nown and better understood, not to be working out its problems and
bringing it about, is to be living outside of the contemporary life of
the world. For a book upon any other subject at the present time some
apology may be necessary, but a book upon this subject is as natural a
thing to produce now as a pair of skates in winter when the ice begins
to bear.

All we writers find ourselves engaged perforce in some part or other of
a world-wide propaganda of this the most creative and hopeful of
political ideas that has ever dawned upon the consciousness of mankind.
With no concerted plan we feel called upon to serve it. And in no
connection would one so like to think oneself un-original as in this
connection. It would be a dismaying thing to realize that one were
writing anything here which was not the possible thought of great
multitudes of other people, and capable of becoming the common thought
of mankind. One writes in such a book as this not to express oneself but
to swell a chorus. The idea of the League of Nations is so great a one
that it may well override the pretensions and command the allegiance of
kings; much more does it claim the self-subjugation of the journalistic
writer. Our innumerable books upon this great edifice of a World Peace
do not constitute a scramble for attention, but an attempt to express in
every variety of phrase and aspect this one system of ideas which now
possesses us all. In the same way the elementary facts and ideas of the
science of chemistry might conceivably be put completely and fully into
one text-book, but, as a matter of fact, it is far more convenient to
tell that same story over in a thousand different forms, in a text-book
for boys here, for a different sort or class of boy there, for adult
students, for reference, for people expert in mathematics, for people
unused to the scientific method, and so on. For the last year the writer
has been doing what he can--and a number of other writers have been
doing what they can--to bring about a united declaration of all the
Atlantic Allies in favour of a League of Nations, and to define the
necessary nature of that League. He has, in the course of this work,
written a series of articles upon the League and upon _the necessary
sacrifices of preconceptions_ that the idea involves in the London
press. He has also been trying to clear his own mind upon the real
meaning of that ambiguous word "democracy," for which the League is to
make the