t a powerful navy for the defense of these political assets, and
to give the youth of the country a semi-military training.[344] Defense
presupposes attack. War, therefore, is not excluded--nay, it is admitted
by the world-reformers, and preparations for it are indispensable.
Equally so are the burdens of taxation. But if liberty of defense be one
of the rights of two or three Powers, by what law is it confined to them
and denied to the others? Why should the other communities be
constrained to remain open to attack? Surely they, too, deserve to live
and thrive, and make the most of their opportunities. Now if in lieu of
a misnamed League of Nations we had an Anglo-Saxon board for the better
government of the world, these unequal weights and measures would be
intelligible on the principle that special obligations and
responsibilities warrant exceptional rights. But no such plea can be
advanced under an arrangement professing to be a society of free
nations. All that can with truth be said is what M. Clemenceau told the
delegates of the lesser states at the opening of the Conference--that
the three great belligerents represent twelve million soldiers and that
their supreme authority derives from that. The role of the other peoples
is to listen to the behests of their guardians, and to accept and
execute them without murmur. Might is still a source of right.

It is fair to say that the disclosure of the true base of the new
ordering, as blurted out by M. Clemenceau at that historic meeting,
caused little surprise among the initiated. For there was no reason to
assume that he, or, indeed, the bulk of the continental statesmen, were
converts to a doctrine of which its own apostle accepted only those
fragments which commended themselves to his country or his party. Had
not the French Premier scoffed at the League in public as in private?
Had he not said in the Chamber: "I do not believe that the Society of
Nations constitutes the necessary conclusion of the present war. I will
give you one of my reasons. It is this: if to-morrow you were to propose
to me that Germany should enter into this society I would not
consent."[345]

"I am certain," wrote one of the ablest and most ardent champions of the
League in France, Senator d'Estournelles de Constant--"I am certain that
he [M. Clemenceau] made an effort against himself, against his entire
past, against his whole life, against all his convictions, to serve the
Society of Natio