Page:The league of nations and primitive peoples (IA leagueofnationsp00oliviala).pdf/20

 of ability in the concert to enforce the obligations entered into. Their enforcement has depended entirely upon the officiousness of particular Powers that happened to care something about the matter.

However cynical, however incredulous of its being worth while to have any consideration for 'niggers', the temper of any particular nation may be, such cynicism and callousness do not gain ground, but are relaxed and modified, by any international contact between able and public-spirited men. International Conferences, Councils, Leagues, effectually, if gradually, raise the professed standard of administrative principle to the highest common level of humane conscience and purpose. The Berlin Act, in view of its sequels in Congoland, might, no doubt, suggest the imputation of hypocrisy to some of the participants in it. But such standards, once set up, remain on record: it need not transpire, and indeed is soon forgotten, how far, in asserting them, tribute may have been paid by vice to virtue. The vicious may even grow virtuous by imitative observance. However incompletely the Congress that will deal, after the war, with these affairs may realize the hopes of those who are looking towards a League of Nations, it must inevitably, if for such reasons alone, be an event of far-reaching advantage and promise in the history of the fates of primitive peoples.