Half a world peace is better than none.  There seems no reason whatever why the world should wait for the Central Powers before it begins this necessary work.  Mr. McCurdy has been asking lately, “Why not the League of Nations now?” That is a question a great number of people would like to echo very heartily.  The nearer the Allies can come to a League of Free Nations before the Peace Congress the more prospect there is that that body will approximate in nature to a League of Nations for the whole world.

In one most unexpected quarter the same idea has been endorsed.  The King’s Speech on the prorogation of Parliament this February was one of the most remarkable royal utterances that have ever been made from the British throne.  There was less of the old-fashioned King and more of the modern President about it than the most republican-minded of us could have anticipated.  For the first time in a King’s Speech we heard of the “democracies” of the world, and there was a clear claim that the Allies at present fighting the Central Powers did themselves constitute a League of Nations.

But we must admit that at present they do so only in a very rhetorical sense.  There is no real council of empowered representatives, and nothing in the nature of a united front has been prepared.  Unless we provide beforehand for something more effective, Italy, France, the United States, Japan, and this country will send separate groups of representatives, with separate instructions, unequal status, and very probably conflicting views upon many subjects, to the ultimate peace discussions.  It is quite conceivable—­it is a very serious danger—­that at this discussion skilful diplomacy on the part of the Central Powers may open a cleft among the Allies that has never appeared during the actual war.  Have the British settled, for example, with Italy and France for the supply of metallurgical coal after the war?  Those countries must have it somehow.  Across the board Germany can make some tempting bids in that respect.  Or take another question:  Have the British arrived at common views with France, Belgium, Portugal, and South Africa about the administration of Central Africa?  Suppose Germany makes sudden proposals affecting native labour that win over the Portuguese and the Boers?  There are a score of such points upon which we shall find the Allied representatives haggling with each other in the presence of the enemy if they have not been settled beforehand.

It is the plainest common sense that we should be fixing up all such matters with our Allies now, and knitting together a common front for the final deal with German Imperialism.  And these things are not to be done effectively and bindingly nowadays by official gentlemen in discreet undertones.  They need to be done with the full knowledge and authority of the participating peoples.