Our Part in the Great War

s to create an American type at one stroke; it preaches an undiscriminating indeterminate merging of national cultures into a new blend, "the human race," which will

hich is going to accomplish what the Roman Empire and the Spanish I

imilated education, and sees its final stage when "the victim, hating his teachers and ashamed of his parentage and nationality, is intensely miserable." He

enefit to our age. In their main position they were much nearer the truth than their opponents. But the precise point I am dealing with is their theory of cosmopolitanism. And here a grievous personal experience in a cramping environment misled these early radicals, and they incorporated in their program the anti-national item which did not belong. Because their analysis of conditions was in the main so searching, so just, their thought has continued to exercise a profound influence, and the animating ideas in their philosophy of history and in their analysis of industrialism were imported t

rotherhood with gradually disappearing boundaries. We find it in our intelligent skilled social workers. I mention them in no unfriendliness, but because I believe that they and their group are a noble influence in our country, and because their blindness and failure in this crisis are a grief to me and to thousands of other persons who have looked to them for leadership. We find this idea of cosmopolitanism in the modern e

t of analysis into concrete terms. The French and Italians have recognized that the contribution of nationality is vital to the future. Thei

towards the fulfillment of the general mission of Humanity. T

ur country is the fulcrum of the lever which we have to wield for the common good. If we gi

your material conditions without first solv

ry is the idea to which it gives birth." It is "A common

dividual is too insignificant, and humanity too vast." The stuff of nationality is the sacrifice rendered by the people to realize their aspirations-"B

pe is concerned-by the course of the great rivers, the direction of the higher mountains, and other geographical conditions. They (the Governments) have disfigured it so far that, if we except England and France, there is not perhaps a single c

effort, to be able to benefit all Humanity. O my brothers, love your Country! Our Country is our Home, the house that God has given us, placing therein a numerous family that loves us, and whom we love; a family with whom we s

l schools a moral education, a course of nationality-comprising a summary view of the progress of humanity and of

in this war. In the seaside town of Hove, Sussex, where I live, his book, developing the

war, and this is the difficulty one has in pointing out the psychologic unsoundness of Cosmop

d a great and invaluable part in the development of the political consciousness of Europe during the nineteenth cent

h other, but at encouraging the improvement by each of its own racial type." In this way the emotion of political solidarity can be slowly made possible between individuals of consciously different national types. A political emotion, if it is to do away with war, cannot be created by thwarting the instinct of nationality. It must be based, "not upon a belief in the likeness of individual human beings, but upon the recognition of their unlikeness." We in America have tried to deny the facts of psychology by calling all our newcomers Americans. We hav

ricans of mixed race and intense pre-occupation with the game of getting on. I have fou

CT AM

gredients of that race are still being born in Europe at about the usual rate. And, at the worst, if

shed races are the Pilgrims, the Puritans, the Cavaliers, the Huguenots, the Acadian voyagers, the Knickerbockers, the Pennsylvania and New Jersey Dutch, the pioneer forest tribes of Kentucky, Ohio

ay have been born in four states, his parents in two states; whose wife may have been born in a state other than his own and whose four children may be married to men and women of four nationalities, is not worrying greatly regard

hose members have pride in their kind, will live. A race is recruited only through the cradle. A race that disregards its young is doomed. But mankind will not be less numerous and

It treats men as mechanical units in a political and industrial system. They go to their lathe in the factory, attend a motion-picture show in the evening, and so on for a few years to dissolution. It is pessimistic with a dark annihilating qu

bbing tide. Each has the unconscious pathos of a last stand. But not one of these books would have carried beyond the day of its appearance if it had dealt with a life-history removed from its long inheritance. It is only so that the nations among us will in time produce their literature. It will not be by surface types of "rapid" Americans. It will rather be by rendering the individual (whether Jew or Bohemian) in all the loneliness of crowds and modern cities, and revealing the thoughts and "notions" and desires that have come down to him from his very ancient past, and his little ripple of a

ter measure of equality will be achieved in our own time. But how is the social change inside the country to be related to other States? What shall be our foreign policy? This is where the cosmopolitanism of our radical group is a poor guide for action. It is the vice of liberals that they don't harness their ideas to facts. The result is that at tim

nation-States, submerged nationalities, backward races, exploitable territory and international straits, canals and ports of call. That is unfortunate. For, unless the liberal mind is brought to bear on foreign policy, we shall continue to have that policy manipulated

ly the sort of thing they advocate in inter-State relationship. They seek to work by spiritual conversion, turning the hearts of the rulers to righteousness and softening the

ationalization of Constantinople which we apply to wage-scales. Until men of liberal tendency are willing to devote the same hard study to the map which they p