized friends of reform, of honestly and adequately representing that sentiment, and its criticisms and demands upon political parties and public men. The League has pandered to no personal ambition, to no party purpose. ”

“ He had found that morning in his telescribe receiver the Trafalgar Chambers manifesto which had been flashed to friend and foe alike. He had read it with a frown; it savoured of impertinence that it should be sent to him. He finished it with a laugh, half-contemptuous, half-annoyed. He saw that it was a stupid move unless the League had abandoned all hope of forming the League-Labour alliance ”

“ The League is not a dual union in any sense of the word. It is purely an educational organization. It issues no membership cards, collects no dues, and gives out no charters. To join it all that is necessary is to belong to some mass labor union, accept the principles of the League, and subscribe to its official organ, The Labor Herald. ”

“ Opposition to League growing more intense from day to day. Its bitterness and pettiness producing reaction. New polls throughout country indicate strong drift toward league. League of Nations and just peace inseparable. Neither half can stand alone. Know you will not be drawn away from announced programme to incorporate League covenant in treaty. You can afford to go any length in insisting upon this. There is no doubt of your success here and abroad. The real friends of a constructive peace have not begun to fight. ”

“ Kimmensen's hands crushed his thighs, and he stared grimly at Messerschmidt's back.
"Let's look at the record. You and I are citizens of the Freemen's League. Which is a voluntary organization. Now—who founded the League? Josef Kimmensen. Who's been the only League President we've ever had? Who is the League, by the grace of considerable spellbinding powers and an electorate which—by the very act of belonging to the League—is kept so split up that it's rare when a man gets a chance to talk things out with his neighbor? ”

“ Taft explicitly admits and insists that the League is to be a supplement to, and in no sense a substitute for, the duty of our Nation to prepare its own strength for its own defense. He also explicitly provides that, among the various peoples who would not be admitted to the League on an equality with the others, there shall be different spheres of interest assumed by the different powers who have entered into the League. ”

“ The aim of the League is very comprehensively stated in the first article of its constitution: ‘The aim of the League is the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the rule of the proletariat, the abolition of the old society resting on class antagonisms, and the founding of a new society without classes and without private property.’
Marx and Engels were commissioned by the League to set forth its principles in a manifesto, which, as the manifesto of the communistic party, was published shortly before the Revolution of February 1848. ”

“ They are real forces and full of power, which no wise statesman will overlook or forget to reckon with. The building of a League of Nations is not an affair of emotion; it is a work of reason, of patience, of skill in international law and statesmanship; but those who have faith in the work will be helped forward by these hopes and longings. And even those who have no faith left in any of the often-baffled, often-discredited, schemes of human brotherhood will yet hesitate to reject the attempt at a League. ”

“ Is it not plain that if your League is to last there must be no nation strong enough to have any chance against the general will of Humanity? Or, to put the matter in another way; there must be no predominant partner or even group of partners in your League. Is there any case of a successful federation with a predominant partner? In the United States you have the great States of New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, but no one of them counts for more than a small fraction of the whole Union. ”

“ The advantages that a nation would gain in becoming a member of such a league are manifest. The risk of war would be eliminated within the League. Obviously the only things that are vital to a nation are its land and its independence. Since each nation in the League will have pledged itself to respect the territory and the sovereignty of every other, a refusal to do so will logically lead to expulsion from the League. Thus every vital question will be automatically reserved from both war and arbitration. ”

“ This League is not more or less that the germ of Australian independence (sic) . The die is cast, and fate has stamped upon the movement its indelible signature. No power on earth can restrain the united might and headlong strides for freedom of the people of this country, and we are lost in amazement while contemplating the dazzling panorama of the Australian future (Great works) . We salute the League [but not the trio, Vern, Kennedy, Humffray] , and tender our hopes and prayers for its prosperity [in the shape of a goodly pile of half-crowns] . ”

“ Does this League of Nations which has been created by the covenant of 1919 contain within it the germ of any permanent{v2-584} federation of human effort? Will it grow into something for which, as Stallybrass says, men will be ready to “work whole-heartedly and, if necessary, fight”—as hitherto they have been willing to fight for their country and their own people? There are few intimations of any such enthusiasm for the League at the present time. The League does not even seem to know how to talk to common men. ”

“ The League is campaigning against the reactionaries, incompetents, and crooks who occupy strategic positions in many of our organizations. It is striving to replace them with militants, with men and women unionists who look upon the labor movement not as a means for making an easy living, but as an instrument for the achievement of working class emancipation. In other words, the League is working in every direction necessary to put life and spirit and power into the trade union movement. ”

“ But if the League has grown from so small beginnings to he the great and powerful organization which we can now without boasting say that it is, an organization which we may affirm consists not of a few individuals in this and the neighbouring towns, but which includes within its limits almost the whole of the middle classes and of the working population of Great Britain; if the League has risen so much, and increased so much, the information which the most active members of the League have had aforetime has increased and become more valuable, just in the same proportion. ”

“ It is questionable whether once the League had come into operation, any nation could afford to withdraw; but no power should be veiled in it to coerce a nation to remain in the League against its will. The basis of free and voluntary association is the only guarantee of genuine and fruitful solidarity. ”

“ You say there are three thousand members of the Socialist League in Mannhausen?”
“In Franconia,” corrected Johann. “There are several provincial branches, but of course the one here is the most numerous, and gives the lead to the others.”
“Tell me”—the King spoke with a little hesitation—“was it the League which sent you to Neustadt?”
“Oh, no; certainly not. I came here as the agent of a small secret society, which was founded in the reign of your father. The League is a public organisation, and does not undertake any measures of that kind.” ”

“ America and Britain, acting in concert with an openly sympathetic Italy and a secretly assenting Belgium, would have brought such pressure to bear on France as to make it inevitable that the League should act.
The success of the League depends upon the readiness of nations great and small to discuss all their differences at the council table. But no great power has so far permitted any international question in which it has a direct and vital interest to be submitted to the League for decision. ”