Page:The League of Nations and the democratic idea.djvu/29

 or national interest. I could certainly name six Englishmen who could be perfectly trusted, and I think I could name an equal number of Frenchmen, Americans, and Scandinavians.

Secondly, the members of the Council will have working permanently upon them a stronger motive than any ordinary motive of national pride or ambition the determination to avoid war. It is a commonplace to point out that this motive is enormously strengthened since 1914. No doubt the War may have acted in two opposite ways at once. It may have familiarized great numbers of men with the thought of slaughter. It may have doubled or trebled the tendency to crimes of violence. But it has surely burned deep into the hearts of all sane human beings the sense of what war means—the horror, the misery, the incalculable loss. We may, I think, feel sure that during the next ten or twenty years at least, when the Council will be forming its habits and fixing its character, the members will meet in a quite different spirit from that of an ordinary Diplomatic Conference of the old sort. Then their minds were full of their various national ambitions and antagonisms; in future such desires will surely be dwarfed by one main concern to avoid by common counsels the common ruin.

In the third reason we come back, at last, to Democracy. Our imaginary objector argued that each party of delegates would be exposed to the full