The League Idea
The War for Peace. By Leonard Woolf. (Routledge. 7s. 6d.)
I REGRET that the notice of this important book has been delayed by the presence of a time bomb outside St. Paul's. Now that the infernal machine has been so gallantly removed it is not too late, I hope to commend The War for Peace to all those who have leisure to think about the world after the war. The thesis of the book is a general defence of the League idea, together with an analysis of the causes of the League's failure. It is perhaps hardly necessary to say that Mr. Woolf writes well, but we ought to be grateful when we find sanity with a "punch." Mr. Woolf deals faithfully with the so-called " realists " who deride all schemes for a permanently peaceful international system as sentimental idealism, and his criticism of the conception of "national interests" is specially valuable. All defenders of the idea of the League have to face the fact that it has been in practice a disastrous failure, and Mr. Woolf does not shirk the issue. Fundamentally the League failed because "the psychology of co-operation was weak or absent ", and this lack of psychological —or as I should prefer to say " spiritual "—preparation would be still more fatal to a Federal system, which would be unworkable unless the social and political ideas of the federated nations were in agreement. Concerning the possible emergence of a sufficiently powerful "psychology of co-operation" Mr. Woolf writes with restrained optimism. The wag of reason is open, but who would dare to predict that mankind at last will choose it with sufficient clear-sightedness and determination? The forces of irrationalism are strong and have invaded the intellectual sphere so that even the intellectuals have need of renewed faith in reason. To the Christian, who sees in the war one more symptom of the spiritual and moral disintegration of civilisation, it will occur that there is a deeper cause at work than psychological tendencies—the absence of any commonly accepted scale of values or generally agreed belief on the nature of man. However this may be, we may 111 agree with Mr. Woolf's conclusion. "If the international govern. ment which our society demands is not established on a demo- cratic and socialistic basis by free national communities, it may be established in the form of slave empires by dictators." We must assume, however, that the " socialism " here referred to is radically different from any extant examples, as indeed Mr. Woolf
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