League of Nations

“ 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. ”

“ Among the States of European civilization millions of persons are unrepresented in the League of Nations: the United States, who has not wished to adhere to it after the Treaty of Versailles sanctioned violence; Russia, who has not been able to join owing to her difficult position; Germany, Hungary, Austria and Bulgaria, who have not been permitted to join; the Turks, etc. The League of Nations was a magnificent conception in which I have had faith, and which I have regarded with sympathy. But a formidable mistake has deprived it of all prestige. ”

“ Which do you think is the best foundation for the League of Nations? Do you imagine that so long as nations do not like each other, that mere words of good intention, written on mere paper, are going to be enough? ”

“ Observe the fierce and as yet unsilenced dispute which the proposal for the introduction of a binding and universal pact of non-aggression among the nations of Europe has aroused among the avowed supporters of the League of Nations—a League so auspiciously welcomed for the ideal that prompted its birth, yet now so utterly inadequate in the actual principles that underlie its present-day structure and working. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I assert that the problem submitted to the Assembly today is a much wider one. It is not merely a question of the settlement of Italian aggression.
League Threatened It is collective security: it is the very existence of the League of Nations. It is the confidence that each State is to place in international treaties. It is the value of promises made to small States that their integrity and their independence shall be respected and ensured. It is the principle of the equality of States on the one hand, or otherwise the obligation laid upon small Powers to accept the bonds of vassalship. ”

“ Are the Nations of the world prepared now, or will they be ready after this war, to look steadily and clearly at this aspect of the League of Nations, at the limitations and obligations that it will impose, and to say whole-hearted and convinced as they have never been before, "We will accept and undertake them"? ”

“ A League of Nations would work well only if its verdicts were loyally accepted by all the nations composing it. To make majority-rule possible you must have a community made up of members who are reasonably well informed upon one another's affairs, and who are bound together by a tie of loyalty stronger and more enduring than their causes of difference. It would be a happy thing if the nations of the world made such a community; and the sufferings of this War have brought them nearer to desiring it. ”

“ No League of Nations ever will be stronger than the individual thought of the countries combining. Our League of Nations will be no stronger than our feelings against pro-Germanism. If we forget that, and take up the game at the old place, our League of Nations is dead at its birth. ”

“ The new League of Nations movement is an evidence of development of the same line of thought among the thinkers of the Continent, and is slowly gathering momentum through the creation of institutions with laws for their guidance, and the promise of the growth of a body of lawyers as interested to maintain those institutions as the lawyers of the nation-states have been to maintain that form of organization. The League has had to take up the question of the relations of Europe to distant lands, and has stood for a principle of trusteeship, the fate of which is trembling in the balance. ”

“ The League of Nations, as proposed, includes not only obligations not related to the reasons for engaging in the war, but also obligations opposed to the traditions, the time-honored policies, and even the constitutional provisions of the United States. It commits the whole future policy of this country to the decisions of an international body in which it would have only a single voice ”

“ They meant by a League of Nations a league which should consist of all the civilized nations of the world, and that there should be such international dealings with all questions which would prevent war in the future. ”

“ Another element, of course, but a less effective one, will be the creation of a League of Nations, that will be prepared to use force against any nation that breaks away from the observance of international law. ”

“ Much of the work of the League of Nations will have to be undone. But it will not be undone by any League. The nations will settle differences in accordance with the law that permits the more powerful to wield control commensurate with their geographical and intellectual importance. ”

“ By thus making a certainty of the most important question of all history, no matter how difficult and delicate matters of greater or less importance may be, the League of Nations will have assured its success in advance as the greatest and most beneficent influence that the world has ever experienced, just as the peace of Westphalia was in its generation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ League of Nations," one man has written, "when men will fight for it." For this League of Nations at Geneva, this little corner of Balfourian jobs and gentility, no man would dream of fighting, but for the great state of mankind, men will presently be very ready to fight and, as the thing may go, either to kill or die. Things must come in their order; first the idea, then the kindling of imaginations, then the world wide battle. ”

“ Everywhere the conviction has become prevalent that things cannot remain as they were before the outbreak of the present war, and therefore the demand for a League of Nations, or—I had better say—for a new League of Nations to take the place of that which has been in existence for about 400 years, has arisen. ”

“ Our first impulse, when we discuss the League of Nations idea, is to think of some very elaborate and definite scheme of members on the model of existing legislative bodies, called together one hardly knows how, and sitting in a specially built League of Nations Congress House. ”

“ They can give an enduring peace to the little nations and the whole of mankind. It can arrive in no other way. So I take it that the Council of an ideal League of Nations must consist chiefly of the representatives of the great belligerent powers, and that the representatives of the minor allies and of the neutrals—essential though their presence will be—must not be allowed to swamp the voices of these larger masses of mankind. ”

“ Though the great outcry raised by post-war nationalism is growing louder and more insistent every day, the League of Nations is as yet in its embryonic state, and the storm clouds that are gathering may for a time totally eclipse its powers and obliterate its machinery, yet the direction in which the institution itself is operating is most significant. ”

“ The universal demand for a new League of Nations accepting the principles that every judicial dispute amongst nations must be settled by International Courts and that every political dispute must, before the parties resort to arms, be brought before a Council of Conciliation, demonstrates clearly that the Community of States must now deliberately give itself some kind of organisation, because without it the principles just mentioned cannot be realised. ”

“ The movement for a League of Nations is sound, for its purpose is to secure a more lasting peace amongst the nations of the world than has hitherto prevailed. But a number of schemes to realise this [6] purpose have been published which in my opinion go much too far because they comprise proposals which are not realisable in our days. ”

“ One of the conclusions has been that, if the world of which they form an important part is to be saved from what they consider disaster, they must enter the war against Germany; another has been that, if national liberty and peace are to be secure in future, there must be a League of Nations to secure them. ”

“ How, then, shall the League of Nations be organized? Obviously by solemn express convention, a convention whose binding force must depend on the renouncement by every party to it, in some measure, of independent sovereign power, and in particular of the right to be judge in one's own cause. For the plan of merely persuasive authority, which any party may obey or disregard at his own discretion, has been tried and found wanting. ”

“ Therefore the Central Powers must become members of a League of Nations for such a League to be of any great use, which postulates as a sine qua non that Germany must be utterly defeated in the present war. ”

“ Things have been done no doubt in this War which no man living who knows of them can forgive. But a generation soon passes. The burning lava quickly cools, and the grass and flowers grow over it. I wish one could be as confident of a recovery of wisdom and uprightness in the public affairs of Europe as we can be of a reaction towards peace and goodwill. For in the building up of a League of Nations, as in all great constructive work, neither correct principles nor good intentions suffice to ensure success. ”

“ Nevertheless, a League of Nations having once come into existence, International Law grew more and more, and when in 1625 Hugo Grotius published his immortal work on 'The Law of War and Peace,' the system of International Law offered in his work conquered the world and became the basis of all following development. ”

“ It has to be recognised that the institution of a League of Nations precludes any annexations or any military interference with any peoples whatever, without a mandate from the Congress of the League. The League must directly or indirectly become the guardian of all unsettled regions and order must be kept and development promoted by it in such derelict regions as Mesopotamia and Armenia, for example, have now become. ”