BALANCE OR LEAGUE?

That antithesis comes out wherever the problem of preserving the peace of the world is seriously and intelligently discussed.  Six years ago, when he began to turn his attention to this subject, Lord Robert Cecil wrote and privately circulated a memorandum in which he advocated something like a League of Nations.  To that memorandum an able reply was drafted by an eminent authority in the Foreign Office, in which it was contended that out of the discussion “the Balance of Power emerges as the fundamental factor.”  That criticism for the time being checked official leanings towards a League of Nations.  But the war went on, threatening to end in a balance of power, which was anything but welcome to those who combined a theoretical belief in the Balance of Power with a practical demand for its complete destruction by an overwhelming victory for our Allies and ourselves.  Meanwhile, before America came in, President Wilson was declaring that, in order to guarantee the permanence of such a settlement as would commend itself to the United States, there must be, not “a Balance of Power but a Community of Power.”

Opinion in England was moving in the same direction.  The League of Nations Society (afterwards called “Union”) had been formed, and at a great meeting on 14th May, 1917, speeches advocating some such league as the best means of preventing future wars were delivered by Lord Bryce, General Smuts, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Hugh Cecil, and others.  Labour was even more emphatic; and, responding to popular opinion, the Government, at Christmas, 1917, appointed a small committee to explore the historical, juridical, and diplomatic bearings of the suggested solution.  A brief survey sufficed to show that attempts to guarantee the peace of the world resolved themselves into three categories:  (1) a Monopoly of Power, (2) Balance of Power, and (3) Community of Power.  Rome had established the longest peace in history by subjugating all her rivals and creating a Pax Romana imposed by a world-wide Empire.  That Empire lasted for centuries, and the idea persisted throughout the middle ages.  In modern times Philip II. of Spain, Louis XIV. of France, Napoleon, and even the Kaiser were suspected of attempting to revive it; and their efforts provoked the counter idea, first of a Balance of Power, and then in these latter days of a Community of Power.  The conception of a Monopoly of Power was by common consent abandoned as impossible and intolerable, after the rise of nationality, by all except the particular aspirants to the monopoly.  The Balance of Power and the Community of Power—­in other words, the League of Nations—­thus became the two rival solutions of the problem of permanent peace.

THE THEORY OF BALANCE