o keep peace on the planet against all marplots.
I wrote at the time: "The delegates are becoming conscious of the
existence of a ready-made league of nations in the shape of the
Anglo-Saxon states, which, together with France, might hinder wars,
promote good-fellowship, remold human destinies; and they are delighted
thus to possess solid foundations on which a noble edifice can be raised
in the fullness of time. Tribunals will be created, with full powers to
adjudge disputes; facilities will be accorded to litigious states, and
even an obligation will be imposed to invoke their arbitration. And the
sum total of these reforms will be known to contemporary annals as an
inchoate League of Nations. The delegates are already modestly
disavowing the intention of realizing the ideal in all its parts. That
must be left to coming generations; but what with the exhaustion of the
peoples, their aversion from warfare, and the material obstacles to the
renewal of hostilities in the near future, it is calculated that the
peace will not soon be violated. Whether more salient results will be
attained or attempted by the Conference nobody can foretell."[340]

This expedient, even had it been deliberately conceived and skilfully
wrought out, would not have been an adequate solution of the world's
difficulties, nor would it have commended itself to all the states
concerned. But it would at least have been a temporary makeshift capable
of being transmuted under favorable circumstances into something less
material and more durable. But the amateur world-reformers could not
make up their minds to choose either alternative. And the result is one
of the most lamentable failures recorded in human history.

I placed my own opinion on record at the time as frankly as the
censorship which still existed for me would permit. I wrote: "What every
delegate with sound political instinct will ask himself is, whether the
League of Nations will eliminate wars in future, and, if not, he will
feel conscientiously bound to adopt other relatively sure means of
providing against them, and these consist of alliances, strategic
frontiers, and the permanent disablement of the potential enemy. On one
or other of these alternative lines the resettlement must be devised. To
combine them would be ruinous. Now of what practical use is a league of
nations devoid of supernational forces and faced by a numerous, virile,
and united race, smarting under a sense of injusti