Now how are Germany and the Union of Soviet States coming into the League? Are they to come in as Boss States, like the British Empire, with a parcel of accessory faggot votes representing Dominions and Possessions, or are they to come in on a footing with Hayti, the Hedjaz, Abyssinia, and so forth? Will they come in as the equals of Abyssinia? I would like to know the ideas of the Prime Minister upon this question. I do not think the present constitution of the League of Nations allows them to come in on any tolerable terms at all. That being so, it follows that any attempt to bring in either or both of these great masses of people will involve a special conference to reconstruct the League; the League will have to liquidate and reconstruct itself. Both Germany and Russia, that land of new ideas, may have some bold proposals to make. In Britain we have had little but fulsome praise or angry exposure of the League since it was set up at Geneva. In America it has been talked about endlessly, but I do not know if it has been thought about at all. In France there are signs of an awakening to the needs of a reconstructed League. M. Bertrand, of the _Quotidien_, calls for a League that shall represent peoples and not Governments, and proclaims that the first article of the Republican Credo. The time is at hand when the League might be very beneficially altered, given a better balance, and made more serviceable to mankind. One cardinal evil could be attacked and at least minimised: the absurd pretence that anything with the legal status of a sovereign State is a nation, a people, a thing with a distinctive soul and an individuality, entitled to full and equal consideration in the counsels of mankind. It is to this we owe the intolerable absurdity that while such highly individualised people as the Scotch and Welsh have no voice as such in the world’s affairs, a trumped-up State like the Hedjaz votes and speaks on an equality with Holland or Denmark, and that while one group of black barbarians is solemnly welcomed as Abyssinia (that age-long friend of Poland) the far better educated and altogether more civilised Zulu and Basuto peoples must be represented by a tenth of the coat-tails--it works out at about that, I believe--of Lord Cecil. If nations and races are all to be represented, then India is full of them, from the Veddahs upward; if sovereign independence is the standard, then India has no rightful place at Geneva. But if we recognise fully that the League we need is to serve the purposes not of nations but of mankind, then we shall cease to be embarrassed either logically or practically by political oddities or ethnological rarities.