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[Page 145]

WORLD UNITY

INTERPRETING THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE JOHN HERMAN RANDALL, Editor HORACE HOLLEY, Managing Editor

CONTENTS

Vol. IX DECEMBER, 1931 No. 3

Flood and Famine in China Frontispiece

France on Trial Editorial

The Geneva Arms Conference Dexter Perkins

Orient and Occident. II. Hans Kohn

The Novel of the War Years. II Evelyn Newman

The Sole Remedy for War Lucia Ames Mead

World Citizenship and Allegiance Carl A. Ross

Why East and West Are Different. II. Grover Clark

The Value of Science John Herman Randall, Jr.

World Peace and the World Process Robert Whitaker

Propaganda Vs. Truth in Education Richard Glenn Gettell

The American Peace Movement Russell M. Cooper

(Contents indexed in the International Index to Periodicals)

WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE is published by WORLD UNITY PUBLISHING CORPORATION, 4 East 12th Street, New York City: MARY RUMSEY MOVIUS, president; HORACE HOLLEY, vice-president: FLORENCE MORTON, treasurer: JOHN HERMAN RANDALL, secretary. Published monthly, 25 cents a copy, $2.50 a year in the United States and in all other countries (postage included). THE WORLD UNITY PUBLISHING CORPORATION and its editors welcome correspondence on articles related to the aims and purposes of the magazine. Printed in U. S. A. Contents copyrighted 1931 by WORLD UNITY PUBLISHING CORPORATION. [Page 146]Photograph by Col. Lindbergh

FLOOD AND FAMINE IN CHINA

"Literally hundreds of small villages throughout the entire area were standing in water which in many instances covered all but the roofs. Those inhabitants still remaining were living in small boats moored in the streets. Many people were fishing in the streets and where the fields had been. In frequent instances the walls of the houses had collapsed." From Report on Air Survey of Flood Areas in Grand Canal and Lower Yangtze River Districts, by Col. Charles A. Lindbergh.

In "The China Weekly Review" of September 12, this catastrophe is described as "the greatest loss of life since the World War."

How long will humanity tolerate artificial political conditions which prevent the concentration of intellectual, moral and industrial resources upon the tasks needed to meet the most urgent human needs? [Page 147]

FRANCE ON TRIAL

EDITORIAL

T is possible to read too much or too little into the official communique issued to the public on October 25 by President Hoover and M. Laval. According to this statement these two leaders of the United States and of France in their much-heralded conference had "canvassed the economic situation in the world, the trends in international relations bearing upon it; the problems of the forthcoming conference for limitation and reduction of armaments; the effects of the depression on payments under intergovernmental debts; the stabilization of international exchanges and other financial and economic subjects." And M. Laval in a public address said, "We have come to know one another better. Henceforth, we know where we stand, we know what we want, we know what we can expect, and what may be expected of us."

Opinions differ widely as to what has been accomplished by this conference, from that expressed by the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the conferences have set the stage for epochal developments of world-wide importance in the direction of recovery from depression," to the severe editorial in the Philadelphia Record, which declares that the much advertised effort to relieve depression and avert an economic crash ends in agreement to do nothing.

There can be no question but that France has won several victories as a result of the conference. First, it has received assurances that President Hoover will not again take the initiative in the debt question as he did last June. Second, France is virtually assured that the United States will not press the disarmament issue until after "the organization on a firm foundation of permanent peace" is established, whatever that may mean. Third, the United [Page 148]States virtually undertakes to re-examine the inter-Allied debt question after the European powers have agreed to reduce German reparation. To those who had hoped that as a result of this visit the United States and France would join hands in organizing international action to remedy the world depression or to secure definite results at the forthcoming Disarmament Conference, all this seems like a frank surrender of President Hoover’s avowed purposes to the well-known policy of French supremacy in European affairs.

In a carefully reasoned analysis of the communique, however, Walter Lippmann writing in the Herald-Tribune says, “Three major principles of the utmost importance have been established. They deal with the working of the gold standard, the future of inter-governmental debts, and political peace.” He finds a joint public agreement that the two nations propose to make the gold standard workable for each other, and also, that they must together find the means of re-establishing monetary stability in other countries. As to debts and reparations, there is the frank acknowledgment that revision of reparations must take place within the framework of the Young Plan rather than outside it as in the moratorium of last June. This is a victory not merely for France but for the orderly treatment of the question in accordance with treaty obligations. The statement that “the organization on a firm foundation of permanent peace” is “in reality the true mission” of the coming conference at Geneva, seems to Mr. Lippmann as to many others, a flat acceptance of the French thesis that limitation of armaments must follow and cannot precede the organization of political security. But to Mr. Lippmann this means that the two governments have at last a common fundamental principle—the organization of the world for peace—that they propose to discuss this problem rather than to argue about the size of their respective armaments.

“What the President has done,” says Mr. Lippmann, “is to adopt the French thesis, and by doing it he has entrusted France with the responsibilities of leadership. This is sound statesmanship. It remains to be seen whether France possesses the moral and intellectual capacity for such leadership.

J. H. R. [Page 149]

THE GENEVA ARMS CONFERENCE

by DEXTER PERKINS Department of History and Government, University of Rochester

On February 2, 1932, a great conference for the reduction of armaments is to convene at Geneva. What results may be expected from such conference? What are the problems with which it must deal? These are the questions to which it is hoped to provide a partial answer in this article.

Any discussion of the armament problem must distinguish armament on land and armaments upon the sea. In the latter field, a certain amount of progress has already been made. The Washington conference of 1921-22 limited naval construction in capital ships; and though it provided for replacements up to such and such a figure it now appears entirely likely that limitation will be the prelude to actual reduction. The London conference, in dealing with smaller cruisers (under 10,000 tons) and other types of vessels not included in the agreements of Washington, did not do well; it resulted in an agreement of three instead of five powers, the United States, Great Britain and Japan coming to a general accord, and France and Italy being unable to settle their difficulties. Moreover, while it provided limitation, it set figures for such limitation which were, at any rate in the case of the United States, regarded by many persons as excessively high. It is still a question whether the accord then reached will pave the way for further substantial achievement.

And yet, it must be understood, it is in the field of naval armaments that there is the best chance of a measure of success at Geneva. The reason for this lies in the economic situation, and in the possible alteration of the position assumed by France and Italy in the deliberations of a year and a half ago. The major insurmountable difficulty in the London conference lay in the rivalry of the [Page 150]government at Paris and the government at Rome. The French desired to maintain their existing superiority over their Italian neighbor; the Italians put forward a claim to parity with the French. These claims were not only irreconcilable, but they seemed to foreshadow a possible naval competition; and still worse, they affected the position of Great Britain, which is still determined to maintain a navy equal to that of the two greatest of the Continental powers. Now it is wholly possible that the mood both of Paris and of Rome will have undergone a change since the deepening of the world depression. The Italian government has, indeed, taken the initiative in a movement for a year's truce in armaments; and at the moment of writing it seems not impossible that the nations of the world will accept this proposition, and that armaments will be temporarily stabilized. The way may thus be paved for a Franco-Italian agreement; one was nearly reached last spring, it will be remembered. through the good offices of Mr. Arthur Henderson, then British Foreign Secretary. The signing of a genuine five power treaty might in its turn make possible some further steps looking toward proportionate reductions, just as the Washington conference, which had only limitation in view, promoted the larger aim of an actual diminution in armaments. At any rate, it is on this aspect of the conference that the optimists will do well to concentrate.

For the problem of land armaments is bound to be a very thorny one. It is true that a draft convention was after long deliberations drawn up by the League's Preparatory Commission on Disarmament; it is true that this convention proposes limitation, not only of men and of materiel but also of budgetary expenditures. and that it sets up a supervisory commission to watch over the actual execution of the terms of the convention. But it is also true that no agreement was reached with regard to the filling out, in actual fact, of any of the schedules; and that the draft convention itself has been subject to numerous reservations and objections all of which are likely to be raised over again at the forth-coming conference. More important than this, however, the solution of the arms question depends upon certain political factors. The peace treaties conferred upon France and the so-called succession states (that is, [Page 151]

THE GENEVA ARMS CONFERENCE

Poland, Czecho Slovakia, Jugo Slavia and Roumania) a certain privileged position in Europe through the disarmament of the powers defeated in the war. This position they are likely to desire to maintain. They are not any less desirous of doing so today than they were a year or two ago. On the contrary, the development of the jingo spirit in Germany, the antics of the ineffabie Hitler, and the triumph of the National Socialists, as they are called in such important elections as those of Brunswick or Hamburg, have inCreased the distaste of France and her allies for further concessions. At the same time, the irreconcilable bad temper of the ruling classes ilungary affords another excuse for resisting arms reductions, while the obvious desire of both Germans and Magyars to apply al coercion to the dominant European states merely sharpens the antagonism.

There was, of course, a way out of this situation. It is doubtless true today, and has been true for some time, that if the United states would enter into some kind of agreement by which common ..ction would be insured against an aggressor state, the French and their Continental associates would be willing to effect some measure of reduction in armaments. Such an agreement would not necessarily involve the use of force; it might merely imply the withholding of economic and financial support from a law breaking nation. But an understanding of this kind appears to be frowned upon by the present administration; this fact was made crystal clear to the French premier in his recent visit; and, to do justice to Mr. Hoover and his associates, opposition to any action tending to guarantee the existing order in Europe is expressed by no small number of Americans. For myself, I should like to see such a guarantee; but my convictions on this matter cannot blind me to the great difficulties in the way of actually bringing it about.

The United States might contribute to the reduction of land armaments either by making concessions to the French desire for Security, or, possibly, by making concessions on the war debts in exchange for assurances of a cut in the military forces of her debtors. But the possibilities of any achievement through this second expedient now appear to be remote. If we are in possession of all [Page 152]the facts with regard to the meeting of Mr. Hoover and Premier Laval, the United States has virtually agreed to reduce its financial claims on France as that power reduces its claims on Germany. and the possibilities of a further bargain in which this country uses these claims for the purpose of securing a in armaments is excluded. It is difficult to see how American influence can be very effectively exerted at Geneva.

This does not mean, however, that we must give way to counsels of despair. The moral forces countin politics, as they count everywhere else. A widespread demand for reduction of armaments will in itself do something to bring about such a reduction Moreover, the economic pressure to which governments all over the world are subjected may not be without effect. And finally, there is a possible line of action which may bring about results. It is that suggested by that great friend of peace, Lord Robert Cecil. in the October number of "Foreign Affairs." Lord Robert proposes. to put the matter briefly, that a distinction be made between offensive and defensive armaments. All governments claim that they wish merely to be protected against attack; why not provide then for a genuine distinction between such forms of armament as most readily afford such protection, as compared with the weapons of aggression. Fortifications, for example, are clearly in the first class: great bombing planes, on the other hand, are clearly in the second. For further light on the possibilities of such a distinction, it might be possible to turn to the peace treaties, and to observe what kinds of armaments have been especially proscribed in the case of the powers defeated in the World War. There are, no doubt, practical difficulties in the way of basing substantial reductions on such a principle; but it seems to offer, none the less, at least a hope for a measure of accord.

There is a further aspect of this matter which I should like to emphasize in closing. Here in America we are apt to lay too much emphasis on this question of arms reduction as compared with one infinitely more important. By setting up an agitation on this point. attention is diverted from the far more fundamental matter of international organization for peace. Armaments exist in the inter- [Page 153]

THE GENEVA ARMS CONFERENCE

national community, precisely for the reason that they have sometimes existed in civil societies, as, for example, in the West at one epoch in its history. They exist because the machinery for peaceable settlement of disputes, the habit of utilizing such machinery, and provision for enforcing the decisions made through such machinery, are lacking. It is possible to make some headway on the arms question through such agreements as those of Washington and London with regard to navies; but really great progress will come only when the necessity of genuine international organization has been frankly faced. It is a solemn fact that we, here in America, are not willing to face it; it has taken eight years of agitation, and will take, no one knows how much longer, to bring us to the point of adhering to the World Court protocol, a step feeble enough in comparison with those which must be taken. Too many people in this country, in connection with the problem of international peace, want the end without being willing to use the means; and it is these pseudo-friends of world concord who do most to damage its cause. Peace and disarmament are not matters of vague humanitarianism; they are matters of practical statesmanship. The more clearly this fact is realized, the greater will be the contribution of our country to the establishment of a happier era in the history of the world. [Page 154]

II. THE POLITICAL PROBLEM

The modernization of oriental states manifests itself in the introduction of legal codes based on a European conception of law. Widely extensive codification of the law will be undertaken in China, Siam and Persia. It is an interesting fact that the independent oriental states are making haste in this matter, far in advance of those districts which are European colonies or are dependent upon Europe as a protectorate or mandated area. Turkey has repealed the civil code of 1876, which was based in part upon Mohammedan legal precepts and in part was compiled under the influence of French law. On October 4, 1926, a new civil code went into effect in Turkey, based upon an almost unchanged conception of the Swiss civil code and the first two sections of the Swiss law of obligations. For procedure in civil actions Turkey took over the civil regulations of the Swiss canton of Neufchatel, with regard for German civil regulations; for commercial law the German commercial code; for the regulation of actions for debt, the Swiss prosecution and bankruptcy law; and for penal law the Italian code. The adoption by the national assembly, without ratification article by article, was confirmed by the Turkish Minister of Justice in these words: "The Swiss civil code is the newest, most complete and most democratic civil law. It contains not a single provision at variance with our national sentiment." With only quite immaterial changes, the law of a modern national democracy replaced in a few months a law resting upon an Islamic [Page 155]religious and social basis, still medieval, which recognized polygamy and compulsory marriage, made divorce difficult for the wife and neglected her in her inheritance right. (The legal age for marriage has been lowered immaterially in Turkey; even foster-relationship has been declared an impediment to marriage; and in the property law relating to marriage Turkey has made a separate and not a combined ownership the normal property status.) The new form of state democracy which has begun to work itself out in the Orient in the last two decades has created for itself its own new system of law. Since it is of western origin itself, it has received western law. In view of this fact, it may seem that it has made more rapid and decisive progress judicially than it has made politically.

Democracy

Article 3 of the Turkish constitution of April 20, 1924, reads: Sovereignty lies with the nation, without limitation and without condition." Article 4 declares that the supreme national assembly of Turkey is the only true representative of the nation and, in the name of the nation, exercises the right of sovereignty. According to Article 5 the legislative as well as the executive power resides in the supreme national assembly. In this manner Turkey has given herself outwardly the most democratic form of government possible, although, in the interest of the thorough-going modernization of the country, the actual ruling power may lie not in the national assembly but in the autocratic hands of the man whose personality the new Turkey embodies. It is surely most highly significant that all the strong men who stand at the head of oriental governments today, or have created them, have declared democracy as their aim and as the best suitable form of government, and have shrunk from an open acceptance of dictatorship which may easily have devolved upon them in the course of events. Characteristic of the transition period of the Orient from the Middle Ages to modern times is the fact that, as in similar historical stages in the states of Europe or in Russia, so in the East of today, everywhere, strong leading personalities decide and shape the structural changes of their countries. But, in contradistinction to the equivalent historical stage in Europe [Page 156]in the past, the transformation is being brought about, for the most part, not by rulers acting against the will of their people or of influential classes as Peter the Great in Russia did but, under the influence of a Europe already changed in its social developmen and political aspirations, by men of the people who also embody at the same time the endeavors of their countries and are by the masses recognized as their leaders. They are no longer solitary forerunners, but achievers and unifiers. Only in the most backward of oriental countries, in Afghanistan and Central Arabia, are the leaders the hereditary rulers (Aman Ullah and Ibn Saud) who frequently have to carry out their reforms against the will of large classes of their people. But even they strive for a gradual democratization of their form of rule. The fruitfulness of the period in which the Orient finds itself today, which may appear to a later observer as the decisive occurrence of the decade after the World War, the period of the awakening of the Orient, is shown by the fact that while Europe and America in general are today poor in creative statesmen and popular leaders, the same age has brought forth in the Orient men like Saad Zaghlul Pascha in Egypt, Ghazi Mustafa Kemal in Turkey, Riza Khan Pehlewi in Persia, Gandhi in India and Sun-vat-sen in China. None of them is descended from the ruling class. Most of them came from the heart of the people.

Zaghlul and his organization, the Wafd (who represented the overwhelming majority of the Egyptian people) saw in parliamentarian democracy not only the symbol of the country's outward independence, but the symbol also of the liberation of the rising bourgeois class and of the intelligentsia, of peasant blood, from the often even racially foreign aristocracy of the court and the great feudal estates. The conceptions of democracy which govern the western Orient are borrowed from Europe and lack originality.

The older influential classes of the Indian national movement were wholly under the influence of English education and saw in Westminster the model for even the highest institutions of the Indian people. The younger generation, which attempts to lay hold upon original Indian thought under the direction of Gandhi and the still earlier direction of Tilak, has not found time to clothe these at- [Page 157]

ORIENT AND OCCIDENT

tempts in social and political proposals. Only Sun-yat-sen, the son of a poor peasant family, has laid down "the three principles of the people." As a Christian, and through his studies in America and Europe, he came under the influence of western ideas, and later those of the Russian Revolution. In his Canton speeches, made during the first half of the year 1924, he not only preaches the struggle against fatalism, which characterizes the Orient (and also Russia) today, and summons his hearers to initiative, activity and realization, but also sets forth his conception of democracy as government of the people, by the people and for the people, and an incorporation, therefore, of national, democratic and socialistic principles. Government of the people, the national "principle," must realize itself in the struggle against foreign countries and their political and economic ambitions. The deeply rooted family and tribal feeling of the Chinese, which must be preserved, must crystallize in an intense national consciousness. The new state must be founded on the old virtues, the old ethics and the old quest for wisdom. The Chinese must start with their internal civilization and must not cease until the whole earth has become one realm of peace.

Government by the people, the democratic "principle," must not be a blind imitation of the parliamentarianism of the West, but a most practicable, immediate democracy which grants the people a direct voice in the government—a government not by politicians but by experts. Following the Chinese pattern, Sun-yat-sen adds to the three departments of the government—the legislative, the executive and the judicial—two more independent departments: the examining department, which is concerned with the examination and selection of public officials, and that of the censor, which has command of the other departments, to watch over them and, if necessary, to bring charges against them.

Government for the people, the socialistic "principle," has to ward off the disadvantages of encroaching capitalism, not in the way of the class struggle but in the way of the control of economic resources. China, according to Sun-yat-sen, suffers less from an unjust distribution of property than from her insufficient production.

(To be continued) [Page 158]

THE NOVEL OF THE WAR YEARS

by EVELYN NEWMAN Professor of English, Rollins College, W'inter Park, Florida

II

N that admirable chronicle of personal experience, Aus dem Krieg. Herr Linding compares Fritz von Unruh and Henr dealt with futher in a discussion of personal narratives his dis- criminating criticism of these writers is most appropriate here: "One thing is true: this (Le Fen) is the first book which gives ex- pression to the violent feelings which the war evoked in human beings, as distinct from the vicarious emotions. This is far from being the case for example, with Unruh, even in his best work. In Unrul's or der Entscheidung, the characters are soldiers of past wars speaking the language of this one. Barbusse's men, on the contrary, are creatures of war itself. That is what is great about the book."

Such an estimate is just for Opfergang and for Der Mensch ist Gut as well. Both books are often hysterical, showing an emo tion that would seem to be the expression of shell-shocked faculties Yet they cleany give the confused suffering state of mind of many men during the war.

Leonhard Frank's Brigade Surgeon was always a kind and un- derstanding friend to his men in the actual war. Just such a charac ter was the physician and writer Georges Duhamel, whose real name is George Thevenin. His contribution to literature both dur ing and since the war has been the sympathetic portrayal of the suffering of the wounded and the mutilated, as he ministered to them for four and a half years in trench hospital and ambulance [Page 159]

THE NOVEL OF THE WAR YEARS

corps. The first expression of this suffering was published as Vie des Martyrs and received the Prix Goncourt for 1917. Civilization, the second book on this theme, was accorded a like honor for 1918. By these two books, M. Lalou, in his Histoire de la Littérature Contemporaine, declared that M. Duhamel had "confounded all those members of the Institute, actresses of the Café-Concert, politicians and stars of prostitution who have worked to give us a congruous and definite literary picture of the war."

These works and his recent one Les Sept Dernières Plaies (1928) present a rare combination of scientific observation and mystical power, a peculiar blending of intense sympathy for and quiet revolt toward the boundless physical, mental and spiritual agony which the war brought to simple and innocent men. All this he relates with a Zolaesque realism that has a poetic quality even in its most stark recitals. For M. Duhamel reflects sentiments found in Dostoievsky’s Crime and Punishment and The Idiot. In his more restricted field, he has a similar tenderness and psychological power. Again at times he is like the great entomologist Fabre bending with humor as well as insight over the insect he is analysing. It is thus we feel him in Les Hommes Abandonnés and Confessions de Minuit, Deux Hommes and other stories of his post-war period.

It is, however, with the material of his trilogy: Vie des Martyrs, Civilization, Les Sept Dernières Plaies that we must deal. All three are collections of poignant tales of war’s victims. To vague theorising concerning militarism or peace, M. Duhamel opposes what he declares is the reality of "the sole thing certain at this moment of the century: human suffering."

The foreword of Vie des Martyrs contains a message for the world. The author tells of some visitors who on leaving the hospital said to him that the soldiers seemed fairly happy and that they all told the same story. To this superficial optimism he replied: You have just been looking at them, are you sure that you have seen them....

... Below the wounds, in the depths of the mutilated flesh, a soul, strange and futive, is stirring in feverish exaltation, a soul [Page 160]which does not readily reveal itself... but which I would fain. make you understand."

This then is the sacred purpose of M. Duhamel. Let us see how he fulfills it. One of the early stories is of Carré and Lerondeau brought into the hospital the same day with similar wounds. Yet Lerondeau continues to grow better after the amputation of his leg. and Carré continues to grow worse. No part of him is free from pain. The back by means of which we rest has betrayed him: here and there it is ulcerated. He can scarcely breathe. Something is wrong with the intestine. This man who did not cry nor utter a sound under the most terrible suffering talks of death "with a lucidity that sounds like an actual experience." He could not have imagined such suffering when he was ploughing his little garden at home. The good doctor promises him: "I will not let all your sufferings be lost in the abyss."

Carré died. Lerondeau went to his home. Says the doctor in farewell: "Forget your leg, forget your sufferings...

"But the world must not forget them."

Of Tricot he tells the sad story of how, after all his multiple agony under which he had uttered no complaint, his courage flees when a tiny pimple appeared upon his nose, a few days before his death.

"I wanted to prick it.

"Tricot, who had allowed us to cut into his chest without an anaesthetic, exclaimed with tears: 'No more operations! I won't have any more operations!"

"All day long he lamented about his pimple, and the following night he died."

It was just such a mental condition as Tricot's at the last, that caused men and boys who had stood three and even four years of the worst front-line trench and battle life to go mad or lose all nerve control, or even betray so-called cowardice and revolt against military discipline near the end of the war. Dorgelès and Barbusse narrate such incidents.

The young twenty-year old Leglise must have his leg taken off at the thigh. That was bad enough but when the second one must [Page 161]

THE NOVEL OF THE WAR YEARS

go. Leglise declares: "I would much rather die." The doctor talks with him as an "advocate of life." Leglise asks: "I live with my mother... What work is there for a cripple? Ought I to live to suffer poverty and misery?"

The doctor reassures him, declaring that all France would be ashamed to allow him to suffer. As they talk they see the guns flashing at the front afar off, and the night is very beautiful, "like waters dark and divine." So the boy agrees, and the other leg is taken. He recovers and becomes "an elect soul exalted by great suffering." His joy and generosity illumine the hospital: "Oh, Leglise, can it be that there is still something amusing, and that it is to be kind? Isn't this alone enough to make it worth while to live?"

The author's description of Verdun, February to April 1916, as one of the most stirring in the book. He describes the immense number of wounded, the insufficient aid: "Doctors and orderlies, their faces haggard from a night of frantic toil, came and went, choosing among the heaps of wounded, and tended two while twenty more poured in."

The Third Symphony is a brief tale in which we hear of the German prisoner, Vize-Feldwebel Spat. He suffered great pain bravely, never crying out, but he always had an attitude of "stiff hostility." One day as the doctor was finishing dressing his wound, whistling at random while doing so, he glanced at his patient's face. He was amazed to see it aglow with happiness: ""Tell me, Monsieur' (the German murmured) 'it's the Third Symphony, isn't it, that you are... what do you call it?-yes... whistling.""

"Yes, I believe it is the Third Symphony

"A slender bridge had just been flung across the abyss."

Duhamel closes his book with a re-avowal of his mission as one of not only attending the wounds but recording the history of those who had been "sacrificial victims of the race."

The purpose of Civilization is the same, but its stories of suffering soldiers are interspersed with descriptions of the machine of war, the villages and their congested condition, and more elaboration of the author's own philosophy. In his sketch, The Somme [Page 162]Front, he describes the roads that marked off the British from the French, crowded with young men marching to wild negro music of flutes and drums towards the front, while coming in the opposite direction were long lines of hospital trains carrying fair-haired boys from the battle line. He speaks of the congested conditions of the villages "packed to suffocation." The men had driven the cattle from their accustomed shelter in order to occupy it themselves. As he passed along, the Adjutant pointed toward the huge city of white unbleached tents: "That's Hill 8o. You will see more wounded passing there than there are hairs on your head, and more blood flowing than the water in the canal."

He, too, has much to remark upon the army system, upon the immense organization for the "massacre of Europe." As some of the wounded are waiting to be sent on, food is given them. They see the hungry glances of the German prisoners near by.

Said one of the men to the cook:

"Hang it all! Why not give them a piece of bully-beef?"

"Do you know them?' said the cook jocularly.

"Do I know them! The poor devils! We have been punching each other the whole blessed day. Chuck them a piece of meat. Why not?"

In another corner of this evacuation tent were the terribly wounded. The author describes the agony that seemed unbearable, the eternity of time of waiting, the awful spectacles, faces that were smashed by shells with nothing remaining but a "twisted displaced eye—a forehead—"a humble peasant forehead."

With such suffering sights he contrasts the gay life of the people in the great cities, enjoying themselves "in the cafés, drawing-rooms, brothels, while these quivering human beings were sheltering them by such sacrifice."

(To be continued) [Page 163]

THE SOLE REMEDY FOR WAR

by LUCIA AMES MEAD Author and Lecturer

A DISTRAUGHT world, in which the richest nations have heavy deficits, and some are approaching bankruptcy, looks with grave anxiety to the meeting of the delegates of the nations at Geneva in February, 1932. If this Disarmament Conference, so long delayed since the disarmament of Germany, and certain to be one of the most momentous conferences of modern times, succeeds in cutting down fifty percent the outgo for war preparations, which is more than we dare hope, it will bring the world back only to the armament status of 1913. It would be a step, but a tremendous step towards reducing colossal waste, lessening tension and anxiety and forestalling the internal revolutions which threaten when 20,000,000 unemployed are hungry and in dispair.

The bankers at Basle, the professors at Williamstown and the three premiers whom we heard at the great Albert Hall meeting in London in July, declaim one message. The solution of appalling economic problems depends largely on the previous solution of certain political problems. Why is the world poor in the midst of plenty? It is chiefly because of lack of foresight, national conceit and stubbornness and fear. In all this we Americans have great responsibility. We refuse to help build up a community fire-department before fire breaks out. We wait to see the blaze before pledging ourselves to any action. We have been willing to take the risks of war, but shudder at any risks for peace. We talk about our being the most peaceful people in the world, but we are doing problably more than any other to delay adequate world organization which is the sole remedy for war. The dangerous old fallacy that war is [Page 164]rooted in human nature, that it always has been and always will continue until the millennium, is the presupposition of most of the doctrine taught in military schools and in public schools and colleges where over 1700 army instructors are indoctrinating about 150,or o students. These never learn of the sole remedy for war. They rely on armed force to keep the peace. What is the genesis of war?

When the primitive man with the Neanderthal skull and his few scattered contemporaries in the woods and caves began progress toward civilization, he was handicapped and has always been handicapped by three obstacles--Ignorance, Poverty and Selfishness. These are, in the days of the radio and aeroplane, still man's chief obstacles and will remain so for centuries to come. There are still a thousand million illiterates in a world of seventeen hundred million people. There are millions starving and hundreds of thousands now dying of famine. Yet there is now intelligence enough in the world to wipe out illiteracy and poverty within a generation or two were it not that mankind is still spending billions of dollars annually for war preparations and has made such a hole in the world's wealth by the World War that progress, moral and financial, has had an unnecessary and frightful set-back.

War was unknown to the caveman, though doubtless he occasionally clubbed his neighbor with spasmodic wrath, one with whom he usually had to unite in the fierce struggle for life in an environment full of danger from wild beasts, accident and hunger It was countless ages before prehistoric man was capable of waging war. He had first to invent language, thereby showing his infinite supremacy to creatures that inherited barks and squeals and grunts and never rise to the creation of a symbol that is a universal sign of an idea. "Man is a symbol-making animal," said Aristotle. Man's invention of language was the greatest invention ever made. Subsequently, he clumsily wrought implements and finally crude weapons. He slowly learned to organize, but it was countless ages before he made possible collective, organized slaughter of two opposing bodies of human beings. Conscription and war, as we know it, is a very modern thing. Primitive man saw few enemics: [Page 165]

THE SOLE REMEDY FOR WAR

he could travel only as far as his feet could carry him; he had no private property in land; mutual aid, as Kropotkin showed, was an important element in his progress. War has always been childish and almost futile, though inevitable among childish thinkers. Today it is insanity in an interdependent world and the threat and fear of it undermine all the constructive work that man performs. War is alien to the beasts; they fight only to get food. Man is the only animal who deliberately destroys his own species in collective action. No pack of wolves goes out to slay another pack of wolves, nor do lions and tigers destroy their own species. Man's wars have become more widespread, more costly and terrible as his knowledge of science has grown. He has with the utmost misconception of his own interest imagined that he could create security by rival armies. Today, however, no nation dares apologize for aggressive war and it always claims that its wars are purely for defence.

President Hoover has recently assured us that we are spending more for military purposes than any other nation. This is $802,000,000 as our latest estimate for a year, as compared with $80,000,000 in 1926, since when we have had no increase of danger. We are the safest nation in the world, the only one protected by two oceans; contrast this with Great Britain within gunshot of the continent and having, with her imperial possessions, twice our Coast line to protect. No nation has ever declared war against us. in all our five foreign wars, beginning with the Revolution and including the World War, we lost fewer than 75,000 in battle though in the last war alone, ten million of the strongest and ablest young men of Europe were burned, and bombed, and blown to pieces and twice as many more were starved and crippled. We have lost in battle fewer than we have had murdered in the last ten years! Our "defence" is grossly excessive compared with our danger.

How is the "next war," for which the nations are so vigorously preparing, to be side-tracked? The Legion and the War Department have demanded a universal draft law which, even before war begins, would put the powers of a dictator into the hands of the President. They proposed to have him draft labor, industry, mines, [Page 166]railroads, to control banks and regulate prices; but as former Commander Safford of the Legion said, "We cannot draft capital, as that would be against the Constitution and would make us the United States of Soviet America." The Grundy-Snell Resolution which provided a commission to study the question and report in January 1932 passed both House and Senate; this does not permit conscription of labor, much to the regret of the Army and Navy Journal which declares that the exemption of any one class is in violation of the preamble of the Constitution.

We, with about sixty other nations, have solemnly renounced war as a national policy and pledged ourselves to seek only pacific means of settlement of every international dispute. But the army and navy and munition workers, serenely ignoring this, have been working night and day for more armaments and more contracts. The London Naval Parley of 1930 brought a little limitation but no reduction of armaments. Our delegates stressed parity of tonnage instead of parity of security. If we now build up to the permitted parity, which is wholly needless, it will inevitably incite the other nations to increase their forces.

What is the practical American to do in the present ominous situation? He must certainly use swifter and stronger methods than simply trying to remove racial and religious prejudices, rivalry between capital and labor and those internal frictions which will occur for an indefinite future. World War will annihilate civilization if we merely wait for educative and religious influences to abolish the war system. Naturally we must continue to have Leagues of Neighbors, and World Religious conferences; but until more speedy and drastic action is attempted, civilization is in peril.

There has been much ineffective talk about brotherly love, relegating it to some far-off day for the end of war. It confounds disputes with war. Disputes, racial, financial, religious, and national will break out for an indefinite time; but disputes are not war. Our problem is to settle these disputes when they arise even more than to prevent their arising. Shall it be by conciliation or judicial decision, or shall it be by explosives destroying conscripts who on both sides are irresponsible and innocent? [Page 167]

THE SOLE REMEDY FOR WAR

The chief refutation of the popular notion that we must wait for religion and goodwill to control, before we end the systematic cutting of each other’s throats, is our own Constitution and history. When, in 1787, Washington, Franklin and Madison, and their colleagues in the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia faced the problem of thirteen quarrelsome colonies, on the verge of disintegration, they wasted no time in going up and down the land preaching brotherly love and imploring people to obey the Golden Rule. Their genius worked out effective practical methods which have prevented any war ever occurring between one state and another state despite the fact that within each state we have had, all told, the worst record for homicide and crime. Around the border line of each state we have had peace with justice. This came from adequate organization which we must reiterate is the sole remedy for war between nations as we have found it to be between states. Unwittingly the framers of the Constitution not only solved their own problem but worked out the method that the world must follow if it achieves peace with security. They made it easy to do right; to have disputes settled between states without bloodshed. They asked each state to surrender a little of its former sovereignty and to leave to the national government interstate matters. They set up the Supreme Court which since then has settled about 90 interstate disputes, without which we should have had many little wars and broken into fragments. They asked New York to surrender the obnoxious tariff which made her neighbors irritated and wrathy.

Free trade from the Atlantic to the Pacific has done far more to promote the sense of goodwill than all the preaching we have ever had about brotherly love. Our three great, practical, outstanding achievements to promote interstate peace show what the world must do for international peace. We must extend the application of our own teaching, willing to surrender our isolation and to pledge ourselves, not only to pay our little quota to the World Court but, as the other great states are doing, to refer every legal case at issue to it. We should join the League of Nations. [Page 168]Had adequate political machinery been ready, the World War could have been prevented. The peoples did not want war. When years ago, Pastor Wagner of France in an American pulpit placed his hand on his heart and said "War is here," he spoke less than a half-truth. War does not come from blood-lust or sheer deviltry. It comes from the presence of a disorganized society.

Many peace advocates inveigh against "artificial measures." They distrust "political machinery." True, mere paper contracts are worthless, and it is only public consent which makes our Constitution valid. In like manner, we must put aroused public sentiment behind the Disarmament Conference, League of Nations, the Locarno, Briand-Kellogg and other treaties and expedite further legal measures to outlaw war and bring sense of security. The world has gone two-thirds of the way toward world peace; but without drastic cut in armaments, which will come solely from an informed and earnest public, can we complete world-organization so that it is adequate to prevent another world catastrophe?

Admirals and generals, highly trained and sincere technicians in the art and science of war, too often conjure up fantastic bugaboos of danger. They are not statesmen. Charles E. Hughes—who is a statesman—has said: "So far as we can see into the future, the United States is not in the slightest danger of aggression. In no single power and in no possible combination of powers lies any menace to our security." [Page 169]

WORLD CITIZENSHIP AND ALLEGIANCE

by CARL A. ROSS Attorney (Concluded)

Let us go back a bit. War (as distinguished from Revolution) surely involves an armed conflict between two sovereign States and if they are republics, the collective body of the citizens (many of them soldiers) are equally sovereign citizens no matter whether they belong to one side or to the other, and the League type of super-state, where the "sovereign nations" retain their full "sovereignty," involves no change either in sovereignty or in allegiance, the "enemy" and the "patriot" are both equally sovereign citizens, but they owe a conflicting allegiance which the League does not correct. World Citizenship on the other hand overcomes this conflicting allegiance by creating a super-state in exterritorial matters to which "enemy" citizen-soldiers and "patriot" citizen-soldiers like owe a common allegiance, but this involves no change or loss of sovereignty on the part of the citizen-soldiers whether classed as "enemy" or "patriot." In their collective capacity these citizen-soldiers were sovereign before and they retain all their sovereignty under World Citizenship, they have merely changed their allegiance, or, better still, been given a new allegiance. Under the League method they owed allegiance in both domestic and exterritorial matters to their nation, while under the world citizenship method they (patriot and enemy alike) still owe allegiance in domestic matters to their respective nation but in exterritorial matters, patriot and enemy alike, have changed or transferred their allegiance to the World Union. We all know that American citizens were just as "sovereign" after they adopted our constitution as they were before, when they owed allegiance to their respective state only. [Page 170]and the Federalist shows the futility and folly of trying to preserve the "sovereignty" of nations under the League type of super-state or Union.

"The adversaries of the plan of the convention, instead of considering in the first place what degree of power was absolutely necessary for the purposes of the federal government, have exhausted themselves in a secondary inquiry into the possible consequences of the proposed degree of power to the governments of the particular States. But if the Union be essential to the security of the people of America against foreign danger; if it be essential to their security against contentions and wars among the different States; if it be essential to guard them against these violent and oppressive factions which embitter the blessings of liberty, and against those military establishments which must gradually poison its very fountain; if, in a word, the Union be essential to the happiness of the people of America, is it not preposterous, to urge as an objection to a government, without which the objects of the Union cannot be attained, that such a government may derogate from the importance of the governments of the individual States? Was, then, the American Revolution effected, was the American Confederacy formed, was the precious blood of thousands spilt, and the hard earned substance of millions lavished, not that the people of America shouid enjoy peace, liberty, and safety, but that the government of the individual States, that those particular municipal establishments, might enjoy a certain extent of power, and be arrayed with certain dignities and attributes of sovereignty? We have heard of the impious doctrine in the Old World, that the people were made for kings, not kings for the people. Is the same doctrine to be revived in the New, in another shape-that the solid happiness of the people is to be sacrificed to the views of political institutions of a different form? It is too early for politicians to presume on our forgetting that the public good, the real welfare of the great body of the people, is the supreme object to be pursued; and that no form [Page 171]

WORLD CITIZENSHIP AND ALLEGIANCE

of government whatever has any other value than as it may be fitted for the attainment of this object."

American statesmen have not had practice in framing governments, they have not drafted or remodeled the constitutions of thirteen States as our colonial forefathers did shortly before 1789. Sovereignty was one of the basic questions of our Revolutionary War and sovereignty was sought and prized for the thirteen State constitutions. On the other hand, sovereignty was not a direct issue in our World War and at Versailles sovereignty was ignominiously dodged. While Americans in recent years have had little approach to the problem of sovereignty, the new European Republics have all adopted the parliamentary form where sovereignty resides in their supreme legislative body and not in the people. So far as we know, the federal form with a dual allegiance has never been discussed for any of these republics. Great Britain, likewise, in recent years has stuck to her admirable parliamentary system in all the readjustments with her colonies. Thus Bryce's Federal system or World Citizenship has been forgotten; it has never been discussed pro and con in our peace literature since the World War. The result of this blindness to the possibilities of a dual citizenship, and a dual allegiance, based on the distinction between a sovereign parliament and a sovereign citizenry, is well illustrated in the following extracts from such a prominent writer and brilliant thinker as Henry Brailsford.

"It is obvious that any weakening of the absolute sovereignty of the national state demands, not merely great changes in popular feeling, but also general changes in the military and economic structure of the world, which will deprive this proud sentiment of nationalism of the plausible basis in rational calculation to which it can appeal at present. As commonly happens in matters of great moment and complexity, we are turning in a circle. The world will not be safe from war till it has authority which can decree the timely changes which the movement and growth of living and energetic peoples require. To these decrees, the sovereign state will never submit so long as its safety depends on its own armaments, and its prosperity upon the markets which it can monopolize for [Page 172]its own use. Yet in their turn, disarmament and the abolition of national barriers to trade seem to require a powerful international authority, which can first foster, and then in the last resort, impose them.

"The fundamental question is the issue which has confronted us at every turn of this argument. The national state must consent to sacrifice its absolute sovereignty, if the world is ever to enjoy absolute peace with security. It can prove its sincerity only by disarming, but it would be folly to disarm without a binding and general pledge to arbitrate. Disarmament cannot be treated as an isolated and technical matter. It will baffle us, until we find for the Great Society its appropriate constitutional form."

These quotations, to our thinking, correctly summarize the world attitude today; that we are all seeking to build the New Peace, the Great Society, out of our present governments without any surrender of sovereignty on the part of our nations, and it is a road leading to a blind alley. Even though our present nations are not equally sovereign, those less sovereign seem as little inclined to yield their sovereignty as those large nations enjoying full sovereignty. Is not this our thought? Are we not being led to believe that sovereignty cannot be divided? But, provided we can get away from the parliamentary type of government, the parliamentary type of sovereignty, how simple it is to divide sovereignty by dividing allegiance. Must the world remain a slave to the parliamentary or any other "system" of government? Must we perpetuate the impious doctrine of the Old World, that the people were made for kings" in its current form, that the people were made to perpetuate a single parliament, a kingly, supreme parliament? As we read extracts from Bryce the sentimental objections to a divided or multiple allegiance must dissolve.

"The American Federal Republic is not a mere league, for it does not wholly depend on the component communities which we will call the States. It is itself a commonwealth as well as a union of commonwealths, because it claims directly the obedience of every citizen, and acts immediately upon him through its courts and executive officers. Still less are its minor communities, the [Page 173]States, mere subdivisions of the Union, mere creatures of the national government, like the counties of England or the departments of France. They have over their citizens an authority which is their own, and not delegated by the central government. They have not been called into being by that government. They—that is, the older ones among them—existed before it. They could exist without it.

"No State can, as a commonwealth, politically deal with or act upon any other State. No diplomatic relations can exist nor treaties be made between States, no coercion can be exercised by one upon another. And although the government of the Union can act on a State, it rarely does act, and then only in certain strictly limited directions, which do not touch the inner political life of the commonwealth.

"A State commands the allegiance of its citizens, and may punish them for treason against it. The power has rarely been exercised, but its undoubted legal existence had much to do with inducing citizens of the Southern States to follow their governments into secession in 1861. They conceived themselves to owe allegiance to the State as well as to the Union, and when it became impossible to preserve both, because the State had declared its secession from the Union, they might hold the earlier and nearer authority to be paramount. Allegiance to the State must now, since the war, be taken to be subordinate to allegiance to the Union. But allegiance to the State still exists; treason against the State is still possible. One cannot think of treason against Warwickshire or the department of the Rhone."

The League Covenant assumes to guarantee the territorial integrity and existing political independence of each member. But what is to happen when a nation wanders off into the field of exterritoriality, when a nation claims the right to impose its will on other peoples through mandates and "spheres of influence," when it maintains, through doctrines of "international law" and "the comity of nations" that the League should guarantee its "economic penetration," its "vested interests" in foreign lands? In such cases where is there any yardstick to measure by? You say the Covenant of the League should be accepted as a yardstick? But who is to [Page 174]apply it for you a citizen of the United States, who is to apply it for you a citizen of England, of France, a citizen of any other country? Have you as a citizen of the United States, given your allegiance. consented to the League Covenant as your yardstick, as the "supreme law of your land," superior to your United States constitution? Have you given allegiance, consented that any power superior to the United States Supreme Court should interpret your obligations under such conditions? Has an Englishman, a Frenchman or any other national given a like consent by way of an allegiance? The Covenant itself claims no allegiance, rather it confesses the supremacy of each nation and under such circumstances any such consent is logically impossible. The Federalist shows that any such consent by any national would invert all orderly processes of government under our constitution, and the same result would follow for every nation retaining the allegiance of its citizens.

"This Constitution and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof, and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land, and the judges in every State shall be bound thereby, anything in the constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.

"The indiscreet zeal of the adversaries to the Constitution has betrayed them into an attack on this part of it also, without which it would have been evidently and radically defective. To be fully sensible of this, we need only suppose for a moment that the supremacy of the State constitutions had been left complete by a saving clause in their favor.

"In the first place, as these constitutions invest the State legislatures with absolute sovereignty, in all cases not excepted by the existing articles of Confederation, all the authorities contained in the proposed Constitution, so far as they exceed those enumerated in the Confederation, would have been annulled, and the new Congress would have been reduced to the same impotent condition with their predecessors.

"In the next place, as the constitutions of some of the States do not even expressly and fully recognize the existing powers of [Page 175]the Confederacy, an express saving of the supremacy of the former would, in such States, have brought into question every power contained in the proposed Constitution.

"In the third place, as the constitutions of the States differ much from each other, it might happen that a treaty or national law, of great and equal importance to the States, would interfere with some and not with other constitutions, and would consequently be valid in some of the States, and at the same time that it would have no effect in others.

"In fine, the world would have seen, for the first time, a system of government founded on an inversion of the fundamental principles of all government; it would have seen the authority of the whole society everywhere subordinate to the authority of the parts; it would have seen a monster, in which the head was under the direction of the members."

Just where does the League advocate stand on this matter of sovereignty and allegiance? Is it not true that nearly all Peace advocates take it for granted that the nations will retain their full sovereignty under whatever institution is finally adopted for the new Great Society? But do they realize that in this event the League would be the "monster, in which the head was under the direction of the members"? The member nations would retain the allegiance of their respective citizens while the League or new Great Society would have the allegiance of no citizen. Sovereignty and the power resulting therefrom is based on allegiance and would perforce remain with the member nations; the tail, the foot, the ear and other members would all be trying to wag the dog, it would cause less confusion if only the tail were trying to wag the dog, but when the car, the foot and the other members endeavor to wag the dog, we have our present international confusion.

We may be doing injustice to the leaders of the League and other peace movements, because some of their advanced thinkers have abandoned this extreme position, realizing that the League and other peace institutions to be effective must "have sovereignty." One prominent League official recently wrote to the effect that the League was like a ten year old boy and could not be expected to [Page 176]have attained full strength, that it would have to educate public opinion to the point that when some emergency arose, public opinion would force the nations to surrender a little sovereignty here and later in some other crisis a little sovereignty there till the League (like the English Constitution), in the course of many years would have acquired such authority that no nation would dare oppose it. That is, the monster would no longer be under the direction of its members, neither the tail, nor the ear nor the foot or any other member would wag the dog. This may be granted, but the implications back of this position are startling and exactly contrary to the hypothesis held by the majority, that nations will not surrender their sovereignty. Contrary because when the League has acquired such authority it must have acquired the allegiance of all the world's citizens and the nations respectively must have lost this allegiance and with it their sovereignty. This is the blind alley, the stalemate, Henry Brailsford and others encounter.

Can there be an alternative? Is there any way the nations can retain a part of their sovereignty? This leads us back to our beginning, can nations have or possess sovereignty? However this may be, nations can have the allegiance of their citizens and thus exercise sovereignty. If anyone thinks these issues are out of date, we have only to refer them to the current Australian election, where the central government is asking the people to give up their allegiance to their respective States and grant complete sovereign powers to it, the central Parliament. It is also to the front in Spain, where the new Constitution expressly yields up national sovereignty in the crucial right of declaring war.

Why cannot the Covenant of the League be revised or made over to do the same thing? Would not the League advocate be willing to divide his allegiance between the League and his fatherland so that the Council and Assembly of the League (having the allegiance of all world citizens in matters exterritorial) can exercise sovereignty in world affairs and the respective fatherlands (having the allegiance of all nationals respectively in all other matters of a domestic nature) can continue to exercise their full sovereignty in such domestic matters? Would not this tend strongly [Page 177]to bring harmony out of our present chaos, would it not tend to a united control of all backwards peoples, would it not make possible a single monetary standard and currency, would it not make feasible a refunding of all national war debts on a much lower interest basis and a resulting appreciation in the market value of billions of these public securities now largely held by investors in the United States, would it not establish a common allegiance so that the nations could disarm with security and reduce the world's armament to such forces as would be necessary for the New Great Society to maintain domestic tranquility? After the citizens of the thirteen States swore allegiance to the United States, did Massachusetts or any other State continue to maintain an army or navy? Was it not this common allegiance that established the power of the United States to tax, to impose import and excise duties, and to refund the war debt of the Continental Congress and the separate war debt of each of the thirteen States and thus establish public credit, restore confidence and private credit and start this country on its rapid expansion? Today without releasing the nations from their present burden of armaments and without freeing them from the accumulated debts of past wars, how can public credit be reestablished so that national bonds that are now selling on a 10% plus basis will appreciate in value till our investors are relieved of their "frozen assets?" Neither national or international bankers, nor our strongest national governments can longer maintain the national credit of the nations of the world. Our depression shows that the situation has got beyond them, but unless public credit is shortly established in some way, what will we face? The United States holding the bag of the world's public securities will soon have to liquidate billions of bonds many of which are now off 80% in par value, these high grade, "triple A" bonds suitable for trustees of trust funds, for Savings Banks and other banks, for Life Insurance Companies, how are they to be listed in annual statements this year? It is commonly reported that our government authorities will permit these bonds to be listed in annual reports at par or at cost and no one can doubt the wisdom of such an emergency measure, but there is a time limit for thus supporting the [Page 178]credit of these securities and within that time limit the public credit of those nations must be restored. The day is all too soon coming when the law of economics will sound the trumpet. Repudiation has gone far enough, after the world has absorbed over one hundred billion of repudiated paper since 1918, is it any wonder the people are so poor that another like amount of government paper is selling on market to yield over ten percent annually? If this new batch of paper is to be repudiated, what will be the status of credit? You say this is an alarmist view of the situation, that we have had panics and depressions in 1837, 1841, 1857, 1873, 1893 and many lesser flurries, but prosperity closely followed every one. Our depression in 1780 to 1789, was much like our present panic and prosperity followed 1789 too, but it did not come till our public credit was established through the adoption of our dual allegiance.

(Concluded) [Page 179]

WHY EAST AND WEST ARE DIFFERENT

by GROVER CLARK Consultant on Far Eastern Afairs (Continued)

HUS among the hunters the single person had a vastly greater importance than among the farmers—and instead of being held down to rigid conformity and specialization by the competition of numbers, he was encouraged in every way to develop his individual initiative and his particular capacities.

VI

Among the farmers, moreover, the balance of power definitely was with the group as against the single person.

In the thickly-settled agricultural regions, the tendency necessarily was strong for any group which controlled any means of livelihood to hold on to what it had and to resist any effort by outsiders to get a share in that particular source of food or of means of getting food. This is obvious in the case of family holdings of farm land. It applies equally in the case of the possession of some special skill or technique, or of the right to carry on some special occupation. Hence the development of strong craft guilds, merchants’ guilds, etc.—even of beggars’ guilds each with its own special skill or right which was most jealously guarded from outsiders.

Outsiders could get into one of these groups only with much difficulty, except by birth or through a long apprenticeship in the guilds, or by marriage—except, that is, by some means which involved other factors than the desire of the one seeking entrance. Moreover, virtually all the possible means of livelihood were preempted by the several groups.

Thus as long as a man stayed within his own group, he was at least sure of a living unless the group as a whole perished. But if [Page 180]he were thrown out of his own group, his chances of finding a place in some other, and hence of being able to get a living, were small indeed. (Even the beggars' guilds in China make things very uncomfortable for "scab" competitors.)

The result was that the group as such could insist on absolute obedience and conformity from all its members. A refusal to conform meant in the end being driven from the group. That meant death-actual or social.

The group, furthermore, was eminently justified in insisting on conformity. To function effectively-i.e. to insure the welfare of its own members-the internal machinery of the group must run smoothly. Intransigence on the part of any member interfered with that smooth running. Hence the non-conformist, the rebel, the man who wanted to do things his own way, was a constant menace to the group in its perpetual and strenuous competition with other groups. The individualist was socially a menace.

In agricultural lands, therefore, the group for its own preservation and for the sake of the majority of its members, of necessity insisted on conformity-and the individual had to buy his right to live by conforming.

One direct result was that, generation after generation, those with individualistic, non-conformist temperaments were weeded out, and the exceptional social rewards, including the opportunities to share in perpetuating the breed, went to those who obeyed the rules-because these were the socially most useful.

In the circumstances, the astonishing thing is not that today conformity is so much the rule in countries like China and India and Egypt, but that there still should be any inclination to individual initiative and freedom of thought. In spite of the long-continued pressure of the environment in agricultural lands to produce communities on the order of those of bees and ants, at fairly frequent intervals men still appear in these lands with the inclination, determination and ability to break away from tradition.

Among the hunting peoples, by contrast, the balance of power was with the individual rather than with the group.

In regions where the people live by hunting, it was impossible [Page 181]

WHY EAST AND WEST ARE DIFFERENT

to pre-empt all the means of getting food. No matter how jealously a hunting group might guard its territory, a skillful single hunter always could get something to eat. If such a man were ousted from his own group, he might for a short time lack some of the comforts and conveniences of group life. But he need not starve-and if he had anything more than the most ordinary capacity, he soon could find a place for himself in some other group or as the leader of a new group. (Witness, for example, the way lone Vikings moved from group to group.)

Furthermore, just because the groups were small, the forcible expulsion of any member was a very serious matter, to be undertaken only in extreme cases-and the more capable the man in question, the greater the hesitation about expelling him. Independence, failure to conform, all manner of faults would be overlooked for the sake of keeping among the food producers and fighters some especially able individual.

Among the hunters, too, a man's social usefulness-hence his position in his own group and his ability to gain admission to another group-depended chiefly on his personal qualities and not on such extrinsic things as wealth. The most useful man was the good hunter, the good fighter, the good adviser, the man who could devise new tools and new strategies. If he had these capacities, leadership and all that went with it were his; if not he could not acquire wealth or keep it if he did get it.

This point-that a man's value depended not on what he had but on what he could do is of more than passing significance in connection with later developments of the western conception of the value of the individual as such and apart from trappings of wealth or rank.

Yet the very qualities which made a man socially most valuable among the hunters were precisely those which would make a non-conformist, a rebel, one who insisted on doing and thinking as he pleased. The strong or cunning hunter or fighter, the imaginative man who could invent new things or methods-these were not the sort to sit down meekly and do what they were told. In times of emergency they might obey a leader whom they themselves had [Page 182]chosen, but that obedience was voluntarily chosen and for a time of crisis, and that leadership rested on and could be maintained only by superiority in precisely these individualistic qualities. Thus because the hunter groups were small, and therefore were compelled to hold on to all the effective members possible, and because the alternative to group membership was at worst little more than temporary inconvenience, the balance of power was with the individual, not with the group. The group, that is, had to buy the allegiance of the individual by giving him a large measure of freedom.

Moreover, generation after generation the special rewards, including the special opportunities to share in the continuation of the race, went to the individualistic non-conformist. The men who lacked initiative, who was simply "one of the herd," as steadily was weeded out.

Gentleness in social intercourse, careful consideration for the social amenities, refinement in culture, smooth civilization—these were not among the normal productions of the conditions under which the hunters lived, nor of the constant emphasis on the aggressive non-conformist as the socially most useful person. But these conditions and this emphasis did produce a type of people who had energy and inventiveness, who struggled determinedly to get what they wanted instead of passively accepting fate.

Thus another fundamental difference between East and West becomes apparent: In the East, men strive to change their desires to fit their environment; in the West, to change their environment to fit their desires.

VII

From virtually every field of human activity and thought, one might cite illustrations of the consequences, in developing civilizations, of the fundamental differences in the conditions under which the agriculturalists and the hunters lived. A few such illustrations must suffice. The field of religion offers a particularly striking one.

When Buddha preached, he laid great emphasis on the exclusive importance of individual effort in achieving the ultimate goal. One sought to free one's self from the Wheel of Life, but in [Page 183]

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this striving no other being, human or divine, could help or hinder. One several occasions Buddha very emphatically repudiated the suggestion that even he could help his disciples—"I show you the Way," he said; not "I am the Way."

Buddha belonged to the ruling military class, the descendants of barbarian hunting hordes who had swept down into India a short time before and still were far from absorbed into the agricultural life of the land they conquered. His emphasis on the individual, his complete repudiation of the idea of vicarious salvation these were quite typically products of this hunting-people inheritance.

But even at that time India was primarily agricultural. This sort of teaching did not meet the needs or the desires of the people generally. Hence it was natural enough that, a couple of centuries after Buddha's death and when the direction of the development of Buddhism had passed out of the hands of his own class, the Buddhist leaders should have radically revised the teaching. Mahayana Buddhism came into being, with its teaching that individual effort was nothing and faith all, in the attainment of Nirvana. One could not reach the Goal, salvation was impossible, through one's own efforts alone, these leaders taught; belief in the efficacy of Buddha's aid, to be won by the performance of stated rites, and not individual striving, was essential to securing release from the Wheel of Life.

This was a complete reversal of Buddha's own emphatic statements. But the change was inevitable if Buddhism were to secure and hold a place among a predominantly agricultural people for whom the single person as such was of little value and had little power—who had been in subjection so long that they had lost confidence even in themselves. Thus changed, Buddhism in the Mahayana form spread through the East, though ousted from India itself by doctrines which taught even more complete subservience of the single person. The Hinayana doctrine, closer to Buddha's own teaching on this point, had been able to retain only a precarious foothold in small areas, and even this only by partial acceptance of the vicarious salvation concept. [Page 184]The development of Christianity shows a striking reversal of this process.

There is room for difference of opinion as to Christ's own views on vicarious salvation. But whatever he may have taught, Christianity as an organized religion from the days of Paul onward for many centuries made Christ as the Redeemer, the vicariously sacrificed Savior, the very cornerstone of the doctrine. Men were saved by faith, not by works. Individual effort toward a better life counted for naught apart from acceptance of the vicarious salvation offered through Christ.

The Greeks, three hundred years earlier, and the earlier Romans following in their footsteps, had put the emphasis in their religion and philosophy where Buddha put it—on individual effort in achieving the Good. But the Greek and Roman civilizations had achieved their best and most creative expressions while the dynamic, driving energy which the barbarian invading hordes from the North had brought still was unexhausted. By the time that Paul began re-shaping Christian teachings to fit the needs of the masses, and spreading these teachings through the Mediterranean world, the hunteresque influences in Greece and Rome had practically disappeared—as they had disappeared in India when Mahayana Buddhism started its triumphant career. The Mediterranean civilization, by Paul's time, had become almost completely agricultural—the land swarmed with people, despotically ruled.

Socrates and Buddha would have understood each other, and have delighted in sharing a fundamentally similar point of view. But Paul would have found no place of fellowship with these two, even though he understood the common people of his own times so well, and with such consummate skill laid the foundations of a religious structure so perfectly suited to their needs.

What followed was to have been expected. The Catholic Church developed as the supreme Christian institution—and in that development paralleled the typically autocratic political institutions not of Rome only but of all agricultural countries.

Enough of the hunter influence remained to keep from becoming completely dominant such a conception as appeared in Maha [Page 185]

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vana Buddhism—that of the desirability of the final utter disappearance of individuality—though certain sects did teach virtually this. But as long as Christianity remained in the Mediterranean basin and South Europe—i.e. in primarily agricultural countries—the individual, even the greatest of earthly individuals, though God might be concerned over his soul, was as the dust of the earth in comparison with Christ, in theory; and salvation could be achieved only vicariously through Christ, whose exclusive agent on earth was the Catholic Church.

New conceptions were introduced into Christianity when, toward the end of the Middle Ages, the North Europeans secured a voice in shaping Christian doctrines and institutions. These put increasing emphasis upon the rights and freedom of the individual. Luther and the Protestant movement, insisting that men should deal with God directly instead of through the Catholic Church, simply gave expression in this field to the long-established conceptions of the hunters that individuals should share more or less as equals in group discussions and decisions, instead of taking orders from some superior authority.

Further development of North European influence in Christianity brought further changes, in the direction of asserting individual freedom. The story is a long one. Suffice it to point out that, within the past half century or so, this typically hunteresque emphasis on the right of the individual to decide for himself has gone so far with many Christian thinkers and adherents that the whole vicarious salvation concept has been virtually repudiated. Much more is said, these days, of the necessity of living rightly than of accepting this or that creedal statement. Deathbed repentances no longer are considered adequate guarantee of admission to Heaven, and still less adequate atonement for lives ill-spent. Christ is becoming more and more the Great Example rather than the Redeemer.

Fundamentalists still are with us. So is the Catholic Church. They will continue. But it is significant that less than a century ago it was not respectable to be anything but a Fundamentalist or a Catholic. Now religious adherence of any sort no longer is an essential condition of respectability. [Page 186]Buddhism, in brief, began by emphasizing the unique importance of individual effort—and ended by repudiating it. Christianity reversed the process. Buddhism started as the teaching of a member of a typical semi-civilized hunting group, and reversed itself when it passed into the hands of typical agriculturalists. Christianity began at the hands of that religious statesman Paul, with vicarious salvation, continued to deny effective significance to individual action as long as it remained in agricultural lands, and progressively reversed itself by emphasizing individual freedom and significance as it came under the leadership of peoples closer to their hunting ancestors.

The determining factor in the development of these two pre-eminent religions, that is, has been not the teachings of the founder but the ways of life and thought of the people among whom they spread. This is as it should be, for unless a religion can meet the needs and satisfy the desires of the people, it can make no contribution to the betterment or happiness of their lives,—and therefore is valueless.

(To be continued) [Page 187]

THE VALUE OF SCIENCE

by JOHN HERMAN RANDALL, JR. Department of Philosophy, Columbia University

R. Bertrand Russell has written another pot-boiler, The Scientific Outlook, (the phrase is his own, or at least his publicity agent's, and describes not unaptly most of his recent production) while Professor John Dewey has collected a number of articles and addresses under the title of the first article, Philosophy and Civilization. The most widely known philosophers of England and of America, respectively, address themselves to a common problem: how is science with its immense potentialities as a servant of human living to be kept from turning master? What is the value and what are the limitations of science in our civilization? What can science do, and how can we make it do what we want it to? And the outcome in both cases is the conviction of the need for a new moral outlook and a conscious program.

Mr. Russell to be sure, is hardly the man to write wisely on the scientific outlook and the meaning of science. He has, of course, kept abreast of the latest ideas in physics, and to judge from this book he is an assiduous reader of Nature, that useful British periodical which has unfortunately no American counterpart. Unlike most of the physicists who have of late discovered the prestige of the rôle of scientific preacher, he has made an earnest effort to familiarize himself with present-day psychology. Yet it is doubtful whether Mr. Russell himself possesses to any marked degree the scientific temper of mind. Presumably when one sets out to write a popular book-a pot-boiler, for instance there is much to be

-Bertrand Russell, The Scientific Outlook. Norton and Co. 277 pp. $3.00. 2-John Dewey, Philosophy and Civilization. Minton, Balch and Co. viii, 334 pp. $5.00. [Page 188]said for sacrificing everything to an effective phrase. The modern reader loves to be shocked and excited, and his interest is directly proportional to the number of epigrams per page. Now the desire for literary fame and a shocking success is nowise incompatible with the utmost brilliance in the analysis of ideas, as the example of David Hume makes clear. But when one sees the argument galloping lightly over piles of inconvenient facts in its eagerness to capture the next wise-crack, one begins to wonder. We may be fascinated by the witty conversation of a man striving to shine over the coffee cups, and still doubt the appropriateness of the occasion or the method for conveying much sense of the scientific enterprise. It is difficult to illustrate in your own writing what you mean by the scientific outlook when your chief concern is to become the Jimmie Walker of philosophers.

But Mr. Russell's handicap unfortunately goes deeper than the strained cultivation of an irritating and provoking style. By training and temperament he is a mathematician, not a scientist; and the difference is profound. He has learned, that is, to follow out to the bitter end the implications of any initial assumption, to see clearly the connections of ideas. He possesses an extraordinary degree of intellectual imagination, and no man in our time has explored so many possible worlds. But the mathematician has deliberately excluded from his realm all facts and all experience, while it is the essence of the scientist's enterprise to be ever mindful of the actual world, of the sheer weight of existence, of the compelling thereness of facts, making sport of all our systems and theories and logical schemes. One often doubts whether Mr. Russell has ever given a minute's consideration to a fact, or whether he is capable of learning anything from experience. Social programs and present tendencies projected into the future he treats as so many non-Euclidean geometries, as the proper field for the play of ideas and their dialectic elaboration. That they are deeply embedded in the tangle of human aspirations and activities never seems to occur to him.

In consequence, Mr. Russell can expose brilliantly the muddle and contradiction into which men get when they try to use ideas to organize their chaotic experience; for such a task logical acumen is [Page 189]

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sufficient. By far the best portion of his book consists of just such a devastating and merciless treatment of contemporary harmonizers of science and religion. They are left without a logical leg to stand on. But Mr. Russell can never tell when he ceases to be brilliant and becomes merely absurd, because absurdity is dispelled only by a sense of facts, and Mr. Russell is hardly at home with facts. All his popular writings, and indeed his whole philosophy of nature, are a curious mixture of clarity and silliness, and unfortunately he cannot distinguish the two parts. His readers can count upon finding him always interesting and suggestive, often perspicuous and clarifying, and never wise.

Mr. Russell starts from the assumption that since science has in its brief career already proved profoundly disruptive to Western society, it is destined to be still more explosive in the future. His work is an essay in prophesy. What would a culture be like in which science were completely dominant and unchecked by any other factor? In thus following out the implications of science as it exists today, he divides his task into three parts. What conception of the nature and scope of scientific knowledge will prevail? What increased power of manipulation will scientific technique make available? What changes in social life and institutions does scientific technique demand? In brief, his answers are: science will realize that it is not a form of knowledge at all, but a form of power; it will become, as Bacon phrased it, the power of effecting all things possible; and it will create a type of society in which every institution will be perfectly organized and every man perfectly miserable. Since each of these possibilities revolts Mr. Russell, he hopes that the progress of scientific power will be accompanied by something else, wisdom, or the right conception of the values and ends of life. Science is irrelevant to wisdom, and wisdom must come from elsewhere just where is not made clear.

Scientific method is simple for Mr. Russell; it consists in observation of facts and the inference to a general law governing those facts. Such a method of arriving at opinions is highly unnatural to man; indeed, it came into the world for the first time full-fledged with Galileo. Galileo climbed the Leaning Tower of [Page 190]Pisa and dropped two unequal weights. Since they reached the ground simultaneously, it was proved that Aristotle has been one of the greatest misfortunes of the human race. Because Galileo was so rash as to make sport of a theory of the nature of science advanced by the Pope—and shared, incidentally, by Mr. Russell—he was condemned by the Inquisition, with the result that no other Italian has since been a scientist or had a new idea. Galileo thus vindicated the spirit of induction against the spirit of deduction, and created the modern world.

This description of the Athene-like birth of science from the head of Galileo is an excellent proof of Mr. Russell’s contention that science is not knowledge but power. It is exceedingly effective; and every statement in the preceding paragraph is historically false. Consequently it is excellent science, and Mr. Russell’s whole treatment of the history of science is similarly scientific: Newton, Darwin, and Pavlov are made the occasion of equally witty remarks.

Since it is not possible, at this date, to say anything very new about scientific method, Mr. Russell does not bother to do so; he contents himself with repeating what is believed at Cambridge. All exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation. When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in infering that he is an inexact man. Mr. Russell also tells us the exact truth about many other things. All scientific laws rest upon induction, which, considered as a logical process, is open to doubt, and not capable of giving certainty. The reasons we invent explaining why induction is valid have no better claim than cocktails have to be included in the technique for the pursuit of knowledge. Moreover, when we see our friend Mr. Jones, it is certain that what we are really seeing is a succession of colored patches in our brains. To say that you see Jones is thus no more correct than it would be, if a ball bounced off a wall in your garden and hit you, to say that the wall had hit you. We do not, therefore, ever see what we think we see, and there is no reason to think that what we think we see exists, although it is a convenient hypothesis. It is really irrelevant to physics to inquire whether there are any other occurrences than those in our own brains. As a method of securing [Page 191]

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knowledge, consequently, science has grave limitations. The most that can be known, and that only on the most hopeful view, is that there are certain relations in the physical world which share certain abstract logical characteristics capable of mathematical expression with the relations that we know. But since scientific thought is essentially power-thought, whose purpose is to give power to its possessor, and since power is gained when causal laws are known, such abstractions are quite sufficient for the practice of scientific technique.

The faith that science can give any genuine knowledge about the world is thus at present in rapid decay. In science as elsewhere our age is increasingly substituting power for the older ideals. Science as the pursuit of power becomes increasingly triumphant, while science as the pursuit of truth is being killed by a scepticism which the skill of the men of science has generated. But instead of believing, with Russell, that the universe is all spots and jumps, without unity, without continuity, without coherence or orderliness or any of the other properties that governesses love; instead of recognizing that there is little but prejudice and habit to be said for the view that there is a world at all, physicists confronted with the decay of the scientific faith have turned to pre-scientific superstition, and have been abandoning logic for theology in shoals.

And why not, one is tempted to ask, if Mr. Russell's views as to the outcome of science as presumptive knowledge, of scientific metaphysics, are the only alternative? If the above paraphrase has suggested that Mr. Russell is fundamentally confused, that he is indeed heir to all the paradoxes and absurdities inherent in that view of science which began with Locke and has been supported by hard-headed British thinkers to this day, it has fulfilled its purpose. But he has brilliantly developed the implications of traditional British empiricism to their ultimate absurdum, and like Hume he has attained literary fame and a shocking success. He may rest content with his Credo quia absurdum.

Set a thief to catch a thief, we are told; Mr. Russell is at the same time unrivalled at exposing the logical confusion of others. His treatment of Eddington, Jeans, and the evolutionary theolo [Page 192]gians is a delight. The impression popularly held, especially among liberal ministers, that modern physics practically confirms the whole of Genesis, is hardly justified. Eddington and others for example, have attempted to rescue free will by appealing to our ignorance of the behavior of atoms—to Heisenberg's Principle of Indeterminacy, to be specific. In fact, Heisenberg only pointed out that we cannot ascertain the behavior of particles, not that they have no fixed behavior. It is very rash to erect a theological superstructure upon a piece of ignorance which may be only momentary, especially since it makes men hope new discoveries will not be made. More over, the study of men, as contrasted to that of electrons, has revealed increasingly the presence of unform laws. Finally, if nature is not subject to causal laws, no inference is possible; and hence patently the existence of God cannot be inferred. Eddington, to be sure, deduces religion from the fact that atoms do not obey the laws of mathematics, while Jeans deduces it from the fact that they do. Theologians have accepted both with equal enthusiasm. And what Gods they have been given! Grateful for small mercies, they do not seem to care much what sort of God the scientist gives them so long as he gives them one at all.

There is, indeed, no better reason to suppose that the world was caused by a Creator than to suppose it uncaused; either equally contradicts the causal laws we can observe. Is the Creator amenable to the laws of physics or is He not? If He is not, He cannot be inferred from physical phenomena, since no physical causal law can lead to him; if he is, we shall have to apply the second law of thermodynamics to Him and suppose that He too had to be created at some remote time.

Of the evolutionary theologians, like Lloyd Morgan, Mr. Russell demands evidence that evolution has been in accord with a Divine Purpose. If it has, we must reckon Nero a saint in comparison with the Author of that plan. But no evidence has been offered. Eddington and Jeans contradict each other, and both contradict the biological theologians, but all agree that science should abdicate before what is called the religious consciousness. This is the counsel of discouragement and loss of faith in science. The [Page 193]

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unyielding rationalist has a better faith than any of the timid seekers atter the childish comforts of a less adult age.

Mr. Russell offers no new arguments against the physicists turned theological apologists. He repeats the arguments made by Hume and Kant against all natural theology, all attempts to prove the dogmas of religion from the principles of physical science. Those arguments have never been refuted, and they are as valid against Jeans and Eddington as against the Paleys of a century ago. For one who understands them, they are irrefutable.

In the third section of his book Mr. Russell attempts to do in modern terms what Plato did in the Republic, to examine what a society would be that had been created deliberately with a certain structure so that every institution should be scientifically organized and guided by the best scientific technique. Plato called his society the perfectly just state, while Mr. Russell calls his the scientific society; but both mean the same thing: a society in which scientific organization has been made supreme, and all else sacrificed to it. The outcome in the twentieth century is almost precisely what it was in the fourth century B.C. The only significant difference is that since national boundaries have become a technical absurdity, the modern state will be world-wide, and there will be in it but two classes; Plato's second class of Guardians or soldiers is useless. It is only in the direction of an organized World State that the human race can develop unless it abandons scientific technique.

There will be a ruling class of scientists and a working class, increasingly divergent as breeding and education are effective. The latter will be told royal lies, to keep them satisfied; perhaps drugs will make them like it. There will be no place for individualism or liberty, since the scientists will know what is best to do. A system of controlled propagation will be necessary. Equality like liberty is a nineteenth century dream. Individuals will be made to suffer for the public good. Christian ethics will be banished as unscientific. Education will follow the Jesuit plan: the workers will be trained to be docile, industrious, punctual, thoughtless, cooperative, and contented, while the rulers will be taught intelligence, physical hardihood, and command over others. They will not be permitted [Page 194]to question the value of science or scientific organization; scientific progress will diminish, and discovery will be killed by respect for authority. All particular loyalties, of parents and children, of man and wife, even of friendship, will be extirpated in favor of undivided loyalty to the scientific society. All these are possibilities in a world governed by knowledge without love, and power without delight. Everything will be sacrificed to science, conceived not as knowledge, but in Mr. Russell's present vein as power, the power to produce intended results.

Mr. Russell explicitly states the outcome, where Plato, the greater artist, was able to suggest t dramatically to the discerning mind. "The scientific society is not of course to be taken altogether as a serious prophesy. It is an attempt to depict the world which would result if scientific technique were to rule unchecked. The reader will have observed that features that everyone would consider desirable are almost inextricably mingled with features that are repulsive. The reason of this is that we have been imagining a society developed in accordance with certain ingredients of human nature to the exclusion of all others. As ingredients they are good; as the sole driving force they are likely to be disastrous. The impulse toward scientific construction is admirable when it does not thwart any of the major impulses that give value to human life, but when it is allowed to forbid all outlet to anything but itself it becomes a form of cruel tyranny."

Science as power is incompatible with the pursuit of truth, with love, with art, with spontaneous delight, with every ideal that men have hitherto cherished, except ascetic renunciation. Power is a means, not an end, and science will not minister to the good life until men remember the ends that power should serve. These ends have nothing to do with science. "The world we perceive is full of a rich variety: some of it is beautiful, some of it is ugly; parts seem to us good, parts bad. But all this has nothing to do with the purely causal properties of things, and it is these properties with which science is concerned." The choice of ends and values is consequently an individual thing; science can not guide us here. "Let us [Page 195]

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cease to be parochial in time, and remember what besides power men have found good."

Mr. Russell's conception of science thus confesses itself bankrupt in the face of the values of living. Nor is there help elsewhere. He is a thoroughgoing pragmatist, in his own sense of the term; science is the power to do things, truth is what gets things done, and as to what shall be done one man's guess is as good as another's.

It is interesting to compare with Mr. Russell's power-pragmatism the radically different conception of science held by Professor Dewey. Mr. Dewey is also known as a pragmatist; but Mr. Russell, were he capable of recognizing another man's ideas, could hardly grant him the name. For Mr. Dewey, the fact that science is a method, an instrument, a human power to effect change, at once suggests consideration of the ends for which it shall be used. What is the relation of human ideas and ideals to the social consequences produced by science as an instrument? It is possible, like Mr. Russell, took for human ideals in some esoteric realm of values, totally divorced from scientific intelligence. "But there is another alternative: to take the method of science home into our own controlling attitudes and dispositions, to employ the new techniques as means of directing our thoughts and efforts to a planned control of social forces." Science grew up in a world already organized and institutionalized, and the momentum of traditions and purposes that preceded its rise took possession of the new instrument and turned it to their ends. The fact that science has been largely devoted to one particular kind of power, pecuniary power over men, has not flowed from the inherent nature of science. It has come from the persistence of older and traditional ends which science has been made to serve. Science has enormously extended the power of the interests and values inherited from a pre-scientific age; it has as yet hardly been used to modify those interests and illuminate the values possible in a scientific society.

For Mr. Dewey does not limit science to the erection of a consistent system of the patches of color which for Mr. Russell can alone constitute our experience; it is an instrument whereby we can perceive the consequences of any event or activity. Far from [Page 196]holding that the values of things, their beauty and ugliness, their goodness and badness, their delight and repulsiveness, have nothing to do with their purely causal properties which are the concern of science, he insists that they can be wisely judged and selected only in the light of their causal relations, of the means necessary to produce them and of the consequences to which they lead. The criticism of values, in other words, far from being irrelevant to scientific method, is precisely the field in which its importance is greatest, and its lack most sorely felt. To determine what kind of power science should be used to effect is the crowning problem for scientific method to solve.

Hence while Mr. Russell regards a scientific society as one in which the government can secure the results it wants to, and warns us that we should also take care lest it make life intolerable, Mr. Dewey’s scientific society is one in which life is continually enhanced for all by the possession of the power to effect such enhancement. “Knowledge of the structure of sticks and stones, an enterprise in which of course truth is essential, apart from whatever added control it may yield, marks in the end but an enrichment of consciousness, of the area of meanings. Thus scientific thought itself is finally but a function of the imagination in enriching life with the significance of things; it is of its peculiar essence that it must also submit to certain tests of application and control.” “Meaning is wider in scope as well as more precious in value than is truth, and philosophy is occupied with meaning rather than with truth. Making such a statement is dangerous; it is easily misconceived to signify that truth is of no great importance under any circumstances; while the fact is that truth is so infinitely important when it is important at all, namely, in records of events and descriptions of existences, that we extend its claims to regions where it has no jurisdiction. But even as respects truths, meaning is the wider category; truths are but one class of meanings, namely, those in which a claim to vertifiability by their consequences is an intrinsic part of their meaning. Beyond this island of meanings which in their own nature are true or false lies the ocean of meanings to which truth and falsity are irrelevant. We do not inquire whether [Page 197]

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Greek civilization was true or false, but we are immensely concerned to penetrate its meaning." "The significance of being is the emotion it stirs, the thought it sustains."

A scientific society is therefore for Mr. Dewey one in which such meanings as the significance of Greek civilization, vital emotions, and active thought are widely shared. In Mr. Russell's power-pragmatism, science has ceased to aim at knowledge and becomes the power of those in authority. In Mr. Dewey's meaning-pragmatism, science aims at knowledge so that it may thereby enrich social life with a perception of the meanings of things.

Now of course what the two men want is very similar. But the Englishman conceives science in such guise that it will bring him what he finds intolerable, and he has no method for securing what he does want. The American has a conception of science which offers great promise of securing his aim, and which brings all the power of the scientific method to bear on the enterprise. Is there much doubt which of the two has a genuinely scientific philosophy, which has a scientific outlook upon science?

Mr. Dewey's volume contains many other riches besides the first and last essays, upon which the above discussion is based. It is by all odds the most valuable and significant collection of papers he has published, comparable with Experience and Nature and the Quest for Certainty. Elucidations of many of the fundamental points of his thought should help to clear up prevalent misunderstandings. Here are a statement of his relations to the whole pragmatist movement, several papers on the philosophy of law and legal method, a well-worked out theory of sense-perception and other psychological studies, a penetrating analysis of the idea of freedom-fundamental statements upon all of his interests, in fact, except current politics. Here are no pot-boilers. Instead, there is at work a mind engaged upon the task of philosophising itself, "the old and ever new undertaking of adjusting that body of traditions which constitute the actual mind of man to scientific tendencies and political aspirations which are novel and incompatible with received authorities." It is a mind which can truly claim to be "additive and transforming in its role in the history of civilization." [Page 198]

WORLD PEACE AND THE WORLD PROCESS

I

by ROBERT WHITAKER Author, La Crescenta, California

IT IS EASY to over-estimate popular interest in world peace. The prize which Mr. Bok offered was, in monetary terms, one of the greatest ever held out for the arousing of popular interest. It was very widely advertised. It was plainly within the scope of popular ability in that it asked for no finished literary essay, no great work of imagination, no display of dramatic ability. It was a plan, a suggestion that was asked, to be stated in quite simple terms, and at any practicable length. Moreover the prize offer emphasized certain limitations of the plan wanted. It was to be American, and within the limits of popular acceptance here. That is, it was to reflect the popular interest and conviction of our own people, which brought the demand within the range of everybody's daily observation. And there were submitted only twenty-two thousand plans.

No, I did not use that word satirically. Twenty-two thousand manuscripts seems like a great mass, viewed from the standpoint of what it means to read them and digest them. But The Ladies' Home Journal, Mr. Bok's own paper till lately, receives over sixty thousand stories a year. This without any special prize offers, and with no special advertising. The number of those who think they can write a story is large, amazingly large. But it might have been supposed that the number of those who would think themselves able to suggest a program for the United States to follow looking toward world peace would have been larger. And it would have been if there had been anything like as deep an interest in presenting such a plan as there is in making a few dollars by writing a salable piece of fiction. [Page 199]

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It will be said that many of the peace plans offered represented groups, in some instances large groups, raising the total of interest exhibited. But the group plans were usually the work of a very few, were in many instances merely an advertising device for getting over their regular propaganda a little more publicly, and in no instance did they preclude the offering by individuals of these groups of their own variant or dissenting suggestions. The fact that so many groups did publicly discuss the matter ought to have operated, and probably did, to increase the number of individual papers presented. Yet the total was less than one to each four thousand of our population, allowing nothing for the many plans which doubtless came from foreign lands. That twenty-five people in a city of one hundred thousand, rather twenty-two people, should have responded to such a tantalizing financial appeal, so obviously dangled in everybody's sight, is certainly no great demonstration of burning interest in the theme.

Within the past six months my wife and I have motored over four thousand miles on the Pacific Coast, all over the State of Washington, and from Seattle to San Diego, besides many an incidental side trip. We have met all kinds of people in a vast variety of circumstance and situation. I do not recall that one of them ever initiated a discussion of the Bok Peace offer, or plan, or the issue of a world alignment for peace. Except such use of the incident as preachers would inevitably make of so well-advertised an item the church advertising here on this coast shows no great concern with the subject, less than it does with the Fundamentalist controversy, or in particular, the issue of the Virgin Birth. I attended recently a Union Ministers' Meeting here, a monthly gathering of the pastors of a city which boasts over one hundred thousand population now. Two men from out-of-town were present, one having come from Los Angeles, the other from New York, and both representing general church organizations whose avowed objective is the abolition of war. The two men were allowed twelve minutes in which to present their message and appeal. Mark the exactness of it, twelve, not ten or fifteen minutes. A woman, resident here, was given more than twice that length of time to present the local hospital needs, [Page 200]in particular the need of a Protestant as distinguished from the large and well-equipped Catholic hospital already here. Her stressing of the sectarian gap was plainly in evidence, and evoked a manifest interest the plea for a warless world had altogether failed to arouse. Likewise, there was a significant interest in the strongly stated objection that a Protestant hospital as such could not be made to go, for lack of the necessary solidarity of interest behind it. Even a warless Protestantism had no strength of sustaining interest to achieve such ministry.

These things are not written in any cynical or pessimistic mood. They are simply set down in the interests of reality in our dealings with this vastly important matter. There is no interest, in the churches, or out of them, that is at all proportionate to the tremendous significance of the subject itself. One minister to my knowledge, among all those who ran war-mad here during the reign of the great mania on the Pacific Coast, has made public acknowledgment of his error, and public apology for the measure in which he was carried away with the war hysteria. He has had no popular recognition among his brethren for doing it, and despite his prominence, perhaps because of it, the papers are soft-pedalling the news. Even the local labor-paper has made little of it. On the other hand the churches quite commonly here go on making special ado over war groups, the Grand Army, and more emphatically now the American Legion. Not one of them has ever made exhibit or appeal based upon the recognition of the men who fought for freedom of conscience, or who suffered even unto death for their resistence to the resort to wholesale falsehood, robbery, and bloodshed. Even Seattle, with all its reputation as a city of progressive and radical ideas, could turn out a larger crowd to witness a naval or military parade than the whole number of those who individually sent in plans for the Bok peace proposition. The tumult and the shouting are still on the side of war. Neither the disappointments of the last war, nor the horrific prophecies of the character of the next wat have availed to make any vast, vital consuming interest on the side of peace.

It was so with the abolition of slavery in the decade just before [Page 201]

WORLD PEACE AND THE WORLD PROCESS

the end of American chattel slavery came to pass. So observant and naturally optimistic a participant in the struggle as Henry Ward Beecher is said to have remarked as late as 1858 that he saw no signs of the passing of slavery from the United States within the nineteenth century. The signs were not there, unless one went below the levels of intellectual and moral appeal to an analysis of the world process in the material realm. With respect to the prohibition of the liquor traffic it might seem to be otherwise, for the process of expulsion was more gradual, and its dependence upon the rational and moral appeal seemed to be constant and intimate. But in reality the difference was not as wide as many will insist. The economic shift was the underlying factor which drove toward the exclusion of the saloon. It was the world process, in particular that process as it had to do with the standardizing and intensifying of our industrial activities, together with the workings of modern monopoly in relation to the organized vices of the land, which put the moral appeal over at last. We are not more rational in America, on the whole, nor more moral, that we are first in outlawing the liquor traffic, even if it be granted that such outlawry is an unmixed moral triumph in its results. We are first because the play of world development was first here at the points where it contacts with that issue. it is the most individual of all our social problems, and is most immediately related to that industrial efficiency which the master class of the modern world are bound to take more and more into account. The great bulk of our people were not interested in temperance meetings, nor were they lieing awake nights pondering how to get rid of the saloon. The saloon had to go because it got the way of the economic advance.

This is why war is going. Not without moral appeal and much reasoning about it will war go. But at neither of these points are we abler or better than our fathers were. Channing's sermons of a century ago are in advance of the Unitarian reaction to the last war as witnessed in their papers and pulpits. Elihu Burritt got a greater recognition as a peace advocate than any of our contemporaries can claim as such.

But two things have happened since Channing and Burritt that [Page 202]make all the difference in the world between the anti-war appeal of their day and ours. On the surface of life, where the talkers are most in evidence, the situation seems more disheartening today than it was in their day. But it is not actually so. For one thing, the world of our day is much more closely bound together as one world than it was in their time. There is no such thing as a splendid isolation now. We are all in each other’s back-yards whether we like it or not, and we have to play together however much we may sulk about it, or turn our play into blows. The world process toward the expansion of human relationships, and the intensifying of international intimacies has moved us forward more in the last one hundred years than in many centuries before.

The second factor is not less significant. It is the expansion of creative, and therefore of destructive power. We can kill hundreds where we could kill one a century ago; we can wipe out cities with less effort than it cost us to wipe out a battalion of merely professional fighters then. The prospect is that the Next War will spare none of us. With all its risks that is an occasion for thankfulness. We shall either quit fighting soon, or there will be none of us left to fight. The world process is forcing us to choose either world organization for peace, or the suicide of our present civilization.

This frank summary of the matter, and this emphasis of the material process is not a depreciation of rational and moral appeal. It is putting them in their place, which is on the superstructure, not at the foundations of the substruction of life. It is recognizing life itself as greater than any of our rationalizings about life. The trouble with most religious people is that they are not religious enough. They are afraid to trust God in the actualities of life; He must be worshipped only in the temples of words and symbols. Whereas God in fact insists upon working through the whole process, and most emphatically in the things where most emphatically we live. [Page 203]

YOUTH DEMANDS PEACE

PATRIOTIC PROPAGANDA VS. TRUTH IN EDUCATION

by RICHARD GLENN GETTELL Undergraduate. Amherst College

THE viewpoint of a student still in college necessarily is limited by his narrow experience, but, on the other hand, it is Iited men because he is in the very process of forming that viewpoint. He has come to college to learn, and, under ordinary circumstances, he receives the mental stimulation from contact with other seeking minds which will encourage him to think about the things going on about him, and to form opinions about them. Often, perhaps, he is too hasty in forming snap-judgments; he may enter into things wide-eyed and gullible, shifting his views whenever he hears a new theory expounded; he may have acquired his opinions before he came to college and then either stubbornly stick to them or, more wisely, use them as a foundation for maturer thoughts; his mind may grow in any one of a number of ways, but however it does, his judgments are bound to be somewhat superficial.

To the charge of superficiality, therefore, I must plead guilty, but, in writing on the subject of the teaching of patriotism, I feel justified not only by my intentions and sincerity but also by the fact that I have been afflicted with that very teaching for the last twelve years and, consequently, should have something pertinent to say on the subject.

Patriotism in education can be examined from three different angles; by asking what, how, and why; by finding out what patriotism is, how it is taught, and why it is taught. Following this outline, first we are to find out what patriotism really amounts [Page 204]toand, indeed, it is almost a question in my mind as to what patriotism does represent—whether it is as unifying in this country as one is supposed to believe.

February marks the birth-dates of two of our greatest national heroes, extolled in patriotic literature. A well-known philosopher commemorating these events speaks of Washington and Lincoln saying, “When you begin to think of this nationalistic consciousness of ours that leads us into patriotic celebrations, some curious anomalies appear. One of these men whose birthday we remember led, and led to victory, an armed revolt against what can properly be called his mother country. He was a rebel. His rebellion succeeded. We laud him as a great patriot, the ‘father of his country.’ Lincoln did exactly the opposite. He suppressed a rebellion. The rebel, Jefferson Davis, in an attempt at secession from his ‘mother country’ failed. His rebellion was crushed, secession prevented. The Union was preserved. The term ‘rebel’ is still a term of opprobrium. We still preserve in our annals that lynching hymn of hate, ‘Hang Jeff Davis to a Sour Apple Tree.’ Lincoln is our hero, but Davis’s birthday is celebrated in ten states. It is evident that there is something very local and very personal about our patriotic events. They cannot be matters of principle, they must be matters of personality.”

Now this shows Washington and Lincoln revered for diametrically opposite actions; it shows the provincialism of patriotism and the emphasis on personalities rather than principles. It makes patriotism appear, not as a unifying principle, but as an institution teeming with contradictions—containing different personal and local interpretations of what is usually believed to be all the same thing. “It cannot be a matter of principle, it must be a matter of personality.”

Let us now examine the second question—the how of it. Let us inquire into the way in which patriotism is taught. By means of school exercises, with the aid of carefully prepared textbooks deleted of all material unfavorable to the country, with stirring songs, militant poems, and other forms of nationalistic propaganda, we are led to believe this country superior to all others. Don’t we [Page 205]

YOUTH DEMANDS PEACE

all have that feeling? Our pride is aroused by the belief that we are better, that our battles, always fought in the right, of course, were almost always victorious. This complacent pride in our superiority over other nations is inculcated in us by a misrepresentation of facts, by perversion of, or omission of, the whole truths, and, cleverly enough for the purposes of the nationalists, it is done so early in our education as to become instinctive with us-beyond rationalization.

Should you like examples of this kind of teaching, may I refer you to a certain huge volume, "A Manual of Patriotism," a book composed solely of pro-American material, compiled by the Superintendant of Schools of New York State a few years ago, for the admitted purpose of prejudicing and moulding young minds to blind love of their country. May I mention "Modern Eu History" by Hayes and Moon, and Muzzey's "Americ each banned in several states for unpatriotically telling the truth.

When do we learn the truth? We can't be shielded from it always. It must be agreed that we should have the truth by the time we get to college. If there only we learn the true facts about our country, how about the people who don't get to college? Where can we draw the line of distinction? In high school? Some don't finish there. Why not build on a foundation of truth and teach tolerance? -avoiding the bigotry we are afflicted with if we never learn the truth, or the disillusionment when we finally do, after being taught the untruth. Education is supposed to be a training of our mental and moral powers-teaching moral ideas. Is it possible that patriotism, based as it is on prejudice, omission of the whole truth, and misinterpretation of the facts, can be a mental training or a moral training? Who ever heard of a moral training based on lies or deceit? And yet that is how patriotic propaganda is taught.

Remembering the what and how, let us now investigate the reason why patriotism is taught, and let us see if it accomplishes the desired results. Patriotism is supposedly taught to mould young minds to be of service to their country as a group and as individuals. That may be a worthy enough aim as far as it goes-but it doesn't begin to go far enough. It stops with nationalism, and, rather than [Page 206]making for a mutual understanding and peace, builds up a conscious distrust and even hatred of other, supposedly inferior, countries. It is one of the greatest existing hindrances to international cooperation, unity, and peace.

When it is taught for its influence on the individual, it is pernicious for two reasons. First, prejudice results in misguided efforts. Need I mention the actions of William Hale Thompson of Chicago and the war he has conducted on a certain English king who died in 1821, or the D. A. R. blacklist of some of our prominent thinkers as unpatriotic men? Need I talk about some of our Fourth of July orators, with their flag-waving bigotry and jingo-nationalism, or such 100 per cent organizations as the National Civic Federation—keeping alive the worst elements of supernationalism?

Secondly, there is the moral implication of teaching patriotism which has a pernicious result. Patriotism is supposedly taught to give us ideals and loyalty. And what does it give us? It gives a blind love, a "My country, right or wrong, my country" attitude which is most undesirable. We want true loyalty which is accomplished, not by hiding mistakes, but by explaining them. This avoids disillusionment and builds for that quality so necessary to constructive criticism and work—tolerance and broad-mindedness!

When a country's affairs are not all they should be, there are two extremes of action, and a golden mean. One extreme of action consists of hiding the truth and relying on prejudice and general ignorance—that is patriotism as it is today; the second extreme is learning the truth, complaining, and doing nothing about it but complain—that is the extreme of radicalism which, when organized, can result in dangerous anarchy. Both of those extremes are undesirable, but the golden mean is learning the truth and building correctively and constructively for the general good of all peoples—Humanitarianism!

Which of these three choices should we think best: The extreme of irrational patriotism, the extreme of imprudent anarchism, or, aiming towards an ideal of universal understanding, the golden mean of just and sane action brought about by education in truth?

The third contribution to a symposium conducted by undergraduates of Amherst College. [Page 207]

THE AMERICAN PEACE MOVEMENT

CURRENT PLANS AND ACTIVITIES

by RUSSELL M. COOPER Graduate School, Columbia University

IT is often charged, and doubtless with considerable reason, that the most hopeless spot for social education lies within our educational system. When one considers the conviction and zeal with which students of Europe and the Orient grapple with the political issues of the day, and then contemplates the almost bovine complacency prevailing among large sections of American student life, he may well wonder whether our students will ever arouse themselves over issues more socially significant than their own pleasures and vocational preparation. This is a searching question, but recent developments on college campuses across the country indicate that a new day may be dawning and that students are awakening to the great international struggles confronting the world.

On nearly every campus, it is true, there has always been a liberal element, a small group of students, often scorned by their fellows and feared by the faculty, which has openly criticized established customs and discussed the controversial questions of student and public life. This element is today larger and stronger than ever, but the greatest source of encouragement lies in the quickening interest of the other ninety per cent. Students, after all, are little different from the masses around them. For an issue to arouse them it must have two characteristics. First, it must be dramatic and challenging. Secondly, there must be apparent and effective channels through which the student may personally throw his energies in helping toward a solution. Such an issue brought enthusiastic and almost universal response to the call to colors in 1917. Such an issue may very likely be found in the international crisis of [Page 208]1931. At any rate, our students now are becoming so greatly aroused that one must certainly consider them in his appraisal of the American Peace Movement.

Reports from all sections of the country reveal that the Christian Associations, campus newspapers, International Relations Clubs, and Liberal Clubs are very active in disseminating information, arousing discussion, and pressing for student action. Wesleyan has appropriated two bulletin boards and a reserve library shelf to display latest material on the disarmament conference; Oberlin is staging a series of discussions under the direction of the Oberlin Peace Society; Vassar has enlisted the dramatic department to help make the issues vivid. Such activities are student-initiated and are typical of those under way on literally hundreds of campuses. Several colleges are staging model disarmament conferences, often with delegates from other schools to represent and advance the contentions of specific countries. Eleven colleges are cooperating in such an affair at Bucknell, and similar conferences will be held at Pittsburg, Cornell, Northwestern, and Boston Universities. In nearly every case the date for these model conferences will be the weekend of December fourth.

The next quadrennial Student Volunteer Convention is meeting at Buffalo, New York, from December 30 to January third. For nearly half a century these conventions have called forth students from every state to consider the great problems confronting the world. At the last meeting, held at Detroit four years ago, over 4,000 students were in attendance, and officials confidently anticipate an equal or greater number this year. With leaders like John R. Mott, Kirby Page, Bishop McConnell and T. Z. Koo, the students will consider the present distraught world situation, and the place of Christianity in its solution. If the experience of past years is any criterion, one may expect a great impetus to student thinking when these delegates return from their five days at Buffalo.

To stand by their ideals has often required the staunchest conviction and courage on the part of individual students. This is especially true in their struggles with the R.O.T.C., of which a typical case is now pending in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Drew and Gay [Page 209]

THE AMERICAN PEACE MOVEMENT

lord Granger and Gerald Neff, all members of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, have refused, on conscientious grounds, to drill in the Thomas Jefferson High School Corps, and have been forced to withdraw from school. The Methodist ministers of the Des Moines Conference have passed a resolution deploring this "assault upon youth," and prominent papers have come to the boys' defense. As we go to press, however, the school board is still adamant, the boys are still at home, and the case will probably be carried into the courts.

At Penn State College this year, five students were granted exemption from military training on religious grounds. At Ohio State one lone man stood out against the drill, and has been solidly backed by the Committee on Militarism in Education and the Methodist ministers of that region. The administration at first definitely refused the petition, but now is taking the matter under consideration and a decision is expected soon. A concession from this strongly militaristic school will be a great victory for the forces opposed to compulsory training. Individuals and groups of students conscientiously opposed to training in war methods have appealed for aid in California, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Washington, New York, Kansas, Nebraska, and Ohio.

In order to correlate and stimulate peace projects among students, the Intercollegiate Disarmament Council, with headquarters at 129 East 52nd Street, New York City, has recently been organized. In close cooperation with the National Student Committee on Disarmament, which is a committee of the Council of Christian Associations, this group is working very closely with fifteen national peace societies. The Disarmament Council originated among a group of American students who were studying in Geneva, Switzerland, last summer. They were so fired with the urgency of the present world situation and the desire to arouse their fellow students in America, that they organized this Council to vocalize active student expression, and, through its effect upon public opinion, to influence the American delegation to the Disarmament Conference.

The Council urges every campus to consolidate its peace [Page 210]activity and use every available means for awakening the interest of the entire student body, and it stands ready to advise methods and suggest materials whenever needed. In addition, the Council is conducting a national student poll on disarmament, blanks being sent to every campus, and the results to be filed by December 15th, after which they will be presented to President Hoover. The poll seeks to ascertain what percentage of reduction the students would have America advocate at the forthcoming conference, and their attitude toward American adherence to the World Court and toward military training. In Canada, also, a survey of student opinion is under way. This survey is not in the form of a poll, but as a petition to the Prime Minister of Canada "so to select and instruct the representatives of Canada at Geneva as to insure that Canadian influence will be exerted vigorously on behalf of significant reductions of armaments." In Great Britain, a petition has been signed by nearly every student leader in the country, calling on the government to insist upon armament reduction of at least 25 per cent. In this way the student voice is heard clearly and emphatically all round the world.

Such petitions have become a popular method for generating and recording public opinion on disarmament. Some call for general or specific reductions, while others request the President to appoint our most distinguished civilian statesmen on the American delegation to Geneva. The petition of the Women's International League with 150,000 signers asking for total disarmament, has already been presented to President Hoover. The Federal Council of Churches, in addition to its numerious pamphlets of information distributed to ministers, has likewise issued a petition urging for a distinguished delegation and a substantial reduction of armaments. Blanks for 500,000 names have been sent out and these are being mailed direct to the President by the local church groups.

Another petition of nation-wide dimensions is being circulated by the National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War, a women's organization under the chairmanship of Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt. This committee links together eleven national women's organizations with a combined membership of one-fifth the adult [Page 211]

THE AMERICAN PEACE MOVEMENT

women of the country. Through these channels, it is expected that between three and five million people will express their plea for drastic armament reduction. A similar petition in Great Britain already has been signed by over 1,500,000 women, and in Holland the total is 2,500,000. These nation-wide efforts can not fail to arouse interest and influence public opinion toward disarmament.

The James McDonald radio talks on international questions are continuing with increasing popularity, being broadcast from WEAF and associated stations every Thursday at 6: 30 P.M. Eastern time. The topics for November were The Manchurian Menace, Franco-American Cooperation, Bruening and the Reich, and Spain Makes a Constitution. The Foreign Policy Association bi-weekly luncheons at the Hotel Astor were renewed November 21 with a discussion of the economic situation in Europe. On December 5th the topic will be the Franco-German situation. These broadcasts have helped greatly in past years to keep the public intelligently informed on current international events.

With lectures, pamphlets, discussions, and petitions, the peace forces are battling for disarmament and international organization. The forces of inertia and nationalism, however, are difficult to over-come, and the next six months will be momentous in determining which way the tide will go. [Page 212]

ROUND TABLE

A new and worthier type of "war memorial" has been raised by Evelyn Newman in her scholarly work on The Novel of the War Years. Here are perpetuated the actual experiences of the men in the field, in the form in which those experiences can be most fully transferred to other human beings. The world is littered with monuments, buildings, statues and tombs ostensibly created to pay honor to the heroic dead, but actually revealing the incapacity of the living to re-experience the inner spirit of the sacrifice. We transform that spirit into an inert material substance, as if sacrifice could be honored by anything save itself.

Along with constructive plans for a warless world, it is well to return, in moments of personal or public hesitation, to the shameful slaughter of the trenches, in the living and creative words of those novelists of all warring countries whose mutual agony testified to the underlying oneness of mankind.

Dexter Perkins, Lucia Ames Mead and Russell M. Cooper combine in giving due emphasis to the importance of the forthcoming Disarmament Conference, a fair test of the present power of the international peace movement, or rather, perhaps, a fair test of the capacity of present governments to respond to the needs of humanity at this hour. Those who truly believe in world peace must hold the conviction that peace is the test of civilization, rather than that civilization is the test of peace. The integrity of life, and the spiritual forces within evolution, are not betrayed by the plots of politicians scheming for party spoils nor by the intentions of economic leaders who may throw their influence into schemes for the maintenance of the unjust conditions ultimately responsible for military strife. Resistance to the "spirit of the age" is merely a dam thrown up to stop the river of life. Behind that dam its power con- [Page 213]

ROUND TABLE

stantly augments, until the breaking point is reached, when revolution accomplishes with violence and confusion that which might have been accomplished far sooner and more peacefully by reason and goodwill.

While far larger hopes and far stronger exertions have come to center upon the success of the Disarmament Conference called by the League of Nations for the fourteenth year after Armistice Day, the legitimate expectation of the friends of peace does not depend upon the formal conclusions reached next February in Geneva. The true power of the peace ideal has already manifested itself in this lay of peace: by the overthrow of the Napoleonic dynasty in France; by the overthrow of the Hohenzollerns in Germany; by the overthrow of the Czar in Russia; by the overthrow of the Turkish Sultan; by the overthrow of the Spanish throne this very year; by the miraculous extension of the means of communication and intercourse throughout the earth. War itself has come to serve the ends of peace, in the sterility of that "victory" written into the Treaty of Versailles.

The articles by Carl Ross on World Citizenship terminate in this issue. His thesis that a true world government would have direct relations with peoples and not with "sovereign" national governments, based upon and inspired by the experience of Americans in adopting the present Federal Government rather than attempting to perpetuate a League of Independent States, is logically irrefutable. Its opposition lies in the emotional lag of peoples long accustomed to national governments, and influenced by partisan politicians who see no future for themselves in a world directed by intelligence and no longer controlled by adolescent emotion.

A naive layman would think that such a thesis should prove of tremendous interest to the legal profession, the future of which surely depends upon the degree to which law is made an agency to serve human needs. The law today, apparently, is too occupied with its own precedents to realize that the future is more important than the past. As in every other field, progress seems to be made by courageous individuals and not by conservative organized groups. [Page 214]

THE MEANING OF FREEDOM

This much discussed topic in education will be fully treated in the December, 1931 issue of PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION

Among the contributors are, William Heard Kilpatrick, Teachers College; Joshua Lieberman, editor of "Pioneer Youth"; Hughes Mearns, New York University; Laura Tirbes, Ohio State University; S. A. Courtis, University of Michigan; Mrs. Josephine Duveneck, Peninsula School of Creative Education, San Francisco; Mrs. Gudrun Thorne-Thomsen, Ojai Valley School, California, Elsa Euland, Carson College, Pennsylvania.

You will not want to miss this unusual number, nor the many features in 1932 of practical, stimulating benefit. PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION is issued from October to May, inclusive, a magazine which has won widespread recognition in the field of liberal education. A subscription entitles you to membership in the Progressive Education Association. Note the special offer in the coupon attached below for your convenience.

PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION ASSOCIATION 716 JACKSON PLACE, Dept. L WASHINGTON, D. C.

Date

Enclosed is my check for $3.00 for which enter my subscribing-membership in the Progressive Education Association for one year from date. I am to receive one previous issue free of charge.

Enclosed is my check for $5.00 for which enter my subscribing-membership for two years from date. I am to receive one previous issue free of charge.

Please write clearly your name and address to which you wish the magazine sent.

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VITAL MESSAGES OF UNITY

Letters from World Unity Readers-VI

I cannot think of any of the magazines to which I subscribe of a more constructive nature than the "World Unity" publication. In a civilization such as we are living messages of unity are indeed vital. No one can deny the fact that we are all dependent upon one another. Human beings are gradually becoming cognizant of this fact. Whatever may be our particular calling in life or whatever the group or creed to which we belong, all of us, at least outwardly, portray the truth that we have all been created by one God. The phrase "The Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man" has been to so great an extent known that it is high time it became a reality. Of course this cannot be accomplished over night. When we have learned the true import of this phrase, then perhaps we will have moved a step onward.

"World Unity" is doing much towards the unfolding of this concept. The essential verities which underlie world civilization, verities such as justice, truthfulness, sincerity, cooperation, are the truths which your magazine champions.

The spirit of the new age must be expressed in these terms. Up to the present time people have given themselves over to the lip service of these concepts but nothing more. The fulfillment of them has not yet come to pass. I know of no task greater or more constructive than this. "World Unity" is at least doing its share towards the achievement of this goal.

Philadelphia Congregation Rodeph Shalom SIDNEY E. UNGER [Page 216]

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