Council of their own fellow-citizens.  They are the minority members of a heterogeneous Council towards which they owe no allegiance and recognise no binding responsibility.  There is no half-way house between Citizenship and no Citizenship, between Responsibility and no Responsibility.  No man and no community can serve two masters.  When the point of conflict arises men and nations have to make the choice where their duty lies.  Not the representatives of Great Britain on the International Concert, but the people of Great Britain themselves would have to decide whether their real allegiance, as citizens, was due to the World-State or to their own Commonwealth:  they would find themselves at the same awful parting of the ways which confronted the people of the Southern States in 1861.  When at the outbreak of the Civil War General Lee was offered by Lincoln the Commandership of the Northern armies and refused it, to become the Commander-in-Chief on the side of the South, he did so because “he believed,” as he told Congress after the war, “that the act of Virginia in withdrawing herself from the United States carried him along with it as a citizen of Virginia, and that her laws and acts were binding on him.”  In other words, unless the proposed Common Council is to be made something more than a Council of the delegates of sovereign States (as the Southern States believed themselves to be till 1861), a deadlock sooner or later is almost inevitable, and the terrible and difficult question—­so familiar to Americans and recently to ourselves on the smaller stage of Ulster—­of the right of secession and the coercion of minorities will arise.  But if the Common Council is framed in accordance with a Constitution which binds its representatives to accept its decisions and obey its government, then the World-State, with a World-Executive, will already have come into being.  There will be no more war, but only Rebellion and Treason.

Such is the real meaning of proposals to give a binding sanction to the decisions of an Inter-State Concert.  Anything short of this—­treaties and arbitration-agreements based upon inter-State arrangements without any executive to enforce them—­may give relief for a time and pave the way for further progress, but can in itself provide no permanent security, no satisfactory justification for the neglect of defensive measures by the various sovereign governments on behalf of their peoples.  Mr. Bryan, for the United States, has within the last eighteen months concluded twenty-six general arbitration treaties with different Governments, and may yet succeed in his ambition of signing treaties with all the remainder.  Yet no one imagines that, when the immunity of the United States from attack is guaranteed by the promise of every Government in the world, America will rely for her defence upon those promises alone.