It is of supreme importance, if we are to get on to any real and effective world confederation, that it should be a gathering of linguistic, racial, and cultural groups rather than of nationalist governments--trailing their infernal “foreign” policies into its deliberations. That is the most obvious defect of the Geneva situation; it is not a gathering of world representatives, but a bargain- and alliance-hunting place for diplomatists. One of the most obvious consequences of such larger aggregations of kindred peoples would be that in them the old nationalist and imperialist policies that still divide and afflict the world would be dissolved and lost. Spain and Italy linked up to Latin America would find little support for adventures in North Africa. Great Britain, tied a little closer to the United States, would be under a new restraint towards Mesopotamia or Asia Minor. This idea of a league of peoples into which the Powers of the world would come not as “national” sovereign States, but as great groups of States, each group with something like a common culture, is not a new one. It was suggested in the memorandum of 1918 upon which the British propaganda against Germany was based. But President Wilson and the British Foreign Office ignored that, and indeed most other documents and facts, when the existing League of Nations was brought into being--and so we have this preposterous body at Geneva, which is, and must be, I maintain, for any large and grave international occasions, a hopelessly useless body. I use the word “preposterous.” That may seem a harsh, excessive epithet to many readers. They believe in this sham. They give it their love and enthusiasm. They burn indignantly at my criticisms and treat me as an enemy to Peace and mankind. But I would put before them, mainly in the words of Mr. H. Wilson Harris, a little story of what happened at Geneva this year, and I would ask them to remember that this is an assembly from which the sixty millions of Germany and the hundred odd millions of Russia are inexorably barred out--presumably as unfit for representation. Abyssinia is not barred out. Abyssinia is now taking its part with France, Sweden, Britain, and the other great nations of the world--in whatever the League of Nations is permitted to do. Here is the account of the coming of Abyssinia. It must surely fill the citizens of the United States with envious admiration. “The delegation consisted of two dark-skinned native representatives and a French adviser,” Count Robert Linant de Bellefonds, bearing a letter of authorisation from “Her Majesty the Queen of the Kings of Ethiopia.” A few minor questions had to be settled by telegram between the Queen’s Court and Geneva. Ethiopia renounced the slave trade and one or two other little domestic oddities by cable, and on September 28,