need for many people to tidy up their ideas at this point.  We cannot have our cake and eat it.  If association is worth while, there must be some sacrifice of freedom to association.  As a very distinguished colonial representative said to me the other day:  “Here we are talking of the freedom of small nations and the ‘self-determination’ of peoples, and at the same time of the Council of the League of Nations and all sorts of international controls.  Which do we want?”

The answer, I think, is “Both.”  It is a matter of more or less, of getting the best thing at the cost of the second-best.  We may want to relax an old association in order to make a newer and wider one.  It is quite understandable that peoples aware of a distinctive national character and involved in some big existing political complex, should wish to disentangle themselves from one group of associations in order to enter more effectively into another, a greater, and more satisfactory one.  The Finn or the Pole, who has hitherto been a rather reluctant member of the synthesis of the Russian empire, may well wish to end that attachment in order to become a free member of a worldwide brotherhood.  The desire for free arrangement is not a desire for chaos.  There is such a thing as untying your parcels in order to pack them better, and I do not see myself how we can possibly contemplate a great league of freedom and reason in the world without a considerable amount of such preliminary dissolution.

It happens, very fortunately for the world, that a century and a quarter ago thirteen various and very jealous states worked out the problem of a Union, and became—­after an enormous, exhausting wrangle—­the United States of America.  Now the way they solved their riddle was by delegating and giving over jealously specified sovereign powers and doing all that was possible to retain the residuum.  They remained essentially sovereign states.  New York, Virginia, Massachusetts, for example, remained legally independent.  The practical fusion of these peoples into one people outran the legal bargain.  It was only after long years of discussion that the point was conceded; it was indeed only after the Civil War that the implications were fully established, that there resided a sovereignty in the American people as a whole, as distinguished from the peoples of the several states.  This is a precedent that every one who talks about the League of Nations should bear in mind.  These states set up a congress and president in Washington with strictly delegated powers.  That congress and president they delegated to look after certain common interests, to deal with interstate trade, to deal with foreign powers, to maintain a supreme court of law.  Everything else—­education, militia, powers of life and death—­the states retained for themselves.  To this day, for instance, the federal courts and the federal officials have no power to interfere to protect the lives or property of aliens in any part of the union outside the district