on the part of
individual citizens. The naval control of the seas will best be left in
British hands. No people has a graver or more immediate interest in the
freedom and security of the sea-borne trade; and the United Kingdom has
shown that it is to be trusted in that matter. And then it may well be
that neither the national pride nor the apprehensions of the British
people would allow them to surrender it; whereas, if the league is to
be formed it will have to be on terms to which the British people are
willing to adhere. A certain provision of armed force will also be
needed to keep the governments of unneutral nations in check,--and for
the purpose in hand all effectively monarchical countries are to be
counted as congenitally unneutral, whatever their formal professions and
whether they are members of the league or not. Here again it will
probably appear that the people of the United Kingdom, and of the
English-speaking countries at large, will not consent to this armed
force and its discretionary use passing out of British hands, or rather
out of French-British hands; and here again the practical decision will
have to wait on the choice of the British people, all the more because
the British community has no longer an interest, real or fancied, in the
coercive use of this force for their own particular ends. No other power
is to be trusted, except France, and France is less well placed for the
purpose and would assuredly also not covet so invidious an honour and so
thankless an office.

* * * * *

The theory, i.e. the logical necessities, of such a pacific league of
neutral nations is simple enough, in its elements. War is to be avoided
by a policy of avoidance. Which signifies that the means and the motives
to warlike enterprise and warlike provocation are to be put away, so far
as may be. If what may be, in this respect, does not come up to the
requirements of the case, the experiment, of course, will fail. The
preliminary requirement,--elimination of the one formidable dynastic
State in Europe,--has been spoken of. Its counterpart in the Far East
will cease to be formidable on the decease of its natural ally in
Central Europe, in so far as touches the case of such a projected
league. The ever increasingly dubious empire of the Czar would appear to
fall in the same category. So that the pacific league's fortunes would
seem to turn on what may be called its domestic or internal
ar