France, might hinder wars, promote good-fellowship, remold human destinies; and they are delighted thus to possess solid foundations on which a noble edifice can be raised in the fullness of time.  Tribunals will be created, with full powers to adjudge disputes; facilities will be accorded to litigious states, and even an obligation will be imposed to invoke their arbitration.  And the sum total of these reforms will be known to contemporary annals as an inchoate League of Nations.  The delegates are already modestly disavowing the intention of realizing the ideal in all its parts.  That must be left to coming generations; but what with the exhaustion of the peoples, their aversion from warfare, and the material obstacles to the renewal of hostilities in the near future, it is calculated that the peace will not soon be violated.  Whether more salient results will be attained or attempted by the Conference nobody can foretell."[340]

This expedient, even had it been deliberately conceived and skilfully wrought out, would not have been an adequate solution of the world’s difficulties, nor would it have commended itself to all the states concerned.  But it would at least have been a temporary makeshift capable of being transmuted under favorable circumstances into something less material and more durable.  But the amateur world-reformers could not make up their minds to choose either alternative.  And the result is one of the most lamentable failures recorded in human history.

I placed my own opinion on record at the time as frankly as the censorship which still existed for me would permit.  I wrote:  “What every delegate with sound political instinct will ask himself is, whether the League of Nations will eliminate wars in future, and, if not, he will feel conscientiously bound to adopt other relatively sure means of providing against them, and these consist of alliances, strategic frontiers, and the permanent disablement of the potential enemy.  On one or other of these alternative lines the resettlement must be devised.  To combine them would be ruinous.  Now of what practical use is a league of nations devoid of supernational forces and faced by a numerous, virile, and united race, smarting under a sense of injustice, thirsting for the opportunities for development denied to it, but granted to nations which it despises as inferior?  Would a league of nations combine militarily against the gradual encroachments or sudden aggression of that Power against its weaker neighbors?  Nobody is authorized to answer this question affirmatively.  To-day the Powers cannot agree to intervene against Bolshevism, which they deem a scourge of the world, nor can they agree to tolerate it.

“In these circumstances, what compelling motives can be laid before those delegates who are asked to dispense with strategic frontiers and rely upon a league of nations for their defense?  Take France’s outlook.  Peace once concluded, she will be confronted with a secular enemy who numbers some seventy millions to her forty-five millions.  In ten years the disproportion will be still greater.  Discontented Russia is almost certain to be taken in hand by Germany, befriended, reorganized, exploited, and enlisted as an ally."[341]