of Columbia.  The state governments still see to that.  The federal government has the legal right perhaps to intervene, but it is still chary of such intervention.  And these states of the American Union were at the outset so independent-spirited that they would not even adopt a common name.  To this day they have no common name.  We have to call them Americans, which is a ridiculous name when we consider that Canada, Mexico, Peru, Brazil are all of them also in America.  Or else we have to call them Virginians, Californians, New Englanders, and so forth.  Their legal and nominal separateness weighs nothing against the real fusion that their great league has now made possible.

Now, that clearly is a precedent of the utmost value in our schemes for this council of the League of Nations.  We must begin by delegating, as the States began by delegating.  It is a far cry to the time when we shall talk and think of the Sovereign People of the Earth.  That council of the League of Nations will be a tie as strong, we hope, but certainly not so close and multiplex as the early tie of the States at Washington.  It will begin by having certain delegated powers and no others.  It will be an “ad hoc” body.  Later its powers may grow as mankind becomes accustomed to it.  But at first it will have, directly or mediately, all the powers that seem necessary to restrain the world from war—­and unless I know nothing of patriotic jealousies it will have not a scrap of power more.  The danger is much more that its powers will be insufficient than that they will be excessive.  Of that later.  What I want to discuss here now is the constitution of this delegated body.  I want to discuss that first in order to set aside out of the discussion certain fantastic notions that will otherwise get very seriously in our way.  Fantastic as they are, they have played a large part in reducing the Hague Tribunal to an ineffective squeak amidst the thunders of this war.

A number of gentlemen scheming out world unity in studies have begun their proposals with the simple suggestion that each sovereign power should send one member to the projected parliament of mankind.  This has a pleasant democratic air; one sovereign state, one vote.  Now let us run over a list of sovereign states and see to what this leads us.  We find our list includes the British Empire, with a population of four hundred millions, of which probably half can read and write some language or other; Bogota with a population of a million, mostly poets; Hayti with a population of a million and a third, almost entirely illiterate and liable at any time to further political disruption; Andorra with a population of four or five thousand souls.  The mere suggestion of equal representation between such “powers” is enough to make the British Empire burst into a thousand (voting) fragments.  A certain concession to population, one must admit, was made by the theorists; a state of over three millions got, if I remember