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Rh daughter of the 3rd Baron Cloncurry and wrote a number of novels and verses dealing with Irish life. Of her novels Hurrish (1886), With Essex in Ireland (1890) and Crania (1902) are the most important, and of her verses With the Wild Geese (1902) is the best-known volume. She was given an hon. degree at Dublin University in 1905. She died at Gomshall, Surrey, Oct. 19 1913. LAWRENCE, THOMAS EDWARD (1888- ), British traveller, archaeologist and soldier, was born in Wales Aug. is"i888, and educated in Jersey and at Dinard as well as at the High School, Oxford, proceeding on to Jesus College, Oxford, and graduating ist class in modern history 1910. He went the same year to Carchemish on the Euphrates, as assistant in the British Mu- seum's excavation of that ancient Hittite site. There he was still working when the outbreak of the World War and the decision of Turkey to join the Central European Powers put an abrupt stop to all archaeological work and called Lawrence to what proved a wider field. From Oct. to Dec. 1914 he worked at home in a department of the War Office. In 1915 he went to Egypt as a staff captain. The following spring he was in Mesopotamia at Army Headquarters, whence he returned to Cairo as intelli- gence officer for the Mesopotamia expeditionary force. In the autumn he was attached to the Arab Bureau at Cairo, under Lt.-Comm. D. G. Hogarth, being then a staff captain on the Foreign Office list, not under War Office control. In that capacity he was attached in 1917 to the staff of Gen. Sir F. Wingate, the general in command of the Hejaz expeditionary force. This gave Lawrence his great opportunity. He possessed, to an extraordi- nary degree, a power of getting into intimate association with the Arabs of the desert, such as has belonged to but one or two of his predecessors in Arabian travel, and he combined with this gift the soldier's instinct and a capacity for leadership which raised him at once to the first rank of commanders in desert warfare. The story of how he raised and led a force of Arabs, which cut the Hejaz railway, pushed forward in the van of Allenby's advancing army and were first into Damascus, is but faintly reflected in the dry official record of his various promotions to major (Aug. 1917) and lieutenant-colonel (1918), when he was transferred to Gen. Allenby's staff.

To decorations and official recognitions he was notoriously indifferent. He was a Prince of Mecca, a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, the holder of the Croix de Guerre (with palms), the Italian silver medal and various British war medals. But what he cared for was the cause of the Arabs, whom he had learned to know and admire, and for whose interests he pleaded at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. In that year he was demobilized and retired into academic life, being elected to a research fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford. Unofficially he remained in frequent touch with the Emir Faisal; but he did not reemerge officially until March 1921, when Mr. Winston Churchill, on succeeding Lord Milner at the Colonial Office, appointed Lawrence to be his adviser there on Middle Eastern affairs, with a view to the sub- sequent creation of a special department dealing with them. LEAGUE OF NATIONS. The Covenant of the League of Nations, incorporated in the Peace Treaty in 1919, was perhaps the most remarkable of all the direct results of the World War.

The League of Nations may be regarded as a necessary result of the development of human society in political organizations. It is not an abnormal achievement of human idealism a great leap in advance beyond the achievements 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 after any great European conflict. Fundamentally, this demand is that the relation of these States among themselves 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 an illustrative commentary on the maxim of the Roman lawyers ubi societas ibi lex. But the purpose and the content of these 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, for example, wrote his famous work on the Law of Nations, he was writing of a Society of States whose intercourse was disturbed by the continual outbreak of hostility. Indeed, Europe had been con- vulsed 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 establish 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 rejected 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 is worthy of closer atten- tion. He tried to substitute 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 provided his " Conference of Ambassa- dors " with an organized plan, of work and with a secretariat, and he supplemented it by occasional Conferences of the Princi- pal Statesmen of the Concert. His Conference 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.

Later in the igth century Castlereagh's work bore fruit in the European Concert, which proved on a number of occasions to be an effective instrument for the joint settlement of Balkan prob- lems and for the maintenance of European peace. But at the time, and for the purpose for which he had created it, Castle- reagh's system of diplomacy by conference 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 control, and without the pressure behind them of a general democratic will for peace. Indeed the paramount cause of failure, not only of the vague and mystic ideas of Alexander, but also of the more practical and definite schemes of Castlereagh, was that they were not backed by the force of a strong, persistent, instructed public opinion.

Since the Napoleonic wars, forces have been at work which have slowly changed the economic condition of the world knit- ting its many parts together, and making more and more possible an international political organization, which shall exist side by side with the economic organization already created. The first of these forces is the revolution in communications which has occurred in the course of the last century, and which has brought the most remote parts of the world nearer to each other than neighbouring towns were a hundred years ago. The second of the forces in a sense it is the result of the first is the remarka- ble raising of the standards of civilization through the coopera- tion of mankind in ever larger groups and in enterprises con- ceived and conducted on an ever greater scale. To-day no part of the world can live without the rest; and a greater proportion of the world's commerce is conducted by vast international companies. Thus we have a general community of interests between human beings living in different States. It was evident before the World War and if it were not, the war proved it to demonstration that the interests of any one civilized country are indissolubly bound up with those of every other country, and no sensible statesman will ever again base his policy on the principle that his country will gain by another's loss.

Nor is this community of interests between peoples confined to their material well-being. It extends to every sort of scientific, political and moral activity in which men cooperate for the progress of their race. The revolution in communications, which is still in progress, rapidly destroying the factors of space