And now let us consider what are the powers that must be delegated to this proposed council of a League of Free Nations, if that is really effectually to prevent war and to organize and establish and make peace permanent in the world.

Firstly, then, it must be able to adjudicate upon all international disputes whatever.  Its first function must clearly be that.  Before a war can break out there must be the possibility of a world decision upon its rights and wrongs.  The League, therefore, will have as its primary function to maintain a Supreme Court, whose decisions will be final, before which every sovereign power may appear as plaintiff against any other sovereign power or group of powers.  The plea, I take it, will always be in the form that the defendant power or powers is engaged in proceedings “calculated to lead to a breach of the peace,” and calling upon the League for an injunction against such proceedings.  I suppose the proceedings that can be brought into court in this way fall under such headings as these that follow; restraint of trade by injurious tariffs or suchlike differentiations or by interference with through traffic, improper treatment of the subjects or their property (here I put a query) of the plaintiff nation in the defendant state, aggressive military or naval preparation, disorder spreading over the frontier, trespass (as, for instance, by airships), propaganda of disorder, espionage, permitting the organization of injurious activities, such as raids or piracy.  Clearly all such actions must come within the purview of any world-supreme court organized to prevent war.  But in addition there is a more doubtful and delicate class of case, arising out of the discontent of patches of one race or religion in the dominions of another.  How far may the supreme court of the world attend to grievances between subject and sovereign?

Such cases are highly probable, and no large, vague propositions about the “self-determination” of peoples can meet all the cases.  In Macedonia, for instance, there is a jumble of Albanian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Greek and Rumanian villages always jostling one another and maintaining an intense irritation between the kindred nations close at hand.  And quite a large number of areas and cities in the world, it has to be remembered, are not homogeneous at all.  Will the great nations of the world have the self-abnegation to permit a scattered subject population to appeal against the treatment of its ruling power to the Supreme Court?  This is a much more serious interference with sovereignty than intervention in an external quarrel.  Could a Greek village in Bulgarian Macedonia plead in the Supreme Court?  Could the Armenians in Constantinople, or the Jews in Roumania, or the Poles in West Prussia, or the negroes in Georgia, or the Indians in the Transvaal make such an appeal?  Could any Indian population in India appeal?  Personally I should like to see the power of the Supreme Court