devoted most of its effort to the use of mandates for captured German colonies. For
preserving the peace, it had considerable faith in compulsory arbitration and hoped to
combine this with widespread disarmament.
The Group's own statement on this subject appeared in the December 1918 issue of
pointed out that British sea-power had twice saved civilization and any proposal that it
should be used in the future only at the request of the League of Nations must be
emphatically rejected. The League would consist of fallible human beings, and England
could never yield her decision to them. He continued: “Her own existence and that of the
world’s freedom are inseparably connected. . . . To yield it without a blow is to yield the
whole citadel in which the forces that make for human freedom are entrenched; to
covenant to yield it is to bargain a betrayal of the world in advance.... [The League must
not be a world government.] If the burden of a world government is placed on it it will
fall with a crash." He pointed out it could be a world government only if it represented
peoples and not states, and if it had the power to tax those peoples. It should simply be an
interstate conference of the world.
“The Peace Conference . . . cannot hope to produce a written constitution for the globe
or a genuine government of mankind. What it can do is establish a permanent annual
conference between foreign ministers themselves, with a permanent secretariat, in which,
as at the Peace Conference itself, all questions at issue between States can be discussed
and, if possible, settled by agreement. Such a conference cannot itself govern the world,
still less those portions of mankind who cannot yet govern themselves. But it can act as a
symbol and organ of the human conscience, however imperfect, to which real
governments of existing states can be made answerable for facts which concern the world
at large."
In another article in the same issue of
Problems of the Settlement," December 1918), similar ideas were expressed even more
explicitly by Zimmern. He stated that the League of Nations should be called the League
of States, or the Interstate Conference, for sovereign states would be its units, and it
would make not laws but contracts. "The League of Nations, in fact, is far from
invalidating or diminishing national sovereignty, should strengthen and increase it.... The
work before the coming age is n to supersede the existing States but to moralize them....
Membership must be restricted to those states where authority is based upon the consent
of the people over whom it is exercised ... the reign of law.... It can reasonably be
demanded that no States should be admitted which do not make such a consummation
one of the deliberate aims of their policy." Under this idea,
name from the new League, Liberia, Mexico, "and above all Russia." "The League," it
continued, "will not simply be a League of States, it will be a League of
Commonwealths." As its hopes in the League dwindled,
exclusive, and, in June 1919, it declared, "without Germany or Russia the League of
Nations will be dangerously incomplete. "
In the March 1919 issue,
wanted—"a common clearing house for noncontentious business." Its whole basis was to
be "public opinion," and its organization was to be that of "an assembly point of
bureaucrats of various countries" about an international secretariat and various
organizations like the International Postal Union or the International Institute of
Agriculture.
“Every great department of government in each country whose activities touch those
of similar departments in other countries should have its recognized delegates on a
permanent international commission charged with the study of the sphere of international
relations in question and with the duty of making recommendations to their various
Governments. . . . Across the street, as it were, from these permanent Bureaux, at the
capital of the League, there should be another central permanent Bureau ... an
International secretariat.... They must not be national ambassadors, but civil servants
under the sole direction of a non-national chancellor; and the aim of the whole
organization . . . must be to evolve a practical international sense, a sense of common
service.”
This plan regarded the Council of the League as the successor of the Supreme War
Council, made up of premiers and foreign ministers, and the instrument for dealing with
political questions in a purely consultative way. Accordingly, the Council would consist
only of the Great Powers.
These plans for the Covenant of the League of Nations were rudely shattered at the
Peace Conference when the French demanded that the new organization be a "Super-