I know that this will be a very shocking proposal to all our able specialists in foreign policy.  They will talk at once about the “ignorance” of people like the Labour leaders and myself about such matters, and so on.  What do we know of the treaty of so-and-so that was signed in the year seventeen something?—­and so on.  To which the answer is that we ought not to have been kept ignorant of these things.  A day will come when the Foreign Offices of all countries will have to recognize that what the people do not know of international agreements “ain’t facts.”  A secret treaty is only binding upon the persons in the secret.  But what I, as a sample common person, am not ignorant of is this:  that the business that goes on at the Peace Congress will either make or mar the lives of everyone I care for in the world, and that somehow, by representative or what not, I have to be there.  The Peace Congress deals with the blood and happiness of my children and the future of my world.  Speaking as one of the hundreds of millions of “rank outsiders” in public affairs, I do not mean to respect any peace treaty that may end this war unless I am honestly represented at its making.  I think everywhere there is a tendency in people to follow the Russian example to this extent and to repudiate bargains in which they have had no voice.

I do not see that any genuine realization of the hopes with which all this talk about the League of Nations is charged can be possible, unless the two bodies which should naturally lead up to the League of Nations—­that is to say, firstly, the Conference of the Allies, and then the Peace Congress—­are elected bodies, speaking confidently for the whole mass of the peoples behind them.  It may be a troublesome thing to elect them, but it will involve much more troublesome consequences if they are not elected.  This, I think, is one of the considerations for which many people’s minds are still unprepared.  But unless we are to have over again after all this bloodshed and effort some such “Peace with Honour” foolery as we had performed by “Dizzy” and Salisbury at that fatal Berlin Conference in which this present war was begotten, we must sit up to this novel proposal of electoral representation in the peace negotiations.  Something more than common sense binds our statesmen to this idea.  They are morally pledged to it.  President Wilson and our British and French spokesmen alike have said over and over again that they want to deal not with the Hohenzollerns but with the German people.  In other words, we have demanded elected representatives from the German people with whom we may deal, and how can we make a demand of that sort unless we on our part are already prepared to send our own elected representatives to meet them?  It is up to us to indicate by our own practice how we on our side, professing as we do to act for democracies, to make democracy safe on the earth, and so on, intend to meet this new occasion.