Unless they are in the vein for it, “it does not really interest them; rather it worries them.” That is why he believes so ardently in the need of a new Bible--a Bible of Civilisation--which will restore to modern men “a sense of personal significance, a sense of destiny, such as no one in politics or literature seems to possess to-day.” That is why he scorns such a compromise and concession to the frailty of human nature as a League of Nations and calls on men to turn their eyes from all such conveniences and makeshifts and to concentrate on the more arduous ideal of human unity. Of the League of Nations he writes: The praise has a thin and legal and litigious flavour. What loyalty and what devotion can we expect this multiple association to command? It has no unity--no personality. It is like asking a man to love the average member of a woman’s club instead of loving his wife. For the idea of man, for human unity, for our common blood, for the one order of the world, I can imagine men living and dying, but not for a miscellaneous assembly that will not mix--even in its name. It has no central idea, no heart to it, this League of Nations formula. Many people will agree with much of Mr. Wells’s scornful criticism of the League of Nations. He is obviously writing the plainest common sense when he declares that it has failed so far to solve the problem of modifying the traditional idea of sovereign independence and the problem of a super-national force that will be stronger than any national force. The average statesman is still an Imperialist at heart, even when he praises the League of Nations with his lips. He desires a world-order that will confirm the present order of rival Empires rather than a world-order that will supersede it. He desires to avert war, but only if he may preserve all the conditions that make war inevitable. Mr. Wells is impatient of all this as a treachery to the greatest ideal that has come into the world in our time. On the other hand, I think that the advocates of the League of Nations and not the advocates of the World State are going the right way to propagate the sense of world-unity that Mr. Wells desires. The League of Nations, whatever its shortcomings, does make human nature a partner in its ideal. It remembers the ordinary human being’s affection for his own country, and does not treat it as a mere prejudice in the path. It realises that the true victory of internationalism will be not as the destroyer of individualism but as its counterweight. It used to be thought that a man could not be loyal to both his church and his country unless the Church were a State Church. Some Socialists have believed that the family and the State were inevitable rivals. As a matter of fact, every man is in a state of balance among conflicting loyalties--loyalty to himself, to the family, to the school, to the Church, to the State, to the world.