, the money, and the work for the belligerent states, and
endures the hardships and makes the sacrifices requisite to sustain it.
Therefore, the peoples are primarily interested in the abolition of the
old ordering and the forging of the new. Moreover, as latter-day
campaigns are waged with all the resources of the warring peoples, and
as the possession of certain of these resources is often both the cause
of the conflict and the objective of the aggressor, it follows that no
mere political enactments will meet contemporary requirements. An
association of nations renouncing the sword as a means of settling
disputes must also reduce as far as possible the surface over which
friction with its neighbors is likely to take place. And nowadays most
of that surface is economic. The possession of raw materials is a more
potent attraction than territorial aggrandizement. Indeed, the latter is
coveted mainly as a means of securing or safeguarding the former. On
these and other grounds, in drawing up a charter for a society of
nations, the political aspect should play but a subsidiary part. In
Paris it was the only aspect that counted for anything.

A parliament of peoples, then, is the only organ that can impart
viability to a society of nations worthy of the name. By joining the
Covenant with the Peace Treaty, and turning the former into an
instrument for the execution of the latter, thus subordinating the ideal
to the egotistical, Mr. Wilson deprived his plan of its sole
justification, and for the time being buried it. The philosopher
Lichtenberg[339] wrote, "One man brings forth a thought, another holds
it over the baptismal font, the third begets offspring with it, the
fourth stands at its deathbed, and the fifth buries it." Mr. Wilson has
discharged the functions of gravedigger to the idea of a pacific society
of nations, just as Lenin has done to the system of Marxism, the only
difference being that Marxism is as dead as a door-nail, whereas the
society of nations may rise again.

It was open, then, to the three principal delegates to insure the peace
of the world by moral means or by force. Having eschewed the former by
adopting the doctrines of Monroe, abandoning the freedom of the seas,
and by according to France strategic frontiers and other privileges of
the militarist order, they might have enlarged and systematized these
concessions to expediency and forged an alliance of the three states or
of two, and undertaken t