Those who want peace, it is said, prepare for war. Those who are already at war prepare for peace. So, before the Second World War was even halfway through, debate began about the new organisation which was to be established at its end. Both among the general public and among governments there were varying views about the form the new organisation should take. But about one thing there was general agreement: the new organisation, whatever its powers and functions, must be an improvement on the one which had gone before. All those involved in the deliberations had lived through the painful and disillusioning history of the League. All had shared, at least in some measure, the hope that that institution, revolutionary in its original conception, would be a means of abolishing war from the earth and substituting the saner procedures of international conciliation. Instead they had seen that brief and inglorious organisation prove totally ineffectual. The League's record in fact, even in matters of peace and war, was not altogether bad. Once or twice in its very early years, when the incident was small and the nation to be withstood was weak, the League had begun to live up to its promises. It resolved a frontier dispute between Finland and Sweden; defended the sovereignty of infant Albania when she was threatened by Greek and Yugoslav forces; secured the withdrawal of Greek forces from Bulgaria in 1925 and the payment of compensation by Greece after an incident between the two countries; resolved a territorial dispute between Turkey and Iraq over Mosul; and even, in 1934, sent a small peace-keeping force to occupy an area disputed between Colombia and Peru, which secured the withdrawal of Peruvian forces.
Herodotus on Ancient Persia's Cultural Interactions with Foreign Nations
