Secretary Hughes, in the course of his famous speech, May 15, which, whether intentionally or not, cut the ground from under “Defense Day,” said, “There is only one avenue to peace. That is in the settlement of actual differences and the removal of ill will. All else is talk, form, and pretense.”
After speaking of the settlement of differences through “institutions of justice,” he went on as follows: “Between friends any difficulty can be settled. There is no substitute for goodwill. There is no mechanism of intercourse that can dispense with it.”
I am convinced of the correctness of Secretary Hughes’ conclusion. We must be better men if our race is to survive. A civilization shot through with hate cannot continue long after it is fully equipped with poison gas and airplanes. Even for self-preservation we must cultivate goodwill—goodwill between classes and religions and nations and races.
We must subdue in our own hearts the swiftly rising prejudice by nursing, often by an effort of the will, the kindly thought that follows tardily. We must seek to know and understand those we hate; for then, as Charles Lamb discovered, we cannot hate them. Cooperation must replace isolation; progressive world organization must replace international anarchy; and, above all, the spirit of the team must replace “grandstand playing” and national egotism.
IT WILL WORK
The success of our national experiments in “audacious friendliness”—returning the Boxer indemnity to China, feeding the children of Europe, aiding stricken Japan; the success of Ramsay MacDonald’s pursuit of the same policy, which changed the atmosphere of Europe markedly for the better in six months; the success of Herriot in his policy of “rapprochement” with Germany, following Poincare’s ghastly failure with coercion—all this goes to show that international relations are but human problems and that the spirit that “removes” our personal “mountains” will be similarly triumphant between nations. Our realists are going to discover some day to their astonishment that the “practical” policy they are seeking, the policy that will bring security with justice and peace, is this very policy of audacious friendliness functioning through appropriate machinery. We can climb up to peace in no other way.
Model Printing Company, Washington
