hate, not hope and desire, have been hitherto the effective spurs for
men. The most popular religions are those which hold out the widest
hopes of damnation. Our lives are lives of use and wont, we distrust the
promise of delightful experience and achievements beyond our accustomed
ways; it offends our self-satisfaction even to regard them as
possibilities; we do not like the implied cheapening of familiar things.
We are all ready to sneer at "Utopias," as elderly invalids sneer at
the buoyant hopes of youth and do their best to think them sure of
frustration. The aged and disillusioned profess a keen appreciation of
the bath chair and the homely spoonful of medicine, and pity a crudity
that misses the fine quality of those ripe established things. Most
people are quite ready to dismiss the promise of a full free life for
all mankind with a sneer. That would rob the world of romance, they say,
the romance of passport offices, custom houses, shortages of food,
endless petty deprivations, slums, pestilence, under-educated stunted
children, youths dying in heaps in muddy trenches, an almost universal
lack of vitality, and all the picturesque eventfulness of contemporary
conditions. So that we have not dwelt here upon the life-giving aspect
of a possible world state, but only on its life-saving aspects. We have
not argued that our present life of use and wont could be replaced by an
infinitely better way of living. We have rather pointed out that if
things continue to drift as they are doing, the present life of use and
wont will become intolerably insecure. It is the thought of the large
bombing aeroplane and not the hope of swift travelling across the sky
that will move the generality of men, if they are to be moved at all,
towards a world peace.
But whether the lever that moves them is desire or fear the majority of
men, unless the species is to perish, must be brought within a
measurable time to an understanding of, and a will for, a single world
government. And since at first existing institutions, established
traditions, educational organizations and the like, will all be
passively if not actively resistant to the spread of this saving idea,
and much more so to any attempts to realize this saving idea, there
remains nothing for us to look to, at the present time, for the first
organization of this immense effort of mental reversal, but the zeal and
devotion and self-sacrifice of convinced individuals. The world state
must begin; it can only begin, as a propagandist cult, or as a group of
propagandist cults, to which men and women must give themselves and
their energies, regardless of the consequences to themselves. Laying the
foundations of a world state upon a site already occupied by a muddle of
buildings is an undertaking which will almost necessarily bring its
votaries into conflict with established authority and current sentiment;
they will have to face the possibility of lives of conflict,
misunderstanding, much thankless exertion; they must count on little
honour and considerable active dislike; and they will have to find what
consolation they can in the interest of the conflict itself and in the
thought of a world, made at last by such efforts as theirs, peaceful and
secure and vigorous, a world they can never hope to see. So stated it
seems a bad bargain that the worker for the world state is invited to
make, yet the world has never lacked people prepared to make such a
bargain and they will not fail it now. There are worse things than
conflict without manifest victory and effort without apparent reward.
To the finer kind of mind it is infinitely more tragic and distressing
to find that existence bears a foolish aimless face. Many people,
tormented by the discontent of conscience, and wanting, more than they
can ever want any satisfaction, some satisfying rule of life, some
criterion of conduct, will find in this cult of the world state just
that sustaining reality they need. And their number will grow. Because
it is a practical and reasonable shape for a life, arising naturally out
of a proper understanding of history and physical science, and embodying
in a unifying plan the teaching of all the great religions of the world.
It comes to us not to destroy but to fulfil.
The activities of a cult which set itself to bring about the world state
would at first be propagandist, they would be intellectual and
educational, and only as a sufficient mass of opinion and will had
accumulated would they become to a predominant extent politically
constructive. Such a cult must direct itself particularly to the
teaching of the young. So far the propaganda for a world law, the League
of Nations propaganda, since it has sought immediate political results,
has been addressed almost entirely to adults; and as a consequence it
has had to adapt itself as far as possible to their preconceptions about
the history and outlook of their own nationality, and to the general
absence as yet in the world of any vision of the welfare of mankind as
one whole. It is because of this acceptance of current adult ideas
about patriotism and nationality that the movement has adopted the
unsatisfactory phrase, a League of Nations, when what is contemplated is
much more than a league and a very considerable subordination of
national sovereignty. And a large share in the current ineffectiveness
of the League of Nations is evidently due to the fact that men interpret
the phrase and the proposition of the League of Nations differently in
accordance with the different fundamental historical ideas they possess,
ideas that propaganda has hitherto left unassailed. The worker for the
world state will look further and plough deeper. It is these fundamental
ideas which are the vitally important objective of a world-unifying
movement, and they can only be brought into that world-wide uniformity
which is essential to the enduring peace of mankind, by teaching
children throughout all the earth the common history of their kind, and
so directing their attention to the common future of their descendants.
The driving force that makes either war or peace is engendered where the
young are taught. The teacher, whether mother, priest, or schoolmaster,
is the real maker of history; rulers, statesmen and soldiers do but work
out the possibilities of co-operation or conflict the teacher creates.
This is no rhetorical flourish; it is a sober fact. The politicians and
masses of our time dance on the wires of their early education.
Teaching then is the initial and decisive factor in the future of
mankind, and the first duty of everyone who has the ability and
opportunity, is to teach, or to subserve the teaching of, the true
history of mankind and of the possibilities of this vision of a single
world state that history opens out to us. Men and women can help the
spread of the saving doctrine in a thousand various ways; for it is not
only in homes and schools that minds are shaped. They can print and
publish books, endow schools and teaching, organize the distribution of
literature, insist upon the proper instruction of children in world wide
charity and fellowship, fight against every sort of suppression or
restrictive control of right education, bring pressure through political
and social channels upon every teaching organization to teach history
aright, sustain missions and a new sort of missionary, the missionaries
to all mankind of knowledge and the idea of one world civilization and
one world community; they can promote and help the progress of
historical and ethnological and political science, they can set their
faces against every campaign of hate, racial suspicion, and patriotic
falsehood, they can refuse, they are bound to refuse, obedience to any
public authority which oppresses and embitters class against class, race
against race, and people against people. A belligerent government as
such, they can refuse to obey; and they can refuse to help or suffer any
military preparations that are not directed wholly and plainly to
preserving the peace of the world. This is the plain duty of every
honest man to-day, to judge his magistrate before he obeys him, and to
render unto Caesar nothing that he owes to God and mankind. And those who
are awakened to the full significance of the vast creative effort now
before mankind will set themselves particularly to revise the common
moral judgment upon many acts and methods of living that obstruct the
way of the world state. Blatant, aggressive patriotism and the
incitements against foreign peoples that usually go with it, are just as
criminal and far more injurious to our race than, for example, indecent
provocations and open incitements to sexual vice; they produce a much
beastlier and crueller state of mind, and they deserve at least an equal
condemnation. Yet you will find even priests and clergymen to-day
rousing the war passions of their flocks and preaching conflict from the
very steps of the altar.
So far the movement towards a world state has lacked any driving power
of passion. We have been passing through a phase of intellectual
revision. The idea of a world unity and brotherhood has come back again
into the world almost apologetically, deferentially, asking for the kind
words of successful politicians and for a gesture of patronage from
kings. Yet this demand for one world-empire of righteousness was
inherent in the teachings of Buddha, it flashed for a little while
behind the sword of Islam, it is the embodiment in earthly affairs of
the spirit of Christ. It is a call to men for service as of right, it is
not an appeal to them that they may refuse, not a voice that they may
disregard. It is too great a thing to hover for long thus deferentially
on the outskirts of the active world it has come to save. To-day the
world state says "Please listen; make way for me." To-morrow it will
say: "Make way for me, little people." The day is not remote when
disregardful "patriotic" men hectoring in the crowd will be twisted
round perforce to the light they refuse to see. First comes the idea and
then slowly the full comprehension of the idea, comes realization, and
with that realization will come a kindling anger at the vulgarity, the
meanness, the greed and baseness and utter stupidity that refuses to
attend to this clear voice, this definite demand of our racial
necessity. To-day we teach, but as understanding grows we must begin to
act. We must put ourselves and our rulers and our fellow men on trial.
We must ask: "What have you done, what are you doing to help or hinder
the peace and order of mankind?" A time will come when a politician who
has wilfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as
sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It
is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not
stake their own. The service of the world state calls for much more than
passive resistance to belligerent authorities, for much more than
exemplary martyrdoms. It calls for the greater effort of active
interference with mischievous men. "I will believe in the League of
Nations," one man has written, "when men will fight for it." For this
League of Nations at Geneva, this little corner of Balfourian jobs and
gentility, no man would dream of fighting, but for the great state of
mankind, men will presently be very ready to fight and, as the thing may
go, either to kill or die. Things must come in their order; first the
idea, then the kindling of imaginations, then the world wide battle. We
who live in the bleak days after a great crisis, need be no more
discouraged by the apparent indifference of the present time than are
fields that are ploughed and sown by the wet days of February and the
cold indifference of the winds of early March. The ploughing has been
done, and the seed is in the ground, and the world state stirs in a
multitude of germinating minds.
II
THE PROJECT OF A WORLD STATE[B]
[B] Written originally as a lecture to be delivered in America.
In this paper, I want to tell you of the idea that now shapes and
dominates my public life--the idea of a world politically united--of a
world securely and permanently at peace. And I want to say what I have
to say, so far as regards the main argument of it, as accurately and
plainly as possible, without any eloquence or flourishes.
When I first planned this paper, I chose as the title _The Utopia of a
World State_. Well, there is something a little too flimsy and
unpracticable about that word Utopia. To most people Utopia conveys the
idea of a high-toned political and ethical dream--agreeable and
edifying, no doubt, but of no practical value whatever. What I have to
talk about this evening is not a bit dreamlike, it is about real dangers
and urgent necessities. It is a Project and not a Utopia. It may be a
vast and impossible project. It may be a hopeless project. But if it
fails our civilization fails. And so I have called this paper not the
Utopia but _The Project of a World State._ There are some things that it
is almost impossible to tell without seeming to scream and exaggerate,
and yet these things may be in reality the soberest matter of fact. I
want to say that this civilization in which we are living is tumbling
down, and I think tumbling down very fast; that I think rapid enormous
efforts will be needed to save it; and that I see no such efforts being
made at the present time. I do not know if these words convey any
concrete ideas to the reader's mind. There are statements that can open
such unfamiliar vistas as to seem devoid of any real practical meaning
at all, and this I think may be one of them.
In the past year I have been going about Europe. I have had glimpses of
a new phase of this civilization of ours--a new phase that would have
sounded like a fantastic dream if one had told about it ten years ago. I
have seen a great city that had over two million inhabitants, dying, and
dying with incredible rapidity. In 1914 I was in the city of St.
Petersburg and it seemed as safe and orderly a great city as yours. I
went thither in comfortable and punctual trains. I stayed in an hotel as
well equipped and managed as any American hotel. I went to dine with and
visit households of cultivated people. I walked along streets of
brilliantly lit and well-furnished shops. It was, in fact, much the same
sort of life that you are living here to-day--a part of our (then)
world-wide modern civilization.
I revisited these things last summer. I found such a spectacle of decay
that it seems almost impossible to describe it to those who have never
seen the like. Streets with great holes where the drains had fallen in.
Stretches of roadway from which the wood paving had been torn for
firewood. Lampposts that had been knocked over lying as they were left,
without an attempt to set them up again. Shops and markets deserted and
decayed and ruinous. Not closed shops but abandoned shops, as
abandoned-looking as an old boot or an old can by the wayside. The
railways falling out of use. A population of half a million where
formerly there had been two. A strangely homeless city, a city of
discomforts and anxieties, a city of want and ill-health and death. Such
was Petersburg in 1920.
I know there are people who have a quick and glib explanation of this
vast and awe-inspiring spectacle of a great empire in collapse. They say
it is Bolshevism has caused all this destruction. But I hope to show
here, among other more important things, that Bolshevism is merely a
part of this immense collapse--that the overthrow of a huge civilized
organization needs some more comprehensive explanation than that a
little man named Lenin was able to get from Geneva to Russia at a
particular crisis in Russian history. And particularly is it to be noted
that this immense destruction of civilized life has not been confined to
Russia or to regions under Bolshevik rule. Austria and Hungary present
spectacles hardly less desolating than Russia. There is a conspicuous
ebb in civilization in Eastern Germany. And even when you come to France
and Italy and Ireland there are cities, townships, whole wide regions,
where you can say: This has gone back since 1914 and it is still going
back in material prosperity, in health, in social order.
Even in England and Scotland, in Holland and Denmark and Sweden, it is
hard to determine whether things are stagnant or moving forward or
moving back--they are certainly not going ahead as they were before
1913-14. The feeling in England is rather like the feeling of a man who
is not quite sure whether he has caught a slight chill or whether he is
in the opening stage of a serious illness.
Now what I want to do here is to theorize about this shadow, this chill
and arrest, that seems to have come upon the flourishing and expanding
civilization in which all of us were born and reared. I want to put a
particular view of what is happening before you, and what it is that we
are up against. I want to put before you for your judgment the view that
this overstrain and breaking down and stoppage of the great uprush of
civilization that has gone on for the past three centuries is due to the
same forces and is the logical outcome of the same forces that led to
that uprush, to that tremendous expansion of human knowledge and power
and life. And that that breaking up is an inevitable thing unless we
meet it by a very great effort of a particular kind.
Now the gist of my case is this: That the civilization of the past three
centuries has produced a great store of scientific knowledge, and that
this scientific knowledge has altered the material scale of human
affairs and enormously enlarged the physical range of human activities,
but that there has been no adequate adjustment of men's political ideas
to the new conditions.
This adjustment is a subtle and a difficult task. It is also a greatly
neglected task. And upon the possibility of our making this adjustment
depends the issue whether the ebb of civilizing energy, the actual
smashing and breaking down of modern civilization, which has already
gone very far indeed in Russia and which is going on in most of Eastern
and Central Europe, extends to the whole civilized world.
Let me make a very rough and small scale analysis of what is happening
to the world to-day. And let us disregard many very important issues and
concentrate upon the chief, most typical issue, the revolution in the
facilities of locomotion and communication that has occurred to the
world and the consequences of that revolution. For the international
problem to-day is essentially dependent upon the question of transport
and communication--all others are subordinate to that. I shall
particularly call your attention to certain wide differences between the
American case and the old-world case in this matter.
It is not understood clearly enough at the present time how different
is the American international problem from the European international
problem, and how inevitable it is that America and Europe should
approach international problems from a different angle and in a
different spirit. Both lines of thought and experience do, I believe,
lead at last to the world state, but they get there by a different route
and in a different manner.
The idea that the government of the United States can take its place
side by side with the governments of the old world on terms of equality
with those governments in order to organize the peace of the world, is,
I believe, a mistaken and unworkable idea. I shall argue that the
government of the United States and the community of the United States
are things different politically and mentally from those of the states
of the old world, and that the role they are destined to play in the
development of a world state of mankind is essentially a distinctive
one. And I shall try to show cause for regarding the very noble and
splendid project of a world-wide League of Nations that has held the
attention of the world for the past three years, as one that is, at
once, a little too much for complete American participation, and not
sufficient for the urgent needs of Europe. It is not really so
practicable and reasonable a proposition as it seemed at first.
The idea of a world state, though it looks a far greater and more
difficult project, is, in the long run, a sounder and more hopeful
proposition.
Now let me make myself as clear as I can be about the central idea upon
which the whole of the arguments in this lecture rests. It is this:
forgive me for a repetition--that there has been a complete alteration
in the range and power of human activities in the last hundred years.
Men can react upon men with a rapidity and at a distance inconceivable a
hundred years ago. This is particularly the case with locomotion and
methods of communication generally. I will not remind you in any detail
of facts with which you are familiar; how that in the time of Napoleon
the most rapid travel possible of the great conqueror himself did not
average all over as much as four and a half miles an hour. A hundred and
seven miles a day for thirteen days--the pace of his rush from Vilna to
Paris after the Moscow disaster--was regarded as a triumph of speed. In
those days, too, it was a marvel that by means of semaphores it was
possible to transmit a short message from London to Portsmouth in the
course of an hour or so.
Since then we have seen a development of telegraphy that has at last
made news almost simultaneous about the world, and a steady increase in
the rate of travel until, as we worked it out in the Civil Air Transport
Committee in London, it is possible, if not at present practicable, to
fly from London to Australia, half way round the earth, in about eight
days. I say possible, but not practicable, because at present properly
surveyed routes, landing grounds and adequate supplies of petrol and
spare parts do not exist. Given those things, that journey could be done
now in the time I have stated. This tremendous change in the range of
human activities involves changes in the conditions of our political
life that we are only beginning to work out to their proper consequences
to-day.
It is a curious thing that America, which owes most to this acceleration
in locomotion, has felt it least. The United States have taken the
railway, the river steamboat, the telegraph and so forth as though they
were a natural part of their growth. They were not. These things
happened to come along just in time to save American unity. The United
States of to-day were made first by the river steamboat, and then by the
railway. Without these things, the present United States, this vast
continental nation, would have been altogether impossible. The westward
flow of population would have been far more sluggish. It might never
have crossed the great central plains. It took, you will remember,
nearly two hundred years for effective settlement to reach from the
coast to the Missouri, much less than half-way across the continent. The
first state established beyond the river was the steamboat state of
Missouri in 1821. But the rest of the distance to the Pacific was done
in a few decades.
If we had the resources of the cinema it would be interesting to show a
map of North America year by year from 1600 onward, with little dots to
represent hundreds of people, each dot a hundred, and stars to represent
cities of a hundred thousand people.
For two hundred years you would see that stippling creeping slowly along
the coastal districts and navigable waters, spreading still more
gradually into Indiana, Kentucky, and so forth. Then somewhere about
1810 would come a change. Things would get more lively along the river
courses. The dots would be multiplying and spreading. That would be the
steamboat. The pioneer dots would be spreading soon from a number of
jumping-off places along the great rivers over Kansas and Nebraska.
Then from about 1830 onward would come the black lines of the railways,
and after that the little black dots would not simply creep but run.
They would appear now so rapidly, it would be almost as though they were
being put on by some sort of spraying machine. And suddenly here and
then there would appear the first stars to indicate the first great
cities of a hundred thousand people. First one or two and then a
multitude of cities--each like a knot in the growing net of the
railways.