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A Monthly Magazine
for those who seek the world outlook
Joun Herman Ranpatt, Editor Horace Hotter, Managing Editor
CONTENTS Sun Yat-Sen Frontispiece The Ploughshares Editorial
The Practical Program of Religion, A. E. Haydon
The New Economic Organism,
J. H. Raudall
League for Industrial Democri-y, Norman Thomas
J. Tyssul Davis
Internationalism 1789-1815, H. A. Gibbons
How the League Works, Dexter Perkins
Brahmanism
Closing the Gap in the Covenant, Philip Nash
Ordca! of Liberalism, J. H. Randall, Jr.
Forcign Students, Charles D. Hurrey
World Unity Conferences
Round Table
Wortp Uniry Macaztnt is published by Wortp Unrry Pentusntnc Corroration, 4 Ease 12th Street, New York Citv: Mary Remsey Movivs, precedent; Horace Howrey, vice-president; Fror- encr Morton, treasurer; JOHN HERMAN Ranpaut, secretary, Published monthly, 35 cents a copy, $3.50 a year in the United States and in all other countries (postage included), Printed in U.S. A. Contents copyrighted 1929 by Wortp Unity Peatisutnc Corporation.
WORLD UNITY
Contributing Editors
Eanrst Lupwio GrorGce pr LuxKfcs Louis L. Mann
Sir James Marciant Victor Marovuenitte R. H. Marxnam Atrrarp W. Martin '. S. Marvin Kiratiey FF, Matuer Lucta Ames Mrap Frep Merririecp Karntn Micnaens Henroret A. Miteer Dian Gorat Muxeryjt Ips MCturr
Yone Nooucit
H. A. Overstreet Dextser PerKins
J. H. Ranpatt, Jr. M. D. Repticu Forrest Reip
Pau Rictarp Cuances Ricner Nicnoras Rorrica Ti. Ruvssen Natuanice Scumipt Wirtram R. Sucpuerp Mary Sircrist
Anna Hirer Sitver Isipor Since
Davin G. Srean Avaustus O. Tuomas Giipert THomas Isanetita Van Merea Reustum VAmongay Water Watsi Hans Wemnsro
M. P. Wittcocks
Frank Lioyp Wricat
�[Page 146]
SUN YAT-SEN
Portrait drawing by Orré Nobles in Eminent Asians by Josef Washington Hall (Upton Close). The D. Appleton Company.
‘Those of us who saw Sun Yat-Sen’s quixotic struggles, reported
his bombastic statements for a supercilious press, and felt, in our
little pride, embarrassed at his puerilities, now begin to realize
that one of those life dramas which bring into being the world’s
demigods was playing before our eyes. . . . The Sun Yat-Sen idea
will persist until all Asia has attained recognition of political
independence and social equality from the now dominant West
or until its effort to attain these has ended in the cataclysm ot
civilization.”’
�[Page 147]WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE
Von. 'V Dicesner, 1929 No. 3
EDITORIAL Ee ae)
THE PLOUGHSHARES
ERBERT Hoover, engineer, has given form and substance to the peace movement founded by Woodrow Wilson, philosopher-statesman. When the American people come to realize just what can be done in the way of
public works with the dollars and cents saved on naval and military armaments, the argument for peace will have assumed ts Most convincing and unanswerable statement.
It is nothing short of providential that the American people at this particular time should have as president the one man most sninently qualified to turn swords into ploughshares on a vast sale. If the Young plan transferred the problems of the post-war .ta from politics to economics, Mr. Hoover's vision of a gigantic
nzineering development project for the United States has capi- ttlized the advantages of peace for the average man in all coun- tres. Here is what everybody can both understand and appreciate: scentific industry given the job of organizing an entire nation according to the same standards of efficiency hitherto confined to the single factory or store. Roads, waterways and universal power—here at last is a project for the peacetime engineer greater than those temporary works carried out by military engineers under the imperative mandates of war. Problems like disarmament and the World Court can safely be left to specialists if the mass of people once become thoroughly imbued with the engineer's ‘,namic conception of what can be done to promote better living when assured peace policies make available the billions formerly consumed by war.
Man's creative intelligence, freed from the necessity of attack or defense, can solve every social problem that has burdened past
147
�[Page 148]148 WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE
ages. The only power ever able to checkmate the active mind is another mind equally active but impregnated with fear or hatc. On the sole condition that war is outlawed by the leading nations, we may one by one abolish the tragic conditions of poverty, ignorance and sickness throughout the world.
Mr. Hoover's development projects meanwhile suggest several significant implications. In the first place, an American president who places his chief emphasis on a comprehensive system of public works is taking the first step toward ridding government of the influence of politicians. In the second place. a government trained to plan and carry out works involving labor and materials on a large scale is a government capable ot meeting any industrial crisis that may conceivably arise.
The politician is only successful in a narrow range of activi- ties. His genius consists in personal influence, but that influence is only potent as long as the main issues remain doubtful and obscure. When the product of government is specific and concrete public service and not merely laws and statutes, the politician will find himself displaced by business men and engincers.
Present-day industrial society has been subject to crises quite aside from those caused by war and perils of war. The ultimate source of this uncertainty has been the division between a gov- ernment composed of lawyers and a society pursuing business ends. Mr. Hoover is more than likely to bridge this division during the next four or eight years by redefining the ultimate aims of governmental action. In the last analysis, the sanction of government is not merely legislation but social control.
A government, moreover, which carries out larger works
than private industry can perform, but makes use of executives
and engineers whose background is public service rather than
opportunity for personal wealth, can set that example of social
loyalty which the younger generation must have if individualism
is ever to be disciplined and restrained. The situation Mr. Hoover
has created seems to mark a true advance in the very processes of
civilization. ’
�[Page 149]THE PRACTICAL PROGRAM OF RELIGION
by A. Eustace Haypon Department of Comparative Religion, University of Chicago
ELIGION is the mother of dreams. Over the grey world, ruined by deluge and death, it has sought ever, and ound, the arching rainbow of hope. The vision of the good life lured man on to struggle through trackless barrens of privation and hardship, and consoled him even in the valley of the shadow of death. This was the function of the prophets; they kept the beacons of hope burning. There was a beautiful futility about these high-souled dreamers. They knew how to die for their dream; how to wed the ideal to the actual they did not know. The cruel brutality of facts beat them down. The old customs of routine folk-life flowed over them, and suc- ceeding generations made pilgrimage to their tombs. They are the best beloved of the sons of men because the human heart cherishes the hunger for the unattained ideal. Religions cling to it. Through thousands of years they have preached the ideal of the good life, and with remarkable unanimity selected the noblest values of human social happiness as the content of it, and always have failed to find the practical program to embody it in the world of fact. They distrusted the world; and trusted God so much that they could confidently hold aloft the torch of the ideal and wait.
The ideal still lives, but the modern religious philosopher is sobered by responsibility. The religious quest of the ages unfolds before his eyes, challenging him to take up the task, while at the same time he is robbed by modern knowledge of all the comfort- able securities and easy faith of yesterday. His weary shoulders tccl no more the support of an everlasting arm. There is for him
149
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no infallible guide to eternal truth, no assurance of a ‘‘far-off divine event, toward which the whole creation moves,'’ no ab- solute as refuge from the bewildering welter of relativity and change. The urge which drives him to action is the same as that which moved the ages before him—the desire for human satis- factions. But life grows more complex with each generation and the problem of organizing the social relations of men, to yield the joys of living, becomes more difficult. At the same time, there is no escape in pure idealism, nor by the time-honored trust in the transforming allurement of persuasive words. The task is practical. The good life for the many waits upon the good socicty, and the program of religion, to be effective, and not simply another dream, must be a way of organizing the flexible social structure which will produce the individuals capable of giving it intelligent direction and by their cooperative creation, make available the values of the good life. This is the responsibility settling upon the shoulders of modern religious men, and it is staggering. The test of the cosmic-human adventure lies here. It is easy to weave world-views with the niceties of dialectics. It is delightfully simple to build with wishes and hopes the divine city of the ideal. All religions have done these things for ages. The practical program for actualizing the ideal baffled them all.
The task is to impose human purpose upon the cosmic process,
to shape the course of the flowing stream of life with its millions
of conflicting drives, so that it will converge toward the practical
expression of creative idealism. The task is *o put plan and the
direction of intelligent purpose into the future history of man in
society; to release the creative powers of men in a friendly world
dedicated to the beauty and joy of living; to make of the social
and natural environment a satisfying support, stimulus and guide
of the human individual. But the philosopher of religion knows
too well the tenacity and obstinacy of existing custom and habit.
He is faced with the existing facts of religions, hoary with ages
of history in practice and in institutions, with ancient civiliza-
tions of compounded complexity, with vested interests in all areas
of social life in all lands determined to maintain the status quo,
�[Page 151]THE PRACTICAL PROGRAM OF RELIGION Is!
with emotional attitudes woven into the texture of life and but-
tressed by ignorance, with ancient dogmas that for multitudes
have become part of the foundation of the universe. It is reasonable
and true to fact to say that man in his social organizations is the
growing point of planetary life, and that, conscious of responsi-
hility for directing the social process toward the perfecting of
human living, he should use intelligence and scientific method
for the making of an ever nobler future. It appears in a different
light under the shadow of titanic skyscrapers at a crowded inter-
section in a great modern city. This is the symbol of the infinite
complexification wrought by the ages of cosmic evolution. Is it
too late now to give unity of purpose, of ideal, and program to
this maze? The giant buildings are not inert. From them reach
out arms of communication linking the world. China, India,
Africa are bound by invisible bonds to the destinies of dwellers
in the cities of the Americas. Behind the weaving streams of in-
dividuals moving at the beckon of automatic signals down the
imprisoning streets, is an endlessly diversified social network.
Beggar and plutocrat jostle each other; gunman and priest touch
clbows and pass; the ignorant and the intellectuals, the virtuous
and the wrecks of passion, dreaming youth and broken, disillu-
sioned old age mingle together here. The driving desires of life
are channelled in these human embodiments in a thousand
patterns of attitude and behavior. In the background are the social
groups and institutions by which they have been molded, and
behind them again the commingled heritage of many cultures.
A vision of the faces of the crowded street is enough to check the
smiles of easy optimism. So few laugh a glad acceptance to life;
so many, even youthful faces, are marked by old evils—sickness,
anxiety, sorrow, or defeat. Yet everywhere, enveloping them,
are the sounds and signs of man's mastery, the labor-lifting ma-
chines, the marvels of technology, clear evidence of comfore and
control beyond the imagination of the most highly placed of the
aristocrats of early centuries. For the modern city is differentiated
trom all the past by its rich attainment in wealth and power,
potential bases and promise of cultural creativeness and beauty
�[Page 152]1§2 WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE
of living. But power here outruns intelligence and possession exceeds capacity for enjoyment. Disparity and difference are more evident than understanding and unity. The conflict of wills, ma}- adjustments intensified by complexity, lack of any sane and harmonizing purpose threading the tangle of swiftly whirling events—these are the elements of the picture that give concern to the practical idealist. There is no c *ciousness of common will, no vision of a human goal challenging to loyalty.
A cosmic process has come to consciousness and to capacity for purposive self-control on the social level—this is the word ot the philosopher. Groping through the ages in the quest of the good life, man has made his religions to embody and support his hope, and now is equipped with knowledge, power and method to assume responsibility for making the religious ideal a reality —this is the word of the philosopher of religion. But all this, un- fortunately, has little meaning for the millions shuttling in the loom of the work-a-day world. Neither the idea nor the responsi- bility commands their behavior. Our generation will blunder as wastefully, driven by desire and unsatisfied longing, as the ages past unless the new religious synthesis of life can find a practical program for orienting habit and custom and institution toward the ideal.
The problem is intricate and difficult, but the solution is not
as hopeless as it appears. So long as the problem of religion re-
mained in the realm of dialectic, an effort to preserve the eternal
security of a long lost theological world-view by rationalizing,
the best intellectual leadership in religion was diverted from the
practical task. When theologies and traditional institutions are
seen to be transient, and peripheral to the main quest of religion
for the values of the higher life, energies of intellect and emotion
will be released from bondage, recruited anew and devoted to
the construction of a living unity of ideal and program. To be
challenging to modern minds, any such religious synthesis must
be practical and not merely a fairy castle of words. A practical
program aiming at concrete goals, tested and perfected in action,
would begin the modern religious orientation of mankind. Con-
�[Page 153]THE PRACTICAL PROGRAM OF RELIGION $3
ceived on a cosmic scale, the task of religion may appear over- whelming but in actual fact it is simply the solution of problems piecemeal.
The world of today knows nothing more familiar than man's
success in imposing his will upon the flow of events. No time is
wasted by the man of affairs in anxious speculation regarding any
supposed metaphysical controls and rigidities in the universe or
in human nature. He changes the face of the earth and alters the
habits of man. If reality, in its natural and social forms, may be
molded to plans imposed by groups irspired by self-interest, there
is every reason to hope for greater success when, in the interest of
the commonweal, the religious ideal descends from the clouds
and takes the form of a practical program for the removal of evils,
and a progressive advance toward a world organized to guarantee
the goods of life. In spite of the inertia of existing religions and
unsatisfying civilizations, mankind everywhere has been per-
sistently striving to gain the worthier values ot existence. When
ways are discovered by means of which the concrete satisfactions
of human living may be attained, the ancient patterns of thought
and behavior offer no ultimately effective obstacle. It may be
difficult to persuade a Moslem to accept Christianity as a surer
guarantee of future happiness than faith in Allah, but Moslem
and Christian alike can appreciate, and gladly welcome relicf
trom economic distress and security from war. The Persian peasant
may reject the Christian salvation, but eagerly adopt new ways
of making the social life happier through sanitary and engineering
science. When missionaries invaded the Greek orthodoxy of
Cyprus with churches and preaching, they met with violent
opposition. When they built schools instead of churches, and
offered education, training in practical arts, and scientific farming
they found a ready welcome. The urge to the good life is more
tundamental than any of its traditional, religious embodiments,
and religion, as a program for the amelioration of the ills of
society that life may be lifted to nobler forms, has a chance to
win however conservatively entrenched may be the existing
structure of religion.
�[Page 154]1§4 WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE
There is further encouragement in the fact that all the re- ligions in the world are adrift. Liberal leaders are awake to the necessity of finding a new religious world-view and a new social order. The past has been shaken everywhere. Willing or unwilling. the historic religions must meet the issues of the changed worl: or die. They can no longer lumber along in the ruts worn hy earlier and different ages. They have been rudely aroused to realize that in the sacred charts of the fathers there is no provision for the problems created by scientific knowledge and by a civi- lization industrialized. The saga of the machine moves to a new. rough rhythm. In India the intellectuals have been compelled to abandon their aloof individualism and quietism. The sufferings of the masses in the world of dusty fact call for healing that hymns of the eternal cannot give. China enlists her educated leaders in the Renaissance. Turkey substitutes social idealism for the anti- quated controls of Islam. In America, religious groups ‘‘interfere’ in business and politics. Modernism is a worldwide movement, and the problems have the same character in all lands. The quest of the long ages is becoming factual. A religious idealism, making earnest effort in its program with the issues of life, will find not only constructive criticism but willing coworkers in every race and religion of the modern world.
For many, the most substantial ground for hope lies in the
new instrument, the method of science, which has won so many
victories in the last two centuries. After fifty years of testing in
the historical materials of religion, the method has been de-
veloped to give safe leading without doing violence to the facts
The advance of method in the social sciences inspires confidence
that intelligence may replace drift and blundering in human
relationships. Ability to analyse problems, to understand atti-
tudes, to clarify the tangled interrelations of facts may make
possible a rearrangement of existing things and conditions, more
favorable to human hopes. The drive of human nature for satis-
factions, material and social, is as vigorous as ever. It is now, as
it has always been, the motive power behind religious ideals.
The ideal was often extravagant and practical technique was
�[Page 155]THE PRACTICAL PROGRAM OF RELIGION 1$5
wanting. Then it frequently happened that desire turned an ascetic face toward the world and came to rest in the comforting arms of a Cosmic Guarantor of all good. The thing needed and lacking was an intelligent method of selecting specific goals and ‘ormulating the program of realization. The surest hope of success tora modern program lies in the very fact that it may be practical and practicable.
A detailed survey of the intricate patterns of the religious technique of the past is impossible in this brief sketch. It belongs to a world that is lost and in all its forms is now infected with change. The religious adventure of mankind is entering upon a new path. Groups that have been sleeping for centuries in the comtortable security of holy routine are shaken into activity by che rough hand of necessity. When both world-view and program ire challenged, novelty is inevitable. There is such striking contrast between the traditional technique of religion and the methods of modern social idealism that some observers announce the passing of religion. Whatever it may be called, it is the same old quest for human values that all the centuries have known. In our age the ancient ways appear quaint, and archaic; in their own native past, they were charged with meaning and power. Ihe cult of any religion is composite, a gradual accumulation Jeposited by the flowing experience of centuries. It presents a colorful combination of magic, practical activity, methods of securing psychic peace, rituals charged with emotion, mystic meditation and prayer. From primitive man to high ecclesi- asticism, the details are infinitely varied. The important thing is that they were prescientific methods of achieving values.
Some practices were the result of primitive emotional re-
sponses in times of crisis. Established as group ritual, they evoked
emotion in their observance. They gave power. War and hunting
dances were such simple forms. Other examples are the sacred
dance of illumination, seasonal festivals, rain ceremonies, group
singing, processions, an endless array of patterns embodying
cmotion. A large class consisted of magical technique for over-
�[Page 156]156 WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE
coming dangers of the environment,—gestures, attitudes of th: body, rites of purification, amulets, exorcism, curses and spell: Like the curse and spell, prayer was an emotion-driven expressio: of a wish. When the gods became the great givers, prayer n. longer acted directly. It was mediated through them. The grow) of the gods and the supernatural realm made a great difference Worship, asceticism, many forms of sacrifice, spiritual exercise: and other means of attaining help and guidance from the unscen outweighed in importance the' methods of practical mastcry When religion snubbed the world of every day events to seck th: higher values in the beyond, a division of secular and sactc: began to open. The divine technique became more holy, requirin: specially consecrated priests. The secular technique was practica’ but emancipated from any necessity of loyalty to the religiou: ideal. Much of the social sorrow of mankind sprang from tha: dualism.
Bridging the gulf between the two realms of reality stoo: the sacred institutions, mediators of truth, and guarantors of t) technique for attainment of the perfect life in the future, Sangha synagogue, and church performed the same function, though the: were very different in the nature of their authority, in organiza. tion and in philosophic theory. Their task was to shepherd t!: masses along safe paths to salvation. In some religions there wa: only one way. In others the program was adjusted to tite capaciti: of the individual. For the intellectual, there was salvation } knowledge; for humbler folk salvation by works or by faith. Th ceremonies and practices of the technique of salvation were t): heart of religion for all the discouraged and world-weary civ: lizations, since the good life was beyond life. Once establishe. as the ideal goal, the realm eternal or the golden age, or the state of bliss, laid their lure upon all the generations. The veste: interests of priest and institution gave dignified support. In thi: technique there was no means of mastery of the world for th welfare of men.
The ceremonies of all religions include rituals to give con-
fidence and comfort in the crises of life,—birth, purification
�[Page 157]THE PRACTICAL PROGRAM OF RELIGION 1§7
cutiation, betrothal, marriage and death. This group illustrates che tenacity of folk-ways, for the rites in their original form
long to the beginnings of human society. They are symbols of
- ¢ cement of the social order. Care of the dead, education of
outh, respect for authority, protection of the family were in- volved in them. The religions of India and China still exert a powertul social control through them. Roman Catholicism ippreciates their worth. In some religions, they have been attenuated to empty forms.
Very significant for religion were the great persons,— prophet, teacher, or savior. They vitalized the cult. Art and poetry scre inspired by their deeds. They stood at the center of the tructure as symbols of the highest truth and noblest ideals. The attitudes of the people toward them were of inestimable im- portance for behavior. Buddha, Zarathustra, Confucius, Moses,
orist, Muhammad, Krishna were, and still are, identified with
‘oe tinest ideal in thought and practice of the religions centered
o then, Sacred books drew their sanctity from them. The passing
ooturies added new meaning and richer values. Interpretations
oanged with the changing world-views, and the function of the
rat person in the religious program has varied. Whatever the
‘erpretation, they were the truth-bringers, the saviors of the
mcople. Thought and emotion centered upon these glorified and
calized personalities until they became the soul and symbol
' their religions. The attitudes and symbolism associated with
‘cin are still very important in the living religions of the world.
- cit names have been identified with the ideal values of the suc-
‘sive generations. Today they ate being modernized once more.
‘‘crr influence lives after creeds and ceremonies crumble. A real-
tic religious program, claiming loyalty, will need to take
acount of their place in the heart of the folk.
From “The Quest of the Ages,” published by Harper and Brothers.
�[Page 158]A WORLD COMMUNITY
The Supreme Task of the Twentieth Century
by Joun Herman Ranpaty
The New Economic Organism
He fundamental fact that the historical viewpoint make:
clear is that in less than a century the manner in whic!
men eatn their livelihood on this planet has been revolu:
tionized. The manufacture of a pair of shoes, a hat or : fabric, even the running of a farm, are totally different from wha: they were in the days of Napoleon I.
A hundred years ago the chief business of every country i: the world was agriculture. At that time the nations might we! have considered themselves as autonomous and sovereign ent: ties, for every nation was practically independent, in the sens that it was able to raise its own food supplies and provide it: own housing and clothing materials. There was no system © exports and imports such as we now know. The basic necessitic: for the life of the people came from within the borders of eac: country. The interdependence of the little industries hard: extended beyond the confines of the village, and that of the larg: industries, hardly beyond a province. Foreign trade was ur: developed. For some time hardy adventurers had gone to th: Orient, bringing back tea, spices, silks, ivory ornaments and t): like, but these were in the nature of luxuries, with which t): people in Western countries could safely dispense. In the who: range of the actual necessities of life, each nation was real! independent of the others.
But within two or three generations all this has been alter: 158
�[Page 159]THE NEW ECONOMIC ORGANISM 1§9
iv the development of machinery. As factories multipled and ndusttialism spread from one Western country to another, agri- culture in these countries was of necessity crowded more and more into the background. In increasing numbers the people left the farms and took their places before the machines in the fac- rories. A hundred years ago it is estimated that go per cent of the rople in the countries of Europe were engaged in agriculture, and only 10 per cent in all other pursuits. Today in the countries that have become most completely industrialized those percent- ages have been, roughly speaking, reversed. As a result, all na- tions have ceased to be self-supporting. Net one is any longer
There are three basic demands of an industrial civilization:
i) tor the raw materials with which to run the factories—coal,
iron, copper, oil, rubber, etc.,—a very large proportion of which must be secured from other parts of the world; (2) for the outlets where the finished product of the factories can be sold, and since the domestic consumption of manufactured articles sooner or ater reaches the saturation point in the industrial state this necessitates the creation of new markets in all parts of the world;
- ) for a large proportion of the food necessary to the existence
ot its people, which its own diminishing agriculture is no longer
able to furnish. It is estimated that if the food supplies coming
tolay from outside to industrial nations like England, France,
Germany, and Italy, were to be shut off, the peoples of these
countries would statve to death in from three to four months.
\nd yet, a hundred years ago these same countries were self-
supporting and able to furnish their own food supplies. To be
ire the populations of these countries has greatly increased,
hut this does not alter the fact that agriculture has diminished
as industrialism has grown. The historian tells us that what
tded the Great War was not so much any decisive victory on the
»attlefield as the fact that the blockade and the submarine had
plaved such havoc with the steady stream of food supplies coming
‘rom across the seas to the countries of Europe that the people
ot those countries were starving to death and the War had to end.
�[Page 160]160 WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE
But there is still a fourth demand of industrialism. Sooner or later the developing industrial state produces a surplus of capital which is constantly seeking places for investment where it can secure larger returns than are possible in its own more highly developed country. And thus this capital gradually goes out into all parts of the world, wherever there is the opportunity to build railroads, construct docks, develop mines, grow rubber, dig oil wells, and the like. The foreign investments of the United States today amount to between 14 and 15 billions of dollars, exclusive of the Allicd indebtedness. If we include these debts, the total is close to 25 billions; and our foreign investments are incteasing at present at the rate of a billion a year. The samc is true, to a greater or less degree, of every industrial state.
The fascinating story of the rapid expansion of Europe during the ninetcenth century and of the expansion of the United States in the twentieth, with the consequent growth of colonial empires, is simply the story of how the developing Western in- dustrial states have been seeking to satisfy these basic demands of their new civilization. They have reached out into the coun- tries of the Orient, of Africa, of South America, and of the islands of the sea, after the raw materials, a large proportion of which must come from the tropical regions, for food commodities which today come from all parts of the globe, for new world-markets in all lands, and eventually, for places to invest their surplus capital where it will bring the largest returns.
The result of this rise and rapid spread of our industrial
civilization has been to force the nations to become specialists
Hence today we have the grez* agricultural countries like Russia.
Rumania, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand,
sending their steady streams of food supplies across land and sea
to the great industrial countries; and on the other hand the
leading industrial countries are sending their steady streams 0!
manufactured articles—clothes, shoes, tools, furniture, books.
etc., across the land and sea to the countries that still remain
wholly or chiefly agricultural. This constant interchange of the
food commodities and raw materials of the less highly develope:
�[Page 161]THE NEW ECONOMIC ORGANISM 161
countries, and the manufactured articles of all kinds of the in- justrialized nations, is the fundamental characteristic in the relation of nations today as compared with their relations a century ago.
From a position of practical independence as respects all the basic necessities in the life of a people, the nations have moved on, thanks to the rise and spread of our industrial civilization, to a relation of interdependence. We are today all mutually dependent one upon the other. The interests of nations are no longer separate and isolated, but all bound together inextricably hv a thousand and one new economic ties and relationships that had no existence whatever a century ago. No nation, not even the strongest, is in a position to break with the others without depriving itself of the sources of its indispensable supplies and of its necessary customers, and consequently, without bringing ruin upon itself. :
From the economic viewpoint the world has changed to a creater extent within the last four generations than in the twenty centurics that have elapsed since the beginning of the Christian cra. In the whole range of our economic life, as nations and reoples, we are today living in a world that has already become internationalized; it is only on the political side of the life of nations that we are still trying to live as if we were independent, wi!-supporting and sovereign entities; and the simple fact is that there is no such nation in the world today. The international hanker and financier, the intelligent big business man realize tis. They know that during the last century there has come into existence a vast, complicated, intricate economic world machinery that has made this world one in the whole range of its economic ite, and that is demanding new readjustments constantly if there to be a larger measure of justice and a truer cooperation in the tv of nations. But there are very few who know even the facts »! this tremendous change that has taken place, and a still smaller umber who see the significance of the facts for the world’s future.
The trouble with this muddled and chaotic world today is
that the statesmen, and rulers and leaders generally, with a few
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notable exceptions, are trying to solve problems, however hon: estly, that are in their very nature economic and internationa’ by means that are political and national; and it simply cannot k done. They ate seeking to force this new internationalize: economic world that has been brought into existence by th: industrial revolution into the old thought forms and formula: and practices of the independent and self-supporting politica! state, forms that have become obsolete and that have no mor existence in reality than the myths of ancient Greece.
Production of commodities in every field has long since tx- come internationalized. When in the late eighteenth century, few business men, making use of Crompton's invention, set ur in Lancashire the first mechanical spinning ‘‘mules,”’ the:: purpose was simply to sell cloth more cheaply than their com- petitors. It never crossed their minds that the woolen industr might run short of raw material. Sheep raising had been fo: centuries one of the main sources of wealth in Great Britain But a time came when the spinning mule was run at such a low cost that orders flowed in from all sides. Factories multiplic: and soon there were not enough English sheep to go round. The: the gold seekers of Australia, the gauchos of the Argentin: pampas, the Puritans of the Cape turned to sheep rearing. The: had at their disposal immense prairies belonging to nobod: where innumerable flocks might graze under the supervision 0: one man and a few dogs. The wool cost practically nothing k- yond the outlay for shearing, and soon the spinners would hav: no other. The English farmer, unable to hold his own agains: his remote competitors, became an insignificant factor in th: world production of wool.
With an ever increasing demand from Yorkshire, flock:
have multiplied on the tablelands of the Transvaal and of Nata!
in the prairies of Argentine and in the mountains of New Sout:
Wales and New Zealand. These great sheep countries do no:
spin and weave their own wool to any great extent, for the simp:
treason that coal and skilled labor are not so easily obtainabi
as in England. Thus has each country become specialized. Ir:
�[Page 163]THE NEW ECONOMIC ORGANISM 163
dustrial England produces relatively little wool; Australia, the Cape and the Argentine make little cloth. Division of labor has been imposed upon the nations by the freakishness of the cost of production. At the same time, it has made them absolutely de- pendent upon each other. Should distemper break out among the sheep on the pampas, at once the price of wool goes up on the Bradford market. An industrial crisis in Yorkshire will ruin the sheep raisers in New Zealand. Thus two countries situated at the antipodes one of the other are as closely united as the limbs of the same body.
The cotton industry, the silk industry, the shoe industry, the hat industry—in fact every article of human apparel—all have followed the same evolution. A heavy frost on the banks of the Mississippi, or the increase of activity on the part of the boll-weevil due to a wet season in Georgia or Texas, provokes a violent rise of the price of raw cotton on the Liverpool exchange, and the disturbance reverberates rapidly from Rouen, Lille, and Calais to the furthermost depths of Saxony. A change in the dic- tates of fashion, or the introduction of a new product like rayon, will bring on an industrial crisis among the silk-worm growers in Japan. Such is the solidarity that binds the different parts of the world together.
All this prodigious mechanical development presupposes a powerful metal industry. It seemed at first as if England would be able to supply the needs of other nations while retaining cnough for herself. Since then the insatiable appetite of blast turnaces has almc .t exhausted her iron ore, and the United States has discovered her vast resources of iron, copper and other minerals. The steel works on the Rhine have exhausted the Sieg valley. The Belgians who have no ote, have sought for.a supply 1 every direction, among the rocks of Algeria and under the ‘cows of the polar regions. Today the metallurgical trades of ‘urope are supplied by the ore of Spain, of Canada, of Swedish Lapland, of Algeria, as well as by that of the United States and ther countries.
At the outset the driving force required for all this machinery
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was coal, and coal has played as important a part as bread 1: modern life. The nation that is without the fuel necessary for :: factories is no more master of its destinies than if it were unah, to feed its population. On the other hand, the coal supplvin: nation secures for itself a very real preponderance over the other Coal lay at the basis of England's supremacy during the whol. of the last century. Producing more coal than she required fo: her own industries, she had established coaling stations at ever: important point of the globe, and every other navy thus becai, her tributary.
Today, however, with the invention of the Diesel engin oil is rapidly replacing coal in industry, in the mercantile mari. and the navy. England, which achieved naval, commercial, an industrial supremacy primarily through her coal, is without 0) she imports three-quarters of her supply from the United Stax and Mexico. In her turn, she thus becomes dependent upon oth: countries for what is today, and will be increasingly tomorrov an indispensable fuel. England, with all other civilized countric: is frantically seeking to lav her hands upon any available o wells that may be found in the most remote regions of the cart!
It is thus that the development of machinery has had t). singular result of gradually and forcibly internationalizing ¢) great industries. It has grouped together enormous agglomeratio: of factories and workshops mainly in the vicinity of coal basin: Local resources having been promptly exhausted, it has had : seck its raw material in distant countries across the seas. Litt. by little specialization has taken place, some people furnish: the raw material which thev do not transform; others transforr ing raw material which they do not produce. Thus they has. kecome complementary one to the other and solidarity has be established between them. However national pride may seck « disguise it, the nations have ceased to lead an independe: existence.
In three or four generations, the world has become so tram
formed that every nation has ceased to be self-supporting. Specia
ization has been forced upon the nations as a result of the develo;
�[Page 165]
THE NEW ECONOMIC ORGANISM 165
sont of machinery, and has brought enormous prosperity. But at the same time economic interdependence between the nations as become an unalterable law. They grow rich only by standing rocether; separated, they perish. Without cooperation the world ‘hat the machine has created could not exist a single day.
A series of intricate problems had to be solved in connection «ith the growth of international trade. How were these enormous sasses of commodities to be transported to great distances across oth land and sea? How were bargains to be clinched? How were eivments to be effected, and how was capital to be transferred?
- became necessary to devise a new kind of machinery in which
culwavs and steamships, telegraph and cable, leading markets, tock exchanges, etc., all cooperated toward the smooth and
“cctive running of this world machinery. This extremely com- ricated mechanism was gradually brought into more and more mtieet running order during the second half of the nineteenth otury. Ie constitutes today the circulating apparatus of the ternational economic organism; on it depends the life of every the internationalization of trade is an obvious fact. But intricate international mechanism by which purchases are a'c, and prices and payments are settled, is little understood cn bv those who make use of it. Because of the development ‘the Cotton Exchange, for example, a manuiacturer is able to rhase his raw material at a distance of thousands of miles and tout seeing what he buys, or to sell from an equal distance thout ever having met his purchaser. Similar exchanges exist
‘ wool, corn, sugar, metals, rubber, chemicals, and generally, all commodities involving considerable transactions. All of ose exchanges in the different countries are linked up together
. telegraph and cable so that the chalking up of a figure in a Sew York bank can make or mar fortunes in London or Paris, in ‘kholm or Brussels, in Rome or Tokyo. Orders are transmitted, ‘ccs fixed and accepted, goods delivered and payment made, through the accurate working of the international mechanism it has come to underlie and control the world's economic life.
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In the recent words of a French economist: ‘Whether for
clothes or food, for work or pleasure, we are all dependent upon every country under the sun today. We cannot make a gesture without displacing some object that has come from the mos femote region; and conversely, every important event on the surface of the globe finds its echo in our daily life. Modern mur is truly a citizen of the world. But be is completely unaware of this fad And herein lies the tragedy of our time and the cause of all the turmoil of the post-war age from which a means of escape has yet to be devised."’ In these last words, our author lays his finger on the secret of «much of the confusion in our thinking, and so much of the futility of our efforts, as we seek to solve the many complex prob- lems that now confront the world. In the whole range of his eco:
- nomic life, modern man has indeed become a citizen of the world
His prosperity, and equally his ruin, are inseparably bound up wit!: the fate of all other peoples. As a matter of grim reality, leaving all sentiment and idealism aside, no nation can longer live unto itself, any more than can the individual, in the world economic community into which our industrial civilization has brought us. And the tragedy does indeed lie in the fact that the vast majority of men, not in France alone, but in all countries, ar: totally ignorant of the facts of these new relations into which we have come, or else they fail utterly to see their significance for the world's life today.
All men know that the United States conducts an export an:
import trade of large and growing extent, but only a small pro-
portion of our citizens realize all that this means in our relations
to other nations. Few even visualize the extent to which the
products of other lands enter into all our activities, rural as we!!
as urban. All the facts are not obvious; many of them are obscure
A housekeeper buying domestic supplies from a department stor
or a mail-order house might be amazed to be told that she wa:
getting goods from abroad that her own country was unable tw
supply. Her kitchen equipment and personal apparel witness to it
We accept as a matter of course statements which place ou:
�[Page 167]THE NEW ECONOMIC ORGANISM 167
country at the head of the nations in all that makes for material nower. And such statements occupy the front page of our papers aod teed our 100 per cent Americans.
The United States is doubtless a more nearly self-sufficient sation than any other. The development of our standards of life . such that our social life makes more extensive and imperative mands than that of any other country, and this has led to an onomic development that is itself unparalleled. Without in inv sense disparaging our material progress and economic power, with whatever real benefits these have conferred, what we do
t realize is chat our complex needs go far beyond the power of anv one nation, even our own with all its rich resources, to satisfy. ihe thing we must learn is that no nation today is self-contained, vor even the United States, and that it is absolutely necessary ‘or the maintenance of our very life as a people that we should reach out into all parts of the globe for the goods we require. Our insufliciencies and needs are as notable as our resources.
In 1926, William C. Redfield, former Secretary of Commerce, published a little book entitled, ‘Dependent America.'’ In his position, the author was able to secure much interesting and authoritative data dealing with the economic relations of the \nited States to the rest of the world, data never before avail- able to the general public. If every business and professional man
‘the country could but read and ponder this little book, it would tend to dispell the widespread illusion of our self-sufficiency; t might also chasten the blatant type of 100 per cent Americanism ‘hat thrives on ignorance of the real facts.
On the cover-blurb of the volume the Publishers ask these
yuestions: “Did you know that more than one hundred substances
necessary for national defense must be imported from other
countries? Or that half a million animals are killed every day
throughout the world to supply us with leather? Or that we
vuport each year a million miles of sausage-casings and twenty-
ive million tooth-brushes? Or that we produce no tin and yet
we are the largest makers of tin-plate and consume more than
one-half the tin output of the world?"’
�[Page 168]168 WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE
This is a good introduction, but as we turn the pages of the book we discover that the steel production of the United States, “our gteatest industry,’’ requires at least forty different com- modities brought from fifty-seven different countries. Some o! these commodities, like coal, copper, lead, iron ore, we produce on a great scale, but we also import large quantities of each o! them from other lands; of others, such as manganese and chrome, we have only a limited quantity that would be exhausted in a very short time did we not depend on other countries; and ot some, we produce nothing at all. Our leading steel makers have no rivals in the volume or variety of their output and their prod- ucts go all over the globe. We make over half the world's stcc! American locomotives ate drawing trains in every continent. and in’ Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia our machinery and steel products are of widespread use. But this is only half the story. The modern locomotive is possible only through the sweat of the toilers in the Caucasus, or in the heat of India and Brazil. through the labors of miners in distant Rhodesia or in New Caledonia in the South Pacific, through the aid of Canadian workers in nickel mines, through the help of Peruvian Indians extracting vanadium ore. These have supplied for that loco- motive what America lacked; their far-off labors have united with our efforts at home. Manganese and chrome, nickel and vanadium, tools of steel alloyed with Chinese tungsten, all have met in the steel fabric of our locomotive—literally the product of all the continents.
The United States is the foremost leather making, using and
exporting nation in the world, and is still an important source
of hides and skins; our production, however, falls short ot
domestic manufacturing requirements. In the year 1924 our supply
of calf skins, cattle hides, goat skins, sheep skins, and horse
hides was over 101,000,000 pelts, of which 62 per cent were im-
ported, as the Tariff Commission says, ‘‘from all corners of the
world."’ According to the official records for July 1925, we drew
hides from twenty-seven countries, calf skins from twenty-two.
sheep and lamb skins from twenty-nine, goat and kid skins from
�[Page 169]. THE NEW ECONOMIC ORGANISM 169
‘hirtv-one, and *‘other hides and skins’’ from twenty-four. In all, “itv countries sent us some kinds of animal pelts in that one nonth. But if the collection of hides for our tanneries is a ‘‘study » eeography,”’ the gathering of tanning materials is little less so. he Official Report for 1922 states that nearly half of the ma- wrials used for tanning purposes in this country was imported ‘om all parts of the world. ‘The peasant families gathering alonia in Asia Minor and Greece, the Italians sending sumac ‘irough Palermo, the natives of Natal shipping wattle from Jurban, Indian nut harvesters in the hinterlands of Madras, and ‘hose collecting pods in Venezuela and bark in Madagascar, are i] tcllow workers with the tannery employes of Pennsylvania.” It is but a few years since the production of rubber boots and oes was the largest single element of our rubber industry. That as the case as recently as 1901; but in 1923, as against 16,440 is Of rubber used in boots and shoes, and their parts, more than oco tons were consumed in making tires, tubes, and their .cssories. In the year 1924 we imported 734,845,000 pounds of rude rubber, of which 407,849,000 pounds came from the Straits ttlements, 131,762,000 pounds from the Dutch East Indies, and 4.000 pounds from Ceylon. Brazil, once the chief source of pply, sent only 29,025,000 pounds. More recently, however, ‘nerican companies have made large investments in Sumatra, ‘.s Malay Peninsula and Liberia. ln his recent book, “The Old Savage in the New Civiliza- ‘ Raymond Fosdick writes: ‘From the time an American ven rises in the morning until he goes to bed at night he is sounded with the products of foreign countries. His linen vices from Ireland, his necktie from Japan, his suit of Austra- ian Wool is padded with jute from Indie The buttons on his thes come from South America, France or the Philippine ‘ands. The bristles of his hairbrush are from China, his tooth- cush is from Japan. He cannot even wash his hands without ‘iling on help from abroad. He sits down to a breakfast of ‘apetruit, coffee, sugar, and perhaps sausages—all of which are, “hole or in pare, the products of foreign countries. His news-
-.
�[Page 170]170 WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE
paper is made of Canadian wood pulp. He puts on a felt hat that comes from an Australian rabbitskin. The doormat at his fron: door comes from India. The nickel that he pays for his strect ca: fare was mined in Canada. The tires of his automobile come from the rubber plantations of the Dutch East Indies. His briar pip: comes from France. Even the locomotive that pulls his tra:: cannot be manufactured without imported materials—the man- ganese comes from the Caucasus, the chrome from New Caledonia, the vanadium from Peru."’
America may be justly proud that through the application of science and skill to production and transportation, she ha: brought the material wealth of the world into the home of tli avetage man to an extent never achieved before. We have gon: farther than any other people on che way toward the conquest 0: poverty. But we should remember that it is the wealth of tix whole world and not merely our own wealth that we have thu: put at the service of the average man. Were it not for these im- mense contributions made daily to the needs and demands of ou: complex social and individual life by all countries of the world what would become of our wealth or our power?
The machine, and the civilization it has created, has made o:
the world an economic unit where we ate all indispensable mem-
bers one of another. The world has in fact become one organism
And one of the chief problems of the twentieth century is so to
develop and perfect the world economic machinery that ha:
already come into existence as to secure a larger measure 0:
harmony, of justice, of honesty and fair dealing among all th
various members of the new world community, be they large o:
small, strong or weak.
�[Page 171]THE WORLD WE LIVE IN
Ve live less and less in geographical and more and more in spiritual communities. The involuntary
nents of existence tend to be limited to the regional area, the voluntary elements find increasing ovrtunity of self-expression through association of likeminded people selected out of the entire
voulation by identity of interests and ideals. In this department, World Unity Magezine will publish
+s month a brief description of some important modern movement, voluntary in character and
‘.manitarian in aitn, believing that knowledge of these activities is not only essential to the world ook, but also offers the true remedy for the sense of isolation and loneliness which has followed - breakdown of the traditional local neighborhood.
LEAGUE FOR INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY by
NorMAN THOMAS Execatire Director
all sorts of things. It has been asked for information on
company unions and how to make them work and charged
with the crime of being only a variant of the I. W. W. \ctually che L. I. D. is a membership society organized nationally is! locally to promote education for a new social order based on production for use and not for profit. The phrase is gentle but vadly. It says that the present order is ethically indefensible ind socially unsound.
The League is tremendously interested in the effective or- cantzation of labor, but obviously it is not a trade union. It is tremendously interested in effective political action but is not a political party. Its function is in the realm of ideas and informa- ion though at all times it tries to relate ideas to concrete tuations.
As things go, the League has attained a very respectable age. 't was founded in 1905 as the Intercollegiate Socialist Society to promote the study of Socialism in colleges where at that time socialism was little studied and commonly regarded as some
171
T: League for Industrial Democracy has been suspected of
�[Page 172]172 WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE
strange foreign disease. Among the founders of this movemen: were Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Thomas Wentworth Higginso: and Clarence Darrow. After the war the League changed its nani and somewhat broadened its scope. It still continues to stress it: work in the colleges and at its Twentieth Anniversary Dinne: was particularly proud of the greetings it received from the ables: educators in the country. :
Whether in or out of the colleges the L. I. D. finds little com- petition in its chosen educational field. Other organizations ma: deal with particular phases of this problem, as, for exampk Public Ownership, Cooperation or the right of labor to organiz The League tries to bring into the field of thought and discussio: all phases of the movement, conscious and unconscious, towar. a social order which acknowledges the supremacy of huma: need rather than private profit as its organizing principle. It : dealing with one of those great generalizations by which, a Dean Inge has said, men live. But it is trying to deal with tha: generalization in a scientific spirit attempting to test the fact: to substitute knowledge for assertion and reasoned convictic: for blind acceptance of slogans.
The L. I. D. works through Research Bureau, Speakers Corps Pamphlet Bureau, Editorial Service, City Chapters, Collex Chapters, Winter and Summer Conferences. It is very proud 0: the fact that one of the pamphlets published by its Researct Bureau, ‘The Challenge of Waste,’’ written by Stuart Chase. marked the beginning of the literary work of one of the mos brilliant American commentators on our present social order Besides *‘The Challenge of Waste'’ some current pamphlets ar ‘The Profit Motive’ by Harry F. Ward, ‘‘Public Ownership” b Harry W. Laidler and ‘The Challenge of War'’ by Norma: Thomas. The League has also sponsored three books discussin: at some length ‘‘New Tactics in Social Conflict,"’ ‘‘Prosperity? and ‘‘The Socialism of our Times."’
It is dull business to chronicle conferences and the work 0:
City Chapters and college groups, though the League is only toc
happy to write to individuals who seek membership or contact:
�[Page 173]LEAGUE FOR INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 173
with these groups. Norman Thomas sends out an Editorial
x
tvice that goes to over 200 labor, farm and college papers. But
nrhaps the most conspicuous work of the League has to do with
, s
s speaking activities. Its regular staff and special speakers under
ts auspices in 1928 spoke at over 100 college meetings to more than 44,000 students, not to mention another 50,000 men and
“2
ee
eCtin gs.
omen at labor forums, churches, synagogues and strike
As we write, the League through Paul Porter and John
Herling is actively participating in the organizing campaign of
« textile fields of the South. Its subsidiary, the Emergency Com-
~ittce for Strikers Relief, has proved a very beneficent and useful
~
‘ustrial Red Cross. The now independent Committee on Coal 4 Power which the League established and fostere:! is re-
ponsible for some of the most thorough and valuable studies in ‘1s whole field of superpower. Raushenbush and Laidler's book
« ‘Power Control” is a standard work on the subject.
It will be seen that the activities of the League are economic
| do not directly touch the field of peace. Yet the League estab-
shed the American Committee for Justice to China on the basis ‘an appeal from its Field Secretary, Paul Blanshard, who was » China at the time of the great Shanghai strike. And the League - very sincerely and directly concerned with that cooperation
‘ich is the only sure basis of peace in an economically inter-
“px odent world 6
The League is governed by its membership which elects the
‘ound of Directors. Catalogues of names have a way of being ‘ings that everybody skips but the League believes that its
vers are a very genuine recommendation. They are President, bert Morss Lovett, Vice Presidents, John Haynes Holmes,
ii limit: Karapetoff, Florence Kelley, James H. Maurer, Alex-
vt Meiklejohn; Treasurer, Stuart Chase. The Executive staff
omposed of Harry W. Laidler and Norman Thomas, Executive
rectors, Paul Porter, Field Secretary and Mary Fox, Executive
retary, The Headquarters of the League are at 112 East 19th
root, New York City.
�[Page 174]ONE RELIGION—MANY FAITHS
by J. Tyssut Davis Theiflic Church, London
Brahmanism—The Religion of Justice
a tas, alas that all men should possess divinity, be one with the Great Soul, and that, possessing it, th divine should so little avail them.
‘“Pervading all, yet transcending all; of all the within, of all the without; what none thinks with thc mind ve: what is in the thinking of the mind, what none sees with the eye, yet what gives secing to the eye, that know thou as Brah- man.'’—Upanishads.
“Whenever there is decay of righteousness and there is exaltation of unrighteousness, then I myself come forth, for the protection of the good, for the destruction of evil-doers, for the sake of firmly establishing righteousness, I am born from age to age."
‘However men approach Me, even so do I welcome them, for all the paths men take are mine. The same am I to all beings Even the devotees of other gods, who worship with true devotion in ignorance worship Me."—Bhagarad Gita.
As an Aryan people, we must be naturally interested in the Aryan religions, though destiny has made us nominal believers in the Semitic faiths. Celt and Saxon, Greek and Persian, Scandi- navian and Hindu have all sprung from a common ancestry. It 1s to the religion of our common forefathers that the most ancient Vedic hymns take us back, and to a period before the grcat emigrations from the north of India began. These emigration: swept across Persia and Syria and Asia Minor, over Greece and
174
�[Page 175]BRAIMANISM—THE RELIGION OF JUSTICE ° 175
Italy and Gaul, and in successive waves carried our Celtic and Saxon and Norman forefathers into the Isles of the West.
The life of the primitive Aryan people reflected in the most ancient Sanskrit hymns is that of a simple agricultural people, who lived in happy consciousness of the bounty of Nature, and expressed their gratitude in delightful songs to the benignant Powers they felt around them.
With the stage of deeper reflection came the conviction that all the forces of Nature, all the creative, preservative and de- structive powers, all the gods are only manifestations of the One, ‘the only being that exists.’ (Rég-Veda.)
‘He who is our Father that begot us, he who is the Creator, He who knows all places and all creatures,
He who gave names to the Gods, being one only,
To Him all other beings go, as suppliants."’
So, though certain Gods became favorites, Indra, Agni, Mitra, Varuna are just so many forms of the One God.
I¢ is significant that the name given to the oldest Aryan Scriptures is Veda, *‘Knowledge.'’ The Hindu religion is based on the assumption that the truths of religion may be known at first hand, that they form a demonstrable science, and ate not matters of faith or belief or tradition.
God, the soul, immortality, all the facts of spirit are matters to be experienced at first hand, not to be taken on trust. All knowledge is based on experience. Science is that which any man under given conditions can demonstrate, prove, re-discover for himself. Somebody once knew the facts. What once happened may happen again. ‘‘Christ knew. The Buddha knew. The Hindu Rishis knew. Why take things on trust, on faith?"’ asks a modern Hindu.
No wonder, then, that when our missionaries go to India,
offering not what they know, but only what they have been told,
they win but slight response from the disciples of Brahmanism.
Their own Vedas have taught them that in the Great Quest a
man must go beyond the books and attain Truth for himself.
�[Page 176]176 WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE
For over 4,000 years the Sages of India have followed a system of obtaining direct Truth. On the basis of the Divine Immanence, God is present in his fullness at every point. To bx able, therefore, to reach the inner core, the kernel, the real sub- stance of anything, is not merely to get at its divine essence, bu: to get at That which is the Divine Source and Origin and Life o: everything.
When Tennyson addressed the flower in the crannied wall. he said to it, ‘Little flower, but #f I could understand what you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and Mar is.’’ That is the fundamental teaching of Hinduism. Only Hindu- ism goes farther, says there is no #f about it, but such knowledge is possible, man has the capacity for it, and such knowledg: is the only thing worth possessing.
The key of the system is to get at the divine essence of th: thing nearest to man, his own nature. By deeper and deeper con- sciousness, sink into the depths or rise into the heights of you: own divinity. |
‘Truth is within ourselves, There is an inmost centre of us all Where Truth abides in fullness.’’—Browning.
There in the secret Holy of Holies, man meets the Eterna! face to face. Whereas in the West men have been'more prone to seek without, to gaze outward for Truth, the Easterner and tly mystic everywhere have penetrated within.
The training of the truth-seeker in India, therefore, is a rigor- ous discipline of the powers of the mind and the will in order t life the range of his consciousness up to that level upon whic! God thinks his thoughts and man may think them after him. 4 whole body of sciences and arts dealing with mental concentra: tion, meditation and contemplation have been evolved to helt the disciple.
The first qualification for the task is a complete ethica:
equipment. There must be perfect unselfishness, subjugation ¢:
the ordinary desires, greeds, ambitions. The things upon whic!
�[Page 177]BRAHMANISM-—THE RELIGION OF JUSTICE 177
ethics lay stress, gentleness, kindness, forgiveness, purity, love, are only preliminaries. Saintship is only a preparation. A realiza- tion of God, of one’s own divinity is the goal. Union with God, “| and my Father are one’’—that is the end. For the human spirit is in essence identical with God. That is why we love. The divine self in me seeks the divine self in you. That is why the beauty of nature attfacts. That is why the wine of fellowship is so intoxi- cating. To all things that stir the spirit within us, we may say: Tat twam asi—'*Thou art That.'’ Where, but in India, could the victim turn to his murderer and say, as the Yogi who broke a vow of silence kept for fifteen years, in order to say to the man who stabbed him: *‘Thou also art He—Thou also art God!
The tendency of this spiritualization of the nature of things is to make the physical body of no account. It is merely a portion of the physical world under the control of the dweller in the body. The True Self is also distinguished from the mind. Man is not the mind, but uses the mind as its instrument in the world of thought. The soul in the same way is the passional, affectional vesture of man in the world of desire and emotion. To transcend these worlds, and enter into the peace and serenity of man’s spiritual home is the religious aim of Brahmanism.
But to distinguish the divine reality from that which is not reality is to create a dualism. How is this dualjsm to be reconciled with the doctrine of the divine unity constantly reiterated? This is one of the most difficult tasks which Hindu philosophy has attempted, seeing that thought itself is impossible without the antithesis of subject and object. Still the Hindu will have it that there is only one Reality, and all else is Maya, illusion, appear- ance. Just as dreams are true while they last, so is the world- dream, the projection from the mind of God, an appearance last- ing only as long as God imagines it. The universe is God clothed in this veil of illusion.
Why God called it into being, why God made the universe
is, of course, the ultimate problem. The answer Brahmanism offers
is on the following lines. Why does the bird sing? Why does the
artist create a beautiful thing? So God made the world for the
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sake of Jila, for joy, for fun, out of a happy creative impulse, the pleasure of doing it. The universe came into being as an act of free joyous sacrifice, a love of giving, of spending himself. That is why life is normally such ecstasy, such wonder, such bliss. We were born out of the Divine joyousness.
But as to the why of everything, the Brahman prefers to answer with his finger upon his lips. We may know something of what God is in the world, of his wisdom, his power, his love, in fact, all that we do know is a knowledge of God, but of what is behind, the eternal unconditioned and unmanifest, of Para- brahman, better be silent.
In this way place is found for the transcendent deity of Hebraism, and the immanent deity of pantheistic Hellenism, and reconciliation of the unknowable of Herbert Spencer with the personal God of the Christian.
Hinduism lays no obstacle in the way of those who need comfortable gods. Men are at all stages of evolution. Give milk to babes. Give toys to children. Saints and saviours, ministering angels, nature-spirits, these you cannot revere and adore without revering and adoring the bliss and wisdom which they express and embody. There is no gap in the beneficent order between man and the archangel. This desire to meet all tastes, to satisfy all needs, this attempt to exclude nobody and to include all truth, to accept all that God accepts from snakes to seraphim, marks Hinduism as the most catholic and in this respect ‘the most important religion in the world’ (Fasrbairn).
But this toleration of every form of childlike faith and prac-
tice has led to gross abuse and superstition. The counteracting
advantage is that it is able to keep the most ignorant within the
restraining influence of religion. And there are ever waiting for
those ready, the cogent appeals of the most subtle Vedantist
philosophy. The gods arrive when the half-gods go. And one
must judge of a religion not by the tastes of the idol-makers,
which have furnished such a stumbling-block to the severe
monotheism of Islam and Judaism, but by its highest and best.
Brahmanism has been described as less a religion than a cycle of
�[Page 179]BRAHMANISM—THE RELIGION OF JUSTICE 179
ligions, a congeries of worships, unified by a comprehensive theory of the universe.
With this comprehensiveness goes perfect freedom of opinion. it is orthodoxy of conduct rather than of belief that Hinduism chiefly concerns itself with. You may think as you will in matters of theology, but for the sake of the stability of the social fabric vou must preserve the purity of the family life, you must not marry beneath your caste.
When the Aryans entered India, populated by an inferior aboriginal race, it was necessary that they should be protected ‘rom a lowering of the standard of Aryan integrity. The laws of Manu made provision for this contingency. Upon them the Hindu -aste-system is founded. Its vindication is the natural inequality of men, due to the fact that souls born into this world are at ‘ifferent grades of development. Young souls have to be guided ov their elder brethren. It is the oldest and strongest who must wat the heavier burdens. And it would be fatal if the lower should have power over the higher.
According to Hinduism, birth, like other natural phenomena, is under the operation of law. There is no chance. Heredity and -nvironment are only two of the determining factors. The most mportant is the third—Karma, the principle of cause and effect i. the moral world, which directs that a spirit shall be guided into a condition suitable to its needs of experience and to its ‘eserts. It is man himself by his conduct in a former existence who decided the kind of life he should have in this life. The law works out equitably, without favor. A man’s poor circumstances, vlicate body, slender capacities are the outcome of the use and misuse of the opportunities accorded in former lives. You get what you ask for. Only in the course of a multitude of lives you warn to ask wisely. God is kind. He offers endless chances.
In the doctrine of rebirth, Hinduism offers a solution to the
apparent injustices and inequalities implied in the wide dis-
parities of human destiny. The purgatories and heavens through
which the soul passes are essentialjphases of development, the
discarnate experiences between two incarnations. School is not
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left till its lessons are lear... One does not pass into higher worlds until all that this world can teach is learnt. One docs not pass from the kindergarten to the university by an act of faith
So let men not gird at life's anomalies, but resolve to do better, to deserve better. This doctrine gives courage and con- fidence to the most unfortunate, the most miserable. For it cheers them with the promise: ‘Where the highest and purest now stand, you shall climb."’ The road of the saint and the sage i: open to all. Absolute justice rules the affairs of mankind. There is no luck, but inexorable law. Play the man, you cannot fail, or miss your way. One day you shall arrive.
The sage and the saints, being what they are without grace or favor, are apprised at their true worth. ‘‘Those who can, do. those who can’t, teach’’—not so in India. It is only those who can, whose teaching is heeded. These are the men who have attained. The respect paid to them is sincere. High officers o! state and royal personages will go and pay reverence to a naked ascetic, who possesses nothing, is outwardly ungainly. He is the symbol @f the true greatness of India, of the wealth of India.
For he is the witness that there is something more precious than riches, or science, or social rank—-and that is spiritual power He is the actual proof that a knowledge of the mysteries of lite. a command over the forces of nature, a contempt of heaven, are still possible to men. To attain to his indifference to worldls things, to require nothing from men, to laugh at destiny, to lx a king over himself, master of his fate, to front the world and lx able to say ‘‘I want nothing, ror I have God—that is the dream of the Hindu devotee, and the ambition of the philosopher an¢ the wonder of those still held in the toils of the vanities of Mava.
SS,
�[Page 181]NATIONALISM AND INTERNATIONALISM
by Hersert Apams G1BBONS Hiflorian
Nationalism versus Internationalism from 1789 to 1815
QO: a superficial reading of history would give anyone
reason to believe that the American Revolution was
the precursor of nationalism in Europe, and that the
Declaration of Independence inspired the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Thomas Jefferson never made any such claim. In common with other founders of the American Republic, he got his inspiration from France. And the French Revolution was due to causes that had been at work since before the dis- covery of America. If you go back into English or French history, or into the history of any European country, to trace the growth of nationalism, you will realize that the traditions of a European race ate the heritage of centuries. They have not only to do with the blood, the common blood, of the people, and with the language and culture that had been regionally developed: they have also to do with uhe country itself, the land, the union of duchies and principalities, and, back of that, of petits pays. lLuropeans have made a definite locality their pays, and attach- ment to the soil has been born and handed down through centuries.
On May 5, 1789, Louis XVI opened at Versailles the first session of the States Generai that had been held since 1614. The reason for convoking it had been to reconcile the people to in- creased taxes. The king's advisors had been aware, of course, of the unrest in the country, and the fact alone of the convocation
ot the almost forgotten feudal assembly indicated their snowledge
181
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of the necessity of appeasing the people. In fact, in the call for the election of the States General, the government had aske/ the people to send in their grievances and their suggestions fo: reforms. The response to this request, in documents known a: the cabiers, was overwhelming. Such an indictment of a régime by the people who lived under it had never before been known ir history. Go to your public library, and ask for a collection o: these cabiers, of which there are several English translation: They make fascinating reading. If you supplement the study o: some of these with the perusal of Arthur Young's diary of his journey through France on the eve of the Revolution, you wil! have gone to original sources without much effort, and you wil! have gained an insight into the causes and conduct of the Frenc!: Revolution that no history book could give you.
It was suicidal folly for the King of France to face twelv:
hundred elected representatives of his people, half of whom
belonged to the Third Estate (those not nobles or clergy), an:
make no promises of reforms. Then to have Necker, the financ
minister, follow him with a three hour speech on finances, th:
upshot of which was that the States General should expres:
assent to increased taxation! The Third Estate, which repre-
sented nineteen-twentieths of France, convinced of the bad faith
or ignorance of Louis XVI and his ministers, after six weeks 0:
waiting declared itself to be a national assembly, and in the ol:
tennis court that still stands its members took an oath not to
disband until constitutional government had been won for
France. Two and a half years of royal errors followed. After th:
destruction of the Bastille, Louis went to Paris, and signed th.
decrees that abolished the last traces of feudalism, game laws.
tithes, and other things complained of in the cahiers, including
the old local administrative divisions which had so long hindere¢
national unity. A mob from Paris compelled the royal family to
return to the city, and wrung further reforms, such as the aboli-
tion of hereditary titles and the sale of Church property. Many
nobles fled from the country. Louis XVI tried to follow them,
but was captured and brought back to Paris.
�[Page 183]NATIONALISM VERSUS INTERNATIONALISM TO 1815 183
These dramatic events led to an effort on the part of the Kings of Austria and Prussia, the former of whom was the brother of Marie-Antoinette, to declare that they would like to form a coalition to rescue the king and maintain the existing social order. England was not ready to cooperate. But all the neighbors of France encouraged the nobles who had left the country to return and lead a counter-revolution. Austria at that time was a neighbor of France through her control of Belgium. Her bitter hostility, and her instigation of counter-revolutionary movements, led the Convention, now the supreme authority in I'rance, to declare war. Prussia joined Austria. The two powers promptly invaded France with the idea of capturing Paris and releasing the royal family. Many of the French nobility ac- companied them.
Thus began the gigantic struggle that was to last until 1815, and give birth to nationalism throughout Europe. The French retaliated by executing their royal prisoners, and sending to the guillotine most of the nobles who had not fled. Revolutionary tribunals were set up all over France, and excesses more frightful than those of the reign of terror in Paris were committed in Nantes and Lyons.
England, Spain, Holland, the smaller states of Germany, and
Italy, frightened lest the revolutionary movement would spread
to their countries, joined Austria and Prussia. It was Europe
against France. But France was ready for the test, and demon-
strated at Jemmapes first of all, and then on numerous fields of
battle during the years to follow, that she was a nation-—/a
putrie in a sense that had never been revealed before. In two years
730,000 volunteers had enrolled in the Republican armies under
the tricolor. Considerably more than half of these soldiers came
from provinces of France that were far from the menace of in-
vasion. These soldiers did not fight for a feudal lord or a king;
they did not fight for a religion; they did not fight for their
own little bit of soil; they fought for the defense of France as a
whole and for the spread of the principles of the Revolution to
other oppressed peoples.
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The first stage of the new nationalism ended with the dis- appearance in the reign of terror of the great figures of the Revolu- tion. After guillotining their King, they sent one another to the guillotine. When Robespierre’s head fell, in July 1794, the new France was without a commanding leader. But the enthusiasm he had inspired kept the movement going. Militant nationalism, triumphant over the invaders, annexed Belgium and Nice, and declared that the natural frontiers of France were the Alps and the Rhine. The armies were in good hands. But Paris floundered for a while. The new master gave the first glimpse of himself in 1795, when, at the age of twenty-five, as a young artillery officer, he was entrusted with the task of putting down an incipient insurrection.
During the First Directory the war with most of Europe continued. Only Prussia, Spain and Holland made peace with France. As general commanding the armies in Italy, Napolcon Bonaparte compelled Austria to sue for peace, and erected the Cisalpine Republic, the herald of United Italy. The new star sailed for Egypt in 1798. Upon his return, it was easy for him to become the commanding figure as First Consul, and then crown himself Emperor of the French in 1804.
It was only five years from the beginning of the French Revolution in the revolt of the Third Estate from the Versailles Assembly and the oath they took on the tennis court to the death of Robespierre; three years from the death of Robespierre until General Bonaparte signed the treaty of Campo Formio with Austria; and seven years from this first successful campaign until Bonaparte became emperor of the French as Napoleon I. Let us pause a moment to consider the significance of the development of nationalism in those fifteen years.
The grievances put into the cabsers which the delegates of
the three estates took to Versailles had grown up through
centuries. They summed up the reasons why France wanted a
change in régime and demanded representative government.
The grievances were those of the centuries. The tangible ex-
pression of them was possible only when a large body of people
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in an autocratic state became intelligent and well-informed. The Revolution in its incipiency was marked by no violence and no bloodshed. Public opinion demanded constitutional guaran- tecs for the liberty and security of the individual and for the equality, fiscal and judicial, of all Frenchmen. There was no sudden rebellion or uprising in Paris or elsewhere. The men who went to Versailles were willing to negotiate with Louis XVI tor a constitution. They asked of their sovereign only tvhat the English Constitution had given the people of Great Britain a hundred years before. At the beginning there was no attempt to assassinate Louis XVI or even to put him in prison. The voice of nationalism spoke to him. He did not understand it. He became trightened. He ran away. Foreigners invaded France to rescue him. The nobles came back to their country with the foreigners. And there was a counter-revolution in the Vendée. It was then that Louis lost his life, and the guillotine began to work.
The conscious expression of national feeling, translated into the spontaneous action of Frenchmen hurrying to join Dumouriez and Hoche, was possible in 1792 where it would not have been in 1789. The people of France, during those three years, had gained precious rights, which the foreigners, egged on by the Rovalists, were going to nip in the bud. Men were not anxious to join armies of their own free will and get themselves killed tor the beautiful eyes of a king (pour les yeux beaux d'un roi) in a quarrel that they had had no part in making. In 1792, they said to themselves, ‘*We have liberties now, which we shall defend; we have privileges now, that they want to take away from us; we have opportunities now, that the restoration of the old régime will cause to disappear.'’ Mixed up with the idea of la patrie was the idea of Je patrimoine. Patria et patrimonium. The two things xo together, or nationalism is the unstable dream of fools. Even the prodigal son, going out from the father's house, had the sense to ask for that Portion of the goods that belonged to him.
There is no use being born into a nation by right of family
or being born into it by right of soil, if you are not born into some-
thing worthwhile and that is going to do you some good. Only
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when you have the idea that your citizenship is a benefit to you personally and to those you love, have you a genuine and lasting conception of nationalism. The soldier defends his soil, his home, his loved ones, and, above all, the privileges that are his from belonging to /a patrie. Why did the Roman proudly boast, Citi: romanus sum? Kaiser Wilhelm II did not tell his German subjects that they could have pride in saying, Ich bin ein deutscher Burgher, until he had dilated upon the privileges of that status.
The Revolution of 1789 was an example set to the rest ot continental Europe by nearly one-fourth of her population. The French demanded representative government, not accidentally or carried on the wave of some enthusiasm or impulsive mob psychology, but because there had gradually grown up the knowledge as to what a state in the management of whose affairs they had a voice would mean to them. And then there was the feeling, so eloquently expressed when the Third Estate changed itself into the National Assembly, that they had the power to insist upon their rights.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man was a document, however, not limited to rights for Frenchmen. Let us recall the formula of Robespierre: ‘‘Think only of the good of the country and the interests of humanity.'’ And the interets of humanity’ He taught the Jacobins that the principles of the Revolution were of world-wide application. That Revolutionary ideas were not for France alone is the significance of the Jacobin movement, and it is the key to the history of the period from 1789 to 1815. In drawing up the Declaration of the Rights of Man, its framers were thinking not of themselves and their homes alone, but ot all Europe. They had instinctively the feeling that they could not stand against their lords, against their monarch, against the forces of autocracy which controlled the governmental machinery of other countries as well as their own, unless, after asserting the ‘‘rights’’ at home, they were able to cross national frontiers, carrying to these other countries the principles of the Rights ot Man which they believed were necessary to their own political development.
�[Page 187]NATIONALISM VERSUS INTERNATIONALISM TO 1815 187
Here is the difference between the French Revolution and the American Revolution. Here is the difference between the French Revolution and the English Revolution. The Declaration of the Rights of Man might be called a pan-European conception, no, more than that, a mondial conception. The French Revolu- tion was the first revolution in the world's history that was intended to be world-wide. When they held the torch, the Jacobins thought not of Frenchmen only, but of a universal principle. Their nationalism was at its foundation international- ism. It ‘vas really a move toward human brotherhood. It was one of the early manifestations of the world unity of which we are thinking and talking today.
Every revolution that France has experienced since 1789, has had an international repercussion. This was especially true of the Revolution of 1789, when it was as Europeans rather than Frenchmen that the idealists of 1789 proclaimed their great truths. They yearned for the acceptance by all Europeans of the principles of the Rights of Man. It was only a step from the pious wish to the determination, in the first flush of victories on the tield of battle. Their gospel was a gospel for all Europe, and, by the Eternal, all Europe had to accept it!
At Philadelphia in 1776 we spoke for ourselves, in a struggle
with a government of our own race and traditions across the
sca in London. Ours was a family revolution. The limited scope
of out vision is proved by the fact that when we proclaimed,
‘All men are born free and equal,"’ we did not include the negroes
in our midst. Since then we have not included Chinese and
Japanese; and we have been disposed to qualify the statement in
regard to Jews, Italians, and all other non-Nordics. The leaders
of the French Revolution, inspired by Rousseau, thought in
terms of men and not in terms of Frenchmen. They ardently be-
lieved that a new epoch was dawning for the whole world, and
that they were contending for civilization against darkness,
lighting the battles of others as well as of themselves, when they
turned the tables on the invaders of France, and carried their flag
and the Revolution across the Meuse, the Rhine, and the Alps.
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The French ate like that. They have been like that since the days of the crusades. Their battle line is always the frontier of civilization.
Victories in the expansion of France from Lodi to Austerlitz won the people so wholly to Napoleon that there was no opposi- tion to his taking the government into his own hands. First of all, everybody was thankful for order after the reign of terror, and for the reéstablishment of commerce and industry on a sound money basis. Then Napoleon's armies lived on the land wherever they went and cost France nothing. The transition in ten years from a nation fighting for its life against half,a dozen hostile States to the greatest power in Europe, imposing treaties upon all other countries, nourished fully the rapid growth of nationalism.
But there was more than that! Napoleon utilized the Jacobin spirit and ideal from the day he led his first army across the Alps into Italy. He made his armies feel that they were freeing op- pressed peoples and bringing to them the blessings of the Revolu- tion. What he told his own soldiers, he told the peoples of the countries he invaded. France was not the enemy, but the big sister who had found her way into nationhood. Hers was not the spirit of conquest but of emancipation. Every proclamation of Napoleon, as well as every speech to his armies, was a declara- tion of the high mission of France. The French were friends; the enemy was a ruler who had not given his people liberty, equality, and fraternity. It was Jacobinism pure and simple.
We are not concerned here with the motives of Napoleon, and
his inconsistencies. He put himself on the throne of France, and
gave to members of his family the thrones of some of the countrics
of Europe that he had conquered. His actions often seemed to
belie his words. But whatever his motives, the wars waged by
Napoleon in all parts of Europe did carry on the program of the
French Revolution. Peoples who had no national consciousness
began to acquire it. Slumbering traditions, which would tend
to give birth to national aspirations of submerged peoples, were
awakened. Large states, through the humiliation of invasion
�[Page 189]NATIONALISM VERSUS INTERNATIONALISM TO 1815 189
and conquest, were incited to the same growth and display of nationalism that had recently come to France through invasions. last, but not least, Napoleon's interference with the existing political divisions of the Holy Roman Empire and Italy, paved the way for the later development of German and Italian national- ism. It is not too much to say that the Napoleonic upheaval marked the beginning of national movements in Europe which transformed that continent into a series of countries and peoples inspired with nationalism.
But in stirring up nationalism to destroy the rulers who opposed him Napoleon had an international conception. In 1804, with the crown of France upon his head, he had predicted that there would be no peace in Europe until it was under a single ruler. His idea of uniting European peoples—of making a United states of Europe—was a system in which there was to be an emperor who would have, as he put it, “kings for officers.” This idea he tried to put into effect. But the nationalism he evoked ‘id not become internationalism: it was nationalism of the kind that destroyed him and that has prevented France from ever again attaining the place in Europe she occupied under the lourbons and himself.
During the recent World War the Entente Powers preached t!e doctrine of self-determination, and made themselves its Giampion, with the sole thought of weakening their enemies. iiev did not realize the boomerang effect upon themselves. It was that way with Napoleon during his attempted conquest of | urope. He capitalized nationalism, bringing to bear every argu- trent that history and tradition, economic interests and idealistic principles of government, could give him, in his effort to destroy tue despotic rulers who were his enemies, ‘enemies of civiliza- tion’ they were styled in France. But the enthusiasm he called torth, turned against him in the countries his armies invaded; ind the spectre of despotism he evoked became, in the eves of the people to whom he posed as liberator, the Emperor Napolcon.
The outstanding illustration of a national spirit created by
Napoleon which destroyed him is the Tugendbund in Prussia.
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Napoleon thought he had disarmed Prussia in 1806. He had. But the youth of the country, organized by men imbued with the spirit of the French Revolution, prepared secretly for years to free their country from foreign domination. Nationalism became their religion, and was the incentive for every sacrifice. In 1813, when the tired armies of Napoleon returned from Russia, thev found themselves passing through hostile territory. Napoleon could not believe that the Prussians, whom he had crushed at Jena only seven years before, could put up much of a fight. Art Leipzig, in October, 1813, the secretly trained members of the Tugendbund furnished the principal contingent in the armies of the last coalition against Napoleon.
Leipzig was Napoleon's first overwhelming defeat. It was called significantly ‘‘the battle of the nations,’’ because the opponents of France were not rulers whose soldiers were fighting at their behest, but citizen armies, like those of Dumouriez and Hoche twenty years earlier. A new spirit had come over Europe. The Russians at Moscow had burned their city rather than sec it fall in the hands of a foreign invader; from the first clash at Gerona, the Spanish people had fought Napoleon; and everywhere a flaming spirit of opposition to the foreigner, which was the first and most marked sign of nationalism, was in evidence. Was not this proof that the French Revolution had started a new era in Europe?
�[Page 191]THE QUEST OF WORLD PEACE
by
Dexter Perkins Department of History and Gevernment, University of Rochester
HOW THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS WORKS
N AN earlier article, discussing the rdle of the League of Nations and the quest for world peace, I dwelt particularly upon the utility of the League as an agency of contact for the statesmen of most of the principal countries of the world.
Kut the League is much more than this; it is an important piece ot machinery for the solution of vexing international problems. it has played a great rdle in the practical settlement of interna- sional disputes; in the interpretation and execution of the so- called minority treaties; in the institution of that new method ot treatment for the simpler peoples which is known as the man- ‘ate system; in the development of other instrumentalities for the preservation of world peace. In this and succeeding articles | intend to discuss its work from this point of view.
In the actual composition of serious disputes between states the League has played an important, though not invariably suc- cessful, rdéle. Its critics may legitimately call attention to certain ‘ecisions which depart from ideal justice; they may indeed direct theit criticisms against other cases in which no solution at all has been arrived at; but the friends of this great international institution are doubtless in a position to retort that human in- stitutions have a way of functioning with somewhat less than 100 per cent efficiency, and that it would be as unreasonable to expect complete success from the League as it would from any other agency for the settlement of controversies betwecn man and man, group and group, or nation and nation.
191
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But let us look more closely at the record itself. There are. it is true, two cases in which the League Council, after long discussion, has not been able to find a solution of the question: brought before it. One of these is the question of Vilna, whic! involves the conflicting territorial claims of Poland and Lith- vania. Always an obstacle to the relations of the two nation: since the seizure of the city by the Polish freebooter Zeligowsk: in 1921, this dispute remains unsettled up to the present dav In the same way the problem of the Hungarian optants ha: baffled solution. The inhabitants of the Rumanian province o: Transylvania who have elected to retain their former Hungarian nationality have steadily resisted the application of the Rumania: agrarian laws limiting the size of landed estates, and have her sustained in their point of view by the Hungarian government The Council of the League, though frequently occupied with this controversy, has as yet found no way of reconciling the riva! interests involved.
Yet even in these cases the activity of the League has no: been entirely fruitless. If no solution has been arrived at, ther has at least been an opportunity for the release of the irritatior felt by both of the contestants, and this safety-valve type 0: activity ought to be recognized as having a certain value.
But in the main the League has been much more success{u.
than in the two cases just alluded to. Perhaps its most striking
success was in the prevention of a possible war between Greec
and Bulgaria in 1925. In this case, a border clash having occurte:
in Macedonia, M. Briand, the President of the Council of tl:
League, called an immediate meeting of the Council, and th:
ineeting demanded of the two disputants that they immediate
desist from military action, pending an investigation. The Greek
and Bulgarian governments acquiesced in this demand. A mil:
tary commission was despatched by the League to Macedonia ti
investigate the situation. The upshot of the matter was that th
Greek government was found to be responsible for the clas!
which had occurred, and was required to pay an indemnity tc
Bulgaria. Swedish officers were attached to the Greek and Bul.
�[Page 193]HOW THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS WORKS 193
garian forces on the border to prevent further breaches of the peace, and a dangerous and explosive situation thus lost most of its perils. It is very doubtful indeed whether this crisis could have been dealt with so effectively if the machinery of the League had not been available.
There are, of course, numerous other instances in which the League has composed national differences, and relieved the ten- sion in moments of strain. One of the most interesting is the case of the Silesian plebiscite. The treaty of Versailles called for a plebiscite in the important province known as Upper Silesia, to determine whether in the ruture this territory should belong to Germany or to Poland. The plebiscite was held, but the interpre- tation of the results was not at all easy. The British and French governments, moved by differing sympathies, the first inclined toward Germany, the second toward Poland, were at loggerheads on the question. Direct negotiations proved extremely difficult, and, as so often happens, national pride added to the troubles of the negotiators. M. Briand, then as in 1925 and in 1929, one of the best friends of international peace, proposed that the matter be referred to the League for solution. The thing was done. The status of Upper Silesia today is regulated by the decisions taken by the League Council, and accepted by the two governments immediately concerned.
In this case, no doubt, it would be easy, speaking from the stand-point of abstract justice, to criticize the character of the solution arrived at. It is certainly exceedingly complicated, and whether or not it accurately reflects the results of the voting, it clearly involves economic maladjustments of a rather annoying kind. And yet it is only fair to observe that the arrangement which the League has formulated actually works in practice. It has been the cause of relatively little controversy since it was put into effect. Judged by the comparative and not the absolute standard, it deserves to be ranked amongst the League's successes,
In certain other problems the League has again and again
been extremely effective. In the case of the Aland Islands, for
cxample, it brought about a wholly satisfactory solution to the
�[Page 194]194 WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE
controversy between Sweden and Finland as to sovereignty ove: this disputed territory. It settled a boundary dispute between Czecho-Slovakia and Poland. It provided a formula for the rec. onciliation of the rival claims of Great Britain and Turkey wit) regard to the territorial limits of Iraq. Its action in such matters has more than once removed a very vexing problem from thx sphere of diplomatic controversy.
I have left to the end of this article the most interesting cas: of all, the case of Corfu. In September, 1923, the Italian dictator, Mussolini, basing his action on the murder of an Italgan member of a boundary commission delimiting the frontiers between Greec. and Bulgaria, bombarded and then seized the island of Cortu and demanded of the Greek government an apology and an in- demnity. A critical situation thus arose, and many there wer who believed that even were the Greek government to accedk to the demands of Italy, the island of Corfu would probably te- main in Italian hands. Events, however, turned out otherwise The Assembly and Council of the League happened to be sitting at the time. A storm of criticism broke upon the heads of the Italian delegates. The public opinion of the world was mobilized The way was cleared for a solution of the crisis. It is true that. to save the face of the Italian government, the final settlement o: the question was handed over to that curious post-war survival. still in existence in 1923, the Council of Ambassadors. But it 1: also true that Italy got out of Corfu.
To sum up, one’s opinion on the League action in composing
international disputes depends upon how much one demands ot
human institutions, and whether one judges them from the ab-
stract or from the practical and comparative point of view. By
the former test, there is room for legitimate criticism. By the
latter, this new international institution marks an indubitable
and very considerable advance. And surely, the way to render
its decisions still more effective and still more just, is not to scck
to demolish and restrict its influence, but to lend it a hearty.
though discriminating, support in its labors for the peace of the
world.
�[Page 195]THE PARIS PACT AND THE LEAGUE OF
NATIONS
CLOSING THE GAP IN THE COVENANT
by
Puiuip C. Nasi Director, League of Nations Association, Inc.
HE Tenth ordinary Assembly of the League of Nations has
just adjourned and the general opinion seems to be that
it has been by far the most important and constructive
Assembly that has yet been held. This feeling exists be- cause of several very important accomplishments and announce- ments of programs for the future. |
Among other happenings these stand out. Forty-two nations have now signed the optional clause of the World Court, agree- ing in advance to submit to the Court all disputes coming under ‘ts jurisdiction. Fifty nations have signed the protocol for Amer- ican adherence to the World Court; M. Briand announced that he would try to secure French ratification of the General Act ‘or the pacific settlement of all disputes; Mr. Henderson declared that Britain would support a convention to give financial aid to an attacked nation; the cornerstone of permanent League build- ings was laid; M. Briand started serious discussion of a United ‘tates of Europe; and Britain, Germany, Greece, Belgium, Peru . ind Lithuania recommended that the League Covenant be re- vised to bring it into harmony with the Pact of Paris.
It is this last proposal that is of most immediate interest to \mericans and may well result in far-reaching changes in our vilicial attitude towards the League. The situation is about as tolows,
The Paris Pact forbids all the signatory nations to wage
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�[Page 196]196 WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE
war for any purpose whatsoever except defense. Articles 12, 13. 14, 15, 16, 17 of the League Covenant, although far superior in outlining methods for the settling of disputes, do not go so far in actually prohibiting war, when peaceful methods fail Under these articles, the nations agree to submit any disputes to arbitration, judicial settlements, or to the Council of the League. If the Council does not come to a unanimous (excepting the parties to the dispute) decision in the matter, the members of the League reserve the right to themselves to ‘‘take such action as they shall consider necessary for the maintenance o/ right and justice’’"—that is, to go to war. It is this ‘‘gap"’ which the League is trying to close.
The Assembly made real progress in the preliminary study of such changes, providing for the appointment of a committe: of eleven persons to meet early in 1930 and report to the mem- bers of the League in order that such action as may be deemed appropriate may be taken at the next Assembly, September, 1930
The basis of the committee's work will be the amendments to the Covenant of the League proposed by the British delega- tion as follows:
In Article Twelve, paragraph one, the last words Cin étalics, would be stricken out thus:
‘The Members of the League agree that, if there shoul: arise between them any dispute likely to lead to a rupture they will submit the matter either to arbitration or judicia! settlement or to inquiry by the Council and they agree ir no case to resort to war. wntil three months after the award by the arbitrators or the judicial decision or the report by th Council."’ |
In Article Thirteen, paragraph four, one clause Cin étalics) would be deleted thus:
‘The Members of the League agree that they will carr
out in full good faith any award or decision that may lx
rendered. and that they will not resort to war against a Member
of the League which complies therewith. In the event of anv
failure to carry out such an award or decision the Council
�[Page 197]THE PARIS PACT AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS 197
shall propose what steps should be taken to give effect thereto."
In Article Fifteen, paragraph six, the last phrase would be changed
from:
‘‘Members of the League agree that they will not go to war with any party to the dispute which complies with the recommendations of the report’’ to “the Members of the League agree that as against any party to the dispute that complies with the recommendations of the report they will take no action witich is inconsistent with its terms'’ so that the whole paragraph would read thus:
“If a report by the Council is unanimously agreed to by the members thereof other than the Representatives of one or more of the parties to the dispute, the Members of the League agree that as against any party to the dispute that complies with the recommendations of the report they will take no action which is inconsistent with its terms."’
In Article Fifteen, paragraph seven, these words would be added, “‘Other than a resort to war,’ so that the paragraph would read:
“If the Council fails to reach a report which is unani- mously agreed to by the members thereof, other than the Representatives of one or more of the parties to the dispute, the Members of the League reserve to themselves the right to take such action as they shall consider necessary for the maintenance of right and justice, other than a resort to war." With changes of this sort the Covenant of the League can
be brought into entire agreement with the Pact of Paris. Under
both treaties the nations will have given up their right to go to war. Under the Pact a nation breaking this law ‘'should be denied the privileges of this treaty'’; under the Covenare slic
“shall be deemed ipso facto to have committed an act of war
against all other Members of the League’’ who will proceed to
take economic and financial steps against her and to give financial
aid Cif the proposed convention is ratified) to the defending
nation or nations.
�[Page 198]198 WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE
Our country realizes that the Paris Pact is not 2 complet. finished document. It is a noble expression of policy agreed + by fifty-three countries of the world but it still needs ‘imple. menting’’ to make it wholly effective. The parts needed make the machine really do the work demanded of it might b: listed thus:
A. Sanctions
(1) Factfinding machinery to determine which is th aggtessor nation in case of actual hostilities
(2) Some form of definite sanction against a natio: breaking the Pact. Such sanction proposals ar already on file before our Congress in the Burton Capper, Porter, and Fish resolutions.
B. Machinery to call into operation automatically th ““peaceful means'’ for settling the dispute and th: underlying causes of the trouble.
One familiar with international affairs will realize at onc that this machinery is provided and is ready for use, in the League of Nations and the World Court. Not only is the ma: chinery built, it has been tried out and actually tested in practice In the Graeco-Bulgarian dispute, the factfinding commissio: appointed by the Council collected the data and made recom: men.’ations which solved the problem. In the Bolivia-Paragua: trouble and in disputes which did not drift so far towards hos. tilities as this, the Council of the League, being already organize. for just such purposes, was able to suggest peaceful methods 0: handling the case.
The other nations of the world have been quick to see how
the Covenant of the League can be strengthened in the preventio:
of war by the philosophy of the Pact. Presumably this chan
will be made in 1930. It is now the duty of American statesme:
to see how the Briand-Kellogg Treaty can be similarly strengt)-
ened. We ate proud of this Pact; we feel that our country too,
the lead in offering it to the world. But it would be a sad coin-
mentary on our statesmanship if we leave it, half-finished,
become mere words and pious wishes.
�[Page 199]THE PARIS PACT AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS 199
The steps that might be taken were hinted at above:
A. Join the League under the amended Covenant. Pre- amably the proposed amendments, the membership and even vadership of Ireland and Germany in the League, and the gen- -tal progress and development of the League in the last ten years, will dispel most thoughtful opposition to membership of the -nited States. If this step were taken, then practically the whole world would be consulting and acting together in case peace were menaced.
B. If public opinion in the United States is not ready for
actual membership in the League, a plan might be formulated
by which a representative of the United States would sit with
the Council of the League temporarily and for the sole purpose
ot conference and action on a threatened breaking of the Paris
Pact. This form of cooperation is the same as the situation which
will utise in the election of World Cou: . judges, when and if we
adhere to the Court. It will be a natural development of inter-
national cooperation, making the world as safe from warfare
as treaties alone can make it.
�[Page 200]THE RISING TIDE
Notes on current books possessing special significance in the light of the trend toward world unity.
Edited by
Joun Herman Kanpatt, Jr. Department of Philosophy, Columbia University
THE ORDEAL OF LIBERALISM
iLBERT Murray has written a powerful and brilliant ple:
for the ending of international anarchy through intellec.
tual cooperation.' His argument is focussed upon th:
avoidance of war, and the practical means to this end
but he rises from this pressing problem to the still further need fo:
the creation out of our present chaos of a genuine cosmos, a
ordered and unified world. It is still doubtful whether civilize:
man will succeed in understanding the profound changes that 1:
the last fifty years have overtaken his environment, and in aday.
ing himself to meet them. This broader problem constitutes th: “ordeal of this generation."
The book has a finely reasoned coherence, and is beautifull: and movingly written. Professor Murray has illustrated once mor: the lucidity of expression and the imaginative insight that can k gained from contact with the best thought of ancient Greece. H: possesses also an invaluable acquaintance with the practical ditt: culties of international cooperation, through his years as president of the League of Nations Union, and through his participation i the work of the International Secretariat at Geneva, as British member of the Committee of Intellectual Cooperation. He 1. moreover, one of the most persuasive surviving representatives 0:
! Gilbert Murray, The Ordeal of this Generation. Harpers. x, 276 pp. $3.09.
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�[Page 201]THE ORDEAL OF LIBERALISM 201
the long tradition of British Liberalism, and his book comes with the magisterial blessing of the Manchester Guardian, ‘’The very best introduction yet written to the technical problem of bringing international anarchy to an end."'
It is a thoughtful and sane discourse, delivered out of the tulness of political wisdom and the ripeness of a reasoned outlook on the world. But there have been many reflective considerations of the present international situation and the adequacy of the |.cague to meet it; and save in its moving eloquence this treatment does not differ markedly from the best of the others. What inter- ests the reader is not so much its practical counsel as the phi- losophy in which it is set. And here he soon finds himself wonder- ing whether it is really the ordeal of this generation which Professor Murray so deeply feels and so keenly analyses, or the ordeal of that in which he grew up. In the face of our present confusion, he exhibits a touching nostalgia for the great days of Victorian Liberalism. And it is such Liberalism bravely struggling to meet an altered world that is here displayed.
Professor Murray tells of a friend whose eloquence fell flat because his audience wanted ‘‘none of that damned middle-class idealism.’’ “‘It was the Victorian Age,"’ he adds, ‘‘condemned by that which came after: the ‘middle-class idealism’ of people who did not suffer, but sympathized with suffering and wished to be good, condemned by people who themselves suffered and hated those who did not suffer, and did not in the least care to be good.” It is such idealism at its best, chastened by the common suffering of the War, that Murray offers. Its best is very good; but the reader is left wondering whether for better or worse he is not fated to belong to that audience. Liberalism is today facing its ordeal.
Murray has a philosophy of history. There is in civilization
a constant alternation between two processes—first organization
and then disorganization, first the slow building up of an ordered
social structure or cosmos, then the reduction of that cosmos into
chaos. No human cosmos endures long; such stagnation would
mean the end of progress. But it is in a cosmos that man wishes
�[Page 202]202 WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE
to dwell; there alone is security, there are standards, there is mutual confidence and trust. '‘A clear conteption of the world as an intelligible whole is an immense influence towards regular ani law-abiding conduct. Morality and decent living depend so much on the recognition of oneself as being only a member of a great ordered whole, not an isolated being whose sole purpose is its own happiness.”
For Murray, the Victorian Era was such a cosmos, an ordered
unity; and we have witnessed its breakdown. ‘The age of 19th
century Liberalism was, compatatively speaking, a Cosmos. Not
merely a great age, or an age in which society seemed on the
whole successful, but an age possessing a definite form and char-
acter, in which people knew what to expect of the world and
how to live in it.'’ Englishmen were agreed on the family, on
parliamentary government, on a common humanitarian religion
of progress. ‘The English 19th century view of the world was
apt to be shallow, but it worked. . . . For Great Britain espe-
cially it marked the zenith of national success, the widest expan-
sion over the world of British government, British commerce,
British political thought, British morals, philosophy, science,
poetry and prose literature.’’ And Murray, looking back to that
golden age, rings the changes on its achievements in every sphere
of life, from plumbing to poetry, and ridicules its contemners.
‘The Victorian Age cared more for life than for thought; conse-
quently it produced abundant and fine life, while its thought was
comparatively unambitious and aimed mainly at serving the
practical purposes of life. It cared intensely for morals and little
for metaphysics; a good deal for religion and scarcely at all for
theology; and since morals depend ultimately on metaphysics and
religion on theology, it left always a large extent of vague and
misty margin in the beliefs which it held most firmly. It had an
immense faith, a faith in goodness, in duty, in the future of
mankind. . . . It realized especially the immense value of reti-
cence in art. . . . In politics there was the same reticence, tlic
same idealism. Where a social evil could be dealt with, they
talked about it; otherwise not.”
�[Page 203]THE ORDEAL OF LIBERALISM 203
Now this grandeur of the Victorian compromise may all be truce; but I doube whether many today, who did not grow up in that era, would share Professor Murray's yearning for its remem- hered security. Above all, I doubt whether they would pick the iyth century from the record of history as peculiarly a cosmos, an ordered world; whether they would see its legislation as aimed at “the protection of the nation as a whole against abuse and privi- lege,” as “abandoning the ferocious defence of property for a spirit of sympathy and help to the oppressed.’’ Nor would they view the industrial revolution as a kind of ‘flaw and excrescence"’ in the Victorian cosmos! Liberalism has ceased to mean for us what it means for Murray, and we cannot agree that its one defect was belief in the independent sovereign state. Far from being an excrescence, that belief seems to us the inevitable flowering of a chaotic and transitional world.
Murray tewails the decay of this golden cosmos. Religious
agreement has vanished. Pacificism and militarism are fighting
vach other. Nationalism is rampant. Men have turned aside from
politics to football. Political machinery has broken down. For all
this the war is partly responsible, in destroying the discipline of
peace, in lowering standards of public and private action, in
unsettling education, in creating cynicism and bitterness, in over-
throwing parliamentary government throughout Europe. But
deeper causes were at work: Britain lost her industrial supremacy ;
science abandoned its Victorian neatness, and a transformed
physics shook men's faith in science, in reason, and therefore in
Liberalism; psychology has taken up vivisection, glorified impulses
once unspeakable, and degraded the Victorian virtues; women
have emancipated and educated themselves into the general chaos.
Victorian Liberalism needed criticism; and the great writers sup-
plied it. But the time has passed for such critics. ‘If is all very
well to praise ‘storms at sea when you are safe on land and not
intending to make a voyage. It is all very well to ridicule the law
and peace and conventional morality when you are not in danger
of being left with no law and no peace and the standards of
behaviour broken.’’ We need to seek safety, to cling to what is
�[Page 204]204 WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE
left of our 19th century standards; for our whole civilization is in danger.
Such an attitude is natural in a Victorian Liberal; his civili- zation és in danger. But those who have grown up in this newer world of ours ate not so perturbed. We can accept its passing with few qualms, and with no nostalgia. We see, not cosmos dissolving in chaos, but an opportunity to turn chaos into cosmos; or rathcr, we rejoice that a narrow and inadequate form of life has given way to the promise of greater richness and the challenge of gen- uine organization. And we rejoice that in practice we can work shoulder to shoulder with Murray. For in his view, civilization is bound up with the British Empire; and the safety of the Empire depends absolutely on the tranquillity of the world. Another war would end the Empire, Great Britain, and civilization. There must, therefore, be no more war.
The American may be pardoned a smile at the argument Pro- fessor Murray uses, not so much to express his own convictions, as to reach the British public. It is an argument made on grounds of material advantage, of common prudence, of fear, and of self- flattery. ‘‘The British Empire stands to gain nothing by war; it stands to lose all. The Empire is of all the Powers of the Eastern hemisphere the richest, the most contented, and the most vulner- able."’ England represents almost alone today a shaken and unpopular principle, the rule of human beings by an alien race. Against her is now directed all the hatred, the malevolent propa- ganda, that before 1918 went out against all the imperialisms. Against her is arrayed a new social system and a new religion, which promises freedom to those peoples bearing the burden of Empire. Her greatest advantage is the League of Nations. Through it alone she can prevent a fatally disruptive war; through it she can secure an international sanction for her Empire, provided she lives up reasonably to her imperial obligations.
In other hands and other lands this argument might not
sanctify the League. Coupled in Murray with a genuine enlight-
enment as to imperialism, and a readiness to condemn the thought-
less refusal to accept any commitment, like the optional clause or
�[Page 205]THE ORDEAL OF LIBERALISM 20§
the Kellogg Pact, which ties England's hands against war, it is obviously sincere. And to Englishmen, whether Liberals or Con- servatives, it is conclusive. Imperial Britain confesses, with Lord Grey, ‘We must learn or perish.'’ That peace and fair-dealing and cooperation are indispensable to the very existence of Britain, does not convict Englishmen of hypocrisy. It aligns behind world organization the strongest of all forces, national self-interest and patriotism. World unity must rise above such forces; but it cannot dispense with them.
For his part, Professor Murray smiles at America. “‘It is strange to hear sober Americans, when not a tomtit in the wide universe utters a chirp to threaten their security, talk glibly of the need of a vast navy to make themselves ‘respected’ and the need of inventing synthetic rubber for ‘the inevitable war with lurope.’ These things move one not so much to indignation as to a sort of despair of the human race. . . . A comparison of the speeches made on Armistice day, 1928, by Mr. Baldwin and Mr. Coolidge respectively, reveals not so much any great divergences in policy, but an extraordinary difference in spiritual experience. One sometimes feels toward the American public as the small Balkan nations are said to feel towards the English. No doubt they are very rich and strong and full of good-natured impulses; but they care for nobody, nobody can tell what they may want to Jo next, and as they turn to the right or the left their whim may spread prosperity or ruin. America is probably the one nation in the world which does not realize what war is and which could afford the luxury of another.'’ And Professor Murray has the same doubts about the Kellogg Pact that others have about British adherence to the League.
What is the way to Cosmos? Through world cooperation,
through the machinery of the League. The League furnishes the
all-important opportunity for conference; it provides a permanent
Secretariat. It has established a World Court, and it offers an
optional clause to accept its jurisdiction. It has failed to provide
an effective sanction for its decisions, specifically because England
refused to sign the Protocol, but more generally because the spirit
�[Page 206]206 WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE
of cooperation is still weak. ‘‘There is still too much mutual distrust in the nations of Europe. ‘Make a firm treaty and we can trust each other,’ said the French and those who thought with them; ‘we cannot trust you while you refuse to commit yourselves.’ ‘We will make a firm treaty when once we do trust each other,’ responded the British and Scandinavian elements, ‘we cannot pledge ourselves to you till we are sure that you ar playing fair.’ It is this kind of imperfection, rather than any actual! incompleteness of provision or flaw of drafting, that has most hampered the working of the League for peace. It can only le removed by a much more whole-hearted acceptance gf the League spirit and League methods on the part of the Great Powers.’
Throughout the sober discussion of the world inside and
outside the Covenant there runs the same note. The Metanoia, the
change of mind and heart, is still to be accomplished. Men stil!
talk in the old fashion, of wars and rumors of wars. They point
to the tiger in man, oblivious that ‘‘war in modern conditions is
never a mere outburst of angry passions; it is simply the result
of bad policy—stupid, selfish, narrow-minded, aggressive or dis-
honest policy." They ate not willing to reduce armaments
because they do not trust each other, or their own loyalty to
peace; there is no moral disarmament. The Council of the League
has not trusted itself; it has been afraid to act where action was
not difficult. No one has cared about protecting minority popula-
tions. The dark shadow of imperialism persists under the mandate
system. Yet ‘‘the Covenant, though not without certain ambigui-
ties and loopholes, is on the whole a wonderfully successful
instrument, flexible, comprehensive, and exactly directed to the
main evil which it was desired to cure. It does aim straight at
the heart of the international anarchy; and it does so by a method
which is calculated to stir up the very minimum of opposition.
Its normal sanction is the public opinion of the world; its most
effective weapon publicity.’’ The chief source of distrust of the
League is the peace treaties it guarantees. Murray agrces that at
some time these should be reconsidered ; but ‘‘it is more important
to get rid of war than to rectify the treaties."’
�[Page 207]THE ORDEAL OF LIBERALISM 207
Outside the Covenant are many dangers. Civil war is wn- touched, and quite properly; but it is unsettling. There is no out and out prohibition of warfare; Great Britain has stcadily detended the right of war. Murray hardly takes the Kellogg Pact wriously. America’s reservation of the right of self-defence, with no machinery to decide on aggression, such as the League pro- vides, testores the old freedom to make war when a nation chooses. England's imperial reservation is just as bad. Fortunately the Covenant has no such gaps. Above all, there is imperialism, which ill fits in with any scheme of world organization, and is the source of most of Britain's difficulties. The only hope there is to apply the spirit of the Covenant beyond its present jurisdiction. America stands alone, although she has just pledged herself to commit no aggression. Russia is an open enemy of the League, the chief instrument for improving the social order without war or revolution.
What is the way to Cosmos? It is the intellectual cooperation
of the nations. ‘‘The first need is disinterested good will, the next
1s to pool the best brains of all nations for the common service of
all."’ Are the new forces that have come pouring in to bring the
edifice of Victorian Liberalism tumbling to the ground to destroy
us completely? Murray answers as a true Liberal, still firm in the
taith. “‘Surely by now we know a better method. We have the
instruments for practicing it. Man has, in the last issue, only one
weapon for dealing with the innumerable problems which
he wilder and which may destroy him, the weapon of thought.
Thought may go wrong; but it is the best guide we have, if it is
patient, if it is based on study, if unwarped by personal interests
and unmoved by the spirit of good will. Need we ask no more?
Yes, just a little more. We may ask something of that spirit
which, since the very beginnings of history, men have expected
and found in the average common soldier—a will to endure
hardship for the sake of duty and to use life as one who knows of
things better than life. That granted, I look to intellectual
cooperation among men of good will for the restoring of our lost
Cosmos and the ultimate wise guidance of the world."
�[Page 208]YOUTH AND THE MODERN WORLD
Edited by
IsaBELLA VAN METER "Above and beyond all war and death is our deep yearning for th: time when we shall be able to work side by side with the youth of the whole world.”
During the crucial years since the European war, the youth of che world has been gathering its force as if for a supreme struggle with the militant, destructive past. Repudiating alike its inhe:i: ance of institutions, customs and ideals, the generation now assuming manhood and womanhoo! in East and West is gradually creating the substance of a different way of life, a new outlook, destired to form a new civilization. Viewed from the ranks of those molded by the past, this manifestation of youth has appeared one of the most tragic, misguided, even sinister of social phenomena, since its triumph must involve the overthrow of so much that mankind has done and been. The statement of youth itself, so far as youth has yet defined ity own energies, experiences and directions, will tei a different story. In this deparement World Unity Magazine will publish from time to time brie! articles expressing the outlook of youth, by youth itself, on those vital issues which are recurrent from age to age.
ForeiGn Stupents SHock our COMPLACENCY by
Cuarztes D. Hurrey General Secretary of The Committee on Friendly Relations among Foreign Students
O FOREIGN students promote friendly relations? In general, yes; in some instances, no. It all depends,—upon factors like the following:
Economic Status. If the student is dependent upon his own efforts to earn part of his expenses, he comes into competition with American students, to whom preference is generally shown. this fact makes him conscious of being not too welcome in the community. Moreover, his limited financial resources compel him to deny himself many of the ‘‘extras’’ which ate essential to a liberal education and also add to his handicap of strangeness o! language and social customs. Too often a student in such circum- stances lives to himself in the daily struggle for existence and does little to promote international friendship.
208
�[Page 209]FOREIGN STUDENTS SIIOCK OUR COMPLACENCY 209
Social Relationships. The foreign student who is extraordi- natily fond of social life becomes sensitive to any little discrimina- tion; ifan American git] refuses to dance with him, his feelings are hurt; he is grieved if he does not receive a ‘‘bid’’ to fraternity membership, and in his opinion people are ‘‘high hat"’ if they do sot speak to him on the campus after having met him casuaily at a church social. Fortunately this sort of student is in the minority. it is my observation that there is a growing friendliness between students from abroad and American students and professors; at cast ten different national fraternities have admitted Oriental students to their membership. It must be remembered that aver- sion to inter-racial marriage causes reserve and discrimination on the part of some people toward certain foreign students. The stu- ‘ent from abroad who is content to enjoy his American girl triendships in a mixed group rather than by individual ‘‘dating’’ 's not encountering serious discrimination.
Campus Activities. It is to be deplored that there still exists in some colleges actual opposition to admitting certain foreign stu- ‘ents to honor societies and fraternities; such discrimination is shown more frequently toward Jews and colored students than toward others. There are instances on record of denying a foreign student a place on a debating team or in an oratorical contest or in musical or dramatic clubs because of race or color. Some Cosino- politan clubs blackball the black man, though he comes direct trom the West Indies, Africa or Brazil; such clubs are perplexed when called upon to defend their motto, ‘Above all nations is humanity.’' In the realm of athletics the foreign student from the Jarker races suffers much unjust discrimination; the ‘Big Six"’ athletic league, including, among others, the universities of Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and Colorado, denies the colored man a place on its teams; the use of gymnasium, swimming pool and shower baths is granted in several instances only by a plan of humiliating segregation.
Facilities for Room and Board. Preference is almost invariably
shown for American students by keepers of rooming and boarding
houses; some college cafeterias and dining halls refuse admission
�[Page 210]210 WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE
to colored students, native and foreign. Among the attempts at solution of this problem are Cosmopolitan club houses, racial club houses such as the Chinese, Japanese and Filipino centers at the University of California and elsewhere. The compiling of a list o! boarding houses open to foreign students has been a helpful service rendered by many college communities.
Relation to Churches and Other Religious Organizations. Many foreign students take an active part in the program of the churches and Christian Associations; there are a few followers of non- Christian faiths enrolled in our theological seminaries; frequently, however, the foreign student encounteres in pulpit and pew such ignorance and intolerance regarding the culture and religious back- ground of his people that he is repelled and assumes an ultra- critical attitude. When approached naturally and with an open mind the foreign student is not only willing but eager to discuss religious questions; he is here to study all phases of our life and he does not overlook our organized religious agencies.
Attitude Toward Western Civilization. It is significant that an increasing number of Oriental students are coming to the United States for the study of engineering, commerce and industry; they realize that the development of natural resources and the industri- alization of tie Orient are inevitable. Quite naturally thes Orientals in their contact with the West do not wish to become ‘‘Americanized;"’ their future usefulness at home depends upon maintaining a close and sympathetic contact with the home people and their problems; they must therefore keep an open mind toward all new ideas, but they must constantly ask: ‘‘How can we best apply our training to the service of our people?"’
Much damage is done to the cause of international friendship
by allowing students to come here too young; such a practice
means that they often remain eight or ten years, and their affec-
tion for the home land is frequently alienated on account of the
luxuries and comforts which American life affords; utter lack o!
adequate knowledge of English on the part of the foreign student
is another cause of disappointment and ill feelings; the student
may have knowledge and capacity but if he cannot express it the
�[Page 211]FOREIGN STUDENTS SHOCK OUR COMPLACENCY 211
impression made upon fellow students and teachers is that of stupidity. The student who comes from abroad with the feeling that generous Americans ate somehow going to take care of him is out for trouble; those who have come with a ‘‘chip on the shoulder’’ attitude, willing to accept help on every occasion, but even more willing to malign the people who have offered assist- ance, ate blocking the wheels of progress in better race relations. The goal of the ten thousand foreign students in America trom one hundred different nations should be pursuance of their studies, the acquiring of knowledge and training, the exchange of ideas concerning « ur respective cultures, and a return home, pre- terably after three or four years to devote their ability to the advancement of their own people and the furtherance of inter- national understanding. Such agencies as the Friendly Relations Committees, the Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean and Russian student Christian Associations, the Cosmopolitan Clubs, the International House and Hindustan Association are immensely helpful in enabling foreign students to realize their ambitions. Mature graduate students who are specialists in their line are coming to the United States from all parts of the world; such men and women are effective ambassadors of goodwill; they are sig- nificant in the promotion of commerce, industry, education and religion; if we treat them with respect, cordiality and justice we shall receive in return their undying gratitude and their champion-
ship of our noblest ideals.
�[Page 212]WORLD UNITY CONFERENCES
Under the Auspices of World Unity Foundation
The World Unity Conferences are a medium by which responsible leaders of opinion can conver their message to the public without restriction of race, class, nationality or creed. Upholding tix ideals of brotherhood found in all religious and ethical teachings, the Conferences strive to quicke: the spiritual resources of the community by bringing upon one platform gifted speakers representicg the universal outlook and capable of interpreting the meanings of the new age. World Unity Co ferences are held at freque:t intervals in cities of the United States and Canada, and this educations activity will be extended as soon as possible co Europe. A distinctive feature of the Conference: consists in the local Wor/d Unity Councils, composed of leading liberals, established in the vatiow cities to further the world unity ideal.
Program of Meetings—October, 1929-May, 1930
Cleveland, Ohio—October 20 to 24 Washington, D.C.—February 16 to:; Chicago, Ill.—November 10 to 24 Baltimore, Md.—March 9 to 13 Buffalo, N. Y.—December 1 to 5 Pittsburgh, Pa.—April 6 to 10 Detroit, Mich.—January 19 to 23 Philadelphia, Pa.—May 4 to 8
Boston, Mass.—May 18 to 22
WORLD UNITY COUNCILS
Buffalo
Mr. William Evans
Rev. Palfrey Perkins Rabbi Joseph L. Fink
Dr. Augustus H. Sherrer
Mrs. Joseph Devine Mrs. Chauncy J. Hamlin Rev. Donald Tullis Mrs. Harold M. Es Miss Olive Williams Chicago
Prof. Fred Merrifield, Chairman Mrs. Ed. E. Dixon Miss Mary McDowell
Dr. George W. Allison S. John Duncan-Clark Rabbi Louis L. Mann
Prof. Edward Scribner Ames Mr. F. C. Eiselen Dr. Rowena Morse Mann
Dr. William H. Boddy Dr. G. George Fox Dr. Curtis W. Reese
Dr. Preston Bradley Dr. Charles W. S. Gilkey Mrs. P. A. Spaulding
Mrs. Charles S. Clark Professor A. Eustace Haydon _—Lorado Taft
Mrs. Henry Clay Doffeen Mrs. Edward S. Lowenthall Dr. Ernest F. Tittle
Cleveland
Dr. Charles F. Thwing, Parker Wright Meade Dr. Henry Turner Bailey Hen. an Miss Ethel Parmenter Dr. Dan Bradley
Mr. Ta Mr. ot Remenyi Mrs. Frances F. Bushea
Rabbi S. Goldman Rabbi Hillel Silver Mr. Dale S. Cole
Rev, Joel B. Hayden Mes. Judson Stewart Mic Linda A. Eastman
Prof. W. G. Leutner Judge George S. Addams Dr. A. Caswell Ellis
Dr. Dilworth Lupton Mrs. Royce D. Fry
�[Page 213]WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE
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“tis Mary Vida Clark
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‘iss Olive Colton
Maurice Hutton, Chairman
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« Trevor H. Davies
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~ WH. P. Faunce,
Hon, Chairman
{rs John H. Wells, Chairman
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Jat iin L. Alger + James E. Cheeseman
David Rhys Williams, Chairm Helen Probst Abbott
aoh: Philip Bernstein Mr “Thomas A, Bolling
tis Liizabeth Brooks
Detroit Mes. H. W. Dunklee Dr. Chester B. Emerson Rabbi Leo M. Franklin Pee Eric
Mr. Ralph C. McAfce Mrs. Charles M. Novac
Hartford Mr. George C. Hubert Dr. John C. Jackson
Rev. Richa H. McLaughlin Dr. A ith Miss Ella E. Muir
Spring field Miss Maude B. Corbett Rev. W. N. de Berry Rev. Owen Whitman Eames Mr. Carlos B. Ellis Dr. James Gordon Gilkey Rev. Frank B. Fagerburg
Toronto Mrs. Dunnington-Grubb Dr ard
.E. A.B Mr. J. W. H Dr. ames L. ughes Rabbi Ferdinand 1 M. Isserman Dr. D. D. MacDonald Mrs. J. Pat McGregor
ins
Washington Dr. Henry Grattan Doyle Dr. Mordecai Johnson Rev. Moses R. Lovell Mr. Allan B. McDaniel
Providence Rev. Arthur W. Cleaves Mrs. George H. Crooker Professor L. M. oe Rabbi saneil M.G
Rochester
Mrs. Ma oe Lewis Gannett
an Mr. Fran
ae Dr. Riymon Kise
Mr. Clement G. Lanni Dr. Dexter Perkins
213
Re. Rev. Herman Page Dr. Morton Pearson
Dr. Augustus P. Reccord Mr. Jarvis Schermerhorn Mr. Adam Strohm
Mr. Lee M. Terrill
Mr. W. W. Wing
Mrs. R. P. Nason
Dr. Rockwell Harmon Potter Mrs. Milton Simon Professor Edward L. Troxell Mr. Fred D. Wish
Mrs. Archer F. Leonard Mrs. Asel A. Packard Sirs as Price Mes. Joseph Pynchon Mrs, settee . Stebbins Mrs. Hilley C. Wellman
Mrs. George Lawrence Parker Mr. Grove Patterson
Mr. Harold C. Place
Miss Florence S ing
Mrs. Robert J.
Mr. Fred C. Meyer
Miss J. M. Norton
Dr. Pas Pidgeon nd
Mrs. ae, B. Thompson Mrs. F. C. Ward
Judge Mary O'Toole Dr. Jason Noble Pierce Rabbi Abram Simon Mrs. Wm, Adams Slade
Rev. Richard McLaughlin Miss M. S. Morriss
Mrs. Frank E. Peckham
Re. Rev. James de Wolf Perry Rev. O. S. P. Thompson
Dr. Justin Wroe Nixon Miss Helen W. Pomeroy Dr. Orlo J. Price
Mr. Harold W. Sanford
Mr. LeRoy E. Sa ae
Me. William F.
�[Page 214]ROUND TABLE
Another annual program of World Unity Conferences began with the meet- ings held in Cleveland, Ohio, Octo- ber 22 and 23. The complete Confer- ence schedule for the season October, 1929-May, 1930 appears elsewhere in the magazine.
The Cleveland meetings ted an educational program of unusual scope, the speakers including Mr. William Pickens, Field Secretary, Na- tional Association for the Advance- ment of Colored People; Dr. John
Herman Randall, Director, World:
Unity Foundation; Dr. Ralston Hay- den, Department of Political Science, University of Michigan; and Rabbi Solomon Goldman, Congregation Anshe Emes, Chicago. These ‘‘responsible leaders of opinion’’ made available to the public of Cleveland a free, non-partisan discussion of the follow- ing subjects: the Race Problem, World Community, Problems of Unity in the Pacific Area, and Christianity and Judaism. The World Unity Foun- dation is greatly indebted to the members of the local World Unity Council whose active cooperation en- abled the meetings to reflect the thoughtful and progressive spirit of the city.
- 6 @
The considerable volume of current
214
literature written by Contributing Editors of World Unity Magazine, as listed on this page from time t time, now includes the interestin; title “‘The Scourge of Christ’’ by Paul Richard, published by Kropf Mr. Richard's power of spiritual rer- ception was made apparent to Worl: Unity readers by his article “Th: Spiritual Crisis of the West,"’ in the August, 1929 issue.
- *
Every reader of this magazine i: invited to participate in a Question: naire which the editors are sendiny to 1000 international leaders in soc: ology, teligion, education, journal ism and public affairs, the purpose 0: which is to secure an expression o! opinion on the question: what te: living men and women constitute the most powerful and effective influence for internationalism?
An adequate response to this Ques tionnaire should have more thar casual interest, for the results of an impartial vote will reveal what fac: tors and influences are considered to be vitally potent in the promotion oi world unity at this time, whethe: political, educational, etc.
We hope to receive many replies
from reader on this question before
February 1, 1930.
�[Page 215]
PARENTS AND SCHOOLS
The December issue of
PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION
Of vital importance to parents who want the best education for their children, and who want to know what the progressive schools are doing «) provide it. Notale articles. Concrete school surveys. Striking illus- trations. Interesting projects. The new books.
For teachers as well, who want to know what the alert parent is thinking concerning the schools.
Single copy, $.75. Subscribing-Membership, $3.00 yearly.
Important Announcement
Beginning with January 1930, the magazine will be issued eight times « year, instead of quarterly except the summer months. The subscription price will remain the same. Single copies will be $.50. All subscriptions rvcived before December 1 will include the December issue free.
Write Department C
Progressive Education Association, oe 10 Jackson Place, Washington, D. C.
Please enroll me as a Subscribing-Member in the Progressive Education Associa- ‘ion. It is understood that I am to receive the December issue free. Enclosed is my heck for $3.00,
PHIGIORE: os wae eb 4rd Cee 1 CORSE SOON ERE eee Ty err re CEE TT
215
�[Page 216]WORLD UNITY
BOOK OF THE MONTH
IN THIS SPACE EACH MONTH WORLD UNITY WILL RECOMME ONE CURRENT WORK WHICH CAN PROFITABLY BE READ BY ALL WHO SEEK TRUE UNDERSTANDING OF THE NATURE OF WORLD AFFAIRS |
December 1929 Selection “LEARNING AND LEADERSHIP”
by ALFRED ZIMMERN
Lectures delivered at the
Geneva School of International Studies
‘Man's needs and desires have brought about a world-wide civiliza- tion. His next task is to discover its institutions.”
This work is a study of the nceds and possibilities of ingernational intelle cooperation, dealing with the new environment evolved since the war, and problem of its control in terms of education.
ORDER BLANK FOR BOOK ONLY OR COMBINED WITH SUBSCRIPTION TO WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE
Worip UNity PuBLisHiInG Corp. 4 EAST 12TH STREET NEW YORK
I enclose $2.00 for “LEARNING AND LEADERSHIP.” (Or) I enclose $4.75 for “LEARNING AND LEADERSHIP” combined with year's scription (regular price $3.50) to World Unity Magazine.
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