A Year of Prophesying by H.G. Wells — Read

If the world had suddenly become rational in November 1918, I suppose there would have been a conference of all the Powers of the world to atone for their common sins and restore their common welfare. But as the world is some thousands of years yet from rational collective conduct we have the treaty of the Victors, the Demi-League of Nations, and all the post-war disorder, waste, and misery that still unfold upon us. The League is unsoundly planned; it stands on rotten foundations; it is poisoned by the delusion that sovereign States are real enduring human things instead of being arrangements entirely provisional and largely hallucinatory, and it does not represent more than a portion of mankind. Still, there is talk of at last bringing in Russia and Germany, and it will be interesting to see how the people who have got hold of it will set about tinkering up an arrangement with the German people and the Russian Soviet States.

In Britain and America there are considerable organisations for the glorification of the League of Nations. In Britain, in the countryside especially, the League of Nations Union has become a social feature, rather like a more liberal Primrose League; it has pleasant meetings, parties, bazaars, tennis tournaments, fêtes with sack races, and so forth, and no parliamentary candidate can afford to neglect it; but it has no ideas worth speaking about of how the problems of a world organisation are to be approached. It just glorifies, simply and loyally. At the beginning of the League of Nations Union a few of us made a desperate attempt to establish a Research Department in the organisation. We felt there were a lot of things we didn't know and that had to be known about the psychology of international co-operation, a lot of questions about scope and method that wanted hammering out, and that the time was short before action was thrust upon us.