above suspicion and whose strength was to be restrained by the jealous
watchfulness of one another. If any one State, like France under
Napoleon, grew too powerful, all the rest were to combine to restrain
it.

Now, there is a good deal in common between Castlereagh's idea and that
of the League of Nations. Of course, there are obvious differences.
Castlereagh's Powers were monarchies rather than peoples; they were
limited to Europe; little regard was paid to smaller States, whose
independence sometimes rested on no better foundation than the inability
of the Great Powers to agree about their absorption; and force rather
than law or public opinion was the basis of the scheme. But none of
these differences, important though they were, between Castlereagh's
Balance of Power and the League of Nations is so fundamental as the
difference between two things which are commonly regarded as identical,
viz., Castlereagh's idea of the Balance of Power and the meaning which
has since become attached to the phrase. There are at least two senses
in which it has been used, and the two are wholly incompatible with one
another. The League of Nations in reality resembles Castlereagh's
Balance of Power more closely than does the conventional notion of that
balance; and a verbal identity has concealed a real diversity to the
confusion of all political thought on the subject.

Castlereagh's Balance of Power is what I believe mathematicians call a
multiple balance. It was not like a pair of scales, in which you have
only two weights or forces balanced one against the other. It was rather
like a chandelier, in which you have five or six different weights
co-operating to produce a general stability or equilibrium. In
Castlereagh's scheme it would not much matter if one of the weights were
a little heavier than the others, because there would be four or five of