To take but one instance. How confident were the assertions made in the
days preceding the unification of the states of the North American
continent regarding the insuperable barriers that stood in the way of
their ultimate federation! Was it not widely and emphatically declared
that the conflicting interests, the mutual distrust, the differences of
government and habit that divided the states were such as no force,
whether spiritual or temporal, could ever hope to harmonize or control?
And yet how different were the conditions prevailing a hundred and fifty
years ago from those that characterize present-day society! It would
indeed be no exaggeration to say that the absence of those facilities
which modern scientific progress has placed at the service of humanity in
our time made of the problem of welding the American states into a single
federation, similar though they were in certain traditions, a task
infinitely more complex than that which confronts a divided humanity in
its efforts to achieve the unification of all mankind.
Who knows that for so exalted a conception to take shape a suffering more
intense than any it has yet experienced will have to be inflicted upon
humanity? Could anything less than the fire of a civil war with all its
violence and vicissitudes--a war that nearly rent the great American
Republic--have welded the states, not only into a Union of independent
units, but into a Nation, in spite of all the ethnic differences that
characterized its component parts? That so fundamental a revolution,
involving such far-reaching changes in the structure of society, can be
achieved through the ordinary processes of diplomacy and education seems
highly improbable. We have but to turn our gaze to humanity's
blood-stained history to realize that nothing short of intense mental as
well as physical agony has been able to precipitate those epoch-making
changes that constitute the greatest landmarks in the history of human
civilization.