before the end of that time. Broadly speaking, the frontier has been drawn, entirely irrespective of economic considerations, so as to include as large as possible a proportion of German voters on one side of it and Polish voters on the other (although to achieve this result it has been thought necessary to assign two almost purely German towns, Kattowitz and Königshütte to Poland). From this limited point of view the work may have been done fairly. But the Treaty had directed that economic and geographical considerations should be taken into account also. I do not intend to examine in detail the wisdom of this decision. It is believed in Germany that subterranean influence brought to bear by France contributed to the result. I doubt if this was a material factor, except that the officials of the League were naturally anxious, in the interests of the League itself, to produce a solution which would not be a fiasco through the members of the Council of the League failing to agree about it amongst themselves; which inevitably imported a certain bias in favor of a solution acceptable to France. The decision raises, I think, much more fundamental doubts about this method of settling international affairs. Difficulties do not arise in simple cases. The League of Nations will be called in where there is a conflict between opposed and incommensurable claims. A good decision can only result by impartial, disinterested, very well–informed and authoritative persons taking _everything_ into account. Since International Justice is dealing with vast organic units and not with a multitude of small units of which the individual particularities are best ignored and left to average themselves out, it cannot be the same thing as the cut–and–dried lawyer’s justice of the municipal court. It will be a dangerous practice, therefore, to entrust the settlement of the ancient conflicts now inherent in the tangled structure of Europe, to elderly gentlemen from South America and the far Asiatic East, who will deem it their duty to extract a strict legal interpretation from the available signed documents,—who will, that is to say, take account of as _few_ things as possible, in an excusable search for a simplicity which is not there. That would only give us more judgments of Solomon with the ass’s ears, a Solomon with the bandaged eyes of law, who, when he says “Divide ye the living child in twain,” means it. The Wilsonian dogma, which exalts and dignifies the divisions of race and nationality above the bonds of trade and culture, and guarantees frontiers but not happiness, is deeply embedded in the conception of the League of Nations as at present constituted. It yields us the paradox that the first experiment in international government should exert its influence in the direction of intensifying nationalism.