Page:The League of Nations and the coming rule of law.djvu/5



HE movement in favour of a League of Nations, or, in the franker American wording, a League to enforce Peace, has now gone so far that there is no need to argue for taking it seriously. Like the reforms of the Liquor Control Board and all other rational reforms, it has enemies or treacherous friends in the camps of opposite extremes. A handful of chauvinists, whose only war aim seems to be to make plunder of the battered and discredited shining armour of Prussianism for their own wear, denounce it with their shrillest screams as a pacifist fad. A handful of pacifists and semi-pacifists offer their insipid lip-service with the purpose of taking out all the backbone and converting a drastic remedy into a futile anodyne. But a cause that has commanded the public support of such men of action as President Wilson, ex-President Taft, and General Smuts, such practical scholars and publicists as President Lowell of Harvard and Lord Bryce, and such a profound and impartial jurist, in the best sense of that often abused word, as Lord Parker, can afford to neglect both extremes.