I do not advocate the supremacy of international authority over the national state in order to destroy the national state.

I advocate that supremacy as the sole way with which I am acquainted to set the great fact of nationalism in its proper perspective.

My point is, then, that the fact of a nation’s existence does not entitle it to the full panoply of a sovereign state.

Scotland and Wales are both of them nations; neither possesses that panoply; neither, I think, suffers in moral or psychological stature by reason of its absence.

Neither, let me add, do the Scandinavian peoples--perhaps the happiest of modern communities--who are only sovereign states upon the essential condition that they do not exercise their sovereignty.

But there is no more humiliation in that position than in the position any government occupies in the context of its own subjects.

Power is, by its very nature, an exercise in the conditional mood.

The sovereign king in Parliament could legally disfranchise the working-classes in England; practically we know that it dare not do so.

Everyone in England is aware of the grim, practical limitations under which parliamentary sovereignty operates; no one, I believe, finds humiliation in limits such as we know.

The Covenant of the League of Nations is a method of limiting the unfettered exercise of national sovereign power.

It is a painful and delicate operation; how painful and how delicate the timidity that has been characteristic of the League’s history makes hideously manifest.

Yet experience of the League gives us hope rather than despair.

It took three centuries to build up the sovereign national state to that amplitude which proclaimed its own disastrous character in 1914; it would be remarkable indeed if a decade full of memories and hates so passionate as those of the…

We can at least say out of the experience of those ten years that remarkable incursions into that authority have occurred.

We have discovered a great range of social questions the solution of which is not relevant to the national state or to the problems of power that state first of all considers.

We have found, further, that a platform can be constructed at Geneva the nature of which throws any possible aggressor upon the defensive, and suggests the possible organization against it of the rest of the civilized world.

We are finding ways of reaching the opinion of citizens in different states over the heads of their governments; of making those citizens demand attention to League recommendations in a way that a generation ago would have been unthinkable.

We have shown, and this, in some ways, is the vital discovery of our time, that men of different nationalities can co-operate together in the task of international government in such a way as to sink the pettiness of a narrow outlook…

I know that Sir Arthur Salter is a great Englishman; but I believe his quality as an Englishman has been made complete because he is above all a great citizen of the world.

I do not want to exaggerate the prospects of achievement that lie before us; one blunder in Moscow or Rome might easily destroy every hope we may tentatively cherish.

I want merely to note that the idea of a world-state is slowly, painfully, hesitantly, taking shape before our eyes.

I want to emphasize the logic of that state in an international community so inescapably interdependent as this.

I want to draw therefrom the inference that national sovereignty and the international community confront one another as incompatibles.

I do not believe it is exaggeration to suggest that the underlying motive of the Kellogg Pact was compensation by America for her abstention from the Geneva Covenant.

The Pact, by itself, is an empty declaration; but its logic, like that of the Covenant, is likely to take it much further in the direction of international government than its authors intended it should go.