motives to arm will weaken and tend to disappear.  If nations, actuated either by arrogance or greed or fear, continue to desire to increase their fighting strength, no arrangements for proportionate disarmament are likely to be effective.  On the other hand, if the basis of a really valid league or federation can be laid, precluding the most ambitious State from any reasonable hope of indulging dreams of successful conquest, while relieving timid States from the apprehensions under which they have lived hitherto, the natural play of political forces within each State will favour disarmament.  An international arrangement that meets our requirements must be strong enough to reverse the motives, aggressive and defensive, which in the past have caused nations to arm.  Nations will not pile up armaments if they believe that they will have no need or opportunity to use them.  To produce this belief in the uselessness of national armies and navies is therefore a prime object of international policy.  The successful establishment of this belief involves, however, a change of disposition among national governments amounting to the process known in religious circles as conversion.  They must be induced to forgo that right of war which according to past statecraft has been the brightest jewel in the crown of sovereignty.

Thus we are again brought round to our vital issue, that of the amount and kind of cession of sovereignty required for an effective International Government.  It may be the case that it will be impossible to induce a sufficient number of the great States to transfer the ultimate right of waging war to a representative International Government, or to cede to such a Government the right to legislate on international relations with power to enforce obedience to these laws.  There are, however, many of us who hold that these powers are essential to an international arrangement which shall effectively guarantee the peace of the world.  The abandonment of the sovereign right to make war is essential for the future security of peace.  Legislative and executive powers for an International Government are essential to obtain by pacific means those changes in the political and economic relations of peoples which hitherto have only been attainable by war.  No merely statical settlement will suffice.  Great new issues of national controversy or of economic needs will certainly come up afresh for settlement, and until some stable method of government is established with power to determine and enforce the equities and the utilities they represent, recourse to the arbitrament of war will still be likely.

But granting that national government does not represent a final form of political structure, and that some federal internationalism is now practicable, is it possible to hope or to expect that by a single stride, or by a series of rapid strides, the sovereignty of national states will submit to so much diminution as is involved in the more advanced scheme of international government?  Most historians, statesmen, and political philosophers will, I think, hold that so large and rapid a process of development is impracticable, however desirable in theory it might be.  It will be necessary, they insist, to take one step at a time, to preserve as closely as possible the principle of continuity, and not to attempt to move further and faster than circumstances and the necessities of the time compel.