I opened this series of articles with an attack on the existing League of Nations at Geneva. This attack provoked a very considerable correspondence in reply. Hardly anyone was disposed to defend the League as perfect or satisfactory, but it was urged that it was a beginning, a germ, a young thing that might accumulate power and prestige, that its intentions were admirable, that it embodied and sustained an ideal, and that if it were destroyed there would be nothing to stand between the nations at all. I was reproached because--after an advocacy of world unity for a quarter of a century--I refused to recognise this poor diplomatic changeling as the birth of my desires. It is perhaps desirable that I should answer these criticisms and state a little more explicitly why I think this affair at Geneva is worse than no league of mankind at all. I do not think it can ever develop into a serviceable organ for world civilisation, because I think that it was planned from the outset upon the wrong lines; and that it is as reasonable to support it in the hope of its growing to meet the world’s needs as it would be to buy a broken-down perambulator in the hope that it would presently develop into a much needed automobile. The Geneva League of Nations is a start, I admit, but it is a start in the wrong direction; and before we can get upon the way to any real collective organisation of world affairs we have to retrace our steps to the starting-point before there was any League. The League is malformed in such a way that it can never hope to grow straight and strong. One primary fault in the structure of this existing League is its complete abandonment to the idea of national sovereignty in its intensest and most mischievous form. Any little bundle of human beings, however small, illiterate, and unimportant, provided only that it was a law unto itself and waved a flag about and insisted upon a cantankerous independence, was regarded as a possible unit by the pedants who devised the League. Any body of people, however numerous, intelligent, and significant in human affairs, provided it had grouped itself into any other larger political aggregation, ceased, on the other hand, to be anything but a merged participator in the League’s affairs. So Abyssinia, in which there are probably not two hundred people capable of understanding the rudiments of world politics, could be considered seriously as a member of this absurd association, while Scotland, the best educated country in Europe, was not to appear except as a button or collar-stud, so to speak, upon the figure of the British representative.