"The brotherhood of mankind must no longer be a fair but empty phrase," wrote President Wilson to Russia; "it must be given a structure of force and reality. The nations must realize their common life and effect a workable partnership to secure that life against the aggressions of autocratic and self-pleasing power." The world's choice is between "Utopia or hell," is Mr. Wells' striking phrase, which he expounds in a remarkable article in _The New Republic_ on "The League of Nations." "Existing states," he says, "have become impossible as absolutely independent sovereignties. The new conditions bring them so close together and give them such extravagant powers of mutual injury that they must either sink national pride and dynastic ambitions in subordination to the common welfare of mankind or else utterly shatter one another. It becomes more and more plainly a choice between the League of free nations and famished men looting in search of non-existent food amidst the burning ruins of our world. In the end I believe the common sense of mankind will prefer a revision of its ideas of nationality and imperialism to the latter alternative." Mr. Wells is right. The proposal to establish a league of nations presents itself in our day as a matter of plain common sense. Yet if there is one lesson written with perfect clearness on the pages of history, it is that common sense alone cannot save the world from the tragedies of error, self-will and sin, and that common sense motived by self-interest will in the end defeat itself. In his Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching, Dr. Henry Sloane Coffin has called our attention to the remarkable prophecy of the present world war made by Frederick W. Robertson in a sermon preached at Brighton on January 11, 1852, addressed to a generation that glorified commerce as the guarantor of world unity and sought to establish morality upon a basis of enlightened self-interest. The passage cannot be quoted too often, nor too firmly impressed upon the minds of the present generation, for there were those among us who, even up until the invasion of Belgium, kept protesting that there could be no war in a world so bound together by economic and commercial ties, and there are those now who find in such interests the only durable basis for world reconstruction. "Brethren," said Robertson, "that which is built on selfishness cannot stand. The system of personal interest must be shriveled to atoms. Therefore, we who have observed the ways of God in the past are waiting in quiet but awful expectation until He shall confound this system as He has confounded those which have gone before, and it may be effected by convulsions more terrible and bloody than the world has yet seen. While men are talking of peace and of the great progress of civilization, there is heard in the distance the noise of arms, gathering rank on rank, east and west, north and south, and there come rolling toward us the crushing thunders of universal war....