Genesis of the League

(Political, Economic, Historical, Biographical)

TOWARDS INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE--F. N. Keen--With an Introduction by Professor Gilbert Murray--Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

This is a collection of essays and papers written at various times by an eminent English jurist (barrister-at-law, of the Middle Temple and the Parliamentary Bar) and is a good running story of the legal growth of the League of Nations idea from the recognition in 1914 that the Hague Tribunal and the "concert" of Europe had failed to preserve the peace.

Mr. Keen starts in 1915 with the idea of a "superstate" equipped with an executive council (the members of which should be chosen on a population basis) and full power to alter boundaries and settle disputes, an international World Court (espoused by the late U. S. President Harding in 1923), an international body of laws and an international army to enforce those laws. He advocates an international currency. The author traces the various schemes, from the prospectuses of the British League of Nations Society and the American League to Enforce Peace, to their fruition in the actual League of Nations at Geneva. He also advocates various methods for a League with "teeth in it."

In the face of the author's enthusiasm swaddled in legalistic conceptions Professor Murray's Attic sanity is most reassuring. The author is too enamoured of the grandiose conception and presumptive powers of a world state, not to mention the magnificently troubled legal waters that would lave its moral boundaries in which he would be so expert a pilot if not fisherman. Professor Murray points out that our feet are still on the ground and provides a sobering antidote to the effects of too literal an acceptance of Mr. Keen's personal convictions.