WHAT COLLECTIVE SECURITY MEANS Sta,—It surprises me that Sir Norman
Angell should not see the difference between the " collective security " proposed by the founders of the League of Nations and the grouping of the nations into which we have now relapsed—between, that is to say, a combination of all or an overwhelming majority of the Powers for the restraint of aggression by peaceful pressure, and the competition of " Axis " and " Peace-front " keeping an uneasy peace by mutual fear.
I think I speak from knowledge when I say that the dis- tinction between the two things was one of the leading ideas in the minds of those who did the preparatory work for the drafting of the League Constitution. Beyond doubt, they regarded the two things as antithetical and hoped that the new order which they were inaugurating would supersede the old order of competing alliances. M. Herriot is assuredly right when he says that the division of the nations into two opposing camps was " the consummation which the League of Nations was designed to avoid." (Article in Sunday Times, August 13th.) Axis and Peace-front could no doubt realise the original idea by amalgamating or co-operating to keep the peace, but the fact which we have to deal with at present is that they are opposing and not co-operating with one another. To speak or think of this state of affairs or of one of the groups as " collective security " would be a dangerous form of self- deception.
When Sir Norman Angel speaks of " we " he means, I suppose, Great Britain. If so, what he has in mind is not collective action, but British action. He appears to assume that, regardless of what others might do, we were under an obligation to perform all the duties which the founders of the League meant to be discharged by all, or a great majority of, the nations. He gives plausibility to this idea by a highly simplified summary of recent history, which makes me feel thankful that he was not in a position to test it by experiment. Discussion about that is beyond the scope of a letter to The Spectator, but I believe Sir John Fischer Williams was right when he said that the doctrine which imputes this individual responsibility to members of the League would have made the League a death-trap for an honest member.
I do not need Sir Norman Angell's parables to convince me that it is desirable to resist aggressors. But I do think it important to make sure, so far as we reasonably can, that our resistance will be successful resistance. That part of the problem is not to be solved by words and phrases.
In speaking of the present phase as temporary, I was, of course, making no such suggestion as Sir Norman attributes to me ; I was merely expressing a hope that a better form of security would eventually be found.—Yours, J. A. SPENDER.
Warren End, Farnborough, Kent.
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