I am not advocating the League of Nations except in the limited way of attempting to show that the Balance of Power is impossible as an alternative unless you can re-create the conditions of a century ago, restore the individual independence of a number of fairly equal Powers, and guarantee the commonwealth of nations against privy conspiracy and sedition in the form of separate groups and alliances.  But there is one supreme advantage in a Community of Power, provided it remains a reality, and that is that it need never be used.  Its mere existence would be sufficient to ensure the peace; for no rebel State would care to challenge the inevitable defeat and retribution which a Community of Power could inflict.  It has even been urged, and I believe it myself, that Germany would never have invaded Belgium had she been sure that Great Britain, and still less had she thought that America, would intervene.  It was the Balance of Power that provoked the war, and it was the absence of a Community of Power which made it possible.

BASIS OF SECURITY

But no one who thinks that power—­whether a Monopoly, a Balance, or even a Community of Power is the ultimate guardian angel of our peace, has the root of the matter in him.  Men, said Burke, are not governed primarily by laws, still less by force; and behind all power stands opinion.  To believe in public opinion rather than in might excludes the believer from the regular forces of militarism and condemns him as a visionary and blind.  For advocates of the Balance of Power bear a striking resemblance to the Potsdam school; and even so moderate a German as the late Dr. Rathenau declared in his unregenerate days before the war that Germans were not in the habit of reckoning with public opinion.  Nevertheless, there is a frontier in the world which for a century and more has enjoyed a security which all the armaments of Prussian militarism could not give the German Fatherland; and the absolute security of that frontier rests not upon a monopoly nor a community, still less upon a balance of power, but on the opinion held on both sides of that frontier that all power is irrational and futile as a guarantee of peace between civilised or Christian people.

Let us look at that frontier for a moment.  It is in its way the most wonderful thing on earth, and it holds a light to lighten the nations and to guide our feet into the way of peace.  It runs, of course, between the Dominion of Canada and the United States of America across the great lakes and three thousand miles of prairie; and from the military and strategic point of view it is probably the worst frontier in the world.  Why then is it secure?  Is it because of any monopoly or community or balance of power?  Is it because the United States and the British Empire are under a common government, or because there is along that frontier a nicely-balanced distribution of military strength?  No, it is secure, not in