This may impair our efficiency as an advocate of a league to enforce peace. Now, as to "what steps should be taken by the League to Enforce Peace." I know that it realizes the magnitude of its undertaking; but owing to the great international communication, general intelligence, and common interest of the people of the world, with the opportune conditions we shall have at the termination of the war--perhaps no greater an undertaking than that devolving upon Washington, Jefferson, Franklin and their associates of the convention of the thirteen former free and independent colonies, then thirteen free and independent states. Their problem was then much as ours is today. That is to say, to form a community of individual states after the methods and manners of the communities of individual men above described, wherein each individual state was to surrender some of its minor natural rights for the greater good of the greater number. There was then, as there are now, great misgivings and doubts even among ourselves. The rest of the world held, through the despotism of custom, the false doctrine that war was the natural state of man. Academic lawyers and diplomats held, as they do now, that there were "state's rights" and "non-justiciable interstate cases" more potent than the rights of human beings. So that outside America the scheme was ridiculed as visionary and impracticable. Our people and the colonies (then states) had become so abhorrent of the devastation, blood and tears of a seven years' war that they decided, through the wise men of this convention, that the states would surrender to the general good the few rights "without remedies" they might have and, so to speak, charge them to "profit and loss." This wise convention surprised the world with a constitution of "league of states" so perfect in all its detail of "legislation," "adjudication" and "execution" (reducing the loss of rights without remedy to the minimum) that for 128 years (with one regrettable exception) the nation had played the Good Samaritan for the natural afflictions of pestilence, flood and famine to all its people of the thirteen states (gradually increased to forty-eight), meanwhile preventing the unnatural afflictions of war and keeping open and well policed all the roads to all the Jerichos within them. In the case of the exception, the force provided proved sufficient and effective to restore order and contentment. To a rational mind giving the matter reasonable study it is hard to conceive a conclusion other than that similar results may be accomplished with a similar league of the nations of the world. ANSON MILLS.