Page:The League of Nations and labour.djvu/9

 proposal to establish a League of Nations. No other practicable suggestion has been made which will have the effect of promoting the unity of peoples. The aim which organized labour keeps steadily in view in the field of international affairs is the solidarity of nations, because we realize that the final safeguard of peace does not lie in the machinery of judicial arbitration and conciliation, however skilfully devised, but in the spirit of international goodwill and the understanding between nations based upon the essential identity of their interests. Two—or twenty—nations at war are like one great nation committing suicide. The establishment of a League of Nations will be a dramatic declaration of the fact that the peoples of the world form one family, and will show that they have learned that war is a family quarrel which humiliates every member of it, and destroys the happiness and prosperity of the whole. When the League is established, it will keep before the eyes of all nations the truth that peace is the greatest of human blessings, and that a dynasty or a government bent on war is the enemy of the human race.

In the forefront of the policy of international conciliation to which the organized workers stand pledged this project is prominently placed. The organized proletariat conceive this war to be a struggle between two kinds of civilization and two irreconcilable systems of government—between the system which treats a country as if it were the private property of