Let us keep our grip on that.  Peace is the business of the great powers primarily.  Steel output, university graduates, and so forth may be convenient secondary criteria, may be useful ways of measuring war efficiency, but the meat and substance of the Council of the League of Nations must embody the wills of those leading peoples.  They can give an enduring peace to the little nations and the whole of mankind.  It can arrive in no other way.  So I take it that the Council of an ideal League of Nations must consist chiefly of the representatives of the great belligerent powers, and that the representatives of the minor allies and of the neutrals—­essential though their presence will be—­must not be allowed to swamp the voices of these larger masses of mankind.

And this state of affairs may come about more easily than logical, statistical-minded people may be disposed to think.  Our first impulse, when we discuss the League of Nations idea, is to think of some very elaborate and definite scheme of members on the model of existing legislative bodies, called together one hardly knows how, and sitting in a specially built League of Nations Congress House.  All schemes are more methodical than reality.  We think of somebody, learned and “expert,” in spectacles, with a thin clear voice, reading over the “Projected Constitution of a League of Nations” to an attentive and respectful Peace Congress.  But there is a more natural way to a league than that.  Instead of being made like a machine, the League of Nations may come about like a marriage.  The Peace Congress that must sooner or later meet may itself become, after a time, the Council of a League of Nations.  The League of Nations may come upon us by degrees, almost imperceptibly.  I am strongly obsessed by the idea that that Peace Congress will necessarily become—­and that it is highly desirable that it should become—­a most prolonged and persistent gathering.  Why should it not become at length a permanent gathering, inviting representatives to aid its deliberations from the neutral states, and gradually adjusting itself to conditions of permanency?

I can conceive no such Peace Congress as those that have settled up after other wars, settling up after this war.  Not only has the war been enormously bigger than any other war, but it has struck deeper at the foundations of social and economic life.  I doubt if we begin to realize how much of the old system is dead to-day, how much has to be remade.  Since the beginnings of history there has been a credible promise of gold payments underneath our financial arrangements.  It is now an incredible promise.  The value of a pound note waves about while you look at it.  What will happen to it when peace comes no man can tell.  Nor what will happen to the mark.  The rouble has gone into the Abyss.  Our giddy money specialists clutch their handfuls of paper and watch it flying down the steep.  Much as we may hate the Germans, some of us will have