Some day, of course, there may come into being a League of Nations so effective that nations can really look to it for their safety. Meantime they must look to themselves. But, unfortunately, for each nation to take these steps about strategic frontiers means not only killing the possibility of an effective League: it means, sooner or later, killing the military alliance which is the alternative. If one Alsace-Lorraine could poison European politics in the way it did, what is going to be the effect ultimately of the round dozen that we have created under the treaty? The history of Britain in reference to Arab and Egyptian Nationality; of France in relation to Poland and other Russian border States; of all the Allies in reference to Japanese ambitions in China and Siberia, reveals what is, fundamentally, a precisely similar dilemma. When the statesmen--Italian or other--insist upon strategic frontiers and territories containing raw materials, on the ground that a nation must look to itself because we live in a world in which international arrangements cannot be depended on, they can be quite certain that the reason they give is a sound one: because their own action will make it so: their action creates the very conditions to which they appeal as the reason for it. Their decision, with the popular impulse of sacred egoism which supports it, does something more than repudiate Mr Wilson's principles; it is the beginning of the disruption of the Alliance upon which their countries have depended. The case is put in a manifesto issued a year or two ago by a number of eminent Americans from which we have already quoted in Chapter III. It says:-- 'If, as in the past, nations must look for their future security chiefly to their own strength and resources, then inevitably, in the name of the needs of national defence, there will be claims for strategic frontiers and territories with raw material which do violence to the principle of nationality. Afterwards those who suffer from such violations would be opposed to the League of Nations, because it would consecrate the injustice of which they would be the victims. A refusal to trust to the League of Nations, and a demand for "material" guarantees for future safety, will set up that very distrust which will afterwards be appealed to as justification for regarding the League as impracticable because it inspires no general confidence. A bold "Act of Political Faith" in the League will justify itself by making the League a success; but, equally, lack of faith will justify itself by ruining the League.' That is why, when in the past the realist statesman has sometimes objected that he does not believe in internationalism because it is not practical, I have replied that it is not practical because he does not believe in it.