For the last stage will mean nothing less than reconstructing the organisation of the world, and establishing a new policy in which a League of Free Nations shall replace the old system of the balance of rival Powers.
The accomplishment of a change so gigantic as the adjusting of national organisations to fit into new super-national machinery must be difficult and slow. Fortunately the very steps necessary to make it possible are steps that will slowly make it actual. Let me select a few simple examples. The cessation of hostilities will leave the world short of food, short of transport, short of raw materials. The machinery that has regulated these during war will have to be kept in action beyond the war. Food will have to be rationed, transport will have to be rationed, raw material will have to be rationed. It is a world problem that can be settled only on a world basis, and there will be every opportunity, in the years of transition, to transform those economic relations which are forced upon us by necessity into a system which will meet with free and general acceptance.
Intimately connected with these matters will be the problem of the returned soldier, whether wounded or otherwise, the problem of pensions, the problems of wages, housing, hours and conditions of work, regulation of child labour, female labour, and so forth. The equalisation of those in different countries will be necessary to fair rationing, and from this necessity will arise international conferences of workers which may be able to settle some of the most difficult questions of super-national organisation. When the question of disarmament arises, some will demand as a fundamental necessity that their nation must have a large army