Yesterday

"This drilling, trampling foolery in the heart of Europe," said H. G. Wells of Hohenzollern Germany, and twenty years later he finds his echo in the columns of the London Graphic. Great Britain, according to the Graphic and the Referee, wants peace, and to that end will force an iron ultimatum upon the Nazis, but the Graphic somewhat unfortunately goes on to say that Great Britain will build a hundred airships in any case. Daladier rumbles out even stronger threats; Switzerland insists that the German offensive will cross her soil, and only from Doorn and from the perspiring Nazi emissary to Geneva is there silence.

To sanguine observers of international affairs, this will mark an occasion for the League to show its teeth, to bring into play all the machinery of economic boycott and strangulation upon which its real efficiency must depend. Observers, less sanguine perceive that the League of Nations, like a stock pool or a successful church, demands from its operators that they be in good faith, that they shall not bargain slyly around the corner. Perhaps Great Britain and France believe in the League, and are willing to commit themselves seriously to its processes; it is no very cynical asperity to remark that this willingness has never been demonstrated.

Both of these nations have a deep, one might almost say an unmanly, respect for the virtues of law and order. They have trained great lawyers, and great legal theorists, and it was upon this that much of the pious twittering of the early post-war prophecies was based. But one of the greatest of these apostles of the rule of law, the British Dicey, was very careful to draw its circle so that international law was excluded, excluded as an inhabitant of that legal periphery more closely related to public ethics than to law. Anyone who has examined, with whatever percipience, the history of the League must commend Dicey's distinction as well drawn. For the kind of legal outland which it described is very close to Geneva; a legal outland in which all must be trusted to the arbitrary will of the individual, to the sovereignty of an irresponsible and independent group which is nothing more than a congress of victory. To such a group the sanctions, and the guarantees, of the internal rule of law cannot be extended; its effective functioning is conditioned by the personal character of its rulers. If this personal standard could be maintained, justice would be achieved; but Plato himself was forced to turn from it wistfully in practise, and to prescribe the more pedestrian rule of law for the secure governance of peoples.

Without world union, which would reproduce internationally the national structure essential to the rule of law, the League must remain in this outland. Mr. Hitler must look to its rulers for its substance; and having done so, he is not reassured. To a mere club of public ethics this sincere patriot should not trust the destiny of a single Prussian grenadier, and the club itself should not expect him to do so. If war comes, Mr. Hitler will bear a heavy burden of guilt, but in that guilt we cannot include charges of contempt for an organization which weighs so little as the League with its own members, which is to everyone only an ambiguous symbol of pacifism, the receptacle for a shrinking pennyworth of good international intentions.

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Thundering forth across the waters from Italy, Benito Mussolini has once more made it known to the world that he intends to harness Capital and Labour together to make of them a Unity. Since his accession after the war, II Duce has repeatedly shouted to the populace below the advantages and tremendous possibilities of the Corporate State. Up to this year exactly three corporations have appeared, and those have had no existence off the foolscap on which their charters were printed. All power to the Corporate (Paper) State! POLLUX.