Whether the ideal of nationality grows stronger or weaker in the future, the fact of nationality … will always remain…. Understanding the service and limits of nationality, we are now in a position to consider how nations both are and can be co-ordinated within the wider community which they build. Such co-ordination can be directly achieved only through the State, which is the primary association corresponding to the nation…. It is true that the limits of nations and States are still far from being coincident, but the great historical movements have been leading towards that ideal. In any case it must be the co-operation of States, whether they do or do not coincide with nations, which will bring order into the still existing chaos of the nations.
In the period following the war, the necessity will be greater than ever before that the government of the United States shall be able to deal with intricate and far reaching problems with intelligence, unity, harmony, and force. This can be done only through an electorate that is intelligent, homogeneous, sympathetic, and free from divisions into antagonistic or incongruous groups.
An extreme but significant illustration of this principle is furnished by the present situation in Russia. If a general truce were declared tomorrow, and the nations sought to get together to discuss a permanent basis of settlement, one of the greatest obstacles in the way of success would be Russia, simply for the reason that at present there is no Russia in the sense that a nation must exist to participate in such a council as that supposed. There is no danger that the United States will fall into any such state of disruption as Russia. But there is a distinct danger that it may suffer from a lesser degree of the same malady, the existence of discordant elements in the body politic, and consequent inability to exert her maximum force in attacking the problems of reconstruction.
The period following the war will be a time for new things. Easier than ever before will it be to shake off the trammels of tradition and precedent, and inaugurate approved though novel political policies. Foremost among the matters which the United States will be called upon to see to will be the reconsideration of our entire attitude toward aliens, and their naturalization. The time to prepare for that reconsideration is now.
WAR PROPHETS
The war is generating prophets as the Nile generated frogs under the mandate of Moses, and there is a similarity in the speech of both products. The prophets are too cautious to risk their reputation in predicting the events of the war; their forecasts relate to the sort of a world we shall find ourselves in after peace returns. But even this measure of prediction is a by-product of the soothsayers who, whether their lips have been touched with a coal from off the altar, or not, certainly wield the pen of the ready writer. The main industry of the busy prophets is to expound to us the meaning of the war, and to disclose to us those causes of the war which we should never have discovered for ourselves.
The ordinary uninspired man feels when he has read the diplomatic correspondence of a couple of weeks at the end of July and the beginning of August, 1914, that he knows fairly well what were the immediate causes of the war, and where the responsibility lies. If he carries his reading back as far as the annexation of Bosnia in 1908, he is satisfied that he has a pretty comprehensive view of the forces that precipitated the war. And if he has read pretty abundant selections from the Pan-German literature and the panegyrics on war—such a literature as no branch of the human race, Christian or pagan, ever produced before—he thinks he understands how it was possible to plunge the German nation into this attack on the world.
But all this is merely a matter of reading and reflection. Any one can reach such conclusions. The prophet must reach some different conclusion in order to sustain his claim to inspiration:
If this young man expresses himself in terms too deep for me,
Why, what a very singularly deep young man this deep young man must be.