The League had been designed to implement, in the most explicit and concrete form, the principle of 'collective security', to which lip-service at the time was everywhere paid. This was the principle of each for all and all for each: the rule that, wherever an act of 'aggression' occurred, the whole international community would combine to defend the victim. In so doing, it would defend not only the particular country concerned, but peace itself. In place of the partial and mutually conflicting alliances of the pre-1914 war, anew, universal alliance would be created, a permanent coalition of the vast majority against any state that dared threaten the peace. So the Covenant declared, in Article 11, that 'any war or threat of war, whether immediately affecting any of the members of the League or not, is hereby declared a matter of concern to the whole League'; and in Article 10 it laid down that 'therefore the members of the League undertake to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all members of the League'. To achieve this object, when an act of aggression took place, the League's Council was to 'advise upon the means by which this obligation should be fulfilled'.
Nightmare of War, Global Hope for Peace and Birth of United Nations
