The Man of Letters as a Man of Business

ng the past hundred and fifty years. I have shown that without a very drastic readjustment of political ideas and habits, there opens before Europe and the world generally, a sure prospec

ly against patriotism as any European understands that word. And it is, I hold, impossible not to bump against European patriotisms. We cannot temporize with patriotism, as one finds it in Europe, and get on towards a common human wel

et rid of patri

necessary to his moral life, that a man should feel himself part of a community, belonging to it, and it belonging to him

triotism isn't really the equivalent of a European patriotism. It is historically and practically a synthesis of European patriotisms. It is numerically bigger. It is geographically ten times as big. That is very important indeed from the point of view of this discussion. And it is synthetic; it is a thin

The thing can be done. If it can be done in the Europeans and their descendants who have come to Ameri

d the thing by taking all the various nationalities who hav

them on to a great virgin continent to learn a wider political wisdom.

getting a view of it from a different direction. Let us then, for a few moments, instead of talking of the expansion and synthes

internationalism" of the stars and stripes. Suppose you found them wanting to set up tariff barriers to the trade of the states round about them. Suppose you found they were preparing to annex considerable parts

cky, is exactly what is happening in Europe in the case of little states that are hardly any larger than Kentucky. They have always been so. They have not gone mad; if this sort of thing is madn

d look for sources of infection. Somebody must have been preaching there or writing in the newspapers or teaching mischief in the school. And I suppose the

an abominable political infection. The children of Europe grow up with an intensity of national egotism that makes them, for all practical international purposes, insane. They are not born with it, but they are infected with it as soon as they can read and write. The British learn nothing but the glories of Britain and the British Empire; the French are, if possible, still more insanely concentrated on France

ul history in which each one will see the past and future of his own country in their proper proportions, and a little truthful ethnology in which each country w

s. Before Europe can get on, there has to be a colossal turnover of these moral and intellectual forces in the direction of creating an international mind. If that can be effected then there is hope for Europe and the Old World

is greater

idea had best be the idea of

e no real and effective barriers and boundaries in the Old World between Europe and Asia and Africa. The ordinary Russian talks of "Europe" as one who is outside it. The European political systems flow over and have always overflo

talk of a United States of Europe, it is just as easy and practicable to talk of a U

he present time point towards some sort of pan-American un

a sort of dual world-the

ng-place. Why make two bites at a planet? If we work for unity on the

upposing that the mechanical drawing together of the peoples of the world into one economic and political unity is likely to cease-unless our civilization ceases. I see no signs that our present facilities for transport and commu

y I would have this idea of human unity put before people's min

t that has been made to create a League of Nations. It has brought before the general intelligence of the wor

gue of nations

that we must at any cost minimize and obliterate if our species is to continue. And the phrase has a thin and legal and litigious flavour. What loyalty and what devotion can

has no central idea, no heart to it, this League of Nations formula. It is weak and compromising just where it should be strong-in defining its antagonism to separate national sovereignty. For that is w

tinuing progress for mankind. We cannot suffer these old concentrations of loyalty because we want that very loyalty which now, concentrates upon them to cement and sustain the peace of all the world. Just as in the p

Jumbo and all the other national and tribal gods. There is no compromise possible in the one matter as in the other. There is no way round. The task before mankind is to substitute the one common idea of an overr

er, however great that task before us may seem, however near it may come to the impossible, nevertheless, in the establishment of one world rule and one world law lies the only hop

merican can realize how much of Europe is already broken up. I do not think many people realize how swiftly Europe is still

d in those minds and either to efface those ideas altogether or to supplement and correct them profoundly by this new idea of a human commonweal. We have to get not only into the at present intensely patriotic minds of Frenchmen, Germans,

n very great changes in human thought. I need scarcely remind you of the spread of Christianity in Western Europe. In a few centuries the whole of Western Europe was changed from the wild confusion of warring

s to the south and west of the Mediterranean, from Spain to Central Asia, into the unity of Islam, a un

posal of their promoters with the means at the disposal of intelligent people to-day, you will find many reasons for be

be used only sparingly. Few people could read, fewer still could translate, and MSS. were copied with extreme slowness upon parchment. There was no printing, no paper, no post. And except for a very few people there were no schoo

and papers, but in the cinema we have a means of rapid, vivid presentation still hardly used. We have schools nearly everywhere. And here in the need for an overruling world state, and the idea of world service

ld peace, without which our race must perish? The world perishes for the want of a common political idea. It is still quite po

nds. We have to spread the idea of a Federal World State, as an approaching reality, throughout the world. We can do this nowadays through a hundred various channels. We can do it through the press, through all sorts of literary expression, in our schools, colleges, and universities, through political mouthpieces, by special organizations, and last, but not le

ns, states, and kingdoms of to-day, which fight and scheme against each other as though they had to go on fighting and scheming for ever, will become more and more openly and manifestly merely guardian governments,

tate. It has been, I fear, rather an abstract discussion. I have k

World State would take. I do not care to leave this discussion with nothing to it but a phrase which is really hardly more than a negative phrase until we put some body

your World President? Won't your World President, they say, be rather a tremendous personage? How are we to choose him? Or will there be a World King? These are very natural questions, at the first onset. But are they sound questions? May they not be a little affected by fa

resident. Let us ask whether it is probable that the

ve short term limited monarchy such as is the United States

must you? Is not this idea a legacy from the days when states

remember there will be no w

functions of the president may not be made too important. Indeed I believe that question h

so rife that there was a project, during the years of doubt and division that followed the War of Independence, for importing a German King, a Prussian Prince, in imitation of the British Monarchy. But if the United

ates and by the British Empire at the present time. It may be possible for one person to be leader and to have an effect of directing personality in a community of millions or even of

and get his smile well home into the hearts of the entire population of the British Empire of which he is destined t

single individual human head i

ely to be not an individual but an idea-such an idea as

hole, then I suppose the senior judges of the Supreme Court, or the Speaker of the Council, or the head

ncil. That seems to be necessary. But will it be a gathering at all like Congress or the British

believe it will be possible to have it a real gathering of representatives, a fair sample of the thought and will of mankind at large, and to avoid a party development by a more scientific method of voting th

should feel a direct and personal contact between himself and the World State, and that he is an assenting and participating citizen of the world; and secondly, because if your council is appointed b

that sort is that its members will have no common language which they will be all able to speak with the facility necessary for eloquence. Eloquence is far more adapted to the conditions of a Red Indian pow-wow than to the ordering of large and complicated affa

ations and works and methods with which this

g not International Law, but World Law.

be a worl

of posts, transport and

products and for the conservation and develo

istry of social and

a ministry o

l, watching and supplementing national educational work and

y new invention, watching for armed disturbances everywhere, and having complete control of every armed force that remains in the world. All

will have an enormously simplified task. There will be no foreign enemy, no foreign competition, no tariffs, so far as it is concerned, or tariff wars. It will be keeping order; it will not be carrying on a contest. There will be no necessity for secrecy; it will not be necessary to have a Cabinet plotting and planning behind closed doors; there will be no general policy except a steady attention to the common welfare. Even the primary origin of a World Council must necessarily be di

the life of one individual citizen. Let us consider very briefly the life of an ordinary you

lot may fall, the first history he will learn will be the wonderful history of mankind, from its nearly animal beginnings, a few score thousand years ago, with no tools, but implemen

ow each one has brought its peculiar gifts and its distinct

e like unpleasant invasions of human dignity and welfare, and he will know more

enture brought home to his mind by all sorts of vivid methods of presentation, s

ales of ancient grievances and triumphs and revenges, but what his particular race and countryside have given and what it giv

ating realms of half knowledge in which man is still struggling to k

sources upon armaments or soldiering, and which produces whatever it wants in the regions best adapted to that production, and delivers them to the consumer by the directes

ugh and tumble schools of to-day, understaffed with underpaid assistants, and having bare walls. It wil

g naval gun or a bombing-aeroplane costs to-day. I know this will sound like shocking extrav

with much less trouble. It will mean, for instance, that most people will have three or four languages properly learnt; that they will think about things mathematical with

little toil left in the world. Mankind will have machines and power enough to do most of the toil for it. Why, between 1914 and 1918 we blew away enough

sa, without a change of money; everywhere will be his country; he will find people everywhere who will be endlessly different, but none suspicious or hostile.

s and infections. Probably he will never know what a cold is, or a headache. He will be able to go through the great forests of the tropics without shivering with fever and without satura

ill more difficult to convey. We live in this congested, bickering, elbowing, shoving world, and it has soaked into our natures and made us

ch a second nature, that a bath really isn't attractive. Clean and beautiful clothes sound like a mockery or priggishness. To talk of spacious and beautiful places only arouses a violent desire in the poor thing to g

bout our world just as we feel about the ninth or tenth century, when we read of its brigands

ll administer public services, or he will be an able teacher, or a mental or physical physician, or he will be an interpretative or creative artist; he may be a writer or a scientific investigator, he may be a statesman in his state, or even a world statesman. If he is a statesman he may be going up perhaps to the federal world congress. In the year 2020 th

world of dirt, war, bankruptcy, murder and malice, thwarted lives, wasted lives, tormented lives, general ill health and a social decadence that spreads and deepens toward

d invincible, that we who talk of a world state now are only the pioneers of a vast uphill strugg

separations are so illogical, so much a matter of tradition, so plainly mischievous and

wills of mankind? It may be that it is well for us not to know

ven before our lives run out we may feel the dawn of a greater age percept