THE WAR PATH OR THE WORLD STATE
This is the key-note of a powerful article by H. G. Wells, in a recent issue of the New York Times. His argument, is that “Man’s increasing power of destruction, unchecked will overwhelm Hope, Beauty and Freedom in the World.”
The submarine and the aircraft have made the horrors of war inescapable by the civil population of any country. The development of destructive weapons during the present war has been marvellous. It seems inevitable that capacity for offense will be so developed in time that no ship will be safe from torpedoes on ocean, river or lake, and that no city or hamlet, or even remote farmhouse, will be exempt from destruction by aërial bombs. What is to prevent a fleet of enemy’s aircraft from burning up the crops of any given region, condemning the inhabitants to starvation? This thought can be expanded ad libitum by those who keep pace with the march of invention, and who realize that just now destructive invention outpaces constructive invention and the science of conservation.
The old scope of war was sufficiently horrible, when it mainly threatened fortresses, battle-fields and men liable to military service. But now its threat is universal, against whole populations, on land and water.
Therefore the question of universal peace is now of vital interest not alone to the statesman, the ruler, the general and the financier, but to “the man in the street,” to the ordinary citizen, to every woman, and to every little child. It always concerned all these in a general way, but now it is brought intimately home to all, because war can at any moment put any individual in imminent personal deadly peril of life or limb.
Is there a possibility of preventing wars in the future short of the adoption of a counsel of perfection—that is to say, the substantial regeneration of human nature to the moral elevation of the mind that was in the Prince of Peace? There is manifestly only one way to approximate universal peace among men so long as they remain in an unregenerate state. And that is a union or welding of nations into what might be called a World-State.
The model is the nation itself. Internal peace is preserved in a civilized and virile nation by the establishment of constitutional safeguards and of institutions of government. Not all the individuals of a nation can be trusted to keep the peace. The non-peaceable are held in check by laws and by the provisions made for the execution of the laws. To this end nations have legislative bodies, executives and courts. The executives have placed under their command armies and police forces to restrain the wicked. With all the machinery of executives and courts and police forces crime is not entirely prevented, nor violence suppressed. People are assaulted and murdered, but in a well-ordered nation the infractions of the law are trifling as compared with the aggregate of peaceful life.
So in a World-State. War and violence might not be entirely prevented, but the aggregate of peaceful life would be so extended as to save civilization and permit moral and material progress. Mr. Wells well says:
The course of human history is downward and very dark indeed unless our race can give mind and will, now unreservedly in unprecedented abundance, to the stern necessities that follow logically from the aircraft bomb and the poison gas and that silent, invisible, unattainable murderer, the submarine.
The way to achieve a World-State was clearly pointed out by the Cleveland World Court Congress. It is doubtful if any other method is workable than to begin with the establishment of a World Supreme Court for Judicial Settlement backed by ample physical force to curb unruly nations. No one contends that such a tribunal can be made effective without the coöperation of the first class powers, or a decisive majority of them. The task of the United States, after the conclusion of the present bloody war, will be to bring these great nations together in a world-conference to perfect the plan for a World-State.