An indispensable condition of success is that the compact binding the members together must be entered into by the peoples, not merely by their governments.  For it is upon the masses that the burden of the war lies heaviest.  It is the bulk of the population that supplies the soldiers, the money, and the work for the belligerent states, and endures the hardships and makes the sacrifices requisite to sustain it.  Therefore, the peoples are primarily interested in the abolition of the old ordering and the forging of the new.  Moreover, as latter-day campaigns are waged with all the resources of the warring peoples, and as the possession of certain of these resources is often both the cause of the conflict and the objective of the aggressor, it follows that no mere political enactments will meet contemporary requirements.  An association of nations renouncing the sword as a means of settling disputes must also reduce as far as possible the surface over which friction with its neighbors is likely to take place.  And nowadays most of that surface is economic.  The possession of raw materials is a more potent attraction than territorial aggrandizement.  Indeed, the latter is coveted mainly as a means of securing or safeguarding the former.  On these and other grounds, in drawing up a charter for a society of nations, the political aspect should play but a subsidiary part.  In Paris it was the only aspect that counted for anything.

A parliament of peoples, then, is the only organ that can impart viability to a society of nations worthy of the name.  By joining the Covenant with the Peace Treaty, and turning the former into an instrument for the execution of the latter, thus subordinating the ideal to the egotistical, Mr. Wilson deprived his plan of its sole justification, and for the time being buried it.  The philosopher Lichtenberg[339] wrote, “One man brings forth a thought, another holds it over the baptismal font, the third begets offspring with it, the fourth stands at its deathbed, and the fifth buries it.”  Mr. Wilson has discharged the functions of gravedigger to the idea of a pacific society of nations, just as Lenin has done to the system of Marxism, the only difference being that Marxism is as dead as a door-nail, whereas the society of nations may rise again.

It was open, then, to the three principal delegates to insure the peace of the world by moral means or by force.  Having eschewed the former by adopting the doctrines of Monroe, abandoning the freedom of the seas, and by according to France strategic frontiers and other privileges of the militarist order, they might have enlarged and systematized these concessions to expediency and forged an alliance of the three states or of two, and undertaken to keep peace on the planet against all marplots.  I wrote at the time:  “The delegates are becoming conscious of the existence of a ready-made league of nations in the shape of the Anglo-Saxon states, which, together with