LEAGUE OF NATIONS. The creation of the League of Nations by the incorporation of the Covenant in the Treaty of Versailles and the other Treaties of Peace in 1919, was perhaps the most remarkable of all the direct results of the World War. For the text of this document see p. 832. (See also EUROPE; SECURITY.) The League of Nations is not an abnormal achievement or human idealism—a great leap in advance beyond the achieve ments of the present age, outstripping the practical needs and requirements of the world. On the contrary, it is a practical method for achieving practical ends which are of importance to every citizen of every country. The demand for an international organization to prevent war has often been made in the last four centuries. Fundamentally, this demand is that the relations of States shall be subjected to something analogous to the system of law and order to which men have subjected themselves within the smaller units in which they live. It is one example of the truth of the maxim of the Roman lawyers—ubi societas ibi lex. But the purpose and the content of the rules for the conduct of their relations—the lex—necessarily depend on the nature of the units of the society and on the nature of their relations.
When Grotius wrote his famous work on the Law of Nations, he was writing of a Society of States whose intercourse was dis turbed by the continual outbreak of war. Indeed, Europe had been convulsed by the Thirty Years' War for a whole generation prior to the publication of his work. Thus it was natural and indeed inevitable that the rules which Grotius produced for the guidance of the Society of States, as he knew it, amounted to little more than a code of laws for the better conduct of war. He did, indeed, sketch the outlines of a law for the pacific relations of States, and, in the following century and a half, his successors developed to some extent what he had begun. But only after the Napoleonic wars was the first serious attempt made to estab lish an organized system of conducting international affairs with a view to the avoidance of war.
To Alexander of Russia's scheme of a holy alliance we need only briefly allude. Though admirable in intention, it was re jected as "sublime nonsense and mysticism" by Castlereagh, and it eventually degenerated into a mere prop of despotism supported by the empires of Central Europe and France. But the work of Castlereagh himself is worthy of closer attention. He tried to sub
stitute for the chaotic political methods of the past a system of diplomacy by conference, confining his efforts, however, to the Great Powers, though he desired to make their attitude to the smaller Powers one of "influence rather than authority." He pro vided his "Conference of Ambassadors" with an organized plan of work and with a secretariat, and he supplemented it by occasional conferences of the principal statesmen of the Concert: His con ference of ambassadors continued to sit in one form or another for almost six years, and he held four or five of his conferences of principal statesmen.
The European Concert.—Later in the 19th century, Castle reagh's work bore fruit in the European Concert, which proved on many occasions to be an effective instrument for the joint settlement of Balkan problems and for the maintenance of European peace. But at the time, and for the purpose for which he had created it, Castlereagh's system of diplomacy by con ference almost completely failed. It did so because it never had in it the seeds of life. Its members differed fundamentally on all the greater issues of international politics—while some of them were independent and autocratic sovereigns, subject to no con trol, and without the pressure behind them of a general democratic will for peace. It could truly be said that international society was not ready for such schemes.
Since the Napoleonic wars, however, forces have been at work which have changed the economic condition of the world, knit ting its many parts together, and making possible a permanent international political organization. The first of these forces is the revolution in communications in the course of the last cen tury, which has brought the most remote parts of the world nearer to each other than neighbouring towns were ioo years ago. The second of the forces—a result of the first—is the remarkable raising of the standards of civilization through the co-operation of mankind in ever larger groups and in enterprises conceived and conducted on an ever greater scale. To-day, much of the world's commerce is international, and it has become evident that the interests of any one civilized country are indissolubly bound up with those of every other country, so much so that no sensible statesman will ever again base his policy on the principle that his country will gain by another country's loss.