This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book explains the two principal strands of Lord Robert Cecil's career in public life: firstly, as a Unionist politician before the First World War, and secondly, as an internationalist after 1919, in a broadly linear fashion. Cecil believed that the League would supersede the nineteenth-century Congress system. At the heart of the post-Napoleonic diplomatic and political system had been a network of alliances whose shifting dynamics responded to tensions between states by neutralising them or by ensuring that any wars that occurred were short and small-scale. Within the League of Nations Union (LNU), Cecil was also respected and admired rather than viewed with affection. Cecil's maverick approach towards politics and League affairs also brought him more than a few detractors. Maurice Hankey, that most institutional of institutional mandarins, described him as a 'crank'.