What is happening to the world is something of the same sort. The Covenant of the League of Nations is a method of limiting the unfettered exercise of national sovereign power. It is a painful and delicate operation; how painful and how delicate the timidity that has been characteristic of the League’s history makes hideously manifest. At any point in which the history of the League is examined, elections to the Council, operations of the Mandate system, application of a plebiscite, resolution of an international dispute, the statesmen of Geneva have hesitated to act upon the logic of the world’s facts. They have seen great nations confronting them, and they have feared that those nations might, if angered, flout the League and go their own way. So the League has fumbled and compromised and evaded. The big states have controlled it, and over almost all of its history there has fallen, darkening it, the shadow of the war. Yet experience of the League gives us hope rather than despair. It took three centuries to build up the sovereign national state to that amplitude which proclaimed its own disastrous character in 1914; it would be remarkable indeed if a decade full of memories and hates so passionate as those of the last ten years sufficed to overthrow its authority. We can at least say out of the experience of those ten years that remarkable incursions into that authority have occurred. We have discovered a great range of social questions the solution of which is not relevant to the national state or to the problems of power that state first of all considers. We have been able, that is, to devise subjects of government in which national control is not the obvious technique of operation. We have found, further, that a platform can be constructed at Geneva the nature of which throws any possible aggressor upon the defensive, and suggests the possible organization against it of the rest of the civilized world. We are finding ways of reaching the opinion of citizens in different states over the heads of their governments; of making those citizens demand attention to League recommendations in a way that a generation ago would have been unthinkable. We have shown, and this, in some ways, is the vital discovery of our time, that men of different nationalities can co-operate together in the task of international government in such a way as to sink the pettiness of a narrow outlook before the greatness of the common task. I know that Sir Arthur Salter is a great Englishman; but I believe his quality as an Englishman has been made complete because he is above all a great citizen of the world.