The business of such a League.
The League would have to work out the problem of unexploited territories, of weaker peoples, and of disorderly States. Just as our original Union had the whole West to organize, so the League would have Africa, large parts of Asia, and the middle Americas as a kind of international domain. It would have to meet those who want merely to exploit, and to support those who are liberal enough to throw about weaker peoples that protection under which they can really grow to freedom. Nor would that be all. The League would have to legislate about concessions, trading rights, tariffs, about spheres of influence, about the use of great ocean and land highways. As soon as it grappled with the economic aspects of diplomacy, it would find, just as our government found, that interstate commerce cannot be regulated satisfactorily by conflicting state interests.
In other words, there is no stopping short at a league to prevent war. Such a league would either grow to a world federalism, or it would break up in civil war. But that, far from being an argument against the League, is the strongest possible argument for it. It is the first step towards a closer world organization, and once that step is taken, the world will have to choose between taking some of the next steps and returning to the anarchy of sovereign nationalities. The vast implications of the League of Peace are what make it important. And its real service to mankind may well be that it will establish the first rallying point of a world citizenship.
It would mean a new world-federalism.
The development of such a citizenship is one of the great moral and educational problems of this century. It cannot mean a vague cosmopolitanism. It must mean the training of people who have learned to modify their national policies so that these do not make impossible an international allegiance. This war has offered us an example of such citizenship. The Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders who are fighting in Flanders and at the Dardanelles are living and dying for the largest political organization the world has so far known. Their allegiance in the British Empire is to a State which embraces one-quarter of the human race. Never before in history have men been loyal to so great and so diversified a unit. They have literally come from all the ends of the earth to preserve a union of democracies. They have shown by example what any World League most needs to know, that federalism on a grand scale is not an idle dream.
The New Republic, March 20 and June 26, 1915.
THE ECONOMIC BOYCOTT
The nations have a powerful non-military weapon.
In the discussion of an International Executive entrusted with powers to compel the fulfilment of treaty obligations, it must not be assumed that coercion can only be exercised by the employment of armed force. The boycott is a weapon which could be employed with paralyzing power by a circle of nations upon an offender against the public law of the world. No nation to-day, least of all the great industrial and military Powers, is or can become socially and economically self-sufficient. It depends in countless ways upon intercourse with other nations. If all or most of these avenues of intercourse were stopped, it would soon be reduced to worse straits than those which Germany is now experiencing. If all diplomatic intercourse were withdrawn; if the international postal and telegraphic systems were closed to a public law-breaker; if all interstate railway trains stopped at his frontiers; if no foreign ships entered his ports, and ships carrying his flag were excluded from every foreign port; if all coaling stations were closed to him; if no acts of sale or purchase were permitted to him in the outside world—if such a political and commercial boycott were seriously threatened, what country could long stand out against it? Nay, the far less rigorous measure of a financial boycott, the closure of all foreign exchanges to members of the outlaw State, the prohibition of all quotations on foreign stock exchanges, and of all dealings in stocks and shares, all discounting and acceptances of trade bills, all loans for public or private purposes, and all payments of moneys due—such a withdrawal of financial intercourse, if thoroughly applied and persisted in, would be likely to bring to its senses the least scrupulous of States.