w can they be expected to "accustom themselves to giving
way"--perhaps to a majority composed of the representatives of undemocratic
governments? Their responsibility is, not to the Concert, but to their
own Government and people. They are not the minority members of a
democratically-elected Council of their own fellow-citizens. They are the
minority members of a heterogeneous Council towards which they owe no
allegiance and recognise no binding responsibility. There is no half-way
house between Citizenship and no Citizenship, between Responsibility and
no Responsibility. No man and no community can serve two masters. When the
point of conflict arises men and nations have to make the choice where
their duty lies. Not the representatives of Great Britain on the
International Concert, but the people of Great Britain themselves would
have to decide whether their real allegiance, as citizens, was due to the
World-State or to their own Commonwealth: they would find themselves at the
same awful parting of the ways which confronted the people of the Southern
States in 1861. When at the outbreak of the Civil War General Lee was
offered by Lincoln the Commandership of the Northern armies and refused
it, to become the Commander-in-Chief on the side of the South, he did so
because "he believed," as he told Congress after the war, "that the act of
Virginia in withdrawing herself from the United States carried him along
with it as a citizen of Virginia, and that _her_ laws and acts were binding
on him." In other words, unless the proposed Common Council is to be made
something more than a Council of the delegates of sovereign States (as the
Southern States believed themselves to be till 1861), a deadlock sooner or
later is almost inevitable, and the terrible and difficult question--so
familiar to Americans and recently to ourselves on the smaller stage of
Ulster--of the right of secession and the coercion of minorities
will arise. But if the Common Council is framed in accordance with a
Constitution which binds its representatives to accept its decisions and
obey its government, then the World-State, with a World-Executive, will
already have come into being. There will be no more war, but only Rebellion
and Treason.

Such is the real meaning of proposals to give a binding sanction to the
decisions of an Inter-State Concert. Anything short of this--treaties and
arbitration-agreements based upon inter-State arrangements without any
exe