by Harold S. BIDMEAD
"The great and radical vice in the construction of the existing Confederation is the principle of LEGISLATION for STATES or GOVERNMENTS in their CORPORATE or COLLECTIVE CAPACITIES, as contradistinguished from the individuals of which they consist... (This is) a principle which, if it is to be executed at all, must substitute the violent and sanguinary agency of the sword to the mild influence of the magistracy." (Independent Journal, New York)
Thus wrote Alexander Hamilton in November 1787, when persuading Americans to replace their collapsing League of Friendship by the federal constitution that has existed to this day.
These words apply with undiminished power to our existing league misleadingly termed the United Nations, and should be borne in mind by all who claim to be shaping a new world order that befits the present technological, scientific era. Washington, Hamilton, Madison, Jay and their colleagues discovered a scientific principle of government which subsequent generations have forgotten or are ignoring.
The Charter of the United Nations is a bogus constitution which seeks to legalize world anarchy. One of the unfortunate results of the United Nations Association having enslaved the federalists is that there is no debate between them as to the vital difference between a league (confederate) system and a federation. Indeed, many of the members of both camps believe the difference, if any, to be one merely of degree, not of essence.
Yet the world urgently needs such a debate. There are those who imagine the so-called "Security" Council can be converted into a viable organ without despotic power. There are those who wish to leave it as it is, a diplomatic bourse, a debating society whose power fluctuates from zero to a.c./d.c. with frightening inevitability, but to create alongside it a working model of the new democratic world order based on the rule of law operating on individuals. Both these schools of thought need a vigorous public and global debate on the difference between a league and a government.
If the federalists and the United Nations improvers still refuse to stage such a debate, somebody else ought to do so; otherwise the world may be doomed to follow those blind leaders of the blind who have taught the world that peace can be ensured by cooperation only, and have helped thereby to lay it in ruins. Proposals to reform the UN are mere palliatives, prescribed to relieve the pain while the patient dies. Just as a mouse cannot develop into a horse, so is a league incapable of converting itself into a government.
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