rightly, two delegates, and if over twenty, three, and some of the small states were given a kind of intermittent appearance, they only came every other time or something of that sort; but at The Hague things still remained in such a posture that three or four minute and backward states could outvote the British Empire or the United States.  Therein lies the clue to the insignificance of The Hague.  Such projects as these are idle projects and we must put them out of our heads; they are against nature; the great nations will not suffer them for a moment.

But when we dismiss this idea of representation by states, we are left with the problem of the proportion of representation and of relative weight in the Council of the League on our hands.  It is the sort of problem that appeals terribly to the ingenious.  We cannot solve it by making population a basis, because that will give a monstrous importance to the illiterate millions of India and China.  Ingenious statistical schemes have been framed in which the number of university graduates and the steel output come in as multipliers, but for my own part I am not greatly impressed by statistical schemes.  At the risk of seeming something of a Prussian, I would like to insist upon certain brute facts.  The business of the League of Nations is to keep the peace of the world and nothing else.  No power will ever dare to break the peace of the world if the powers that are capable of making war under modern conditions say “No.”  And there are only four powers certainly capable at the present time of producing the men and materials needed for a modern war in sufficient abundance to go on fighting:  Britain, France, Germany, and the United States.  There are three others which are very doubtfully capable:  Italy, Japan, and Austria.  Russia I will mark—­it is all that one can do with Russia just now—­with a note of interrogation.  Some day China may be war capable—­I hope never, but it is a possibility.  Personally I don’t think that any other power on earth would have a ghost of a chance to resist the will—­if it could be an honestly united will—­of the first-named four.  All the rest fight by the sanction of and by association with these leaders.  They can only fight because of the split will of the war-complete powers.  Some are forced to fight by that very division.

No one can vie with me in my appreciation of the civilization of Switzerland, Sweden, or Holland, but the plain fact of the case is that such powers are absolutely incapable of uttering an effective protest against war.  Far less so are your Haytis and Liberias.  The preservation of the world-peace rests with the great powers and with the great powers alone.  If they have the will for peace, it is peace.  If they have not, it is conflict.  The four powers I have named can now, if they see fit, dictate the peace of the world for ever.