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[Page 199]

WORLD ORDER

YOUTH AND THE INTERNATIONAL IDEAL

Z. HELEN BILDER

•

WORLD ORDER

A Poem

ROBERT WHITAKER

•

THROUGH THE INVISIBLE

DORIS MCKAY

•

SOCIAL DISRUPTION IN THE SOUTH

KATHRYN COE AND WILLIAM H. CORDELL

•

(Contents continued on inside cover)

•

SEPTEMBER 1935

Price 20c

VIEWING THE WORLD AS AN ORGANISM

[Page 200]

CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE

(Continued)

THE GIFT OF UNDERSTANDING

BAHÁ’U’LLÁH

•

WORLD FEDERATION

OSCAR NEWFANG

•

THE SOURCE OF RELIGION

HORACE HOLLEY

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INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICATION

HELEN S. EATON

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SOCIAL TRENDS IN AMERICAN LIFE

BERTHA HYDE KIRKPATRICK

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THE WAY OUT

Editorial

•

World Order is published monthly in New York, N. Y. by the Publishing Committee of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States and Canada.

Editors, Stanwood Cobb and Horace Holley.

Business Manager, C. R. Wood.

Publication Office—

135 East 50th Street, New York, N. Y.

Editorial Office—

119 Waverly Place, New York, N. Y.

Subscriptions: $2.00 per year, $1.75 to Public Libraries. Rate to addresses outside the United States, $2.25, foreign Library rate, $2.00, Single copies, 20 cents. Checks and money orders should be made payable to World Order Magazine, 135 East 50th Street, New York, N. Y. Entered as second class matter, May 1, 1935, at the post office at New York, N. Y., under the Act of March 3, 1879.

Contents copyrighted 1935 by Bahá’í Publishing Committee September, 1935. Vol. 1, No. 6

[Page 201]

WORLD ORDER

SEPTEMBER 1935

NUMBER 6 VOLUME 1

•

THE WAY OUT

EDITORIAL

•

THE disorder of the times desperately calls for an effective world organization to veto warfare and maintain universal peace. Yet in the very face of such a universally realized need, wars and rumors of wars continue to dominate the international horizon.

World peace is everywhere recognized as essential to world prosperity and progress. In the League of Nations we have an initial effort toward esrablishing such peace; why have all its praise-worthy efforts toward abolishing war proved a failure in the present rising tide of blatant Nationalism? Is it not because the one thing needful to world organization is lacking?

No external attempts at uniting the nations of the world into an actual comity of nations can be successful, until first there is established within the psychology of every one of the various peoples of the world a definite potent consciousness of the essential oneness of mankind. This is the central core around which world organization must be built. As ‘Abdu’l-Bahá warned the world in His many speeches in Europe and America, all merely political attempts at World Unity will prove a failure.

The doctrine of the oneness of mankind is the central theme of Bahá’u’lláh’s message to the world. How is that consciousness to be established, in the face of the negative psychology now prevailing among nations; a psychology built upon emotions of rivalry, of fear, of hatred, of apparently clashing desires and needs?

In the stormy and dramatic days which gave birth to the United States of America, the consciousness of an essential oneness of interests, of opportunity, of destiny was the powerful cohesive force which held the colonies together and made a final and effective union possible in spite of many almost insuperable difficulties. It took the greatest wisdom of the greatest [Page 202] leaders of the thirteen colonies, and much earnest desire and prayer to make possible a successful outcome. But for this effective consciousness of unity which actually prevailed throughout the colonial leadership we might have today, instead of a coherent and powerful United States of America, a group of thirteen small countries constantly warring, mutually suspicious, and blindly conceiving their interests to be opposed one to the other.

WHEN we apply this moral of past history to the world’s situation today, we see the urgent need of establishing in the consciousness of all peoples the idea of the essential oneness of mankind as the dominant motivation for all political and international action. But how is such a consciousness to be established? Enlightened self-interest—urged by many world-thinkers as the motivation for such a Consciousness of Interdependence —can never prove universally effective. It will never be from the direction of self-interest that World Unity can come about, but only through the development of the loftier emotion of other-interest or mutuality. Nothing but a strong spiritual force can create predominantly in the hearts of mankind this essential emotion of international altruism. World thinkers and world leaders must be set on fire with the inspired Gospel of Bahá’u’lláh, who gave to humanity not only practical measures for a new World Order but also a potent unifying force which universally characterizes the influence of the Bahá’í Revelation. “It induces in all who listen to it,” says Christophil in “The Promise of All Ages,” “a new frame of mind, a new outlook in life, a new realization of the Unity of God, of his creation, and of the beings whom He has made.”

Already the universal message of Bahá’u’lláh has proved its potency by bringing into a powerfully cohesive union and world organization people from every race, religion, and major nation of the world. Within this racially and nationally diversified group the absolute consciousness of oneness prevails. As Bahá’u’lláh recommended, they glory not so much in their love of country as in their love for all mankind. A far-reaching metamorphosis of man’s outer world and his inner world, of society and of thought, is already taking place through the influence of Bahá’u’lláh, says Christophil.

Once the new World Order is set up and universal peace is established, the various nations of the world will find that their interests are not in reality, as they hitherto thought, opposed one to the other, but mutual. They will come to realize through actual practice a truth which they could not learn in theory, that the interests of all mankind are virtually one, gravitating around the vital magnetic core of human oneness.

“Then the human race will begin to know itself, to feel its power, to perceive its possibilities, to reach in the life of everyday, heights of achievements and felicity of which none of the nations had dreamed in the night of their estrangement.” Thus prophecies Christophil.

S. C.

[Page 203]

There can be no more fateful task in the world today than that of creating a channel through which the will of the younger generation can flow for the achievement of Peace rather than for the production of another inevitable War.

•

YOUTH AND THE INTERNATIONAL IDEAL

By Z. HELEN BILDER

•

WHEN the armistice was signed to “The War to End War”, statesmen everywhere voiced the resolve, echoed as a prayer in the hearts of all, “This must never happen again.” People said, “We will build a new world order based on international cooperation instead of international anarchy. The fact that we love our own families best does not mean that we must therefore hate our neighbors; in every hamlet, town and city, the community spirit is recognized to be for the good of the individual; in the United States of America, there is State sovereignty, still the States are federated under the national government at Washington. The unit in each case gives up some local privileges for the greater good achieved by group solidarity. So, too, can the countries of the world be federated, a world community, with each nation the family unit, each loving its own best but not, therefore, hating and killing its neighbors.”

Youth movements sprang up on all sides. Young people had not the old habits of thought that taught that Peace was to be found through the bloody channels of War. Young People said, “We remember our tragic childhood with starvation, terror and orphanage; out shoulders are bowed under the burden of taxation from past wars and from the preparations for the next one; before ever we have had a chance to earn our bread, we find ourselves members of the hopeless army of the unemployed. We have studied the history of past wars and we know that the consequences of one are always the causes of the next; we know that the vanquished nation nurses ever a hatred of its conquerors and dreams only of the day when it will be strong enough for revenge. On the graves of our fathers, who died, as they believed, for the good of their country, we resolve, instead to live for our country and to strive to make it part of a family of the nations of the world.” In these young people rested our hope and our faith for the future.

THEN came economic chaos, the inevitable aftermath of war. Here [Page 204] in America, we have had our taste of what we term “The Depression”. In Europe, the actual battleground, where the war lasted so much longer than here, the suffering was of course proportionately greater. Young people, hungry, homeless, jobless, demoralized, were bewildered, eager to snatch at any leadership that promised them any change. Communism came, with bloody revolution a legitimized shortcut to their ideal. Fascism dazzled the world by cleaning the streets, building loads and making the trains run on time; only later did we realize that its benefits were material alone, that the minds of those under Fascism were imprisoned in a straitjacket; —all freedom of the press and of speech denied, that arms were put into the hands of babes scarcely out of their cradles, that militarism and military conquest were taught to be the highest goals of existence.

As if a mad dog were at large, every one gathered together arms to protect themselves against new menaces to their lives and to civilization. Then the old vicious circle was started again. The piling up of arms brought increased fears, suspicions and hatreds; these, in turn, brought increased armament. The world was again a gaming table, with armaments the pawns and the lives of youth the stakes. The tinder-box was again ready for a catastrophic spark —it seemed 1914 again instead of 1935—seventeen short years after the War to end Wars.

One was reminded of the story of the missionary who returned to his native land after many years spent among the cannibals, trying to teach them civilized ways. A friend, meeting him, said, “Tell me,—did you cure them of their loathsome habit of eating human flesh?” “Well, no,” said the missionary, “at least, not entirely, but I can report progress; I did teach them to eat with a knife and fork.” Will our only progress be a refinement of the weapons of destruction?

IF we study the pages of history we must realize that no new social order was ever born at its maximum strength; no new social order ever escaped the danger of sinking back into the evils from which it was seeking to emerge. Why should we expect the millenium by special delivery?

At Rockefeller Institute scientists work year after year, trying to lessen disease. In some cases, they have met as yet with no success; in others, though a preventive serum has been found, epidemics still recur from time to time. We don’t say that medical research is futile—a waste of time and money—that sickness always has existed and always will exist and nothing can be done about it. How much more patience must we have, then, how much greater effort must we be willing to put forth to rid the world of a disease as insidious as is war, not, like physical disease, recognized by all as an evil, but fostered and fomented by those who profit from it, its ugliness masked under gay martial music, the bright panaply of parade and the high sounding phrases that have been built up through the centuries by the sinister forces—fear and greed.

[Page 205] Youth formerly accepted war as a necessary evil; like cholera, in the dark ages, it was considered the will of God. But then, some intrepid souls dared the disapproval of the reactionaries, and cleaned the drains and that unconquerable plague was conquered. If the cobWebs are cleared from our apathetic brains now, we can as surely get rid of war.

I WAS in Geneva in 1932. I was one of the delegates, representing forty-five million women, who asked of the Disarmament Conference to give to the tax-burdened and fear-ridden world some measure of disarmament, that our sons might live, and might live full lives. I saw there crippled war veterans who, with incredible sacrifice and privations, had made the arduous journey from France to plead that others be not sent to the shambles to die or to drag out such shattered lives as were theirs. I heard M. Jean Dupois, the representative of two million International Students of the World, beg that there be disarmament, in order that they might realize the dreams for which their fathers had died. I heard James Green of Yale University, representing seventy colleges in the United States and twenty-nine in Great Britain say, “I should hardly be speaking with the candor of the new world if I did not discuss some of the questions which are constantly being debated in every dormitory, club and fraternity house in America and England. We never cease to ask: ‘Were those ten million young men, who loved life as wholeheartedly as ourselves, the victims of an illusion when they fell to earth only a few years ago? Must the insanity known as war be repeated within our generation at the cost of our lives? What is to be our answer to the Government in case of mobilization for war? We respect the noble war dead but we question the judgment of those responsible for their death. The other speakers have much at stake; we have even more, for we are literally fighting for our lives. It is my generation which will be requested to destroy the best of human culture, perhaps civilization itself, for causes which future historians will discover to be erroneous, if not utterly stupid or actually vicious. We desire to live and to live at peace. We desire to construct a world society providing freedom, equal opportunity and a sense of security.’”

THERE were seven hundred delegates at this Conference and many times that number of advisors. They came from every corner of the globe. Surely some among this number were not totally deaf to these pleas and to the many others no less eloquent and insistant that represented the prayers and aspirations of five hundred million aroused petitioners, fearful of the destruction of civilization, moved by a great will for Peace and ready to share in sacrifices and risks, in order that future generations might be secure. Some among this great assemblage must have remembered these unforgettable pleas for sanity, justice and humanity.

Now, more and more, in colleges, schools and churches, in Y.M.C.A. groups and in workers’ organizations [Page 206] the conviction is crystallizing that the duty of Youth, the salvation of Youth, is to work for Peace, indeed, that not to do so, is suicidal.

Study groups, public forums and regional conferences have sprung up on all sides, with an ever-increasing membership. Youth formerly sat in indifference or in abject despair, accepting and awaiting the inevitable; today, youth has stripped the glamorous mask from the face of War, and revealed Mars in all his stupidity, brutality and greed. Youth now sees War as a Frankenstein Monster whom they must destroy or it will destroy them. They are working enthusiastically, millions of them, to save their own lives and the lives of all the inhabitants of the world; But, not only the lives do they hope to save, through the forces of humanity working together toward the single aim of universal goodwill, but their goal is to make possible for every human being, full development of personality, in terms of the highest human and spiritual values. Their vision is to live in Peace, lives reflecting the concept of a loving and purposeful God.

•

WORLD ORDER

By ROBERT WHITAKER

•

Can order be where self is first,

And every self apart?

Can life be ether than accursed,

With men so slow of heart

To sense dependence on their kind

For fullest fruitage of the mind?

To sense the stake of every soul

In the perfecting of the whole?

Can order be, till each in each

Has found a root of grace?

And every culture, every speech

Has room for all the race?

Who feels not, says not, lives not so,

Wills not to have world order grow.

[Page 207]

Far deeper than the verbal vividness of poetry lie the spiritual truths which the seer and mystic have enshrined in the language of symhol—that language which for its validity depends upon the great law of correspondences.

•

“THROUGH THE INVISIBLE”

A STUDY IN PERSIAN SYMBOLISM

By DORIS MCKAY

•

A CHILD with a new box of blocks makes an important discovery: the letter “C”, the letter “A”, and the little cross called “T”, when placed together in the right order spell CAT; with his first constructed word the child has a taste of the symbol making power. He is enchanted. Soon he will discover symbols that represent movements—to walk, to run, to jump; and symbols that tell sensations—sweet, hot, sour, soft. In time these word symbols will become for him a faculty akin to sight. He will learn to read.

Symbolism, we are told, reaches out to forms that represent rather than reproduce. Through the language of the symbol the prophets and poets of all ages have sought to make Truth articulate; to lead us “through beautiful things to the Eternal Beauty.” As Carlyle declared in “Sartor Resartus”: “In the symbol proper . . . . there is ever some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite: the Infinite is made to blend itself with the Finite, to stand visible, and as it were, attainable there.”

With him Arthur Symonds agrees: “Symbolism” he says, “began with the first words uttered by the first man as he named everything; or before then in heaven when God named the world into being. And we see in these beginnings precisely what symbolism in literature really is: a form of expression, at best but approximate, essentially but arbitrary, until it has obtained the force of a convention, for an unseen reality apprehended by the consciousness.”

Our excursions into the environs of the world religions in search of a spark of the Divine Fire to kindle out cold hearths, lead us to the presence of Those whose first mission it was to embody and reveal the Infinite. Over the dim reaches of oriental time they reigned—the prophets, such men of mystery and effulgence as Zoroaster, Buddha, Lao Tze, and those who came after and before them—those to whose Wisdom the human race were as children learning to spell with new boxes of blocks. To clothe with the familiar the new-old Truth the prophets took symbols. They too spelled a Word [Page 208] —they called it The Word of God.

So we may say that the prophets were the first symbolic poets—and point out that Persia, whose symbolism we are about to discuss, was a land of prophets, and under the poetic influence of prophets. The Persians were a simple people who trod the mystic mazes, and they were born to the tradition of the double meaning of words. Chaldea, Mesopotamia, Assyria, Babylonia—magic realms of the Old Testament—are the Persia of today. Abraham was of that region, and later, Zoroaster; in the sixth century Muhammad, from the neighboring country of Arabia, swayed the land with a Book (the Quran) cryptic with symbolism; in our own century the two poet-prophets, the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh, have poured forth a flood of lyrical beauty. It follows that symbolism should permeate the literature of Persia—especially its poetry.

We approach the theory of double meanings through the words of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Interpreter of the writings of Bahá’u’lláh: “The world spiritual” he explains, “is like unto the world phenomenal. They are the exact counterpart of each other. Whatever objects appear in the world of existence are the outer pictures of the world of heaven.” The message is in code: a knowledge of the symbol translates it. How literal we of the Occident have shown ourselves in our comprehension of our own Bible —for example, in our frustration before the Book of Revelation. J. Tyssul Davis, liberal English clergyman, deplores the inability of “practical westerners” to deal with oriental imagery. Many another misunderstood Voice from the East is described in his defense of Muhammad: “He (Muhammad) tried to make men see the miraculous not in the abnormal but in the commonplace. He recovered wonder at the marvel of ordinary things as though he were a child born into the world for the first time.” Where eternal meanings attach themselves to a blade of grass a study of the Persian background becomes essential if we too would “learn to read”, for it is here in the simplicity of nature, and in the life of the people of Persia, that we shall find our alphabet of symbolic allusion.

LET us wander as a poet would in this Persian land of dramatic contrasts. Travelers describe the sky as a turquoise dome translucent with changing light. Between earth —a waste of desert strewn with the bones of animals—and that turquoise heaven the mountains (symbolising religion) reach, and waters rush down their deep ravines carrying life to the plains below. The foothills at the base of the mountains are natural rock-gardens where in the spring white and yellow wild tulips, anemonies, wild grape-hyacinths, and iris ecstatically bloom. The Persian towns are dots in the pattern of the vast design. Here the motif of the wilds finds repetition: the flat brown roads and walls are like the flowers on the rocky hillside; the mosques with their gold or turquoise domes shine over the towns as the sky above the waste—or as the eternal Reality [Page 209] beams above the dull purposes of unawakened man. The houses present a blank wall to the street as enigmatic as a woman’s veil; but there are intimate arched doorways which like the blue gate of the city wall invite to treasuries and mystery within. Life flows out of these habitations into the marketplaces. It jostles elbows in the dim aisles of the bazaars, where light, pouring through holes in the roof, splashes on the mud floor or awakens highlights in the tiny shops of potters and wheat merchants, of dealers in copper, and silver, and—junk. You often hear of Persians of means renting gardens, not houses: on the edges of the towns or in the hills you come upon these occasional large estates where streams wind among plane and cypress trees, goldfish dart in shadowed pools, and at night “the nightingale sings to the rose.” Out in the desert, pressing so close, gazelles and antelopes leap toward the little groves; camel-lanterns twinkle on the mountainsides as a caravan winds slowly downward intent on the next tavern or caravanserai. Here then, in the change of the seasons, the different hours of day and night; in the trickle of streams and fountains; in flowers and birds and animals; in gardens, gates, doorways, bazaars, caravanserais, marketplaces; in jewels, in veil, in women—the Persian symbolists have cast for us the key to what Omar Khayyam calls “the Invisible”.

“Silence and Speech acting together”, Carlyle called it: our apprehension of reality quickens as we ponder on the merging of the eternal mysteries with the outer world; after all, our accustomed background was but a curtain to another realm— can it be penetrated by “the eye of the spirit”? The Persian poem that we had thought merely a “love poem”, the description of heaven which had seemed solid and materialistic, the embellishments of Persian poetry which we had considered purely decorative, become signs pointing the way to the Placeless. It is difficult to estimate how near an analogy has come to the convention of the symbol proper. The speech of poets and prophets is a continuous flash of metaphor, often self-explanatory. We may say, however, that the few examples offered here for illustration are in accepted usage— subject to individual variation.

The Beloved—symbol of God or His Messenger; Rose—object of affection, often refers to the Messenger of God; Door or Gate—title given by Muhammadans to an expected prophetic leader; Wine—spiritual reality, love; Cup, or Cup bearer— Bearer of the wine of the spirit, the divine bestowal; Garden—Paradise; Nightingale, or bird—the soul of man; Cage—the body; Caravan— journey of life; Tavern or caravanserai— this world's existence; Veils —worldly distractions obscuring our vision of the face of the Beloved: Pheonix—immortality; Fire—divine love; Water—divine knowledge.

The story of Laili and Majnun, written by the great romantic poet, Nazami, in the twelfth century is conceded to be an allegory of “the passion of the soul in its progress to Eternity”: The names of Laili and Majnun—Laili, lost to Majnun and [Page 210] an object of his anguished quest— have themselves become part of the formal language of the later poets. As Nathan Haskell Dole states in his introduction to “The Persian Poets”: “Love becomes a mystic passion signifying union with God, and all the passionate utterances of the Persian poets are interpreted in a manner exactly analogous to the ecclesiastical explanation of the Song of Solomon . . . ”

Rumi (Jelal u’Din), born 1n 1207 and called the greatest mystic poet of any age, shows even in translation the ardor of love for the divine Friend:

“Go on foot, like the grass, because

in this garden

The Beloved, like the rose, is riding,

all the rest are on foot,

He is both the sword and the

swordsman, both the slain and the slayer,

He is at once all Reason and brings

Reason to naught. . . . .

May His bounteous hand perpetually

be a necklace on my neck!”

“O Son of Dust! wrote Bahá’u’lláh six centuries later, “Turn not away thine eyes from the matchless wine of the immortal Beloved and open them not to foul and mortal dregs. Take from the hands of the divine Cupbearer the chalice of immortal life, that all wisdom may be thine, and that thou mayest harken unto the mystic voice calling from the realm of the invisible. . . . . ”

TRANSPORTED by the words of the Messengers and the mystic poets to a new region we look about us: we see the mountains, the streams, the fountains, the flowers, the cities, of “the Invisible”; our slow ears catch the Whisper of a song—it is the eternal love theme of God and man, the Song of Solomon, the “Divine Comedy”; we hear the Word that thrills the universe: “O Son of Man! I loved thy creation, hence I created thee, wherefore do you love Me, that I may name thy name and fill thy soul with the spirit of light.”

“O Son of the Wondrous Vision”, pleads the Voice from out the Invisible, “I have breathed within thee a breath of My own Spirit, that thou mayest be my lover. Why hast thou forsaken Me and sought a beloved (the world) other than Me?”

“Within every blade of grass are enshrined the mysteries of an inscrutable Wisdom, and upon every rosebush a myriad nightingales pour out in blissful rapture their melody. Its wondrous tulips unfold the mystery of the Burning Bush and its sweet savors breathe the perfume of the Messianic Spirit. . . . In every leaf ineffable delights are treasured and within every chamber unnumbered mysteries lie hidden.”

The meaning of symbols? It has been said: “We speak one word and by it We intend one and seventy meanings . . . ” We reveal ourselves, do we not? by the shade of understanding we bring to that “word”. Men come and go but the symbol lives on, a sealed book to a generation “waxed fat”, a secret language of the Unseen of which we have the letters and the spelling of its simplest words.

[Page 211]

A particularly vivid and moving description of a social catastrophe resulting not from violence of war or revolution, hut from the implacable advance of a technical science which does not await the laggard steps of a social conscience responsible for justice and order. The authors, graduates of the University of Arkansas, are trained observers of current events.

•

SOCIAL DISRUPTION IN THE SOUTH

By KATHRYN COE AND WILLIAM H. CORDELL

•

GREAT anxiety has been expressed as to the outcome of the wholesale eviction of tenant farmers from plantations in the South as the result of the government’s cotton adjustment program effecting in 1934 a 40% reduction from the base acreage devoted to cotton the four years previous to the program, and in 1935 a 25% reduction of the base acreage. Thousands of Negro and white tenants and share-croppers with their families are homeless and adrift on highways of the southern states, and most particularly in Arkansas and Mississippi. During a recent trip through the cotton-growing states, countless Negroes were observed eating clay from the banks of the Mississippi on the outskirts of Memphis to assuage their hunger, and most curiously, expressing great fondness for the diet! Conversation revealed that the majority of these Negroes and their families were typical examples of evicted tenants, many of whom had been drifting on the highways a year or more. Hundreds of these families are in circumstances that never fail to excite infinite pity for their plight, and government relief agencies, regardless of the inefficient and inadequate administration of many, have attempted to bring food, clothing, and, less frequently, shelter to these people, it cannot be denied. But thought has in most instances been given only to more or less temporary relief for nearly two million tenant families of the South.

Regardless of charts and graphs prepared by sociologists to indicate increased business, augmented buying power of the average citizen, increased sale of new automobiles to rural Southern districts, etc., designed to prove that the depression is over and that good times are just around the corner, it would be wise at this time to consider tenant relief to cover not a temporary emergency but a [Page 212] plight that will inevitably, in time, become more widespread and socially significant. A solid and permanent foundation should be laid for the building of a new social structure designed to accommodate more and more of the tenants to be evicted from plantations in the South in the years to come.

No prophetic powers are necessary to make the statement that the problem of hungry and homeless men and women in the South has only begun. Two million tenant farmers are soon to see themselves steadily although gradually replaced in their greatest hope of gainful employment by the newly-invented Cotton-Picking Machine, given a public demonstration for the first time in Memphis during May, 1935, on the occasion of the annual celebration of the South’s Cotton Week. The machine is practical and sturdy. It picks only the ripe bolls of cotton, leaving the green bolls unharmed. Little rubbish is taken in to complicate ginning. During recent field tests on Arkansas plantations it has been demonstrated that the tractor-mounted cotton-picker can gather in one day’s time as much cotton as seventy of the most efficient hand pickers. The tractor-mounted cotton picker most frequently used in demonstrations has a tunnel-like opening on the right side from front to back, that it may straddle the row of cotton. An endless belt carries a line of small, smooth spindles projected horizontally in the tunnel. After the rods have run through a moistening device they revolve and comb through the plant. Since the spindles have been moistened, cotton from the rip bolls adheres to the rods and is quickly wound from the bolls. Instantly the cotton is stripped from the rods by another device, and the spindles continue to comb through the cotton plant. Suction takes the cotton gathered into a bag or hopper at the rear of the machine. The machine apparently is simple, but no one denies that the sociological results of the inevitable and wide-spread use of the machine in the South will be revolutionary.

HISTORY demonstrates the social import of an invention made in 1793 in the same field—Eli Whitney’s cotton gin. Cotton is not indigenous to the United States. It was introduced for the first time in this country in 1721, being grown in Virginia and the Carolinas. For many years it was a trifling domestic industry; not until 1784 was United States cotton exported for the first time, a total of eight sacks, or the equivalent of less than two and a half bales today. In 1790, immediately before the invention of the cotton gin, the United States cotton crop totaled around one and one-half million pounds. Sixteen years after the invention, the total weight of the cotton crop had grown to eighty-five million pounds. By 1870 more than 1,923,000,000 pounds of cotton were being produced; by 1900, 4,846,000,000.

The machine invented fourteen decades ago by Eli Whitney had shaped, if not made, from an infant industry the agricultural history, and with it, the social structure of the South. To date there has been but one serious [Page 213] revision of that social structure, the Civil War and the emancipation of the slaves. Soon, however, the Negro race in the South had been re-enslaved as tenants deep in debt, and along with them the poor and landless whites, become share-croppers.

The advent of the mechanical cotton-picker will tear that already crumbling social structure to the ground. No longer will it be profitable for planters to furnish a great number of tenants even with food and shelter the year round. There is the possibility, as some one has suggested, of withholding the marketing of the cotton-picker during the economic crisis. But time has shown that science and progress do not wait. Although science has seemingly ignored the great need for a mechanical harvesting of cotton, actually men have labored for decades to build a serviceable and economical machine for picking cotton, and manufacturers of farm implements have spent millions of dollars in cotton-picking research. The social issue would only be postponed; with the present woes of Southern tenants solved, the blow would be as great to the South’s social structure.

It is conceivable that the new machine will also be marketed in other cotton-growing regions of the world and will constitute a serious threat to a cherished nationalism. Along with the reorganization of its society, the South must face keen and growing competition in cotton from other countries. Already, if for the first time in history, the rest of the world succeeded in producing more cotton (59%) than did the United States (41%) in 1934. The previous year the figures were reversed, the United States growing 60%, the rest of the world 40% of the total cotton produced.

It is possible that a relatively small per cent of cotton planters may be able to buy the machines when they are first introduced. But the extensive use of mechanical cotton-pickers is merely a matter of time, and the sociological and economic problems that result to two million white and Negro tenants, whether their replacement by the machine is instantaneous or gradual, will follow as surely as night the day.

THE United States produced its greatest cotton crop in 1926, estimated at 17,977,000 bales, or by the old way of reckoning, some 8,988,500,000 pounds. The most efficient cotton pickers seldom gather as much as 150 pounds of seed cotton in a day, while average pickers bag around 100 pounds per day. Two-thirds of that 100 pounds picked by hand is seed and only one-third lint. Thus picking the 1926 cotton crop required around 269,655,000 days of human labor at about three-fourths that figure in dollars for their work. Some 49,000,000 acres of cotton were planted in 1926 in the United States. The estimated operating cost of the cotton-picking machine per acre, including repairs, fuel and labor, is only 98c. Whereas about $200,000,000 was paid to human cotton-pickers of the South in 1926, it would cost only $48,020,000 for the machine to do the same amount of work in 1936, and in a much shorter time.

[Page 214] Thus the problem that confronts sociologists in the abstract and the government in actuality becomes more serious in the light of the most recent scientific development for industry. It is not a question of providing temporary food, clothing and shelter for tenants evicted as a result of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. True, these evictions have been contrary to the intentions of the Bankhead Act, they have been numerous, deplorable, and in many cases unnecessary. The resulting lives of evicted tenants have been dire, miserable, and indeed pitiable. But food and pity will not solve the problem which has only begun.

Nor will investigation and indignation prevent more planters from evicting an increasing number of tenants, even before the mechanical cotton-pickers are in use. Fair critics recognize and sympathize with an angle of the problem with which the general public is seldom acquainted; countless plantation owners of the cotton states have had serious struggles, not to obtain the vital necessities with which to sustain life itself, but to retain the homeplaces for genetations, the desirable and (to them) nonetheless necessary standard of existence which has made life, for them, worth the living. Such constant traits are not to be ignored by conscientious sociologists seeking a solution to the problem.

In South Carolina 68% of the farmers are tenants, in Georgia, more than 67%, and in Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, Texas, and Tennessee more than one-half of the farmers are tenants. Up until this time the chief value of tenant farmers to the plantation owners was their availability during cotton-picking time. Only a small number of men are necessary to do the spring planting and plowing on a great plantation. Tractors for this work in the cotton fields have long been available, but few plantations went to the expense of buying the machines for spring plowing when they were furnishing a number of tenants the year round, who would, if the tractor did their work, be idle until cotton-picking. But with a cotton-picker which can be attached and drawn by tractor, the use of the same machine in spring planting and fall harvesting will now be profitable for planters.

Thus the hundreds of evicted tenants seen drifting aimlessly about the Southern states will soon be joined by thousands of the tenants machinery will replace. If it is possible to inaugurate a plan of rehabilitating these homeless families in rural regions on sub-marginal and unredeemed state-tax lands as quickly as they are discarded from the old social structure, the problem of absorbing the increasing number of evicted tenants into the rural rehabilitation program will not be so great in the years to come. There is no just nor humane alternative. Homeless men and women must be given permanent shelter, hungry men and women must not only receive food temporarily but must be given an opportunity to earn their bread in the years to come, and in men and women whose morale has been broken down must be instilled new hope and confidence.

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The understanding by which men can perceive the working of the Divine Will is the supreme gift of God. Without it the world can not retrace its steps and draw near to the Source of creation.

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THE GIFT OF UNDERSTANDING

WORDS OF BAHÁ’U’LLÁH

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KNOW thou that, according to what thy Lord, the Lord of all men, hath decreed in His Book, the favors vouchsafed by Him unto mankind have been, and will ever remain, limitless in their range. First and foremost among these favors, which the Almighty hath conferred upon man, is the gift of understanding. His purpose in conferring such a gift is none other except to enable His creature to know and recognize the one true God—exalted be His glory. This gift giveth man the power to discern the truth in all things, leadeth him to that which is right, and helpeth him to discover the secrets of creation. Next in rank, is the power of vision, the chief instrument, whereby his understanding can function. The sense of hearing, of the heart, and the like, are similarly to be reckoned among the gifts with which the human body is endowed. Immeasurably exalted is the Almighty Who hath created these powers, and revealed them in the body of man.

THINE eye is My trust, suffer not the dust of vain desires to becloud its luster. Thine ear is a sign of My bounty, let not the tumult of unseemly motives turn it away from My Word that encompasseth all creation. Thine heart is My treasury, allow not the treacherous hand of self to rob thee of the pearls which I have treasured therein. Thine hand is a symbol of My lovingkindness, hinder it not from holding fast unto My guarded and hidden Tablets. . . . Unasked, I have showered upon thee My grace. Unpetitioned, I have fulfilled thy wish. In spite of thy undeserving, I have singled thee out for My richest, My incalculable favors. . . . O My servants! Be as resigned and submissive as the earth, that from the soil of your being there may blossom the fragrant, the holy and multicolored hyacinths of My knowledge. Be ablaze as the fire, that ye may burn away the veils of heedlessness and set aglow, through the quickening energies of the love of God, the chilled and wayward heart. Be light and untrammelled as the breeze, that ye may obtain admittance into the precincts of My court, My inviolable Sanctuary.

[Page 216]216 O MY servants! Let not your vain hopes and idle fancies sap the foundations of your belief in the All-Glorious God, inasmuch as such imaginings have been wholly unprofitable unto men, and failed to direct their steps unto the straight Path. Think ye, O My servants, that the Hand of My all-encompassing, My overshadowing, and transcendent sovereignty is chained up, that the flow of Mine ancient, My ceaseless, and all-pervasive mercy is checked, or that the clouds of My sublime and unsurpassed favors have ceased to rain their gifts upon men? Can ye imagine that the wondrous works that have proclaimed My divine and resistless power are withdrawn, or that the potency of My will and purpose hath been deterred from directing the destinies of mankind? If it not be so, wherefore, then, have ye striven to prevent the deathless Beauty of My sacred and gracious Countenance from being unveiled to men’s eyes? Why have ye struggled to hinder the Manifestation of the Almighty and All-Glorious Being from shedding the radiance of His Revelation upon the earth? Were ye to be fair in your judgment, ye would readily recognize how the realities of all created things are inebriated with the joy of this new and wondrous Revelation, how all the atoms of the earth have been illuminated through the brightness of its glory. Vain and wretched is that which ye have imagined and still imagine!

Retrace your steps, O My servants, and incline your hearts to Him Who is the Source of your creation. Deliver yourselves from your evil and corrupt affections, and hasten to embrace the light of the undying Fire that gloweth on the Sinai of this mysterious and transcendent Revelation. Corrupt not the holy, the all-embracing, and primal Word of God, and seek not to profane its sanctity or to debase its exalted character. O heedless ones! Though the wonders of My mercy have encompassed all created things, both visible and invisible, and though the revelations of My grace and bounty have permeated every atom of the universe, yet the rod with which I can chastise the wicked is grievous, and the fierceness of Mine anger against them terrible. With ears that are sanctified from vain-glory and worldly desires hearken unto the counsels which I, in My merciful kindness, have revealed unto you, and with your inner and outer eyes contemplate the evidences of My marvelous Revelations. . . .

O MY servants! Deprive not yourselves of the unfading and resplendent Light that shineth within the Lamp of Divine glory. Let the flame of the love of God burn brightly within your radiant hearts. Feed it with the oil of Divine guidance, and protect it within the shelter of your constancy. Guard it within the globe of trust and detachment from all else but God, so that the evil whisperings of the ungodly may not extinguish its light. O My servants! My holy, My divinely ordained Revelation may be likened unto an ocean in whose depths are concealed innumerable pearls of great price, of surpassing luster. It is the duty of every seeker to bestir himself and strive to attain [Page 217] the shores of this ocean, so that he may, in proportion to the eagerness of his search and the efforts he hath exerted, partake of such benefits as have been pre-ordained in God’s irrevocable and hidden Tablets. If no one be willing to direct his steps towards its shores, if every one should fail to arise and find Him, can such a failure be said to have robbed this ocean of its power or to have lessened, to any degree, its treasures? How vain, how contemptible, are the imaginations which your hearts have devised, and are still devising! O My servants! The one true God is My witness! This most great, this fathomless and surging Ocean is near, astonishingly near, unto you. Behold it is closer to you than your life-vein! Swift as the twinkling of an eye ye can, if ye but wish it, reach and partake of this imperishable favor, this God-given grace, this incorruptible gift, this most potent and unspeakably glorious bounty.

O My servants! Could ye apprehend with what wonders of My munificence and bounty I have willed to entrust your souls, ye would, of a truth, rid yourselves of attachment to all created things, and would gain a true knowledge of your own selves —a knowledge which is the same as the comprehension of Mine own Being. Ye would find yourselves independent of all else but Me, and would perceive, with your inner and outer eye, and as manifest as the revelation of My effulgent name, the seas of My loving kindness and bounty moving within you. Suffer not your idle fancies, your evil passions, your insincerity and blindness of heart to dim the luster, or stain the sanctity, of so lofty a station. Ye are even as the bird which soareth, with the full force of its mighty wings and with complete and joyous confidence, through the immensity of the heavens, until, impelled to satisfy its hunger, it turneth longingly to the water and clay of the earth below it, and, having been entrapped in the mesh of its desire, findeth itself impotent to resume its flight to the realms whence it came. Powerless to shake off the burden weighing on its sullied wings, that bird, hitherto an inmate of the heavens, is now forced to seek a dwelling-place upon the dust. Wherefore, O My servants, defile not your wings with the clay of waywardness and vain desires, and suffer them not to be stained with the dust of envy and hate, that ye may not be hindered from soaring in the heavens of My divine knowledge.

O My servants! Through the might of God and His power, and out of the treasury of His knowledge and wisdom, I have brought forth and revealed unto you the pearls that lay concealed in the depths of His everlasting ocean. I have summoned the Maids of Heaven to emerge from behind the veil of concealment, and have clothed them with these words of Mine—words of consummate power and wisdom. I have, moreover, with the hand of divine power, unsealed the choice wine of My Revelation, and have wafted its holy, its hidden, and musk-laden fragrance upon all created things. Who else but yourselves is to be blamed if ye choose to remain unendowed with so great an outpouring of God’s transcendent [Page 218] and all-encompassing grace, with so bright a revelation of His resplendent mercy? . . .

O MY servants! There shineth nothing else in Mine heart except the unfading light of the Morn of Divine guidance, and out of My mouth proceedeth naught but the essence of truth, which the Lord your God hath revealed. Follow not, therefore, your earthly desires, and violate not the Covenant of God, nor break your pledge to Him. With firm determination, with the whole affection of your heart, and with the full force of your words, tum ye unto Him, and walk not in the ways of the foolish. The world is but a show, vain and empty, a mere nothing, bearing the semblance of reality. Set not your affections upon it. Break not the bond that uniteth you with your Creator, and be not of those that have erred and strayed from His ways. Verily I say, the world is like the vapor in a desert, which the thirsty dreameth to be water and striveth after it with all his might, until when he cometh unto it, he findeth it to be mere illusion. It may, moreover, be likened unto the lifeless image of the beloved whom the lover hath sought and found, in the end, after long search and to his utmost regret, to be such as cannot “fatten nor appease his hunger.”

O My servants! Sorrow not if, in these days and on this earthly plane, things contrary to your wishes have been ordained and manifested by God, for days of blissful joy, of heavenly delight, are assuredly in store for you. Worlds, holy and spiritually glorious, will be unveiled to your eyes. You are destined by Him, in this world and hereafter, to partake of their benefits, to share in their joys, and to obtain a portion of their sustaining grace.

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Today the greatest need of the world of humanity is discontinuance of the existing misunderstandings among nations. This can he accomplished through the unity of language. Unless the unity of languages is realized, the “Most Great Peace” and the oneness of the human world cannot he effectively organized and established . . . Through this means (an auxiliary international tongue) international education and training become possible: the evidence and history of the past can be acquired. The spread of the known facts of the human world depends upon language. The explanation of divine teachings can only he through this medium . . . Therefore the first service to the world of man is to establish this auxiliary international means of communication. —‘ABDU’L-BAHÁ, in “Promulgation of Universal Peace.”

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The second, and concluding, instalment of a statement by the author of “The Road to World Peace” and other works summarizing the case for the principle of World Federation as the only sound solution for the existing international anarchy.

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WORLD FEDERATION

By OSCAR NEWFANG

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V. THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

THE World War was a final and conclusive demonstration of the fact that the fear and the danger of war among nations cannot be removed by partial alliances or a balance of power; but that, the more nearly “balanced” the groups of powers, the more certain it is that they will fight. The world thus became firmly convinced that the only way to remove the fear of war is by a union of all the powers in a single world organization to maintain peace and cooperation among all nations, thus destroying the vicious downward spiral of fear of war and strangulation of trade, leading inevitably to war.

Thus the League of Nations was founded. The general recognition of the need for such a world organization is proved by a membership of fifty-five countries within a few months of the League’s establishment. At the present moment (March 1, 1935) every country of any importance in the whole world is a member except the United States; although it is uncertain whether Germany and Japan will remain in the family of peace-loving nations.

The philosophy of the League is, that world peace can be maintained and the fear of war removed through the guaranty by all the members of the “territorial integrity and existing political independence of all members of the League”, “the reduction of national armaments to the lowest point consistent with national safety and the enforcement by common action of international obligations”.

The form of organization by which peace and cooperation are to be achieved by the League is a loose alliance of sovereign governments. In its Assembly every nation, great or small, has a single vote; unanimity is required for all important decisions; and the ratification of decisions by every individual member state is necessary before such decisions become [Page 220] binding. This procedure followed necessarily from the structure of the organization as a confederacy of governments which did not surrender any part of their absolute sovereignty, and in which, therefore, the votes of the largest majority of delegates could not override the sovereign will of a single one of the smallest nations. On one occasion the single vote of Persia blocked an otherwise unanimous decision of the whole Assembly.

As a smaller executive body, meeting more frequently, a Council is established, consisting of the permanent membership of the great powers and a rotating number of selected smaller states. This body, also, because of the form of the League’s organization, is limited to unanimity in all important matters. A continuing Secretariat to handle routine and prepare the agenda of meetings of the two bodies mentioned is added to the organization.

The method of preventing war provided in the Covenant of the League of Nations consists in the obligation of its members to submit all international controversies likely to lead to a rupture either to arbitration, adjudication, or to the conciliatory efforts of the Council. The submission to arbitration or adjudication is entirely voluntary and must be accepted by both parties to the dispute; but submission to the Council is obligatory upon the members and may be brought about by a single party to a dispute. The members of the League obligate themselves to accept and to carry out in good faith an award or a judgment; but they do not obligate themselves to carry out the recommendation of the Council, should they refuse arbitration and adjudication, and allow the dispute to go to the Council for conciliation. The Covenant, however, provides that, if the recommendation of the Council is unanimous, the members are obligated not to go to war against a party that complies with the Council’s recommendation, but they are not obligated to go to the aid of the member suffering aggression; and if the Council cannot agree unanimously upon a recommendation, the parties are free to go to war over the dispute. The Covenant does not forbid war. It merely forbids any member to go to war without first submitting the dispute to arbitration, adjudication or conciliation: if a member violates this obligation, the members of the League agree to blockade the aggressor.

VI. THE WEAKNESS OF THE LEAGUE

How has this machinery worked? While the League has been able in Europe to effect settlement of a number of disputes that threatened war, partly because of the war-weariness of the disputing countries and partly because it was felt by them that the danger of the spread of any war in that densely peopled continent would move the great powers to intervene with force; in the distant parts of the earth the League’s efforts have not been uniformly successful, since it was felt (and rightly, as the events proved) that the members of the League would not live up to their obligation to institute an economic [Page 221] blockade or to send a military force to distant continents for the prevention of wars in which they had a comparatively slight interest. In several regions the authority of the League has been ignored over long periods.

Owing largely to the unexpected failure of America to enter the League, the Covenant’s entire scheme of sanctions, upon which the member states were to rely for their security against invasion, has proved unworkable; and up to the present time no formula has been found for their application which meets with the approval of Great Britain, who fears a clash with America, should such sanctions be enforced.

In the absence of dependable and effective sanctions the continental powers, and especially France, have not been able to feel that security against invasion which would permit them to reduce their armaments “to the lowest point consistent with national safety”; and as a consequence the League’s efforts toward disarmament over more than a decade have been futile. Peace preservation has failed, sanctions have failed, disarmament has failed, and a profound fear of war remains.

The failure of the League to assure security and to remove the fear of war has made impossible the economic disarmament of the nations. Instead of the “international cooperation” and “equitable treatment for the commerce of all members”, which was the second great purpose of the League’s organization, trade barriers have since the World War everywhere vastly increased in number and in their destructive effect upon the natural flow of commerce.

In short, the League of Nations has shown in actual operation all the weaknessess of any confederacy of governments. A comparison between its history and that of the “Firm League of Friendship” in America, the original confederacy in which the United States were at first joined, is interesting and instructive. Both Leagues were rendered impotent by a similar rule of unanimity; both found it impossible to prevent trade restrictions and oppressions between the member states; both found it impossible to disarm the member states without first providing an adequate central armament for their protection; both found that an unarmed central organization cannot control armed member states; both Leagues proved too weak to prevent separate alliances or cliques among the member states; both experienced the impossibility of applying sanctions or armed force to entire states as political entities without causing war; both Leagues found that a system of providing necessary money and men through quotas directed to the governments of the member states was ineffective, and that no loyalty to the central authority could be created while payment of delegates was made by the separate member states and not by the central Treasury.

A world organization adequate to maintain peace and to promote prosperity among the states of the world must have power to fulfill three functions: it must have authority to declare what shall be regarded as just and equitable relations of states to one another; it must have authority [Page 222] to render all necessary decisions regarding the application of these laws to particular cases; and it must have the ability to compel peaceable submission of all controversies between states to this World Court and to enforce its decisions.

For the first of these functions the League of Nations is equipped with an Assembly which is paralyzed by the requirement of absolute unanimity in all decisions except routine or committee matters. For the second function the League possesses the Permanent Court of International Justice, which has no authority to take jurisdiction in a controversy between member states except by the consent of both parties. For the third function the League has a Council which can merely make recommendations for the settlement of a dispute, but has no international police to enforce these recommendations or to prevent the violation of international law of the disturbance of the world’s peace.

These are the three basic weaknesses of the League of Nations, as they are of any other confederation or mere alliance of governments.

VII. THE HISTORICAL METHOD OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF CONFEDERACIES

As a matter of actual history and experience, what has been the method by which these weaknesses inherent in all confederacies, including the League of Nations, have been cured? The oldest confederacy in the world that still flourishes is the Swiss Confederacy, established by the union of the three Forest Cantons in 1291. Apart from mere growth in the number of states in the confederation, its historical evolution has been in the direction of federation. While the Diet originally consisted of two delegates from each member state, their decisions not being binding upon the members, but depending for their effect upon the assent of each separate member state (the League’s present structure); in 1798 a federal bicameral legislature, a federal judiciary and an executive directory of five were established, a general Swiss citizenship was introduced, and the sovereignty of the people, not of the cantonal governments, was proclaimed. In 1848 a full federal constitution was adopted, which, while preserving the cantonal sovereignty in all local affairs, gave the central organization full authority in all matters of interstate concern and of external relations. This constitution, extensively revised in 1874, still controls the organic structure of the Swiss Federation. The friends of the League of Nations may well study the course of evolution of the remarkable little country in which its seat is located.

The next confederacy that still flourishes was the “Firm League of Friendship” established among the American colonies during the Revolutionary War in 1781. In this instance the weakness of the confederate structure immediately became so glaring and so disastrous, that Hamilton remarked that the confederation was fit neither for war nor peace. In the Congress each colony had one vote, and while only nine affirmative votes [Page 223] out of thirteen were required for action, it was seldom possible to obtain the attendance of more than nine delegations, and the paralyzing effect was very similar to the rule of unanimity in the League of Nations. Oppressive tariffs and trade restrictions were levied against one another by the colonies. For instance, New York taxed all imports for neighboring colonies passing through her port, while she also levied “import” duties on products from Connecticut and New Jersey.

The finances of the Congress were dependent upon requisitions addressed to the state governments; and, out of requisitions of more than $8,000,000, the states responded with only about $1,250,000. As in the case of delinquent members of the League of Nations, nothing could be done about it. Georgia went to war with the Indians without consulting Congress, contrary to the Articles of Confederation, and nothing could be done about it. In the absence of a central armed force, the delegates of Massachusetts said that they had not come to the Constitutional Convention because they needed the protection of the Union: they could take care of their own protection. As in the League of Nations, there was no reliance upon “the enforcement by common action of international obligations”.

There were constant threats of withdrawal from the “Firm League of Friendship”, by Pennsylvania, by Virginia, by Massachusetts, by Delaware; as there are constantly similar threats of withdrawal among the countries of the League of Nations.

The process by which this weak and impotent confederation was developed into the present strong American Federation in 1787 may be studied, as it were on the spot and with the greatest advantage, by reading the Notes on the Constitutional Convention written by President Madison, who was present; and by reading the Federalist, which, by substituting the states of the world for the states of America, constitutes a powerful argument for world federation, as it was an effective argument for American federation.

The third confederacy whose evolution into a federation must be noted is Germany. The opening of the Napoleonic campaigns found Germany a welter of over three hundred separate states, big and little, many of whose territories were not contiguous, but were scattered all over the general region. In 1806 the Confederation of the Rhine was formed, which by 1811 had grown to thirty-six members. In 1815 this confederacy was reorganized on the basis that “the states of Germany shall be independent and shall be united by a federal tie” (Treaty of Paris). Except for an unequal representation in the Diet, the Confederation was little more than a league of independent states, like the League of Nations. In 1854 the German states were economically united in a Customs Union, assuring freedom of trade throughout their extent; and in 1871 the evolution of the federal structure was completed. The overwhelming weight of Prussia in the Federation, however, has made its working unsatisfactory, and Germany is at the present [Page 224] time undergoing a reorganization which will probably lead beyond the federal stage toward that of a unitary republic.

The evolution of federalism in Canada was somewhat different from that of the three instances considered in that it began, not in a confederate alliance of independent states, but in the common dependence of the Canadian provinces upon Great Britain. The Act of 1840 set up the first framework of the present structure of Canadian government, which was revised by the British North America Act of 1867 practically in the form in which it exists at present. The number of provinces has increased to ten, and in operation the federal structure, by establishing a strong and effective central authority while still maintaining the greatest possible autonomy of the provinces, has maintained peace and created prosperity across a whole continent.

In Australia, too, the removal of the friction between the half dozen provinces, independent of one another and related only through their common allegiance to the British Crown, has been achieved by the organization of a federation. While the oldest province, New South Wales, was settled in 1788, the remaining provinces were not settled to any great extent until between 1800 and 1851, in which latter year gold was discovered. Even after that event the provinces were so sparsely settled and had so few economic contacts, that it was not until the twentieth century that the need for an organic union became imperative, and the Australian Federation was established on January 1st, 1901.

The same solution of the problem of an effective central authority to maintain justice and peace among states, while restricting in the smallest possible degree their independence and autonomy, was adopted in many other parts of the earth within the past century; in Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela and the Argentine, in the Western Hemisphere; in a modified form in South Africa; and even in the Federated Malay States, covering part of the Malay Peninsula.

Two more federations must be especially mentioned in this enumeration, the one because of the great extent of territory embraced, covering about one-sixth of the whole land area of the world; and the other because of the vast population involved, being more than one-sixth of the population of the whole earth. The first of these is the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; and the other is the Federation of India, which is even now in process of formation. In the latter case it is worth noting that, the federal form is being selected for the union of a vast sub-continent by Great Britain, which has had the widest experience of all nations in comparative government, from that of the African savages to that of the Mother of Parliaments at Westminster.

VIII. WORLD FEDERATION

We have seen that the weaknesses of the League of Nations as a guardian of world peace and a promoter of world welfare are the weaknesses inherent in every confederacy of states, because of the very nature of [Page 225] its organization. These weaknesses of the confederate structure, we have seen, are (1) the absence of authority in the body of delegates to make laws which shall regulate the just and peaceful relations of the member states; (2) the absence of authority in its court to take original and compulsory jurisdiction of interstate controversies; and (3) the absence in the executive of adequate power to enforce the peaceful acceptance of these laws and the decisions made in their application.

In all of the historical cases considered in the previous section these three vital weaknesses of the confederate structure were removed, (1) by the establishment of a central legislative authority, properly representative of the member states and authorized to legislate finally in a strictly limited field of interstate matters; (2) by the grant of original and compulsory jurisdiction to the central court in all interstate controversies; and (3) by the establishment of an executive with adequate force at his immediate command to compel the peaceful acceptance of the authorized laws and decisions, and to protect any member state from attack by another or by an outside power, thus rendering the separate armament of the member states unnecessary and obsolete, and reducing it to the proportions of an internal police force;

The method of making the League Assembly satisfactorily representative of the member states might be that generally adopted in federations of adding a second chamber apportioned according to population, or that advocated by Switzerland at the founding of the League of counting the votes of the delegates once as units representing sovereign and equal states, and again by allotting to each vote a weight in accordance with the population represented, a double majority being necessary for action. As to the difficult question of defining the sphere in which the central legislature should have authority to act, this would have to be determined in a general convention of the member states and by a full comparative study of existing national federal constitutions and of the success or failure of their operation. It may be noted, however, that the vote of the upper house in a federation upon any pending measure is in itself a decision of a majority of the member states regarding the authority of the central body to act in that field.

In regard to the second weakness of confederacies it is held by many advocates of the League’s development that it is necessary, in addition to the Permanent Court of International Justice, which decides only justiciable disputes, to add to the League organization an Equity Tribunal, which should decide non-justiciable questions of policy. Existing national federations, however, have not found it necessary thus to complicate their judicial branch. The United States Supreme Court, for instance, is not only a Law Court, but also an Equity Tribunal, deciding the cases brought before it either on the basis of existing international law or, in non-justiciable questions of policy, on the basis of equity and good conscience. [Page 226] The prerequisite for binding decisions is an accepted body of law, and a compulsory World Court therefore presupposes an authoritative World Legislature.

As to the third weakness of confederacies there is a large number of peace workers who feel that the enforcement of the general laws and the decisions of the World Court should be left to the force of public opinion alone, and that any attempt to compel submission to them by force of arms applied against a refractory member state would be nothing less than war. This difficulty long occupied the minds of the framers of the American Federal Constitution. Madison felt that any armed sanction applied to an entire state would be more like a declaration of war than an exercise of police power. Hamilton said that no state would permit itself to be used as an instrument of coercion of another state; but he solved the problem by adding, that the federal laws should be made to operate upon the individual citizen in the same manner as the state laws operate. Then their enforcement would be clearly ordinary police action, not war. It is gratifying to note that the League of Nations has recently adopted this vital federal principle, both in the Jugoslavian assassination and in the Saar plebiscite.

Perhaps the chief benefit of a federal union is, that it permits the natural flow of commerce, travel and investment over the whole area of the states in the federation; Not only does this remove practically all the economic causes of war between such states, but it also lays the foundation for a great increase of prosperity, as may be clearly seen in the immense progress of Germany since 1870, and in the wealth of the United States of America.

The lowering of the barriers which have hindered this natural and beneficent intercourse among the states members of the League of Nations would, of course, have to be done gradually, in the same manner in which these walls were built up. A possible formula for this might be the fixing of a reversal date, all obstructive measures being repealed at a period subsequent to this reversal date equal to the period before that date in which they have been in effect.

A further great benefit resulting from a federal world union might be the establishment of a uniform coinage and currency over the whole area of the member states of the League of Nations. The hampering effect upon trade and welfare of the numerous unrelated and fluctuating currencies at present in use among the states members of the League is too evident for comment.

Again, uniformly fair terms of international trade competition and uniformly fair terms of access to the earth’s raw materials could be laid down and enforced by a world federation, and this, also, would eliminate many more causes of war that continue to exist under the League of Nations as at present constituted.

IN this brief statement it is impossible to pursue further the subject of the benefits resulting from world federation. As to the definition [Page 227] of the proper sphere of action of a world federal organization, with a reasonable spirit of good will the delegates in a world convention could doubtless come to an agreement on the minimum amount of authority necessary to be delegated to the World Federation for the maintenance of peace and the reservation of the maximum amount of national freedom and autonomy consistent with that purpose.

The ideal of world federation, it should be remarked in conclusion, is not a legal or constitutional matter alone, but for its realization depends upon a vital. increase of the spirit of justice, good will and amity among the peoples of the world. The existing political and economic barriers are paralleled by moral and ethical barriers which likewise are to be overcome. The advance of social order and the advance of human capacity are inseparably linked in all eras. There is a distinct spiritual advantage, however, in perceiving the direction of true social progress, since agreement upon the common goal provides a foundation upon which unity of effort can be based.

(Concluded)

•

Philosophy is useless when misapplied in support of things which common sense has begun to reject; she shares in the discredit which is attaching to them. The opportunity of rendering herself of service to humanity once lost, ages may elapse before it occurs again. Ignorance and low interests seize the moment, and fasten a burden on man which the struggles of a thousand years may not suffice to cast off. Of all the duties of an enlightened government, this of allying itself with Philosophy in the critical moment in which society is passing through so serious a metamorphosis of its opinions as is involved in the casting off of its ancient investiture of Faith, and its assumption of a new one, is the most important, for it stands connected with things that outlast all temporal concerns.—JOHN WILLIAM DRAPER, in “History of the Intellectual Development of Europe.”

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[Page 228]

Where humanity may find the source of spiritual renewal and inspiration has become the most vital aspect of the world crisis—the subject of this, the first in a series of articles by different authors outlining the Teachings of Bahá’u’lláh.

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A WORLD FAITH

Studies in the Teachings of Bahá’u’lláh

I. THE SOURCE OF RELIGION

By HORACE HOLLEY

•

WHETHER or not they realize the fact, the peoples and races of humanity are living at the beginning of a new cycle of evolution. They have become subject to new laws and principles both in the realm of personal experience and in the realm of social relations. The new cycle manifests itself with a negative and a positive force, a power of destruction exerted upon the pillars of the old order and a power of creation establishing channels for the flow of a regenerating spirit. Between these two potencies, as between the poles of a tremendous electrical energy, the institutions of society and the souls and minds of men are undergoing a transformation no human capacity can control. A year of man’s history today is equivalent to a thousand years in the past.

The first visible sign of the new era was the termination in the nineteenth century of the age-long movement of population across the physical earth. In the realization of the organic unity of their physical environment, men made their first contact with the mysterious forces destined to remold the world. Throughout all prior time, human beings had not lived in one physical environment but in many diverse and separate environments, each a social world complete in itself.

The individual’s moral and mental world had been limited to the area of his own land, his own people, his own social order and his own local faith. Outside this area he could not afford to recognize the validity of any human claim. His universe was an island which he was at all times compelled to defend against the onslaught of the surrounding sea of the perilous unknown. Thought and emotion, art and science, philosophy and religion, commerce and government —every value and every action confirmed the individual in his undivided loyalty to the local order in [Page 229] which he had been born. His social and his physical world could survive only because it was self-centered and self-contained.

Human personality for an uncountable period had thus been conditioned by the fundamental physical fact that territorial isolation supplied the basis for man’s existence and the arena for his mental and spiritual development. Humanity as an organic kingdom, a unity of collective relationships, did not and could not exist. What existed were tribes, races, peoples and nations, each a separate and distinct entity at perpetual struggle one with another.

The destruction of territorial isolation was therefore far more than an advance in the knowledge of geography—it was the destruction of the ultimate basis upon which human personality had slowly and painfully evolved. Actions and ideals useful and necessary throughout the era of isolation suddenly became harmful or impotent when the principle of separation no longer controlled human affairs.

THE second visible sign of the new cycle was the rise of science. The human mind, like an instrument played upon by a master, became inspired to deal with truth in a higher dimension and evoked new chords of harmony from a cosmos which had forever been man’s dreaded tyrant but now became man’s obedient slave. One step forward in this arena of universal knowledge and humanity found itself enthroned above the forces of nature, in possession of an inexhaustible reservoir of material power. With this power men confirmed the unity of their physical environment by weaving firm bonds of communication between all parts of earth. They forged an unbreakable mechanical framework of world unity which represented technological progress and vision but had no reference to the limitations of social sympathy and understanding and no correspondence to age-old social experience. Upon every race and nation poured influences emanating from the entire world. The spirit of inveterate localism in action, feeling and thought stood upon the threshold of a new era whose center had been transferred from the nation to the world. The nation’s spiritual integrity and its political sovereignty became an empty form whence the vital energy had fled.

THE third visible sign of the new age was the conscious effort of a few pioneer souls in every nation, race and religion to transmute their local values into universal truths. Universal histories were written; the ideal of peace became articulate; interpretations of comparative religion were promulgated; many aspects of internationalism were explored; a universal secondary language was developed; the world view arose in ethics and sociology. A consciousness of humanity stimulated leaders of thought. With such high ideals, and the reinforcement of science, it seemed readily possible to reorganize society upon a world foundation.

The mainsprings of collective action, however, remained local and [Page 230] exclusive. Each community employed the new powers of science and industry to develop its own resources and influence. Between the fact of social division and the theory of social union lay an unbridgable chasm—the irrational sentiments and established reactions of the mass soul. Within the fixed limitations of his social sympathy, the individual functioned as though the earth continued to be a series of unrelated fragments whose normal intercourse was strife, whose highest glory was war. It was therefore around a number of competitive local centers that men developed their new powers of science and technology, making them subservient to the tribal outlook upon life. The larger nations rapidly became areas of terrific social energy, with the result that the reasons and instruments making for strife multiplied more rapidly than the reasons and instruments making for peace. For all their accumulated power, none of the nations could control the commerce which had replaced agriculture as the basis of human exiscence.

IT is this very inability to solve the most vital social problems that forms the fourth sign and indication of the new cycle. Commerce, unlike agriculture, is in reality a world function and not the justification of local isolation. Agricultural wealth can be transferred by seizure of land through war. But war destroys the market upon which commerce depends. An agricultural society can exercise the fullness of its sovereignty upon its own members. A commercial society is subject to conditions beyond its control. A commercial society maintaining itself in a competitive world has more to fear from internal revolution than from invasion by a foreign foe.

The loss of genuine sovereignty by modern states has undermined the relation of the individual to his community. His interest has become divided; his loyalty can no longer be fulfilled in terms of material and spiritual security. A true society is one whose material, cultural and spiritual values are harmonious one with another, all derived from one fundamental loyalty to the group. His membership in a true and organic society is the source of the individual’s status as a human being. That membership is far more than a matter of political franchise—its cultural and ethical values give his life its highest meaning and its deepest satisfactions. He is part of an organism to which he contributes and from which in turn he derives nourishment for his entire personality.

But the organic society existing in the past has perished almost from the face of the earth. Deprived of its vital spirit, the community has become unable to maintain the necessary harmony between culture, industry and faith. Each basic interest has become autonymous, specialized, establishing its own values for survival with only slight reference to the quality of the community existence as a whole. Far more than is realized, modern individuals are spiritual exiles in a world which represents a problem and not a home.

THE illusion that any economic [Page 231] or political philosophy can by itself bring about readjustment from the old to the new order wears thinner day by day. Its inevitable collapse in the near future has portentous significance. Nothing in all the course of history compares to the existing crisis, which threatens what we term civilization because it means that the mass of mankind has lost contact with any religious influence capable of creating the world fellowship upon which all have come to depend. Every sectarian faith sanctions some expression of the competitive instinct which is the Samson overthrowing the pillars of man’s earthly temple. The need of spiritual renewal to revitalize human idealism and extend the borders of sympathy and cooperation to encircle the world has become the most vital need of mankind.

How does the spirit of religion come to humanity? What is the source of the life within the soul which alone releases energy for the creation of an organic society? Whence rises that mysterious influence, which like the Nile, periodically overflows and refertilizes the soil of the heart for new harvests of experience and attainment? Where are men to turn for a faith commensurate with the new and larger cosmos recognized by modern reason? How shall we relate ourselves to a mankind which now in its division and confusion threatens us with mutual extinction?

IN THE teachings of Bahá’u’lláh mankind has been given the essence of religion, the fulfilment and maturity of faith, the world view upon social evolution and the universal aspect of the nature of the individual man. Bahá’u’lláh reveals the laws and principles of the new cycle in their positive reality, as the course of events in the new era reveals their shadow, the interruption of the transforming light by a negative and disbelieving world. By the degree of our collective failure, by the penalties incurred by spiritual ignorance, we may measure, in part, the sacredness of the truths which have been ignored.

The teachings of Baha’u’llah may be viewed as the true interpretation of the religions revealed in the past, the key to man’s spiritual history, as though it were a final chapter added to the Holy Books men already possess. They are also to be viewed as the creative source of a world faith and a path opened to man’s future development.

The “Book of Certitude” establishes clear understanding of the source of religion and of its renewal from age to age.

“It is evident that the changes brought about in every Dispensation constitute the dark clouds that intervene between the eye of man’s understanding and the divine Luminary which shineth forth from the dayspring of the divine Essence. Consider how men for generations have been blindly imitating their fathers, and have been trained according to such ways and manners as have been laid down by the dictates of their Faith. Were these men, therefore, to discover suddenly that a Man, who hath been living in their midst, who, with respect to every human limitation, hath been their equal, had risen [Page 232] to abolish every established principle imposed by their Faith—principles by which for centuries they had been disciplined, and every opposer and denier of which they have come to regard as infidel, profligate and wicked,—they would of a certainty be veiled and hindered from acknowledging His truth. . . . Take heed, and be watchful; and remember that all things have their consummation in belief in Him, in attainment unto His day, and in the realization of His divine presence.”

The central fact of religion, Bahá’u’lláh makes clear, is the Prophet, or Manifestation, who in the person of Moses, Jesus or Muhammad, stands as the intermediary between God and man. “To every discerning and illumined heart it is evident that God, the unknowable Essence, the divine Being, is immensely exalted beyond every human attribute. . . . He is and hath ever been veiled in the ancient eternity of His Essence, and will remain in His Reality everlastingly hidden from the sight of men. . . . No tie of direct intercourse can possibly bind Him to His creatures. . . . The door of the knowledge of the Ancient of Days being thus closed in the face of all beings, the Source of infinite grace . . . hath caused those luminous Gems of Holiness to appear out of the realm of the spirit, in the noble form of the human temple, and be made manifest unto all men. . . . These sanctified Mirrors, these Day Springs of ancient glory are one and all the Exponents on earth of Him who is the central Orb of the universe, its Essence and ultimate Purpose. From Him proceed their knowledge and power; from Him is derived their sovereignty. . . .”

“These Prophets and chosen Ones of God are the recipients and revealers of all the unchangeable attributes and names of God. They are the mirrors that truly and faithfully reflect the light of God. . . . When the channel of the human soul is cleansed of all worldly and impeding attachments, it will unfailingly perceive the breath of the Beloved across immeasurable distances, and will, led by its perfume, attain and enter the City of Certitude. . . . That city is none other than the Word of God revealed in every age and dispensation.”

Expounding this supreme mystery to the people of the western world, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá declared: “Education is of three kinds, material, human, and spiritual. Material education is concerned with the progress and development of the body, through gaining its sustenance, its material comfort and ease. This education is common to animals and man.

“Human education signifies civilization and progress: that is to say, government, administration, charitable works, trades, arts and handicrafts, sciences, great inventions and discoveries of physical laws, which are the activities essential to man as distinguished from the animal.

“Divine education is that of the Kingdom of God: it consists in acquiring divine perfections, and this is true education; for in this estate man becomes the center of divine appearance, the manifestation of the words, ‘Let us make man in Our image and after Our likeness.’ This is the supreme goal of the world of humanity.

[Page 233] “Now we need an educator who will be at the same time a material, human and spiritual educator, and whose authority will be effective in all conditions. . .

“It is clear that human power is not able to fill such a great office, and that the reason alone could not undertake the responsibility of so great a mission. How can one solitary person without help and without support lay the foundations of such a noble construction? He must depend on the help of the spiritual and divine power to be able to undertake this mission. One Holy Soul gives life to the world of humanity, changes the aspect of the terrestrial globe, causes intelligence to progress, vivifies souls, lays the foundation of a new existence, establishes the basis of a marvelous creation, organizes the world, brings nations and religions under the shadow of one standard, delivers man from the world of imperfections and vices, and inspires him with the desire and need of natural and acquired perfections. Certainly nothing short of a divine power could accomplish so great a work.”

“From the seed of reality, religion has grown into a tree which has put forth leaves and branches, blossoms and fruit. After a time this tree has fallen into a condition of decay. The leaves and blossoms have withered and perished; the tree has become stricken and fruitless. It is not reasonable that man should hold to the old tree, claiming that its life forces are undiminished, its fruit unequalled, its existence eternal. The seed of reality must be sown again in human hearts in order that a new tree may grow therefrom and new divine fruits refresh the world.”

As the life of earth derives from the sun, so the spirit of man depends upon the vital illumination received from the Prophet in every age. “Know thou that there is in the world of existence,” ‘Abdu’l-Bahá has said, “a center for each great matter and bounties shower from that center. For instance, in the circle of the sun, the sun is the center of the light. Likewise there is a real center for pure love and now that Center is manifest in this world from which the lights of love reflect to all parts of the universe.”

The foundation of religion is the Fatherhood of God, and apart from true recognition of that Fatherhood no man can arrive at his own reality nor attain a lasting and creative relationship with his fellow men. The purpose of the calamities which afflict humanity today is to restore men’s yearning for God and quicken their search for the spiritual food that sustains the soul. The fire of agony alone will purify our vision, enabling us to re-experience the aim of human existence and build a new world order upon divine law. “O Son of the Supreme! To the eternal I call thee, yet thou dost seek that which perisheth. What hath made thee turn away from Our desire and seek thine own?”

[Page 234]

The Assistant Executive Secretary of The International Auxiliary Language Association explains the vital importance of a universal language in the establishment of the new world community.

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INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICATION

•

By HELEN S. EATON

TODAY some form of international language is of urgent necessity in order that the physical means of world-wide communication now available may be used to the fullest extent. The adoption by all countries of one such language would immeasurably help towards organizing the international community and operating it in orderly fashion instead of continuing the present confused state under which it now suffers.

The international mind, fortunately, is becoming more prevalent but it has no single way of expressing itself. It must still operate by the system of translation which, as the late Woodrow Wilson described it, is the “compound fracture of an idea”. The international community is becoming constantly more organized and yet it has no adequate means of expression. Is not this incongruous? One can now telephone round the world but this remarkable feat of scientific invention is of little use if what one says over the telephone can not be understood. How inefficient it is to cling to old methods of exchange of ideas through the confusing use of several national tongues instead of having recourse to the reasonable and logical method of agreeing upon one language as an international medium.

THIS, however, seems to be the problem: to get agreement on a specific world auxiliary language for the purpose.

Many writers contend that English should be the international language. They give all sorts of statistics which, according to their interpretation, show an overwhelming number of people in the world who know English either as a native or a second language. There are, of course, many ways of interpreting statistics. In the days of twenty-five or so years ago, a minimum vocabulary in English— and that of a special kind—was sufficient to have the speaker classed as “knowing English”. Waiters and porters in European hotels were said to know English. So they did—of a [Page 235] certain, limited variety which was all they needed to aid the helpless traveller in choosing food and getting a train. What many people do not seem to realize is the fact that the international community has undergone a great change during the years since the war and is now of an entirely different character from what it used to be. It no longer suffices to be able to “get along” from place to place in foreign countries.

NOWADAYS the international community has become so closely knit, due to the interdependence of its parts and the astonishing improvement in mechanics of communication, that discussion among nationals of all countries concerning many and various factors affecting our daily lives is necessary, if we are to attain any kind of peaceful settlement of the problems which concern us all. There is an ever-growing body of people meeting annually or more often to discuss ideas aiming, for the most part, towards improving the lot of mankind. For this kind of communication there is needed much more than a smattering of some foreign tongue. It has been found, too, that even when some of the participants in international gatherings have a slight knowledge of a language other than their own, it seldom, if ever, happens that they all know the same one.

As a matter of fact, French is even now more extensively used in international conferences than any other tongue. In spite of this fact, English-speaking people seem to feel that their wealth in articulate numbers and in material possessions gives them the right to impose their language on the rest of the world. But English is not suited to be such an instrument of international communication. In fact, as Dr. E. L. Thorndike writes, after his researches in relative ease of learning different languages: “No one natural language is fit to be such an instrument. To burden international intercourse with the irregularities, inconsistencies and other linguistic stupidities of English or Russian would be like compelling the world to do its travelling on horses and mules or to carry on its agriculture with hoe and sickle.”

English, by force of numbers as well as through the material wealth and globe-trotting habits of its native speakers, may become, in mutilated form and frequently misunderstood, the international auxiliary language if nothing is done about it. “The language problem is unquestionably of central and tremendous importance in international affairs and must be tackled seriously by deliberate aetion instead of just letting nature take its course”. This is the opinion of an American professor who has been for the last few years engaged on work in Geneva intimately associated with that of the League of Nations.

THE kind of international auxiliary language that is needed today is not only one that is precise and easy to learn but also one that will be accepted officially by governments throughout the world as the auxiliary language. What chance of this has any national tongue today? Can anyone conceive of one of the [Page 236] so-called Big Powers adopting as its official secondary language one native to another country? An international language, regularly constructed and based on the major European tongues, is from five to fifteen times easier to learn than any natural language and is precise to a degree which will never be attained by our national tongues.

The International Auxiliary Language Association, with national headquarters at 415 Lexington Ave, New York City, is working towards hastening the arrival of the day when there will be taught in the schools throughout the world, as the first foreign language, one and the same language which will be secondary to all national languages and in conflict with none, but which will be a means of direct communication between people of different mother tongues. It is carrying on research in the auxiliary language problem in three fields: educational, linguistic and sociological. In the educational field, it is supervising and testing courses which will show the effect on the mother-tongue and other foreign language study made by the initial study of an artificial language based on European tongues. Up to the present, the results give evidence of benefit from the study and show distinct educational value to be derived from such work. In the linguistic field, it is conducting research which will show the common elements in the various European languages and has as its aim the working-out on this basis of an ideal structure for a constructed language. In the sociological field, it has assembled information concerning international conferences of annual or more frequent occurrence and the language difficulties encountered in them.

IT seems as if no one, who has the interest of world order at heart, could fail to realize the importance of the inevitable language problem. It seems obvious that the adoption of a single, auxiliary language by the governments of the world would, at least, save much time, money and effort and, furthermore, would probably be of great help in providing the means of much fuller discussion and the consequent working out of plans for bettering the condition of people the world over.

[Page 237]

The modern educational system, it is asserted, does not prepare the child for life but tends to relate him to a simpler agricultural society which has passed away. Without a renewed spiritual vision, how can the vital function of education be adapted to a world calling for the utmost intelligence and good will of which humanity is capable?

•

SOCIAL TRENDS IN AMERICAN LIFE

5. EDUCATION

By BERTHA HYDE KIRKPATRICK

•

“THE great masses of men and women who have lived and died on the earth never went to school,” says Professor Counts in his chapter on education in the book we are considering. So thoroughly are we committed to the idea of mass education, so completely do we take it for granted, that we scarcely realize that the idea is quite a new one in the world, indeed hardly more than a century old. But this is by no means the same as saying that education is a new thing. That is as old as the human race. Education begins in the cradle and goes on until our habits and minds become so crystallized that they cannot be changed. We are prone to confuse education and schooling. In any group, education goes on of necessity. “In some fashion or other,” says Professor Counts, “each new generation must be inducted into the life of the group, mastering its skills, knowledges, and philosophies and becoming sensitive to its welfare. Otherwise the group perishes.”

So it was in America that, until about a century ago, when the great social changes that accompanied the industrial age forced us to develop some kind of an educational system, the boy and girl received their education in the home supplemented by influences of the school, the church and the neighborhood. In the home they acquired from their parents the “skills, knowledges and philosophies” needed to fit them to take their places in the agrarian society into which they were born. And for this life they were well equipped. It is Professor Counts’ opinion that these pioneer children with little or no formal schooling were fitted more adequately for the demands of their mature life than our children are today. This is because all the time the child was living a real life. Their education “was marked by a genuineness [Page 238] rarely found in the school. It was intimately related to life. Indeed it was an integral part of the process of living.”

But with the coming of the factory system all this was changed. Industry was taken out of the homes, and children, compelled to spend long hours in factories, were growing up without civic or moral training, in ignorance of all that pertained to a full and balanced life. The more far-seeing Americans saw a generation developing totally unfitted to carry on the duties of citizenship in a democratic country. Accordingly, the battle for free schools was fought and won, school attendance was made compulsory, child labor laws began to be enacted. Thus only a little over a century ago America, true to democratic ideals, committed herself to mass education. A superficial glance at our enormous and elaborate school system that has grown up in the past seventy-five years would allow us to believe that we have attained our goal and that America does offer equal educational opportunities to all. We spend billions of dollars each year for education, we have over a million teachers, school property and endowments are valued at over eleven billion dollars. In 1930 “approximately 30,000,000 pupils were enrolled in day schools”, and in the same year “one out of every seven persons of college age was in college and one out of every two persons of secondary school age was in secondary school. Never before in the history of the world has there been such a development at the upper levels of an educational system.”

But Professor Counts makes it clear that we have by no means accomplished our aim,—that there is not yet equal educational opportunities for all. There is class distinction. Money and privilege tend to enable those in the upper classes to obtain the kind of education that will keep them 1n the privileged class. Poverty keeps a great number from going beyond the elementary grades. There is racial distinction operating against peoples of certain color, nationality or religion. It is notorious that in the southern states the Negro race does not receive its proportionate share of educational funds. Locality also prevents equal opportunity. Certain states or sections are poorer than others and so able to offer only meagre educational opportunities. The present depression is limiting greatly the means of education so that many schools are closed for lack of funds.

EQUALLY serious is the charge that the schooling our young people receive is “remote from life”, that our children are not fitted either spiritually or materially for the world they must live in. “In earlier times children were inducted into the life of the group by discharging genuine rather than fictitious responsibilities. In industrial society as now organized, the surrender of huge areas of economy to industries entirely separated from the home has made extremely difficult the education of the younger generation in the actual duties of life and work. Thus education becomes bookish and unreal.”

Closely connected with the foregoing and most serious of all is Professor [Page 239] Counts’ charge that our schools are lagging behind the great and fundamental changes that are going on in our country and in the world. Even though, as many proclaim, we know not what to expect in the coming years of transition, yet a thoroughly liberal education would enable young people to be alert to grasp the signs and meanings of changes. Instead they are, for the most part, indoctrinated with the philosophy and practices of the old individualistic and competitive age. Curriculum and administrative method tend to bind the schools to the old order. Teachers have little freedom to question or examine the dying social and economic order. Professor Counts believes that the appeal and object of our education is almost wholly selfish. He makes the rather startling statement that “the American public school has been supremely devoted to the ideal of helping the individual, fortunate enough to reach the higher levels of the system, to get ahead of his fellows in the struggle for economic advantage.”

At present, Professor Counts further makes plain, our schools are failing even in this object. He says: “Under the regime of individualistic economy that spread over the country in the early nineteenth century, this devotion of the school to helping the individual to succeed in a material way was supported by the logic of the age. But today, . . . the situation is fundamentally altered. The American people find themselves in an economy that is becoming increasingly cooperative and collectivistic in nature. As a consequence the magnificent school enterprise, . . . is harnessed to social purposes that are out of harmony with the facts of the epoch. The more than 5,000,000 boys and girls now attending the high schools of the country, all looking forward to economic preferment, reveal the bankruptcy of the inherited educational philosophy. The school, along with industry and agriculture and medicine and the family and the remaining social institutions, faces a period of fundamental reconstruction. Through the instrumentalities of organized education American children are being inducted into a society that has passed away.”

MUST we believe then that the American ideal of mass education and equal educational opportunities for all is impracticable and beyond our ability to achieve? We are by no means to be led to this conclusion. This would be a repudiation of our democratic ideals and Professor Counts does not close his book without definite suggestions for a more adequate program. But he does wish us to understand that we are not at present accomplishing what we are prone to think we are in educational ways. Americans he tells us, make almost a fetish of education in their belief that the very size and number of our schools and colleges assures us of an educated community of citizens and that the schools are prepared to correct any and all ills of society. The aims of our schools are too much out of harmony with the facts of the emerging social order to warrant any such confidence.

[Page 240]

NEITHER would he have us underestimate the magnitude of the task which confronts us. Compared with fitting the child for the agrarian community the task is stupendous. It is a world-wide community into which the child of today must be ushered. Moreover with the growth of science and technology has come a great increase of knowledge and much of this must be passed on to the child.

It is evident that to meet this problem of the fundamental reconstruction of our schools we must summon the greatest wisdom of our times. Here in education as in other fields Professor Counts makes us understand how closely our institutions are bound up with our economy. But in the case of the schools the dilemma is even more serious because we need the schools to develop such citizens as will do their part in bringing in the new order. Obviously we cannot depend upon them. Before we can rebuild our schools we must rebuild our economy. Where then shall we turn for the educative forces sufficiently regenerative to produce men with the insight and capacity required to reorganize our economic system? Many believe that only a great spiritual force can do this. “The fundamentals of the whole economic condition are divine in nature and are associated with the world of the heart and spirit,” said ‘Abdu’l-Bahá.

From the beginning spiritual forces have been at work educating mankind, affecting his heart and spirit. Today these forces are working with renewed power and energy. They are educating mankind whether he will or not. They are destroying the old. But it is necessary that man consciously associate himself with them. When man seeks, finds and acknowledges their source, he will see the way and possess the knowledge and insight to build the new.

BOOKS RECEIVED

The United States and Neutrality. By Quincy Wright. University of Chicago Press.

Public Policy pamphlet No. 17, edited by Harry D. Gideonse. Prof. Wright’s answer to the question whether the United States can remain neutral in the event of another major war. “It will be a miracle if the United States preserves its neutrality.”

The Beginnings of War Resistance. By Jessie Wallace Hughan. War Resisters League, New York.

A study of the history of the pacifist groups who make a major activity the boycott of war by pledging individuals to refuse all military or other support. A pamphlet.

Rehousing Urban America. By Henry Wright. Columbia University Press.

Lewis Mumford, in his Foreword, says that “Mr. Wright’s remarkable gifts in planning and his wide experience in housing make this book an invaluable education for the architect and the community planner.” Part One is on Housing, the focal point in rehabilitating our cities; Part Two, at study of the recent evolution and development of housing techniques; Part Three, a forecast of planning development. 187 illustrations.

[Page 241]

THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE

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FOUNDATIONS OF WORLD UNITY

Public addresses delivered by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá during the year 1912 in Universities, Curches and Synagogues, and before members of Peace Societies, to promulgate principles of Universal Peace. 112 pages. Paper covers, $0.75.

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BAHÁ’U’LLÁH and the NEW ERA, by J. E. Esslemont

An exposition of the teachings and history of the religion established by Bahá’u’lláh for the unification of peoples in one faith and one order. This work has been translated into more than twenty languages within the past decade. 308 pages. Bound in leather, $1.00. Paper covers, $0.50.

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SOME ANSWERED QUESTIONS

Compiled by Laura Clifford Barney from the recorded explanations given her by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in 1907 to questions concerned with the significance of the Prophets, the renewal of civilization, the spiritual reality of man, and sociological subjects. 350 pages. Bound in cloth, $2.00.

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SECURITY FOR A FAILING WORLD, by Stanwood Cobb

The psychological approach to economic and political problems, emphasizing the vital need for a new spirit in humanity as well as a new order for societh. 202 pages. Bound in cloth. $2.00.

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THE PROMISE OF ALL AGES, by Christophil

The spiritual content of religion, with its evolving social implications, traced through the succession of Prophets to its culmination in the Dispensation of Bahá’u’lláh. 254 pages. Bound in cloth, $1.50.

BAHÁ’Í PUBLISHING COMMITTEE

135 East 50th Street

New York City