Page:The League of Nations (Grey, 1918).djvu/7

 other conception is fatal, and this exclusive conception is essential to the maintenance of the power of the military party in Germany. As long, therefore, as this rule in Germany continues, Germany will oppose a League of Nations. Nothing will change this except a conviction in the German people that the use of force causes at least as much suffering to themselves as to others, and that security based upon law and treaty and a sense of mutual advantage is better than the risks, dangers, and sufferings of a will to supreme power and efforts to obtain it; and this conviction must so work upon them as to displace the military party and their policy and ideals from power in Germany.

The situation, therefore, of this first condition essential to make the League of Nations practical may be summed up as follows: It is present certainly as regards the Executive Head of the United States, which is potentially the strongest and actually the least exhausted of all the belligerent States: it either is or will at the end of the war be found to be present as regards the Governments of other countries fighting on the same side as the United States. Even among their enemies Austria has publicly shown a disposition to accept the proposal, and probably welcomes it genuinely though secretly as a safeguard for her future, not only against old enemies, but against Prussian domination. All small States, belligerent or neutral, must