INTRODUCTION
When the storm has gone by and the skies after clearing have softened, we may discover that a corrected perspective is the result of the war that we are most conscious of. Familiar presumptions will appear foreshortened, and new distances of fact and possibility will lie before us.
Before the fateful midsummer of 1914 the most thoughtful part of mankind confidently held a lot of agreeable presumptions which undoubtedly influenced individual and collective conduct. The more intangible of them were grouped under such name symbols as “idealism,” “humanitarian impulse,” “human brotherhood,” “Christian civilization.” The workaday ones were pigeonholed under the rubric: “enlightened economic interest.” Between the practical and the aspirational were distributed all the excellent Aristotelian middle course presumptions of the “rule of reason” order.
And why not? The nineteenth century had closed in a blaze of scientific glory. By patient inductive research the human mind had found out nature’s way on earth and in the heavens, and with daring invention had turned knowledge to immediate practical account. The struggle for existence had become a mighty enterprise of progress. Steam and electricity had brought the utmost parts of the world together. Upon substantial material foundations the twentieth century would build a world republic, wherein justice should apportion abundance.
Upon presumption we reared the tower of expectation.
Yet on the horizon we might have seen—some of us did see—a thickening haze and warning thunderheads. Not much was said about them, but to some it seemed that the world behaved as if it felt the tension of a rising storm. With nervous eagerness the nations pushed their way into the domains of the backward peoples. They sought concessions, opportunities for investment, command of resources, exclusive trade, spheres of influence. Private negotiations were backed by diplomacy, and year after year diplomacy was backed by an ever more impressive show of naval and military power.
But we did not believe that the Great War impended. There would still be restricted wars here and there of course, but more and more they could be prevented. The human mind that had mastered nature’s way could master and control the ways of man. Economic interest would bring its resistless strength to bear against the mad makers of the wastes of war. A sensitive conscience would revolt against the cruelties of war. Reason, which had invented rules and agencies to keep the peace within the state, would devise tribunals and procedures to substitute a rational adjustment of differences for the arbitrament of war between states.
The world has recovered from disaster before now, it will recover again. Presumptions that disappointed have been reexamined and brought into truer drawing. Expectation has been more broadly built, it will be more broadly built again.
There is conscience in mankind, and the war has sublimely revealed it, as it has revealed also undreamed of survivals of faithlessness and cruelty. The presumption of rational control in human affairs has been foreshortened, but not painted out. In the background stand forth as grim realities, forces of fear, distrust, envy, ignorance, and hate that we had thought were ghosts. Conscience is as strong and as sensitive as we believed it to be; reason is as effective as we presumed; but the forces arrayed against them we now see are mightier than we knew. So now we ask, By what power shall conscience and reason be reinforced, and the surviving forces of barbarism be driven back?
There is but one answer left, all others have been shot to pieces. Conscience and reason are effective when they organize material energies, not when they dissipate themselves in dreams. Conscience and reason must assemble, coördinate, and bring to bear the economic resources and the physical energies of the civilized world to narrow the area and to diminish the frequency of war.
But how? General presumptions will not do this time. There must be a specific plan, concrete and practical; a specific preparedness, a specific method. And what is more, plan, preparedness, method must be drawn forth from the situation as the war makes and leaves it, not imposed upon it. They must be a composition of forces now in operation.
There were academic plans aplenty for the creation of pacific internationalism before the war began. The bankers had invented theirs; the socialists, the conciliationists, and the international lawyers respectively had invented theirs. The free traders, first in the field, had not lost hope.
It would be foolish to let ourselves think in discouragement that all these efforts to organize “the international mind” were idle. They were not ineffective. They did not organize the international mind adequately, much less did they reform its habits, but they quickened it; they organized it in part, they pulled it together enough to make it powerful for the work yet to be done.
What we have to face, then, is not the extinction or abandonment of internationalism, but the fact that the ideal, the all-embracing and thoroughly rational internationalism lies far in the future, and that before it can be attained we must have that partial internationalism which is practically the same thing as the widening of nationalism that is achieved when nations coöperate in leagues or combine in federations. The league of peace may be academic or it may soon stand forth as a tremendous piece of realism, we do not know which, but the forces that are holding many of the nations together in military coöperation now are present realities, and they will be realities after the military war is over. There will still be tariffs, but the areas within which tariff barriers will no longer be maintained will be immensely widened. Beyond these areas will be, as now, various arrangements of reciprocity. In like manner, there will be a determination on the part of the coöperating nations to stand together for the enforcement of international agreements and to discipline a law-breaking state that would needlessly resort to arms. The internationalism of commerce, of travel, of communication, of intellectual exchange and moral endeavor will continue to grow throughout the world, but in addition there will be the more definite, the more concrete internationalism of the nations that agree in making common cause for the attainment of specific ends.
Within this relatively restricted internationalism there will be, there is now, a certain yet more definite aggregation of peoples, interests, and traditions upon which rests a great and peculiar moral responsibility. The English-speaking people of the world are together the largest body of human beings among whom a nearly complete intellectual and moral understanding is already achieved. They have reached high attainments in science and the arts, in education, in social order, in justice. They are highly organized, they cherish the traditions of their common history. To permit anything to endanger the moral solidarity of this nucleus of a perfected internationalism would be a crime unspeakable. To strengthen it, to make it one of the supreme forces working for peace and humanity is a supreme obligation.
Franklin H. Giddings.