No!  That sort of thing will not do now.  This Peace Congress is too big a job for party politicians and society and county families.  The bulk of British opinion cannot go on being represented for ever by President Wilson.  We cannot always look to the Americans to express our ideas and do our work for democracy.  The foolery of the Berlin Treaty must not be repeated.  We cannot have another popular Prime Minister come triumphing back to England with a gross of pink spectacles—­through which we may survey the prospect of the next great war.  The League of Free Nations means something very big and solid; it is not a rhetorical phrase to be used to pacify a restless, distressed, 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 matter.