"Finally, may I ask, is it possible to stay halfway on the road that leads to total disarmament and the setting up of a League police force? If we contemplate as our ultimate end a League which controls the world’s economic life and the world’s armed forces, then we must say frankly that our ultimate ideal is the creation of nothing less than a World Commonwealth. I think we must make this admission. The establishment of a World Commonwealth is, in the long run, the only alternative to a relapse into a world war. The psychological obstacles are formidable but not insurmountable. There is already a group of nations in the world between whom war may be considered as ruled out forever. Those nations are the British Commonwealth, the United States, and the surviving European democracies. I would add to that group the Soviet Union which, in its international policy, has shown that it is devoted to peace, abhors war, and sincerely believes in the ideal of world union and world cooperation, although it is of the opinion that in the long run such a consummation is impossible without a far-reaching change in the present social order. The democracies stand for a certain view of what constitutes the good life. That view is incompatible with war or with the “totalitarian state”. I do not believe that the values which the Western democracies consider essential to civilization can survive in a world rent by the international anarchy of nationalism and the economic anarchy of competitive enterprise. I think we must get the better of both those forces and subordinate them to the common good through world union on the basis of social justice. I believe that the League of Nations and the International Labor Organization are the instruments to our hand for conceiving and executing such a policy. Today the world is in transition. The vast upheaval of the World War set in motion forces that will either destroy civilization or raise mankind to undreamed of heights of human welfare and prosperity. The policy I have endeavoured to sketch is big, bold, and far-reaching. It will be no light and simple task to lay the foundations of a World Commonwealth. It is, on the contrary, perhaps, the greatest and most difficult enterprise ever imagined by the audacious mind of man. But it is a task which has become a necessity. It is an enterprise that is solidly grounded in realities and in the facts of the modern world. If there is still virtue in our common Western civilization and our faith in democracy – and I believe there is – then we must dare to announce that policy as a challenge to the world and as the summons to a great crusade for peace. What greater cause and what more splendid adventure can be set before the youth of the world than the endeavour to bring into being that age – old dream of saints and sages – the great Commonwealth of the World as the visible embodiment of the brotherhood of man?"