CHAPTER VII

League or Union? Three Tests


Man is not the enemy of man but through the medium of a false system of
Government. -- Paine.

The fatal tendency of mankind to leave off thinking about a thing when
it is no longer doubtful is the cause of half their errors. -- Mill.

We may now turn from these general considerations to more particular
reasons why we must organize our democracies as a union instead of a
league, to the reasons why leagues are undemocratic and unions
democratic, why leagues can not work and unions can, why leagues can not
be trusted to enforce law and unions can. In other words, we shall now
submit our choice to the super-state test, the practical test and the
acid test.

1. THE SUPER-STATE TEST

WHY LEAGUES ARE UNDEMOCRATIC

Suppose we organize our democracies as a league. This league would have
obvious advantages over the League of Nations. Yet because it was a
league this organization of democracies would be a perversion of
democracy. Its equality would still be the equality of states. It would
accord one vote each to 4,000,000 Swiss, 40,000,000 French, 130,000,000
Americans, -- flouting the most elementary democratic principle to this
extreme degree for the sake of the state. It would require for any
important action unanimous agreement among its state members; democracy
proceeds by majority agreement among men.

Even were all our democracies equal in population, to organize them as a
league would still be to encourage dictatorship among them. A league by
giving an equal vote to the government of each nation in it allows the
government least responsible and responsive to its people to manoeuvre
best.

The more democratic a people is the more it respects the minority and
requires a government to explain policies to the people before
committing them, and the more important the issue the more vigilant is
its public opinion. But the more these conditions obtain the more
handicapped the government is in defending the interests of its citizen
in a league. The league system thus places a premium on whatever
strengthens the government as regards its own people and a penalty on
whatever strengthens the citizen's power to restrain his government.

In a democracy patriotism calls on all good citizens to defend the
inalienable rights of the individual. In a league it calls on them to
sacrifice their own rights in order to strengthen the government and
preserve the state. National solidarity thus replaces respect of the
minority or individual as the ideal. The idea spreads that the salvation
of the nation depends on a party, having once gained power, maintaining
its power by suppressing all other parties and all freedom of speech and
press so that the government may be stable and strong in its dealing
with the rest of mankind; and the race is on toward the totalitarian
state. Those who want the proof of experience need only look about them.

WHY UNIONS ARE DEMOCRATIC

It is not on these grounds, however, that the League of Nations has
usually been attacked as undemocratic. The great cry against it has been
that membership involves sacrificing a democracy's independence, that it
forms a super-state. This cry is invariably raised against every
proposal for inter-state government, whether league or union.

Where Senator Borah urged against the League of Nations that it would
sacrifice the national sovereignty of the American Union, Patrick Henry
opposed the Constitution of the American Union as sacrificing the state
rights of Virginia. Both meant that inter-state government sacrifices
the citizen's individual freedom. Even the backers of inter-state
organization usually seem to accept this view; they concede the
sacrifice but plead that it is needed for the general good.

This reflects profound confusion over what occurs when democratic
government, whether national or inter-state, is formed. We have already
noted how this confusion rises partly from the assumption that the
freedom of the state and the freedom of its citizens are necessarily
identical. It also rises from the assumption that the organization of
democratic government involves "sacrifice" of rights by the citizens.

"Sacrifice" is a most misleading word for what we do with our rights
when we organize democratic government; the operation is really one of
safeguarding or investing these individual rights.

When we hand over money to a bank to have it keep an heirloom in safe
deposit for us we do not say we are sacrificing the money and the
heirloom for the good of the bank. We say we are safeguarding our
heirloom and paying for the service. When we hand over money to a
corporation in order to gain more money through ownership of its stock
we do not say we are sacrificing our money for the good of the
corporation. We say we are investing it for ourselves. Even if we lose
we do not call the operation a sacrifice; we call it a bad investment.
We sacrifice our money only when we hand it over with no intention of
gain.

No more in politics than in business can we get something for nothing.
To keep our freedom and to get more of it we must give freedom. It would
not seem to need proving that individuals have always needed to give
some of their liberty to the state in order to secure the rest of it;
every free people has always admitted this.

Nor would it seem to need proving that united action by men, such as the
organization or maintenance of government, involves some loss of freedom
or power by each individual unit in it, and yet may result in a net gain
in freedom or power by each. Where a government is made of, by and for
the people every citizen, as Lincoln was fond of saying, is an equal
sovereign, and national sovereignty would seem to be composed of the
sovereignty its citizens have given it to secure better the rest of
their individual sovereignty. In a democracy a state's rights can only
be the rights its citizens have individually invested in it.

All this is so evident that when men form a democratic government they
say that they make the government for the sake of their own freedom. It
is, in fact, because this is so clear that they tend to identify their
individual freedom with the freedom of their state, and are thus led
into the great mistake of assuming that any loss of the nation's
sovereignty is necessarily a loss to them.

They forget that, for the individual citizen to gain rights, the state
must lose rights, just as a bank must reduce its charges if the heirloom
is to be guarded more cheaply, or a corporation must not merely pile up
power in the form of surplus if stockholders are to get dividends on
their investment in it. If, for example, the citizen is to gain the
right to buy and sell freely in a larger market, his state must lose the
right to levy a tariff.

The object of democratic government is to provide increasing return in
individual freedom to the citizens in return for decreasing investment
of their freedom, -- for example, more individual security for less
taxation and military servitude. Consequently, loss of rights by a
government, far from being a thing necessarily to be avoided or
deplored, is a thing to be sought whenever the rights of the citizens
are thereby really increased.

INVESTING IN UNION

When democracies form a union what really happens is this: The citizens
of each withdraw certain powers they had invested in their national
state and reinvest them, or part of them, in the union state. The
operation involves loss of power by their national states but no loss of
power by the citizens. They give the union state no more rights than
they gave the national state. They simply shift certain rights from one
to another.

The reason why there is no loss but merely a shift is that the citizens
base their union government on the same unit that each of their national
governments is based on, namely, individual man. Each man consequently
remains in precisely the same relation to the new government as to the
old. When 10 men unite on this basis each equals 1. When 10 men thus
unite with 90, or with nine groups of 10, each of the 100 men still
equals 1 for all political purposes. If a democracy of 100,000,000 men
thus unites with others of, say, 5,000,000 and 10,000,000 and
50,000,000, each of the 165,000,000 citizens of the union still equals
what he did before, 1.

It is different when democracies league together. When 100,000,000 men
league with 50,000,000 they lose power as regards the field of
government they transfer to the league, for whereas each formerly had
the power of 1 over policy in this field they now have only the power of
one-half, since the league weights 50,000,000 and 100,000,000 alike.
Because it thus shifts the unit in shifting the field of government, a
league entails loss of power to the citizens of all but the least
populous of the democracies in it.

As for the common illusion that citizens also lose when democracies
unite, two things contribute to it: (A) One of the possible relations of
1 unit to 10 units is l/lOth, and of 1 to 100,000,000 units,
1/100,000,000th, and so the greater the number the less important each
man appears to be. (B) Since 100,000,000 is more than 10, and 10 is more
than 1 the greater the number of citizens the more important the state
appears to become. But the action of a democracy whatever its
population, is determined in final test by 1, any 1 of the citizens, for
it is determined by a majority, and 1 can make a majority. If 10 men are
divided S to S and 1 changes sides he carries with him the power of all
10, for he makes a majority of 6 to 4. Raise the number of voters to
100,000,000 and the majority that determines action is not 60,000,000 to
40,000,000 but 50,000,001 to 49,999,999. No matter what the population
of a democratic state or union, the citizen's relation to the government
and his power to decide its action remain precisely the same.

Far from losing, the citizen gains power by union. While his power to
decide action remains unchanged, the power of the union whose action he
decides becomes much greater as the population increases. If a man must
depend on himself alone for his security he must be on guard 24 hours
daily. When he unites with five other men democratically for mutual
security he needs stand guard only four hours. He gets 24 hours security
for an investment of four hours. He gets six times more freedom, six
times more defensive power. The more men with whom he unites the more
freedom and power he has for less investment of them. In union therefore
the progression from 1 to l/lOth to l/lOO,OOO,OOOth is a progression
downward, not in power and freedom for the citizen, but in the amount of
it he needs to invest in government; and the progression from 1 to 10 to
100,000,000 is a progression upward, not in the absolute power of the
state over the citizens, but in the power it places at the service of
each.

When the citizens of several democracies form a union they create a new
state but, as we have said, this creates no new rights or powers for the
state as State. If they have invested a total of, say, 15 rights in each
national government, and they shift five of these rights to the union
and leave the others untouched, the total rights of Government remain
precisely what they were, 15. The citizens divide them between two
governments, instead of centering them in one, but lose none of their
own power over Government.

On the contrary they gain power and Government loses power as regards
the citizen. By dividing the rights of Government between two
governments the citizen leaves each of them incomplete. The national
state loses supreme right to the union state, but the latter is not the
complete State the former was, for the union's supreme right is limited
by all the rights that remain reserved entirely to its member states. By
this division and by the fact that both governments equally and
independently originate in him, the citizen gains the power of balancing
two governments to his own advantage, of shifting rights or appealing
from one to the other as circumstances may suggest. The citizen of a
complete national state has no such check-and-balance power over
Government. He is in the exposed position of one with all his eggs in
one basket, all his investments in one company.

How a union extends the individual's effective freedom from the State,
-- whether the national, the union, or the foreign state, -- may be seen
by considering the state rights that he completely transfers to the
union. These usually are:

1. The right to grant citizenship.
2. The right to make war and peace, to deal by force or treaty with foreign
states.
3. The right to regulate inter-state and foreign trade.
4. The right to control the value of money.
5. The right to control postal and other means of communication.

(The union also has the right to tax individuals and enforce its laws on
individuals, but these rights are not transferred to it from the
national state, for the latter retains these rights equally. These are
really enabling rights required by both governments to govern
effectively in their fields. They are inherent in democracy's choice of
individual man as the unit.)

When the citizens of, say, fifteen democracies withdraw from each of
them the above five rights and reinvest these in a union they create
within the much larger area of their common state the conditions which
had prevailed in each of its component parts, namely, one citizenship,
one defense force, one free trade area, one money, one stamp. While
leaving each citizen legally where he was as regards the outside world
in these five respects, they greatly reduce the area of that outside
world by removing from it fourteen sovereign states. In reducing fifteen
state sovereignties to one in these fields they reduce enormously the
amount of actual interference from the State suffered by the inhabitants
of this whole area -- and, it is worth noting, by the outside world.
too. Without taking any right from any citizen of any state anywhere on
earth they thus free each citizen to exercise his existing rights on a
far greater scale -- in fourteen states which before gave these rights
to their citizens, but not to him.

TODAY'S SUPER-STATE: THE NATION

The term super-state must be read in terms of power of the state, and
since this can be understood in several ways super-state can easily be
misunderstood. This term can really have terror for democrats only when
it means greater power for the State over the citizens. When it merely
means greater power for the democratic state over their foes, whether
Nature, chaos, or aggressive absolutist states, they must welcome the
super-state, for then it means more power for each democrat.

Yet many shy at any inter-state organization simply because it must be
greater in size than any member. They assume this means greater
governmental power over themselves, as if territory meant tyranny.
Tyranny is tyranny, whatever the geographic scale on which it is
practiced, but the wider this scale the less intolerable men generally
seem to find the same degree of tyranny. The states that gave us the
word tyrant were among the smallest, not the largest, in antiquity. The
tyranny that seems to irritate men most is petty personal tyranny.
Though tyranny in a great state may sometimes be petty, the tyranny of a
small state must be petty.

It is not size that the individual really fears in the state, but power
over himself, interference with his liberties, meddling in his life. He
resents his travel being vexed by more and more frontiers and frontier
restrictions, his savings wiped out by monetary magic, his market cut
off by a tariff, his source of supply ended by a quota. He resents
having higher taxes to pay, being forced to depend increasingly on the
state, having to turn to its soup-line to live, being exposed to more
military service. He resents, in short, being afflicted with more and
more government. It is the snooper state, the trooper state, that men
really fear when they shy at the epithet, super-state, and that
super-state today is the nation-state.

Nationalism has shown that it can even eliminate many of the normal
advantages of size and, by pitting such great democracies as the
American, British and French against each other, raise governmental
meddling to monumental proportions and armaments to appalling figures.
Nationalism has proved in Germany how far it can outdo the absolutism of
the past. And the nation-state has only begun in recent years to show
itself, we have only hints of what it has in store.[1]

Bureaucracy and centralization and taxes growing, growing, growing; the
state's power over the citizen reaching out, reaching in, reaching all
round him, taking livelihood first money next and freedom all the time
until it troops him off to war, -- if the nation-state everywhere today
is not the super-state, what super-state then need be feared?

The dustbins clogged with superfluous government and unnecessary
generals, the war clouds gone, tariffs down and taxes trifling, the
individual freed to roam and trade in half the world, needing neither to
carry passport or change money, the security and freedom of each
extended in every way and magnified a hundredfold, and the same equal
opportunity assured each whether born in the largest or smallest nation
in the union -- it is union of the free that ends the snooper trooper
super-state.

2. THE PRACTICAL TEST

It may perhaps be asked, what need there is of reasoning or proof to
illustrate a position which is not either controverted or doubted; to
which the understandings and feelings of all classes of men assent, and
which in substance is admitted by the opponents as well as by the
friends of the new Constitution? ... But the usefulness of the
concession ... is destroyed by a strenuous opposition to a remedy, upon
the only principles that can give it a chance of success.... This
renders a full display of the principal defects of the confederation
necessary, in order to show, that - the evils we experience do not
proceed from minute or partial imperfections, but from fundamental
errors in the structure of the building, which cannot be amended;
otherwise than by an alteration in the first principles and main pillars
of the fabric. -- Hamilton in The Federalist, XV.

WHY LEAGUES CAN NOT WORK

We come to the practical test of everything: Will it work, can it work?
Men have shown time and again that they prefer undemocratic, even
tyrannical government to ineffective, futile government; indeed, it is
to escape this latter that they turn to dictatorship. There would seem
no need to prove, after all the evidence of history (of which Geneva's
record is only the last chapter), that leagues do not work, can not
work. Yet though there is widespread agreement that leagues have not
worked, there is still widespread faith that the league system can work.

Our civilization, we have seen, requires constant and rapid political
adjustment to be made to meet change. The league system does not allow
this adjusting to be done in time. Because each state must act in a
league through its state government, public opinion must be strong
enough in each state to move the whole government before important
league action is possible. Because public opinion can not act directly
on league delegates but only indirectly through the governments that
name them, and because the delegates do not depend directly on the
voters, much more pressure is needed to get action in a league than in a
union.

Moreover, public opinion in a union can exert pressure directly over the
whole union area, and a majority leader always risks seeing the minority
leader carry the fight into his own district and defeat him. But a
league divides its public opinion into state compartments, and the
delegate of one sovereign government can not go campaigning in another
state to have its sovereign government thrown out or its delegate
changed.

Again, since a league holds the state sacrosanct and is formed to
preserve the state, the first concern of each state government in it
must be state, not league affairs.

Even could a league avoid the difficulty of having to act through
government delegates, its action would remain slow and doubtful because
of the unanimity rule. At best it is extremely hard to get unanimous
agreement on any important matter. It requires a technique, and a degree
of tact, understanding, and persuasive power that Geneva experience
shows is extremely rare even among the world's ablest and most
experienced politicians and statesmen.

The worse the emergency the more swiftly there must be action, but the
more a league then requires unanimity for action and the harder it is to
get unanimity.

The units of a league, unlike those of a union, are not mobile but
rigidly fixed to earth. Voters in a union being men can move from one
region to another if political controversy gets too dangerous for them,
but the voters in a league being states can not change neighbors.
Consequently the men who decide how the state's vote is to be cast must
not only consider the issue on its general merits but ponder even more
how their vote is liable to affect their relations with a neighbor,
especially a more powerful neighbor. All this makes for hesitation,
vacillation, inaction.

There seems no escaping the unanimity rule in important matters so long
as the unit of organization is the state. The choice of this unit means
that the supreme object of government is the preservation of the state's
sovereignty. One must then admit that each state government is more
competent than any outside government to decide what is essential for
its own sovereignty.

An organization that gives each state one vote and lets the majority of
states rule the minority is repugnant both to democracies and
autocracies. It lets a minority of men over-ride the majority. That
defeats democracy even more than does the unanimity rule, for though the
latter allows a minority to block the majority, it does let any minority
take positive control. As for the absolutists, majority rule in a league
puts other states or the league above their state, and that is
incompatible with the absolutist principle that nothing can be higher
than the state.

The unanimity rule may save the absolutist, but not the democrat.
Absolutism thrives on disorder and chaos, whether caused by action or
inaction. Democracy needs law and order to survive, it can not get them
without practical governmental means of timely action, and the unanimity
rule allows it no such means. For it saves individual freedom from bad
law only to expose it to the danger of no law, or law so weak and
ambiguous that it can not be relied on, or law made too late to do any
good.

Then there is the difficulty of ratification. In a league one must
persuade not only all the delegates but the governments behind them.
After one has persuaded a delegate his government may drop him, or after
he has persuaded his government it may be overthrown -- perhaps on this
very issue, perhaps on something quite unrelated to it. Even if the
delegate remains at the league he may be unable to persuade the new
government. While the league statesman is bringing one government in
line another may break loose -- for time is passing and conditions
changing. When all sorts of delicate adjustments have made agreement
finally seem possible, conditions may have changed so that this delicate
balance has to be readjusted to meet new facts: One must start this
heartbreaking work again. If the treaty does reach signature it must
then be ratified by all the governments whose unanimity was practically
required in negotiating it, and this may take years. The failure of only
one or a few states to ratify their delegate's signature has crippled or
killed many a treaty.

None of this is theory, it is all the history of the League of Nations,
of the League of Friendship among the Thirteen American States, of the
international conference method.

WHY UNIONS CAN ACT SWIFTLY

Because it takes man for unit a union can put any important proposal
directly before all its principals simultaneously, as in an election or
plebiscite. Even if a league could assemble in conference the whole
executive and legislative branches of each government instead of a small
delegation, it would not be equaling the direct action possible in a
union. It would still be dealing with agents, not with the sources of
power, the men and women, the citizens, who elect the state executives
and legislatures.

When a union proceeds indirectly, through agents or representatives of
its units, it can still act more rapidly and easily than a league. In a
league no agent ever represents more than one unit. In a union every
agent must represent many units. His power is always delegated to him by
several hundred or thousand of the union's units. A league inevitably
makes the delegate a puppet depending on the instructions of his
government; a union inevitably keeps its representatives from being
rigidly tied to instructions and makes them freer to respond quickly to
new facts or arguments.

The representative in a union may be advised by different units in his
district to do this or that on a given issue; the advice may be
contradictory; he must use his own judgment and strike a balance between
the conflicting instructions he thus gets -- and guess what all the
silent units in his district want him to do. Presumably he will try to
follow the wishes of the majority of units in his district, but he is
free to decide (under penalty of being defeated at the next election)
what these wishes are. He is free, too, to vote against the wishes of
the articulate majority in his district, presumably in the belief that
the inarticulate are with him, or that time will justify him, or that he
can persuade a majority at the next election that he was right. The
delegate to a league can not possibly do this; he would be recalled at
once by his government. Because a union acts by majority it can act much
more quickly than a league.

Once there is agreement in a union to act, action can follow at once.
There is no need in it to wait for its units to ratify the decision of
their agents; the vote of these representatives suffices for law to take
effect. Here again union has a tremendous advantage over a league.

Finally, the greater the emergency in a union the greater is the popular
pressure for action -- that is, the greater is the pressure of the units
on their agents -- and the faster the union machinery moves. The
difficulty and danger in a union are that it can and may act too
swiftly. Where the problem in a league is to get up enough steam to turn
the wheels, in a union it is to control the speed, to arrange safety
valves, governors, brakes, such as the American Union has in the powers
reserved to the people and the states, the two-house Congress, the
presidential veto, the Supreme Court, and the time required to amend the
Constitution.

3. THE ACID TEST

The important truth ... is that a sovereignty over sovereigns, a
government over governments, a legislation for communities, as
contradistinguished from individuals, as it is a solecism in theory so
in practice it is subversive of the order and the ends of civil polity,
by substituting violence in place of law, or the destructive coercion of
the sword in place of the mild and salutary coercion of the magistracy.
-- Hamilton in The Federalist, XX.

WHY LEAGUES CAN NOT ENFORCE LAW

It is not enough for a government to be able to make laws in time, it
must also be able to insure their effective execution. This brings us to
the core of the problem of political organization, whether state or
inter-state, the acid test of any government. Law depends on confidence
that it will be executed. No system of political law has yet gained that
confidence without providing for execution of law by force against those
who refuse to accept it.

To be sound any government or system of law must be built to meet the
danger of an attempt being made to upset it, and to meet it in a way
inspiring confidence that its law-enforcing machinery can and will
overwhelm the lawbreaker. To do this the system must be designed to give
the greatest possible guarantees that, the more dangerous the violation
is, the stronger the position of the law-enforcer will be, and the
weaker the position of the lawbreaker.

Nowhere is the question of the unit in government more important than
here. If the unit is the state, then the law can be enforced only by
states against states; if the unit is man, the law can be enforced only
by men against individual men. To quote Hamilton, the "penalty, whatever
it may be, can only be inflicted in two ways -- by the agency of the
courts and ministers of justice or by military force; by the coercion of
the magistracy or by the coercion of arms. The first kind can evidently
apply only to men; the last kind must of necessity be employed against
bodies politic or communities or States." The effect of taking the state
as unit is to weaken the law-enforcing machinery and strengthen the
position of the lawbreaker. Here are some of the reasons why:

Suppose we form a league of democracies and one of them, say with a
population of 20,000,000, elects by 60 per cent majority a government
that proceeds to violate its league obligations. If the league law is to
be enforced, it must be enforced against a group so powerful and well
organized as to give the enforcer pause. This group is not simply
12,000,000 strong, as it may seem at first glance, but 20,000,000
strong, because its government has control of the state's whole war
power and because the league law must be enforced against the state as a
unit. Whether the coercion is by war, blockade, or non-military
sanctions, it can not possibly be restricted to the 12,000,000, it must
punish just as much the 8,000,000 who presumably sought to prevent the
violation. This fact, on top of the patriotic ideology responsible for
the democracies having organized a league instead of a union, must
encourage the 8,000,000 to join the 12,000,000 in resisting the law.

Here we have the essential unsoundness of the enforcement machinery of a
league. This system begins by making sure that its weakest lawbreaker
will be far stronger than any gang or mob of men -- the strongest
lawbreaker that a union faces -- for a league lawbreaker must be, at
least, an organized nation of men. Then the league system proceeds to
strengthen its lawbreaker by itself outraging justice. Worse, it is
incapable of sparing the innocent when it would punish the guilty. Still
worse, it is bound to punish the innocent common people more than the
responsible leaders. Its blockade strikes the ruler only by starving the
half-starved into revolt, its bullets kill few statesmen. While it is
putting the whole nation behind the offending government, this stupidity
and injustice is demoralizing and weakening those upon whom it must
depend to coerce the offender. To remember the Ethiopian experience is
to see how serious is this defect in a league.

WHEN LAWBREAKERS ARE IMMORTAL

Again, the league system requires enforcement by immortals against
immortals. Its unit is the nation, and nations are immortal, compared to
individual men. Because of this a league in coercing a state of
20,000,000 population must really coerce a state that is more than
20,000,000 strong, for the state disposes of all the power past
generations have stored in it and is fortified by its generations to
come, by its aspirations for and obligations to them.

To enforce law one must find the offender guilty. It is one thing for
the immortal state to brand as a criminal one of its millions of
mortals, and quite another for a few mortal statesmen to attach the
stigma of guilt to an immortal nation. It is an appalling blunder, a
monstrous thing.

"I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole
people," Burke declared in his plea for conciliation with America.

All this would be true even were a nation mortal, and the fact that a
people does not die makes Burke's statement only truer. What could be
worse folly than to encourage men (as a league does by its subordination
of individuals to their state) to put their pride in their nation, to
identify their individual self-respect with their nation's status in the
world -- and to condemn then their nation as criminal? This system,
which visits on the children the sins of the fathers, seems designed to
rouse and maintain a spirit of bitter resistance to league law both
among the fathers and the children; it strikes at what every
self-respecting individual must hold dear, the name he inherits, has
made for himself, and would pass on. The effect of Geneva's verdict
against the Italian government in uniting Italians behind that
government, stimulating them to sacrifice and invent, spurring them in
the field and at home to much greater effort than most people expected
should suffice to show how any system that would enforce law against
immortal nations tends to defeat itself.

There remain the after-effects. Whether a league fails or succeeds in
coercing its guilty nation, the condemned people is not likely to rest
until it has forced its judges to recant, to absolve even the guilty
among it in order to save their innocent compatriots, dead, living and
unborn. One can not better organize enduring bad blood, feud on a
colossal scale than by trying to establish peace and justice, law and
order through the coercive machinery of a league.

To make matters worse, a league's unit is not only immortal but
immobile. An individual man who has been found guilty can hope to escape
the disgrace by moving elsewhere, changing his name, beginning anew, or
his family can. Not so the nation. It is fixed. The individual
Englishman can change from one condition of life to another and another
but the English as a unit must face the world forever as an island
people. The Italians as a nation cannot escape from the problem
Gibraltar and Suez pose, though the farmer whose gates to the highway
are similarly held by another can always, at worst, move away. The
immobility of a league's units breeds and nourishes unnecessary conflict
and makes its enforcement machinery stiff and rigid. It also makes it
harder for the nations that must adjoin forever the accused nation to
condemn it, or for it to accept such disgrace from its neighbors.[2]

The neighboring nations must remember, too, that condemning the accused
endangers them more than other league members; on the neighbors falls
the main burden of coercion in a league, their trade suffers most from
economic sanctions and they are the most exposed to the acts of
desperation or vengeance of the condemned. These neighbors may be as
weak compared to the lawbreaker as Switzerland and Austria compared to
Italy, may have no material interest in enforcing the law against this
particular offense, may hope to profit considerably from not enforcing
it. Their failure to enforce the law may strengthen the offender as
greatly as did the action of Switzerland and Austria in keeping open
Italy's communications with Germany. This shows how the immobility of a
league's units undermines its power to enforce law.

WHERE TRIAL PRECEDES ARREST

People often talk as if the League of Nations could enforce the law in
about the same way their own government does. The difference in unit,
however, makes the procedure of the two radically and inevitably
different. One can lock up a man pending trial, but not a nation -- one
can not imprison a nation at all. When a policeman sees a man, knife in
hand, creeping up behind another man he doesn't stop to consider whether
perhaps no crime but only a practical joke is intended. He doesn't wait
till the blow falls, the blood spurts, the victim appeals to him. He
jumps in at once and arrests the man on suspicion. When the Italian
government openly prepared for nine months to invade Ethiopia and the
League of Nations did nothing to stop it except try to reconcile the
two, many criticized the League for not acting like a policeman. But one
can not arrest a nation on suspicion.

Even had a league the force to do this it would lack the will. Coercion
in a league means war or risk of war. One can get few if any members of
a league to agree to risk war on mere suspicion of aggression. To move
public opinion to that degree one must arrange that the crime, if
committed, will seem as flagrant and black as possible. To do this one
must first convince the public that all means of peacefully preventing
the crime have been exhausted.

If, as in the case of Italy, the suspected government not only protests
its peaceful intentions but agrees to arbitrate, what can a league do
but take it at its word? If the league does not, it itself spoils the
possibility of conciliation, assures the suspected government stronger
support at home and sacrifices the league's chances of rousing public
opinion among its members to support coercion. It thus strengthens the
potential offender while weakening the enforcer.

If the league takes the suspected government at its word, shows the
utmost trust in its good faith, leans backward to be just and patient,
then the crime, if committed, appears more heinous and may rouse enough
indignation to make effective coercion possible. But this means waiting
till the crime has been committed. It also means making eventual
reconciliation and peace among these immortal immobile nations all the
harder, for it makes the crime and stigma worse. It means that the
league is really a partner in the crimes it would repress, responsible
for their being worse than they would have been otherwise. What must one
say of a system of law whose possibility of repressing crime depends on
its success in making crime worse?

Moreover, what law and order would any nation enjoy if the police could
not arrest even a flagrant offender before they had convicted him in
court? Yet this is just what any league must do.

After the Italian government had invaded Ethiopia the League's Council
and Assembly met, heard Italy's defense, and decided that the Italian
government had resorted to war. Only then could the League begin action.
Yet how can any organization of sovereign states allow even its
highest-ranking official to act against an aggressor as the
lowest-ranking policeman does? How can Sovereign States let him use
their armed force against a state before they have formally agreed in
each given case to such grave and dangerous action? In a league the
trial must come before, not after, the arrest.

THE FALLACY OF BLOODLESS SANCTIONS

All this forces a league to begin enforcement gently and slowly, to turn
then to stronger measures, and to encourage the aggressor thereby to
commit worse crimes.

At best every nation is very strongly and naturally reluctant to
participate in the bloodshed which decision to apply military sanctions
risks involving. This reluctance is made all the stronger by the hopes
of success that non-military measures seem to hold. On paper one can
make an attractive case for such measures. One can argue -- as was
argued in the Italian test -- that sufficient agreement can be obtained
on economic sanctions to make sure that the aggressor will be brought
down eventually without the coercers themselves shedding any blood. It
was also argued in the Italian test that the aggressor, seeing that such
wide agreement against him is bound to ruin him in the end, will not
wait till his ruin is consummated but will give up long before.

This, however, is never likely to work out in a league better or
differently than in the Italian test. A case can be made not only for
gradually increasing pressure, but also for staking all on a bold
policy, -- and the merits of this aggressive policy are bound to appeal
most to the aggressive-minded, and therefore to the aggressor, just as
the merits of passive action appeal most to the pacific. Where desire to
win by economic sanctions leads the coercers to see the possibilities of
victory through the aggressor reading the handwriting on the wall, the
same process of wishful thinking leads the aggressor to concentrate on
the possibilities of nullifying these sanctions by economies,
inventions, quick military triumph. He becomes too engrossed in this to
see the handwriting on the wall. And so the war continues week in, week
out, the league appears to be doing nothing effective even to stop the
crime or aid the victim, public opinion is outraged by the spectacle, it
demands that the killing be stopped and refuses to keep coolly and
patiently content with slow-moving sanctions in the face of continued
slaughter. The cry for something more effective is bound to rise, just
as the demand for the oil sanction rose soon after the other sanctions
were applied to Italy.

But what is the effect of this threat of stronger measures? It
encourages the victim to continue an otherwise hopeless war. It
encourages the aggressor to redouble his attack and resort to more
frightful warfare -- just as Italy turned to poison gas as Geneva turned
toward the oil embargo -- in the hope of winning the war before the
sanction takes effect.

JUDGE, SHERIFF, CRIMINAL -- ALL IN ONE

These examples by no means exhaust the difficulties and absurdities into
which a league falls through having the state as its unit. Another
result is that each member is at once judge, juryman, and sheriff.
Worse, as I helped point out when the Italian government, while
undergoing sanctions, took part in the League's hearing on Germany's
violation of the Locarno treaty, the league system "allows a nation to
fill simultaneously the roles of condemned lawbreaker in one case and
judge and sheriff in another." This weakness, the dispatch continued,
was "exemplified by the first international meeting to be held in the
new League palace, that of the Locarno powers on the afternoon of April
10, 1936. In it the Foreign Ministers of Britain and France, who that
very morning had debated before the Committee of Thirteen in the old
League building what to do about Italy, whom the Council found guilty of
committing the worst crime in the League's calendar, debated with Italy
what to do about Germany, whom the Council, with Italy as one of the
judges, found guilty of committing its next worst crime."[3]

This may help make clear why a league can have no effective central or
executive authority. There can be no sheriff in a community where every
man is equally sheriff. The example should make clearer, too, why
projects to endow a league with a permanent league police force for the
coercion of members are doomed to failure. It is not the international
character of such a force that makes it impossible -- look at the French
Foreign Legion -- but the fact that a league army's real unit is not man
but the nation.

When a league does decide to enforce its law it must then improvise its
instrument, whether non-military or military. It "must at the last
minute organize an army out of a mob of armies of sovereigns so jealous
of their sovereignty that they are unable to organize a league force
beforehand."[4] We have already noted why a league can not provide even
the advance military planning needed for confidence in its enforcement
machinery. For similar reasons it can not make concrete advance plans to
enforce its law by non-military means.

The result is that a league can not inspire confidence among its
law-abiding members nor respect and fear among the aggressively
inclined. This encourages its members to arm, and whether they arm for
defense or aggression they make matters worse by putting the enforcement
problem on a still more enormous scale.

Since no league, no matter how strong its paper guarantees to enforce
its laws, can possibly remove the fatal defects inherent in itself, it
can not possibly succeed in getting its members to trust it enough to
disarm and avoid chaos. As long as the state must depend, in a vital
emergency, on its own arms it must also protect strategic industries and
prepare against blockade by artificially maintaining its agricultural
production. So long as it must do this it can not afford to renounce
control over such essential weapons as its currency and trade.
Practically, there is no more possibility of monetary stability or free
trade than there is of disarmament, security, or peace in any
inter-state government requiring coercion of states. Through and through
the league system is untrustworthy.

WHY UNIONS CAN ENFORCE LAW

To be sound, a system of law, we have said, must be built to meet the
danger of some attempt being made to upset it, and to meet it in a way
inspiring confidence that its law-enforcing machinery will overwhelm the
lawbreaker. To do this it must be so devised that, the more dangerous
the violation, the stronger the position of the law-enforcer will be and
the weaker that of the lawbreaker.

A union pins any violation of its law on the weakest possible political
unit, a single mortal, and arrays against him the organized centralized
power of millions of these units -- the union state. Suppose we have
fifteen democracies of 20,000,000 population each. If they league
together the theoretical ratio of law-enforcing power to law-defying
power is at best 280,000,000 to 20,000,000, or 14 to 1. If they unite
the ratio is 299,999,999 to 1. This shows how overwhelmingly the change
of unit from state to man weakens the lawbreaker and strengthens the
law-enforcer.

For law (whether treaty or statute) to be broken some individual man has
to break it. A union by pinning the responsibility for the violation on
this individual and on him alone tends to deprive him of all support.
Members of his family or gang may help him, but they are not to be
compared in power with a government which controls the force of an
organized nation and can appeal to patriotic sentiments to justify its
treaty violation. Union law does not by its very operation drive the
innocent to support the lawbreaker as does league law; instead it tends
to isolate him even from those most likely to support him. His family
seldom resists his arrest.

No group, not even the family, is stigmatized legally in a union by the
guilt of one member, let alone punished simply because of relation to
him. The criminal's family may suffer some social disgrace, but the
family can move away, change its name, begin afresh. Or it may find
protection in the fact that many other unrelated men have the same
family name. The name of each nation in a league is unique, and so there
is no escape from that name and any blot on it stands out more, lasts
longer, and is harder to bear.

There have been many celebrated murderers, but how often is one of their
descendants identified as one -- as, say, the grandson of Dr. So-and-so
who was executed for poisoning a patient? The children of criminals
often attract attention during trials, but how long does it last? They
are soon mercifully lost or forgotten among the millions of men.

In a union there is, then, no enduring disgrace attached to the group to
which a lawbreaker belongs, nothing to entangle all its members
willy-nilly in the crime and turn them, as in a league, against the law
in order to right this injustice or save their self-respect. By its
condemnation a union, unlike a league, does not inevitably turn against
it even the condemned criminal, for, unlike an "aggressor nation," he
can hope to live down the stain on his name, change it if it is
uncommon, move away.

The union system, moreover, gives those it arrests much stronger
guarantees of justice and much greater hope for acquittal than does a
league. It is therefore easier for the innocent to accept arrest
unresistingly. As for the guilty, it is noteworthy that a union's
guarantees to each individual that its overwhelming power will not be
used unjustly against him helps to weaken him at the critical time when
he is about to break the law or is breaking it. The Bill of Rights
serves to isolate the criminal and deprive him of misplaced sympathy by
assuring all other men that their combined power will not be used
wrongly against the weakest man, that the innocent individual will not
be punished, that punishment will fall on the guilty or on no one.

These guarantees to the individual, together with the individual's
inherent weakness, mortality and mobility, allow a union to act against
offenders much more quickly than can a league. They allow it to stop
crime in the bud, to arrest on prima facie evidence of criminal intent.
The number and weakness of its units not only permit a union to have the
powerful central authority a league can not possibly have -- and to
maintain law and order normally with a tiny fraction of the power at its
disposal. It can have, say, one policeman to 1,000 potential lawbreakers
and yet be able in an emergency quickly to outnumber or outpower the
lawbreaker. The nature of a union's unit, moreover, permits and requires
specialized functions for the enforcement of law -- this union unit
being a soldier, that union unit a policeman, another a judge, another a
juryman, still another a prosecutor. It thereby escapes the grotesque
absurdity into which a league is led by its unit; in a union no
condemned criminal can judge for it the crimes of others while
continuing his own.

The union system of law enforcement does not work perfectly. Sometimes
the guilty escape, sometimes the innocent are punished, sometimes the
union may even suffer revolt civil war. But its principle is sound and
the system does work well: it insures general respect for and
enforcement of law by insuring that at the critical moment -- the moment
when the law is flagrantly broken -- the enforcer will be at his
strongest and the violator will be at his weakest. And it does this in
direct ratio to the importance of the violation. It does insure the
citizen more security against burglary than petty theft, and still
greater security against murder than against burglary, and still greater
security against war than against murder.

HOW UNION ELIMINATES INTER-STATE WAR

It may be objected that the enforcement of law against thieves and
murderers is normally left to each state in a union, that such examples
do not apply to conflicts between states in the union, or between one or
more states and the union itself. The examples were used, however, to
illustrate the idea of varying degree of crime and security.

It is true that in a union, as in a league, conflicts may rise between
member states in their corporate capacity, and between them and the
union. A union may refer such disputes to its supreme court, but refusal
to accept the court's decision faces it with a league's problem of
enforcing law against a state. There remain, however, great differences
in favor of union.

In a league such conflicts and problems are the only ones possible; in a
union they are abnormal. The state's position in a union differs
radically, as we have seen, from its position in a league. The transfer
to the union of some of the state's most important rights (which it most
jealously retains in a league) tends to remove many of the worst sources
of dispute and war among states. It leaves the state no longer an
economic entity, the regulation of its trade with other states inside
and outside the union is transferred, to the union government, which
enforces its inter-state commerce laws not against the states but
against individuals in them. Above all, the fact that its citizens have
transferred from state to union the power to make war and peace
eliminates the chief danger of inter-state disputes resulting in war.
The state government, loses not only its motives for war, but also the
means of waging it successfully.

The knife edge is removed from disputes between states in a union
because the citizens of each state are also citizens of the union, have
the same control over both, and inevitably rate higher the citizenship
that opens the wider field to them, lets them move freely from state to
state, and gives them their standing in the world. When a man is equally
sovereign in two governments as he is in a union, disputes between these
two agents of his tend to make him an arbiter instead of a partisan.

History is even more reassuring than reason in these regards. For
example, there were many disputes -- including eleven territorial ones
-- among the Thirteen American States during their league period. War
threatened to result from some of these disputes, and this danger was
one of the reasons that led them to shift from league to union. All
these disputes lost in explosiveness after union, none of them
threatened war thereafter. Supreme Court decisions settled them without
the theoretical danger of a state defying the Court ever actually
arising.

There is no example in the history of the American Union of a state
refusing to accept the Court's decision in an inter-state dispute, of
seriously threatening to use force against another state. A state that
contemplated such action in the American Union could not gamble on being
left to fight it out with the other state as could Italy with Ethiopia,
and Japan with China in the League of Nations. Each state government
knows that, should it resort to force, it would change its conflict from
one with another state to one with the government of the United States,
which is required by the Constitution to "protect each of them against
invasion" and "domestic violence," which has enough armed power at hand
to overwhelm at once the strongest single state and which can draw
immediately, directly and without limit on the Union's whole potential
power. The Union, moreover, can aim its coercive power at the Governor
and other responsible members of such a state government as individual
offenders. It can act against them personally on the ground that they,
and not the people, are to blame, and that as American citizens who are
waging war against the Union they are committing treason.

The only memorable conflicts in American Union history in which states
figured as parties were both, significantly, conflicts not with other
states, as in the American league period, but with the Union government.
There was South Carolina's nullification of the Tariff Act; President
Jackson's blunt warning that he would uphold the Union law with force
against such treason[5] sufficed to maintain the law. Then there was the
attempt of the eleven Southern States to secede which the Union overcame
by force in the Civil War.

This last, however, was not, strictly speaking, a test of the Union's
ability to enforce its laws but a test of its ability to maintain
itself. The fact that the American Union has suffered one civil war in
150 years can not be held against the union system, for secession and
civil war can occur and have more often occurred in other systems of
government. The American Civil War must be cited, if at all, in favor of
the union system. It shows what tremendous resistance that system can
successfully overcome. What is more important, it shows too how swiftly,
completely and solidly a union can make peace, even in the exceptional
case where it must use its coercive power against a state.

Theory and practice, which alike condemn a league, alike attest that a
union works. Both testify that this system is trustworthy, sound. We can
not go right if we organize our democracies as a league. If we go wrong
in organizing them as a union of ourselves we shall be the first to fail
with union.

____

1. This entire section was written in 1934.

2. This was written four years before the Scandinavian countries and
China abstained from voting when the League of Nations "dropped" Russia
in 1939 for aggression against Finland.

3. The New York Times, Apr. 19, 1936.

4. The New York Times, Dec. 29, 1935.

5. See Jackson's Proclamation to the People of South Carolina, "The
dictates of a high duty oblige me solemnly to announce that you can not
succeed. The laws of the United States must be executed.... Disunion by
armed force is treason. Are you ready to incur its guilt?"

