Page:The League of Nations (Grey, 1918).djvu/4

 project recedes again into the region of shadows or abstract resolutions.

This, or something like this, has hitherto been the history of the ideal that has now become associated with the phrase " A League of Nations"; but it does not follow that the history of this or of other ideals will be the same after the war as before it. There is more at stake in this war than the existence of individual States or Empires, or the fate of a Continent; the whole of modern civilization is at stake, and whether it will perish and be submerged, as has happened to previous civilizations of older types, or whether it will live and progress, depends upon whether the nations engaged in this war, and even those that are onlookers, learn the lessons that the experience of the war may teach them. It must be, with nations as with individuals; in the great trials of life they must become better or worse— they cannot stand still. They must learn and profit by experience and rise to greater heights, or else sink lower and drop eventually into the abyss. And this war is the greatest trial of which there is any record in history. If the war does not teach mankind new lessons that will so dominate the thought and feeling of those who survive it, and those who succeed the survivors, as to make new thing? possible, then the war will be the greatest catastrophe as well as the most grievous trial and suffering of which mankind has any record.