He knows, as few other men know, that without a League of Nations the future of civilization is in peril, even the future of the white races; but he has never made the world feel genuine alarm for this danger or genuine enthusiasm for the sole means that can avert it.

He has not preached the League of Nations as a way of salvation; he has only recommended it as a legal tribunal.
It is apparently difficult for a politician, however statesmanlike his qualities, to realize that politics cannot be even divorced from morality, much less to comprehend that morality is the very sinew of politics, being in truth nothing more than the conscience of a nation striving to express itself in State action.

Because of this politics become degraded and sink to the lowest levels of a mere factional manoeuvring for place.

They engage the attention of the attorney, and earn nothing but the contempt of the wise.

They become like the perversions of art in the hands of those who assert that art has nothing to do with morals; they interest only a handful of experts.
But a man like Lord Robert Cecil does surely apprehend that the essence of politics is morality and, therefore, his unwillingness to use moral weapons in the political arena is hard to understand.