chapter xxxvi

, § 7). This was a quite disastrous provision. To many minds it made the Covenant League rather less desirable than no league at all. It was a complete recognition of the unalienable sovereignty of states, and a repudiation of the idea of an over-riding commonweal of mankind. This provision practically barred the way to all amendments to the league constitution in future except by the clumsy expedient of a simultaneous withdrawal of the majority of member states desiring a change, to form the league again on new lines. The covenant made inevitable such a final winding-up of the league it created, and that was perhaps the best thing about it.

The following powers, it was proposed, should be excluded from the original league: Germany, Austria, Russia, and whatever remains there were of the Turkish Empire. But any of these might subsequently be included with the assent of two thirds of the Assembly. The original membership of the league as specified in the projected Covenant was: the United States of America, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, the British Empire (Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and India), China, Cuba, Ecuador, France, Greece, Guatemala, Haiti, the Hedjas, Honduras, Italy, Japan, Liberia, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Rumania, the Serb-Croat-Slovene State, Siam, Czecho-Slovakia, and Uruguay. To which were to be added by invitation the following powers which had been neutral in the war: the Argentine Republic, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, Holland, Norway, Paraguay, Persia, Salvador, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and Venezuela.

Such being the constitution of the league, it is scarcely to be wondered at that its powers were special and limited. It was given a seat at Geneva and a secretariat. It had no powers even to inspect the military preparations of its constituent states, or to instruct a military and naval staff to plan out the armed co-operation needed to keep the peace of the world. The French representative in the League of Nations Commission, M. Leon Bourgeois, insisted lucidly and repeatedly on the logical necessity of such powers. As a speaker he was rather copious and lacking in “spice” of the Clemenceau quality. The final scene in the plenary session of April 28th, before the adoption of the Covenant, is described compactly by Mr. Wilson Harris, the crowded Banqueting Hall at the Quai d’Orsay, with its “E” of tables for the delegates, with secretaries and officials lining the walls and a solid mass of journalists at the lower end of the room. “At the head of the room the ‘Big Three’ _diverted themselves in undertones_ at the expense of the worthy M. Bourgeois, now launched, with the help of what must have been an entirely superfluous sheaf of notes, on the fifth rendering of his speech in support of his famous amendments.”

They were so often “diverting themselves in undertones,” those three men whom God had mocked with the most tremendous opportunity in history. Keynes (_op. cit._) gives other instances of the levities, vulgarities, disregards, inattentions, and inadequacies of these meetings.

This poor Covenant arrived at in this fashion returned with President Wilson to America, and there it was subjected to an amount of opposition, criticism, and revision which showed, among other things, how relatively unimpaired was the mental energy of the United States. It was manifest that the people of America had no mind to a compact that was virtually little more than a league of allied imperialisms for mutual insurance. The Senate refused to ratify the covenant, and the first meeting of the League Council was held therefore without American representatives. The close of 1919 and the opening months of 1920 saw a very curious change come over American feeling after the pro-French and pro-British enthusiasms of the war period. The peace negotiations reminded the Americans, in a confused and very irritating way, of their profound differences in international outlook from any European power that the war had for a time helped them to forget. They felt they had been “rushed” into many things without due consideration. They experienced a violent revulsion towards that policy of isolation that had broken down in 1917. The close of 1919 saw a phase, a very understandable phase, of passionate and even violent “Americanism,” in which European imperialism and European socialism were equally anathema. There may have been a sordid element in the American disposition to “cut” the moral responsibilities the United States had incurred in the affairs of the Old World, and to realize the enormous financial and political advantages the war had given the new world; but the broad instinct of the American people seems to have been sound in its distrust of the proposed settlement.

[Illustration: GERMANY after the PEACE TREATY of 1919]

§ 13

The main terms of the Treaties of 1919-20 with which the Conference of Paris concluded its labours can be stated much more vividly by a few maps than by a written abstract. We need scarcely point out how much those treaties left unsettled, but we may perhaps enumerate some of the more salient breaches of the Twelve that survived out of the Fourteen Points at the opening of the Conference.

One initial cause of nearly all those breaches lay, we believe, in the complete unpreparedness and unwillingness of that pre-existing league of nations, subjected states and exploited areas, the British Empire, to submit to any dissection and adaptation of its system or to any control of its naval and aerial armament. A kindred contributory cause was the equal unpreparedness of the American mind for any interference with the ascendancy of the United States in the New World (compare Secretary Olney’s declaration in this chapter, § 6). Neither of those Great Powers, who were necessarily dominant and leading Powers at Paris, had properly thought out the implications of a League of Nations in relation to these older arrangements, and so their support of that project had to most European observers a curiously hypocritical air; it was as if they wished to retain and ensure their own vast predominance and security while at the same time restraining any other power from such expansions, annexations, and alliances as might create a rival and competitive imperialism. Their failure to set an example of international confidence destroyed all possibility of international confidence in the other nations represented at Paris.

[Illustration: Map to illustrate the TURKISH TREATY, 1920]

Even more unfortunate was the refusal of the Americans to assent to the Japanese demand for a recognition of racial equality.

Moreover, the foreign offices of the British, the French, and the Italians were haunted by traditional schemes of aggression entirely incompatible with the new ideas. A League of Nations that is to be of any appreciable value to mankind must supersede imperialisms; it is either a super-imperialism, a liberal world-empire of united states,

## participant or in tutelage, or it is nothing; but few of the people at

the Paris Conference had the mental vigour even to assert this obvious consequence of the League proposal. They wanted to be at the same time bound and free, to ensure peace for ever, but to keep their weapons in their hands. Accordingly the old annexation projects of the Great Power period were hastily and thinly camouflaged as proposed acts of this poor little birth of April 28th. The newly born and barely animate League was represented to be distributing, with all the reckless munificence of a captive pope, “mandates” to the old imperialisms that, had it been the young Hercules we desired, it would certainly have strangled in its cradle. Britain was to have extensive “mandates” in Mesopotamia and East Africa; France was to have the same in Syria; Italy was to have all her holdings to the west and southeast of Egypt consolidated as mandatory territory. Clearly, if the weak thing that was being nursed by its Secretary in its cradle at Geneva into some semblance of life, did presently succumb to the infantile weakness of all institutions born without passion, all these “mandates” would become frank annexations. Moreover, all the powers fought tooth and nail at the Conference for “strategic” frontiers--the ugliest symptom of all. Why should a state want a strategic frontier unless it contemplates war? If on that plea Italy insisted upon a subject population of Germans in the southern Tyrol and a subject population of Yugo-Slavs in Dalmatia, and if little Greece began landing troops in Asia Minor, neither France nor Britain was in a position to rebuke these outbreaks of pre-millennial method.

[Illustration: The BREAK-UP of AUSTRIA-HUNGARY]

We will not enter here into any detailed account of how President Wilson gave way to the Japanese and consented to their replacing the Germans at Kiau Chau, which is Chinese property, how the almost purely German city of Dantzig was practically, if not legally, annexed to Poland, and how the powers disputed over the claims of the Italian imperialists, a claim strengthened by these instances, to seize the Yugo-Slav part of Fiume and deprive the Yugo-Slavs of a good Adriatic outlet. Nor will we do more than note the complex arrangements and justifications that put the French in possession of the Saar valley, which is German territory, or the entirely iniquitous breach of the right of “self-determination” which practically forbade German Austria to unite--as it is natural and proper that she should unite--with the rest of Germany. These burning questions of 1919-20, which occupied the newspapers and the minds of statesmen and politicians, and filled all our waste paper baskets with propaganda literature, may seem presently very incidental things in the larger movement of these times. All these disputes, like the suspicions and tetchy injustices of a weary and irritated man, may lose their importance as the tone of the world improves, and the still inadequately apprehended lessons of the Great War and the Petty Peace that followed it begin to be digested by the general intelligence of mankind.

It is worth while for the reader to compare the treaty maps we give with what we have called the natural political map of Europe. The new arrangements do approach this latter more closely than any previous system of boundaries. It may be a necessary preliminary to any satisfactory league of peoples, that each people should first be in something like complete possession of its own household.

It is absurd to despair of mankind because of these treaties, or to regard them as anything more than feeble first sketches of a world settlement. To do so would be to suppose that there is nothing in France--that land of fine imaginations--better than M. Clemenceau, nothing in America stronger and wiser than President Wilson, and nothing in Britain to steady the Keltic traits of Mr. Lloyd George. The attention we have given to these three personalities in this _Outline_ is intended less to enhance their importance than to emphasize their unimportance, and to make it clear to the reader how provisional and incidental all that they did must be in the world’s affairs. On no statesmen, on no particular men or groups of men, on no state or organization indeed, and on no Covenant or Treaty, does the future of our race now depend. The year 1919 was not a year of creation and decision, it was just the first cheerless dawn of a long day of creative effort. The conferences of the Ten, of the Four, of the Big Three, had no trace of creative power; there was no light in the men of Versailles; the dawn was manifest rather as a grey light of critical disapproval that broke through the shutters and staled the guttering candles of the old diplomacy as the conference yawned and drawled to its end. Creation was not there. But a great process of thought spreads throughout the world; many thousands of men and women, in every country, for the most part undistinguished and unknown people, are awakening to their responsibility, are studying, thinking, writing, and teaching, getting together, correcting false impressions, challenging foolish ideas, trying to find out and tell the truth; and upon them it is that we must rest our hope, such hope as we can entertain, of a saner plan to take the place of this first flimsy League and this patched and discomforting garment of treaties that has been flung for a while over the naked distresses of our world.

§ 14

The failure to produce a more satisfactory world settlement in 1919-20 was, we have suggested, a symptom of an almost universal intellectual and moral lassitude, resulting from the overstrain of the Great War. A lack of fresh initiative is characteristic of a fatigue phase; everyone, from sheer inability to change, drifts on for a time along the lines of mental habit and precedent.

Nothing could be more illustrative of this fatigue inertia than the expressed ideas of military men at this time. It will round off this

## chapter in an entirely significant way, and complete our picture of the

immense world interrogation on which our history must end, if we give here the briefest summary of a lecture that was delivered to a gathering of field-marshals, generals, major-generals, and the like by Major-General Sir Louis Jackson, at the Royal United Service Institution in London one day in December, 1919. Lord Peel, the British Under-Secretary for War, presided, and the reader must picture to himself the not too large and quite dignified room of assembly in that building, and all these fine, grave, soldierly figures quietly intent upon the lecturer’s words. He is describing, with a certain subdued enthusiasm, the probable technical developments of military method in the “next war.”

Outside, through the evening twilight of Whitehall, flows the London traffic, not quite so abundant as in 1914, but still fairly abundant; the omnibuses all overcrowded because there are now not nearly enough of them, and the clothing of people generally shabbier. Some little way down Whitehall is a temporary erection, the Cenotaph, with its base smothered with a vast, pathetic heap of decaying wreaths, bunches of flowers, and the like, a cenotaph to commemorate the eight hundred thousand young men of the Empire who have been killed in the recent struggle. A few people are putting fresh flowers and wreaths there. One or two are crying.

The prospect stretches out beyond this gathering into the grey vastness of London, where people are now crowded as they have never been crowded before, whose food is dear and employment more uncertain than it has ever been. But let not the spectacle be one of unrelieved gloom; Regent Street, Oxford Street, and Bond Street are bright with shoppers and congested with new automobiles, because we must remember that everybody does not lose by a war. Beyond London the country sinks into night, and across the narrow sea are North France and Belgium devastated, Germany with scores of thousands of her infants dwindling and dying for want of milk, all Austria starving. Half the population of Vienna, it is believed, unless American relief comes quickly, is doomed to die of hardship before the spring. Beyond that bleak twilight stretches the darkness of Russia. There, at least, no rich people are buying anything, and no military men are reading essays on the next war. But in icy Petrograd is little food, little wood, and no coal. All the towns of Russia southward as far as the snow reaches are in a similar plight, and in the Ukraine and to the south a ragged and dingy war drags to its end. Europe is bankrupt, and people’s pockets rustle with paper money whose purchasing power dwindles as they walk about with it.

But now we will return to Sir Louis in the well-lit room at the United Service Institution.

He was of opinion--we follow the report in next morning’s _Times_[525]--that we were merely on the eve of the most extensive modifications of the art of war known to history. It behoved us, therefore--us being, of course, the British and not the whole of mankind--to get on with our armaments and to keep ahead; a fine opening generalization. “It was necessary to develop new arms.... The nation which best did so would have a great advantage in the next war. There were people who were crying aloud for a reduction of armaments----”

(But there the Director of Trench Warfare and Supplies was wrong. They were just crying at the cenotaph, poor, soft, and stupid souls, because a son or a brother or a father was dead.)

Sir Louis believed that one of the greatest developments in the art of warfare would be brought about in mechanical transport. The tank he treated with ingratitude. These military gentlemen are ungrateful to an invention which shoved and butted them into victory almost in spite of themselves. The tank, said Sir Louis, was “a freak.... The outstanding feature” of the tank, he said, was that it made mechanical transport independent of the roads. Hitherto armies on the march had only been able to spoil the roads; now their transport on caterpillar wheels would advance in open order on a broad front carrying guns, munitions, supplies, bridging equipment, rafts, and men--and incidentally ploughing up and destroying hedges, ditches, fields, and cultivation generally. Armies would wallow across the country, leaving nothing behind but dust and mud.

So our imaginations are led up to the actual hostilities.

Sir Louis was in favour of gas. For punitive expeditions particularly, gas was to be recommended. And here he startled and disconcerted his hearers by a gleam of something approaching sentimentality. “It might be possible,” he said, “to come to some agreement that no gas should be used which caused unnecessary suffering.” But there his heart spoke rather than his head; it should have been clear to him that if law can so far override warfare as to prohibit any sort of evil device whatever, it can override warfare to the extent of prohibiting it altogether. And where would Sir Louis Jackson and his audience be then? War is war; its only law is the law that the maximum destruction of the forces of the enemy is necessary. To that law in warfare all considerations of humanity and justice are subordinate.

From gas Sir Louis passed to the air. Here he predicted “most important advances.... We need not trouble ourselves yet with flying destroyers or flying concrete forts, but in twenty years’ time the Air Force Estimates might be the most important part of our preparations for war.” He discussed the conversion of commercial flying machines to bombing and reconnaissance uses, and the need for special types of fighting machine in considerable numbers and always ready. He gave reasons for supposing that the bombers in the next war would not have the same targets near the front of the armies, and would secure better results by going further afield and bombing the centres “where stores are being manufactured and troops trained.” As everyone who stayed in London or the east of England in 1917-18 knows, this means the promiscuous bombing of any and every centre of population. But, of course, the bombing of those ‘prentice days would be child’s play to the bombing of the “next war.” There would be countless more aeroplanes, bigger and much nastier bombs....

Sir Louis, proceeding with his sketch, mentioned the “destruction of the greater part of London” as a possible incident in the coming struggle. And so on to the culminating moral, that the highest pay, the utmost importance, the freest expenditure, must be allowed to military gentlemen. “The expense entailed is in the nature of an absolutely necessary insurance.” With which his particular audience warmly agreed. And a certain Major-General Stone, a little forgetful of the source of his phrases,[526] said he hoped that this lecture “may be the beginning not of trusting in the League of Nations, but in _our own_ right hand and _our_ stretched-out arm!”

But we will not go on with the details of this dream. For indeed no Utopia was ever so impossible as this forecast of a world in which scarcely anything but very carefully sandbagged and camouflaged G. H. Q. would be reasonably safe, in which countless bombers would bomb the belligerent lands incessantly and great armies with lines of caterpillar transport roll to and fro, churning the fields of the earth into blood-streaked mud. There is not energy enough and no will whatever left in the world for such things. Generals who cannot foresee tanks cannot be expected to foresee or understand world bankruptcy; still less are they likely to understand the limits imposed upon military operations by the fluctuating temper of the common man. Apparently these military authorities of the United Service Institution did not even know that warfare aims at the production of states of mind in the enemy, and is sustained by states of mind. The chief neglected factor in the calculations of Sir Louis is the fact that no people whatever will stand such warfare as he contemplates, not even the people on the winning side. For as northern France, south-eastern Britain, and north Italy now understand, the victor in the “next war” may be bombed and starved almost as badly as the loser. A phase is possible in which a war-tormented population may cease to discriminate between military gentlemen on this side or that, and may be moved to destroy them as the common enemies of the race. The Great War of 1914-18 was the culmination of the military energy of the western populations, and they fought and fought well because they believed they were fighting “the war to end war.” They were. German imperialism, with its organized grip upon education and its close alliance with an aggressive commercialism, was beaten and finished. The militarism and imperialism of Britain and France and Italy are by comparison feeble, disorganized, and disorganizing survivals. They are things “left over” by the great war. They have no persuasive power. They go on--for sheer want of wits to leave off. No European Government will ever get the same proportion of its people into the ranks and into its munition works again as the governments of 1914-18 did. Our world is very weak and feeble still (1920), but its war fever is over. Its temperature is, if anything, sub-normal. It is doubtful if it will take the fever again for a long time. The alterations in the conditions of warfare are already much profounder than such authorities as Sir Louis Jackson suspect.[527]

§ 15

This _Outline_ of our history would not be complete without at least a few words by way of a stock-taking of the state of mind in which we leave mankind to-day. For the history of our race for the last few thousand years is no more than a history of the development and succession of states of mind and of acts arising out of them. Human history is in essence a history of ideas, and these tremendous experiences of the war constitute a crowning epoch. In the past six years there must have been a destruction of fixed ideas, prejudices, and mental limitations unparalleled in all history. Never before can there have been so great and so universal an awakening from assumed and accepted things. Never before have men stood so barely face to face with the community of their interests and their common destiny. We do not begin to realize yet how much of the pre-war world is done with for good and all, and how much that is new is beginning. Few of us have attempted to measure yet the change in our own minds.

And on the whole and in spite of much eddying and backwash of motives and thought, there does seem to have been a step forward towards the consciousness of a collective need and of the possibility of a collective effort embracing all mankind. Death, waste, hunger, and disease are very rife to-day; the world is full of physical evils, but there is this mental awakening to set against them.

In all material things the year 1913 seems now, to a European at least, a year of amazing and unattainable plenty. But it was a year of great social discontent and of waste, of vice and an extravagant search for personal indulgence on the part of the free and wealthy classes. The Great War was visibly approaching; yet there was neither will nor understanding to prevent the catastrophe; smart and fashionable life capered to nigger dance tunes, and that hectic generation was disposed to welcome even a universal war as a fresh and crowning excitement. War did not seem real to the moods of that time; nothing seemed real to the moods of that time. It was a world of lost or faded beliefs. It did not believe even in the florid nationalisms and imperialisms which waved their flags and filled half the world with the stir and glitter of great armies. But it set itself in the form of these things because they trampled and glittered very entertainingly and because they promised sensational adventures. The catastrophe of the war was not an unnecessary disaster; it was a necessary fulfilment of such an age of drift. Only through a catastrophe, it may be, could a new phase of human thought and will have become possible.

This graver world of 1920 does seem to be awakening to the truth that there are realities worth seeking and evils not to be tolerated. The mental and moral backgrounds of hundreds of millions of minds have been altered and are being altered by the stern lessons of this age. Brotherhood through sorrow, sorrow for common sufferings and for irreparable mutual injuries, is spreading and increasing throughout the world. There are no doubt great countervailing evils, a wild scramble for the diminishing surplus of wealth, a propaganda, but a failing propaganda, of division and hatred. The dominating fact, nevertheless, is a new sanity....

What a wonderful and moving spectacle is this of our kind to-day! Would that we could compress into one head and for the use of one right hand the power of ten thousand novelists and playwrights and biographers and the quintessence of a thousand histories, to render the endless variety, the incessant multitudinous adventure, and at the same time the increasing unity of this display. Everywhere, with a mysterious individual difference, we see youth growing to adolescence and the interplay of love, desire, curiosities, passionate impulses, rivalries. As the earth spins from darkness into the light, the millions wake again to a new day in their life of toil, anxiety, little satisfactions, little chagrins, rivalries, spites, generosities. From tropic to the bleakest north, the cocks crow before the advancing margin of dawn. The early toiler hurries to his work, the fox and the thief slink home, the tramp stretches his stiff limbs under the haystack, and springs up alert before the farmer’s man discovers him, the ploughman is already in the field with his horses, the fires are lit in the cottage and the kettle sings. The hours warm as the day advances; the crowded trains converge upon the city centres, the traffic thickens in the streets, the breakfast-table of the prosperous home is spread, the professor begins his lecture, the shop assistants greet their first customers.... Outwardly it is very like the world before the war. And yet it is profoundly different. The sense of inevitable routines that held all the world in thrall six years ago has gone. And the habitual assurance of security has gone too. The world has been roused--for a time at least--to great dangers and great desires. These minds, this innumerable multitude of minds, are open to fresh ideas of association and duty and relationship as they were never open before. The old confused and divided world is condemned; it is going on provisionally under a sentence of great and as yet incalculable change.

Every one of these hundred of millions of human beings is in some form seeking happiness, is driven by complex and conflicting motives, is guided by habits, is swayed by base cravings, by endless suggestions, by passions and affections, by vague exalted ideas. Every one of them is capable of cruelties and fine emotions, of despairs and devotions and self-forgetful effort. All of them forget; all of them become slack with fatigue and fearful or mean or incapable under a sufficient strain. The follies of vanity entrap them all into absurdities. Not one is altogether noble nor altogether trustworthy nor altogether consistent; and not one is altogether vile. Every one of them can be unhappy, every one can feel disappointment and remorse. Not a single one but has at some time wept. And in every one of them is a streak of divinity. Each one for all the obsessions of self is yet dimly aware of something in common, of something that could make a unity out of our infinite diversity. And they are everyone more aware of this than in 1913. Through all the world grows the realization that there can be no securely happy individual life without a righteous general life. Through all the world spreads the suspicion that this scheme of things might be remade, and remade better, and that our present evils need not be. Our lives, we see with a growing certitude, are fretted and shadowed and spoilt because there is as yet no worldwide law, no certain justice. Yet there is nothing absolutely unattainable in world law and world justice. More men are capable of realizing this than was ever possible at any previous time. And to be aware of a need is to be half-way towards its satisfaction. We call this stir towards a new order, this refusal to drift on in the old directions, unrest, but rather is it hope which disturbs the world.

What real driving force is there in all this aspiration towards a new and wider order? What directive forces are these stirring millions likely to encounter? What accidents and subtle suggestions may not waylay them and cheat them? An age is closing and an age begins. This chapter of history which tells of the Great Powers into which Christendom broke up and of the unbridled national and individual self-seeking which ensued, has culminated in a world catastrophe and is at its end. What will be the next stage in history?

## BOOK IX

THE NEXT STAGE IN HISTORY

XLI

THE POSSIBLE UNIFICATION OF THE WORLD INTO ONE COMMUNITY OF KNOWLEDGE AND WILL

§1. _The Possible Unification of Men’s Wills in Political Matters._ §2. _How a Federal World Government may come about._ §3. _Some Fundamental Characteristics of a Modern World State._ §4. _What this World might be were it under one Law and Justice._ §5. _The Stages Beyond._

§ 1

We have brought this _Outline of History_ up to our own times, but we have brought it to no conclusion. It breaks off at a dramatic phase of expectation. The story of life which began inestimable millions of years ago, the adventure of mankind which was already afoot half a million years ago, rises to a crisis in the immense interrogation of to-day. The drama becomes ourselves. It is you, it is I, it is all that is happening to us and all that we are doing which will supply the next chapter of this continually expanding adventure.

Our history has traced a steady growth of the social and political units into which men have combined. In the brief period of ten thousand years these units have grown from the small family tribe of the early neolithic culture to the vast united realms--vast yet still too small and partial--of the present time. And this change in size of the state--a change manifestly incomplete--has been accompanied by profound changes in its nature. Compulsion and servitude have given way to ideas of associated freedom, and the sovereignty that was once concentrated in an autocratic king and god has been widely diffused throughout the community. Until the Roman republic extended itself to all Italy, there had been no free community larger than a city state; all great communities were communities of obedience under a monarch. The great united republic of the United States would have been impossible before the printing press and the railway. The telegraph and telephone, the aeroplane, the continual progress of land and sea transit, are now insisting upon a still larger political organization.

If our _Outline_ has been faithfully drawn, and if these brief conclusions are sound, it follows that we are engaged upon an immense task of adjustment to these great lines upon which our affairs are moving. Our wars, our social conflict, our enormous economic stresses, are all aspects of that adjustment. The loyalties and allegiances to-day are at best provisional loyalties and allegiances. Our true State, this state that is already beginning, this state to which every man owes his utmost political effort, must be now this nascent Federal World State to which human necessities point. Our true God now is the God of all men. Nationalism as a God must follow the tribal gods to limbo. Our true nationality is mankind.

How far will modern men lay hold upon and identify themselves with this necessity and set themselves to revise their ideas, remake their institutions, and educate the coming generations to this final extension of citizenship? How far will they remain dark, obdurate, habitual, and traditional, resisting the convergent forces that offer them either unity or misery? Sooner or later that unity must come or else plainly men must perish by their own inventions. We, because we believe in the power of reason and in the increasing good-will in men, find ourselves compelled to reject the latter possibility. But the way to the former may be very long and tedious, very tragic and wearisome, a martyrdom of many generations, or it may be travelled over almost swiftly in the course of a generation or so. That depends upon forces whose nature we understand to some extent now, but not their power. There has to be a great process of education, by precept and by information and by experience, but there are as yet no quantitative measures of education to tell us _how much_ has to be learnt or _how soon_ that learning can be done. Our estimates vary with our moods; the time may be much longer than our hopes and much shorter than our fears.

The terrible experiences of the Great War have made very many men who once took political things lightly take them now very gravely. To a certain small number of men and women the attainment of a world peace has become the supreme work in life, has become a religious self-devotion. To a much greater number it has become at least a ruling motive. Many such people now are seeking ways of working for this great end, or they are already working for this great end, by pen and persuasion, in schools and colleges and books, and in the highways and byways of public life. Perhaps now most human beings in the world are well-disposed towards such efforts, but rather confusedly disposed; they are without any clear sense of what must be done and what ought to be prevented, that human solidarity may be advanced. The world-wide outbreak of faith and hope in President Wilson, before he began to wilt and fail us, was a very significant thing indeed for the future of mankind. Set against these motives of unity indeed are other motives entirely antagonistic, the fear and hatred of strange things and peoples, love of and trust in the old traditional thing, patriotisms, race prejudices, suspicions, distrusts--and the elements of spite, scoundrelism, and utter selfishness that are so strong still in every human soul.

The overriding powers that hitherto in the individual soul and in the community have struggled and prevailed against the ferocious, base, and individual impulses that divide us from one another, have been the powers of religion and education. Religion and education, those closely interwoven influences, have made possible the greater human societies whose growth we have traced in this _Outline_; they have been the chief synthetic forces throughout this great story of enlarging human coöperations that we have traced from its beginnings. We have found in the intellectual and theological conflicts of the nineteenth century the explanation of that curious exceptional disentanglement of religious teaching from formal education which is a distinctive feature of our age, and we have traced the consequences of this phase of religious disputation and confusion in the reversion of international politics towards a brutal nationalism and in the backward drift of industrial and business life towards harsh, selfish, and uncreative profit-seeking. There has been a slipping off of ancient restraints; a real _de-civilization_ of men’s minds. We would lay stress here on the suggestion that this divorce of religious teaching from organized education is necessarily a temporary one, a transitory dislocation, and that presently education must become again in intention and spirit religious, and that the impulse to devotion, to universal service and to a complete escape from self, which has been the common underlying force in all the great religions of the last five and twenty centuries, an impulse which ebbed so perceptibly during the prosperity, laxity, disillusionment, and scepticism of the past seventy or eighty years, will reappear again, stripped and plain, as the recognized fundamental structural impulse in human society.

Education is the preparation of the individual for the community, and his religious training is the core of that preparation. With the great intellectual restatements and expansions of the nineteenth century, and educational break-up, a confusion and loss of aim in education was inevitable. We can no longer prepare the individual for a community when our ideas of a community are shattered and undergoing reconstruction. The old loyalties, the old too limited and narrow political and social assumptions, the old too elaborate religious formulæ, have lost their power of conviction, and the greater ideas of a world state and of an economic commonweal have been winning their way only very slowly to recognition. So far they have swayed only a minority of exceptional people. But out of the trouble and tragedy of this present time there may emerge a moral and intellectual revival, a religious revival, of a simplicity and scope to draw together men of alien races and now discrete traditions into one common and sustained way of living for the world’s service. We cannot foretell the scope and power of such a revival; we cannot even produce evidence of its onset. The beginnings of such things are never conspicuous. Great movements of the racial soul come at first “like a thief in the night,” and then suddenly are discovered to be powerful and world-wide. Religious emotion--stripped of corruptions and freed from its last priestly entanglements--may presently blow through life again like a great wind, bursting the doors and flinging open the shutters of the individual life, and making many things possible and easy that in these present days of exhaustion seem almost too difficult to desire.[528]

§ 2

If we suppose a sufficient righteousness and intelligence in men to produce presently, from the tremendous lessons of history, an effective will for a world peace--that is to say, an effective will _for a world law under a world government_--for in no other fashion is a secure world peace conceivable--in what manner may we expect things to move towards this end? That movement will certainly not go on equally in every country, nor is it likely to take at first one uniform mode of expression. Here it will find a congenial and stimulating atmosphere, here it will find itself antagonistic to deep tradition or racial idiosyncrasy or well-organized base oppositions. In some cases those to whom the call of the new order has come will be living in a state almost ready to serve the ends of the greater political synthesis, in others they will have to fight like conspirators against the rule of evil laws. There is little in the political constitution of such countries as the United States or Switzerland that would impede their coalescence upon terms of frank give and take with other equally civilized confederations; political systems involving dependent areas and “subject peoples” such as the Turkish Empire was before the Great War, seem to require something in the nature of a breaking up before they can be adapted to a federal world system. Any state obsessed by traditions of an aggressive foreign policy will be difficult to assimilate into a world combination. But though here the government may be helpful, and here dark and hostile, the essential task of men of goodwill in all states and countries remains the same; it is an educational task, and its very essence is to bring to the minds of all men everywhere, as a necessary basis for world coöperation, _a new telling and interpretation, a common interpretation, of history_.

Does this League of Nations which has been created by the covenant of 1919 contain within it the germ of any permanent federation of human effort? Will it grow into something for which, as Stallybrass says, men will be ready to “work whole-heartedly and, if necessary, _fight_”--as hitherto they have been willing to fight for their country and their own people? There are few intimations of any such enthusiasm for the League at the present time. The League does not even seem to know how to talk to common men. It has gone into official buildings, and comparatively few people in the world understand or care what it is doing there. It may be that the League is no more than a first project of union, exemplary only in its insufficiencies and dangers, destined to be superseded by something closer and completer as were the United States Articles of Confederation by the Federal Constitution (see