to trust them when one finds at Brussels, at Genoa, at the Hague, and elsewhere they preach the necessity of the economic unity of Europe, and then go down to the House of Commons and justify this Act on the strictest, the baldest, the most unvarnished doctrine of economic particularism for this country? Nor does it stop there. I told you just now that for me this doctrine on which the League is based goes right through many other problems than those of a strictly international character. You will never solve Indian or Egyptian difficulties by a reliance on force and force alone. I believe that the deplorable, the scandalous condition to which the neighbouring island of Ireland has been reduced is largely due to the failure to recognise that by unrestricted unreasoning, and sometimes immoral force, you cannot reach the solution of the difficulties of that country.
And in industry it is the same thing. If you are really to get a solution of these great problems, depend upon it you will never do it by strikes and lock-outs. I am an outsider in industrial matters. I am reproached when I venture to say anything about them with the observation that I am no business man. I can only hope that in this case lookers-on may sometimes see most of the game. But to me it is profoundly depressing when I see whichever section of the industrial world happens to have the market with it—whether employers or wage-earners—making it its only concern to down the other party as much as it can. You will never reach a solution that way. You have to recognise in industrial as in international affairs that the spirit of co-operation, the spirit of partnership, is your only hope of salvation.
The Two Causes of Unrest
What is the conclusion of what I have tried to say to you? There are at the present time two great causes of fighting and hostility. There used to be three. There was a time when men fought about religious doctrine, and though I do not defend it, it was perhaps less sordid than some of our fights to-day. Now the two great causes of fighting are greed and fear. Generally speaking, I think we may say that greed in international matters is a less potent cause of hostility than fear. The disease the world is suffering from is the disease of fear and suspicion. You see it between man and man, between class and class, and most of all between nation and nation. People reproach this great country and other great countries with being unreasonable or unwilling to make concessions. If you look deeply into it you will find always the same cause. It is not mere perversity; it is fear and fear alone that makes men unreasonable and contentious. It is no new thing; it has existed from the foundation of the world. The Prime Minister the other day said, and said quite truly, that the provisions of the Covenant, however admirable, were not in themselves sufficient to secure the peace of the world. He made an appeal, quite rightly, to the religious forces and organisations to assist. I agree, but after all something may be done by political action, and something by international organisation. In modern medicine doctors are constantly telling us they cannot cure any disease—all they can do is to give nature a chance. No Covenant will teach men to be moral or peace-loving, but you can remove, diminish, or modify the conditions which make for war, and take obstacles out of the way of peace. We advocate partnership in industry and social life. We advocate self-government, international co-operation. We recognise that these are no ends in themselves; they are means to the end; they are the influences which will facilitate the triumph of the right and impede the success of the wrong.
But looking deeper into the matter, to the very foundations, we recognise, all of us, the most devoted adherents of the League, and all men of goodwill, that in the end we must strive for the brotherhood of man. We admit we can do comparatively little to help it forward. We recognise that our efforts, whether by covenant or other means, must necessarily be imperfect; but we say, and say rightly, that we have been told that perfect love casteth out fear, and that any step towards that love, however imperfect, will at any rate mitigate the terrors of mankind.
THE BALANCE OF POWER
By Professor A.F. Pollard
Hon. Litt.D.; Fellow of All Souls’ College, Oxford; F.B.A.; Professor of English History in the University of London; Chairman of the Institute of Historical Research.
Professor Pollard said:—The usual alternative to the League of Nations, put forward as a means of averting war by those who desire or profess to desire permanent peace, but dislike or distrust the League of Nations, is what they call the Balance of Power. It is a familiar phrase; but the thing for which the words are supposed to stand, has, if it can save us from war, so stupendous a virtue that it is worth while inquiring what it means, if it has any meaning at all. For words are not the same as things, and the more a phrase is used the less it tends to mean: verbal currency, like the coinage, gets worn with use until in time it has to be called in as bad. The time has come to recall the Balance of Power as a phrase that has completely lost the value it possessed when originally it was coined.
Recent events have made an examination of the doctrine of the Balance of Power a matter of some urgency. The Allies who won the war concluded a pact to preserve the peace, but in that pact they have not yet been able to include Germany or Russia or the United States, three Powers which are, potentially at any rate, among the greatest in the world. So, some fifty years ago, Bismarck, who won three wars in the mid-Victorian age, set himself to build up a pact of peace. But his Triple Alliance was not only used to restrain, but abused to repress, the excluded Powers; and that abuse of a pact of peace drove the excluded Powers, France and Russia, into each other’s arms. There resulted the Balance of Power which produced the war we have barely survived. And hardly was the great war fought and won than we saw the wheel beginning to revolve once more. The excluded Powers, repressed or merely restrained, began to draw together; others than Turkey might gravitate in the same direction, while the United States stands in splendid isolation as much aloof as we were from the Triple Alliance and the Dual Entente a generation ago. Another Balance of Power loomed on the horizon. “Let us face the facts,” declared the Morning Post on 22nd April last, “we are back again to the doctrine of the Balance of Power, whatever the visionaries and the blind may say.” I propose to deal, as faithfully as I can in the time at my disposal, with the visionaries and the blind—when we have discovered who they are.
By “visionaries” I suppose the Morning Post means those who believe in the League of Nations; and by the “blind” I suppose it means them, too, though usually a distinction is drawn between those who see too much and those who cannot see at all. Nor need we determine whether those who believe in the Balance of Power belong rather to the visionaries or to the blind. A man may be receiving less than his due when he is asked whether he is a knave or a fool, because the form of the question seems to preclude the proper answer, which may be “both.” Believers in the Balance of Power are visionaries if they see in it a guarantee of peace, and blind if they fail to perceive that it naturally and almost inevitably leads to war. The fundamental antithesis is between the Balance of Power and the League of Nations.
Balance or League?
That antithesis comes out wherever the problem of preserving the peace of the world is seriously and intelligently discussed. Six years ago, when he began to turn his attention to this subject, Lord Robert Cecil wrote and privately circulated a memorandum in which he advocated something like a League of Nations. To that memorandum an able reply was drafted by an eminent authority in the Foreign Office, in which it was contended that out of the discussion “the Balance of Power emerges as the fundamental factor.” That criticism for the time being checked official leanings towards a League of Nations. But the war went on, threatening to end in a balance of power, which was anything but welcome to those who combined a theoretical belief in the Balance of Power with a practical demand for its complete destruction by an overwhelming victory for our Allies and ourselves. Meanwhile, before America came in, President Wilson was declaring that, in order to guarantee the permanence of such a settlement as would commend itself to the United States, there must be, not “a Balance of Power but a Community of Power.”
Opinion in England was moving in the same direction. The League of Nations Society (afterwards called “Union”) had been formed, and at a great meeting on 14th May, 1917, speeches advocating
