I believe, accordingly, that we can retain all that is essential to the freedom of national life, and yet fully admit the implications of the international community. We can leave to England, for instance, her full cultural independence, her characteristic internal institutions, her special contacts with the Dominions she has begotten; to sacrifice the predominance of her navy, her right, by its means, to dictate the law of the sea, would still leave her England. She would still be England even if, to push speculation to the furthest point, the Suez Canal were internationalized and Gibraltar returned to Spain. France would be not the less France if the gold policy of her bank were set by an international authority, if she gave up her zeal for a conscript army, if she built her frontiers upon the impalpable solidity of friendship rather than the shifting waters of the Rhine. I can see nothing in the conceivable policy of a stronger League which would take from her the glory that has made her the Athens of the modern world. Changes in law policy, a different colonial outlook, a willingness to improve the physical standards of labour, an acceptance of novel and military forces determined upon the basis of world safety instead of national aggressiveness--it is difficult to see in any of these things such a blow at freedom as destroys the prospect of national happiness. I can see grounds for the view that an international authority which forbade the teaching of French in French schools; or altered the boundary of France so as to make Marseilles Italian; or sought the abrogation of the French civil code with its profound impact on the social customs of France; might reasonably be regarded as invading what in a nation’s life that nation only can claim to decide. I can see that a nation might feel an international authority to be oppressive if it sought, say, by an immigration policy seriously to alter the _mores_ of a national life; it should not impose Japanese immigration on California any more than Great Britain seeks to impose it upon Australia. I can even see that oppression might be felt where, in the building of an international civil service, there was a sense that there is discrimination against the members of any particular nation, or that in composing the committees of its government proper attention is not given to the claims of some particular power.