A league of nations is a necessity of mankind. It is a product of the world's growing perceptions of its own moral bankruptcy. At the same time, it is a prelude to any conception of a millennium, for men cannot continue to cheapen the parliament of man in the market place while welding the chains of international brotherhood. It is unfortunate that so many of the great ideals of the new world have been appropriated as the jargon of politics. Liberty has had so many crimes committed in its name that it has almost gone out of fashion. Fraternity reeks of the barricade, and internationalism of the socialistic caucus. Such words have to be rescued from the paltry significance, or insignificance, to which they have sunk, and restored to their generic high estate. And amongst them is the combination of words gathered together in the phrase, A League of Nations.
Slowly the world is learning that a league of nations is not a thing which can be called into being at the imperious bidding of an individual. If it could be, it might reflect all too accurately the human mind, and prove a creation with only too much resemblance to Frankenstein's monster. A real league of nations must be the child of the world's peoples in travail for higher things. The unreclaimed natures of mankind cannot sit together round a table and deliver themselves of such a thing. The great war did not remake human nature nor refine the dross of human character. It did cast it into the crucible, and apply it to the touchstone. What the touchstone revealed, what the crucible gave up, was a man of the earth exceeding earthy. On the day the armistice was signed, the devil was sick, and very inclined to assume the cowl. But as the big guns ceased from thundering, as the war planes dropped down from the skies, and the sea gave up its submarines, the devil tore off the cowl, and decided to sin yet a little time longer. "Mary," said her governess, "which would you rather be, good or beautiful?" "Oh, Miss Jones, beautiful, of course. I can be good whenever I like." The philosopher of seven years is not the only one who has ever made that woeful miscalculation.
The truth of the matter is that leagues of nations are not written on parchment, they are written in men's hearts. In the parable of Dives and Lazarus, when Dives wished to return from hell to warn his brethren of the fate awaiting them, Abraham made reply: "They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them. ... If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead." In the same way, Mrs. Eddy writes, on page 8 of Science and Health, "We confess to having a very wicked heart and, ask that it may be laid bare before us, but do we not already know more of this heart than we are willing to have our neighbor See?" Only, then, as the individual reforms himself can the nation be reformed. It is folly to talk of waiting for new leaders. That is one of the favorite expedients of the human mind for wasting time and endeavoring to shift the responsibility to some one else. Leaders are not the makers of public opinion, but the reflection of public opinion. They come when the nation is ready for them, not an hour before. There may be an isolated George Washington in every generation, but if the generation is morally blind and spiritually deaf, it can neither see nor hear him.
