It should be noted that if the future European coalition means business at all in giving permanent effect to its settlement provisions, the chief Powers would be committed, during any period of war, by virtue of their military obligations, to everything contained in the plan just outlined. All that the project under discussion involves in addition is that (1) certain States interested in the observance of public right, but which, by their circumstances, are not suited to military cooperation, should give economic aid by taking part in the embargo arrangements. They should not be neutral, but should refuse intercourse with the recalcitrant State while according it to the others. (2) That such cooperation should be duly organized beforehand by public arrangement and be recognized as part of the normal measures of international public safety and, being duly recognized in this way, should become part of international law—an amended law in so far as the rules of neutrality are concerned. (3) That the arrangements should include provisions for prolonging embargo or discrimination against an offending State after the period of military operations had ceased. [Sidenote: Boycott would threaten offending nation after the war.] The first point that occurs to one, of course, in considering such a plan is that it has proven ineffective in the present war since this condition of non-intercourse is exactly that in which Germany now finds herself, and it is not at all effective. To which I reply: 1. That Germany, as already pointed out, is not yet subject to a condition of complete non-intercourse, since from the beginning of the war she has been receiving her mail and cables and maintaining communication with the outside world, morally an immensely important factor. Nor is it entirely moral. Large supplies have, despite the naval blockade, come to her through Scandinavia and Holland. 2. That, though of slow operation, it is the economic factor which in the end will be the decisive one in the operations against Germany; as the ring tightens and a necessary raw material like cotton is absolutely excluded, the time will come when this fact will tell most heavily. If the non-intercourse had been world-organized the effect would have operated from the first. Incidentally, of course, America and England, between them, control the cotton of the world. 3. The effect of the suggested embargo, boycott or economic pressure would be most decisive as a deterrent to aggression, not so much by what it might be able to accomplish during a war as by what its prolongation would mean to the aggressor afterwards. _Norman Angell, “The World’s Highway,” pp. 318-324._ WORLD-ORGANIZATION AND PEACE [Sidenote: Types of social organization.]