and land masses of the world. There has been talk in Great Britain of
what people have called "all-red air routes," that is to say,
all-British air routes. There are no all-red air routes. You cannot get
out of Britain to any other parts of the Empire, unless perhaps it is
Canada, without crossing foreign territory. That is a fact that British
people have to face and digest, and the sooner they grasp it the better
for them. Britain cannot use air ways even to develop her commerce in
peace time without the consent and co-operation of a large number of her
intervening neighbours. If she embarks single-handed on any considerable
war she will find both her air and her sea communications almost
completely cut.
And so the British Empire, in spite of its size and its modernity, is
not much better off now in the way of standing alone than the other
European countries. It is no exception to our generalization that (apart
from all other questions) the scale and form of the European states are
out of harmony with contemporary and developing transport conditions,
and that all these powers are, if only on this account, under one urgent
necessity to sink those ideas of complete independence that have
hitherto dominated them. It is a life and death necessity. If they
cannot obey it they will all be destroyed.
III
THE ENLARGEMENT OF PATRIOTISM TO A WORLD STATE
In my opening argument I have shown the connexion between the present
intense political troubles of the world and more particularly of Europe,
and the advance in mechanical knowledge during the past hundred and
fifty years. I have shown that without a very drastic readjustment of
political ideas and habits, there opens before Europe and the world
generally, a sure prospect of degenerative conflicts; that without such
a readjustment, our civilization has passed its zenith and must continue
the process of collapse that has been in progress since August, 1914.
Now this readjustment means an immediate conflict with existing
patriotism. We have embarked here upon a discussion in which emotion and
passion seem quite unavoidable, the discussion of nationality. At the
very outset we bump violently against patriotism as any European
understands that word. And it is, I hold, impossible not to bump against
European patriotisms. We cannot temporize with patriotism, as one finds
it in Europe, and get on towards a common human welfare. The two things
are flatly opposed. One or other must be sacrificed. The political and
social muddle of Europe at the present time is very largely due to the
attempt to compromise between patriotism and the common good of Europe.
Do we want to get rid of patriotism altogether?
I do not think we want to get rid of patriotism, and I do not think we
could, even if we wanted to do so. It seems to be necessary to his moral
life, that a man should feel himself part of a community, belonging to
it, and it belonging to him. And that this community should be a single
and lovable reality, inspired by a common idea, with a common fashion
and aim.
But a point I have been trying to bring out throughout all this argument
so far is this--that when a European goes to the United States of
America he finds a new sort of state, materially bigger and materially
less encumbered than any European state. And he also finds an intensely
patriotic people whose patriotism isn't really the equivalent of a
European patriotism. It is historically and practically a synthesis of
European patriotisms. It is numerically bigger. It is geographically ten
times as big. That is very important indeed from the point of view of
this discussion. And it is synthetic; it is a thing made out of
something smaller. People, I believe, talk of 100 per cent. Americans.
There is no 100 per cent. American except the Red Indian. There isn't a
white man in the United States from whose blood a large factor of
European patriotism hasn't been washed out to make way for his American
patriotism.
Upon this fact of American patriotism, as a larger different thing than
European patriotism, I build. The thing can be done. If it can be done
in the Europeans and their descendants who have come to America, it can
conceivably be done in the Europeans who abide in Europe. And how can we
set about doing it?
America, the silent, comprehensive continent of America, did the thing
by taking all the various nationalities who have made up her population
and obliging them to live together.
Unhappily we cannot take the rest of our European nations now and put
them on to a great virgin continent to learn a wider political wisdom.
There are no more virgin continents. Europe must stay where she is....
Now I am told it sometimes helps scientific men to clear up their ideas
about a process by imagining that process reversed and so getting a view
of it from a different direction. Let us then, for a few moments,
instead of talking of the expansion and synthesis of patriotism in
Europe, imagine a development of narrow patriotism in America and
consider how that case could be dealt with.
Suppose, for instance, there was a serious outbreak of local patriotism
in Kentucky. Suppose you found the people of Kentucky starting a flag of
their own and objecting to what they would probably call the "vague
internationalism" of the stars and stripes. Suppose you found them
wanting to set up tariff barriers to the trade of the states round about
them. Suppose you found they were preparing to annex considerable parts
of the state of Virginia by force, in order to secure a proper strategic
frontier among the mountains to the east, and that they were also
talking darkly of their need for an outlet to the sea of their very own.
What would an American citizen think of such an outbreak? He would
probably think that Kentucky had gone mad. But this, which seems such
fantastic behaviour when we imagine it occurring in Kentucky, is exactly
what is happening in Europe in the case of little states that are hardly
any larger than Kentucky. They have always been so. They have not gone
mad; if this sort of thing is madness then they were born mad. And they
have never been cured. A state of affairs that is regarded in Europe as
normal would be regarded in the United States as a grave case of local
mental trouble.
And what would the American community probably do in such a case? It
would probably begin by inquiring where Kentucky had got these strange
ideas. They would look for sources of infection. Somebody must have been
preaching there or writing in the newspapers or teaching mischief in the
school. And I suppose the people of the United States would set
themselves very earnestly to see that sounder sense was talked and
taught to the people of Kentucky about these things.
Now that is precisely what has to be done in the parallel European case.
Everywhere in Europe there goes on in the national schools, in the
patriotic churches, in the national presses, in the highly nationalized
literatures, a unity-destroying propaganda of patriotism. The schools of
all the European countries at the present time with scarcely an
exception, teach the most rancid patriotism; they are centres of an
abominable political infection. The children of Europe grow up with an
intensity of national egotism that makes them, for all practical
international purposes, insane. They are not born with it, but they are
infected with it as soon as they can read and write. The British learn
nothing but the glories of Britain and the British Empire; the French
are, if possible, still more insanely concentrated on France; the
Germans are just recovering from the bitter consequences of forty years
of intensive nationalist education. And so on. Every country in Europe
is its own _Sinn Fein_, cultivating that ugly and silly obsession of
"ourselves alone." "Ourselves alone" is the sure guide to conflict and
disaster, to want, misery, violence, degradation and death for our
children and our children's children--until our race is dead.
The first task before us in Europe is, at any cost, to release our
children from this nationalist obsession, to teach the mass of European
people a little truthful history in which each one will see the past
and future of his own country in their proper proportions, and a little
truthful ethnology in which each country will get over the delusion that
its people are a distinct and individual race. The history teaching in
the schools of Europe is at the very core of this business.
But that is only, so to speak, the point of application of great complex
influences, the influences that mould us in childhood, the teachings of
literature, of the various religious bodies, and the daily reiteration
of the press. Before Europe can get on, there has to be a colossal
turnover of these moral and intellectual forces in the direction of
creating an international mind. If that can be effected then there is
hope for Europe and the Old World. If it cannot be effected, then
certainly Europe will go down--with its flags nailed to its masts. We
are on a sinking ship that only one thing can save. We have to oust
these European patriotisms by some greater idea or perish.
What is this greater idea to be?
Now I submit that this greater idea had best be the idea of the World
State of All Mankind.
I will admit that so far I have made a case only for teaching the idea
of a United States of Europe in Europe. I have concentrated our
attention upon that region of maximum congestion and conflict. But as a
matter of fact there are no real and effective barriers and boundaries
in the Old World between Europe and Asia and Africa. The ordinary
Russian talks of "Europe" as one who is outside it. The European
political systems flow over and have always overflowed into the greater
areas to the east and south. Remember the early empires of Macedonia and
Rome. See how the Russian language runs to the Pacific, and how Islam
radiates into all three continents. I will not elaborate this case.
When you bear such things in mind, I think you will agree with me that
if we are to talk of a United States of Europe, it is just as easy and
practicable to talk of a United States of the Old World. And are we to
stop at a United States of the Old World?
No doubt the most evident synthetic forces in America at the present
time point towards some sort of pan-American unification. That is the
nearest thing. That may come first.
But are we to contemplate a sort of dual world--the New World against
the Old?
I do not think that would be any very permanent or satisfactory
stopping-place. Why make two bites at a planet? If we work for unity on
the large scale we are contemplating, we may as well work for world
unity.
Not only in distance but in a score of other matters are London and Rome
nearer to New York than is Patagonia, and San Francisco is always likely
to be more interesting to Japan than Paris or Madrid. I cannot see any
reason for supposing that the mechanical drawing together of the
peoples of the world into one economic and political unity is likely to
cease--unless our civilization ceases. I see no signs that our present
facilities for transport and communication are the ultimate possible
facilities. Once we break away from current nationalist limitations in
our political ideas, then there is no reason and no advantage in
contemplating any halfway house to a complete human unity.
Now after what I have been saying it is very easy to explain why I would
have this idea of human unity put before people's minds in the form of a
World State and not of a League of Nations.
Let me first admit the extraordinary educational value of the League of
Nations propaganda, and of the attempt that has been made to create a
League of Nations. It has brought before the general intelligence of the
world the proposition of a world law and a world unity that could not
perhaps have been broached in any other way.
But is it a league of nations that is wanted?
I submit to you that the word "nations" is just the word that should
have been avoided--that it admits and tends to stereotype just those
conceptions of division and difference that we must at any cost minimize
and obliterate if our species is to continue. And the phrase has a thin
and legal and litigious flavour. What loyalty and what devotion can we
expect this multiple association to command? It has no unity--no
personality. It is like asking a man to love the average member of a
woman's club instead of loving his wife.
For the idea of Man, for human unity, for our common blood, for the one
order of the world, I can imagine men living and dying, but not for a
miscellaneous assembly that will not mix--even in its name. It has no
central idea, no heart to it, this League of Nations formula. It is weak
and compromising just where it should be strong--in defining its
antagonism to separate national sovereignty. For that is what it aims
at, if it means business. If it means business it means at least a
super-state overriding the autonomy of existing states, and if it does
not mean business then we have no use for it whatever.
It may seem a much greater undertaking to attack nationality and
nationalism instead of patching up a compromise with these things, but
along the line of independent nationality lies no hope of unity and
peace and continuing progress for mankind. We cannot suffer these old
concentrations of loyalty because we want that very loyalty which now,
concentrates upon them to cement and sustain the peace of all the world.
Just as in the past provincial patriotisms have given place to national
patriotisms, so now we need to oust these still too narrow devotions by
a new unity and a new reigning idea, the idea of one state and one flag
in all the earth.
The idea of the World State stands to the idea of the League of Nations
much as the idea of the one God of Earth and Heaven stands to a Divine
Committee composed of Wodin and Baal and Jupiter and Amon Ra and Mumbo
Jumbo and all the other national and tribal gods. There is no compromise
possible in the one matter as in the other. There is no way round. The
task before mankind is to substitute the one common idea of an
overriding world commonweal for the multitudinous ideas of little
commonweals that prevail everywhere to-day. We have already glanced at
the near and current consequences of our failure to bring about that
substitution.
Now this is an immense proposal. Is it a preposterous one? Let us not
shirk the tremendous scale upon which the foundations of a world state
of all mankind must be laid. But remember, however great that task
before us may seem, however near it may come to the impossible,
nevertheless, in the establishment of one world rule and one world law
lies the only hope of escape from an increasing tangle of wars, from
social overstrain, and at last a social dissolution so complete as to
end for ever the tale of mankind as we understand mankind.
Personally I am appalled by the destruction already done in the world in
the past seven years. I doubt if any untravelled American can realize
how much of Europe is already broken up. I do not think many people
realize how swiftly Europe is still sinking, how urgent it is to get
European affairs put back upon a basis of the common good if
civilization is to be saved.
And now, as to the immensity of this project of substituting loyalty to
a world commonweal for loyalty to a single egotistical belligerent
nation. It is a project to invade hundreds of millions of minds, to
attack certain ideas established in those minds and either to efface
those ideas altogether or to supplement and correct them profoundly by
this new idea of a human commonweal. We have to get not only into the at
present intensely patriotic minds of Frenchmen, Germans, English, Irish
and Japanese, but into the remote and difficult minds of Arabs and
Indians and into the minds of the countless millions of China. Is there
any precedent to justify us in hoping that such a change in world ideas
is possible?
I think there is. I would suggest that the general tendency of thought
about these things to-day is altogether too sceptical of what teaching
and propaganda can do in these matters. In the past there have been very
great changes in human thought. I need scarcely remind you of the spread
of Christianity in Western Europe. In a few centuries the whole of
Western Europe was changed from the wild confusion of warring tribes
that succeeded the breakdown of the Roman Empire, into the unity of
Christendom, into a community with such an idea of unity that it could
be roused from end to end by the common idea of the Crusades.
Still more remarkable was the swift transformation in less than a
century of all the nations and peoples to the south and west of the
Mediterranean, from Spain to Central Asia, into the unity of Islam, a
unity which has lasted to this day. In both these cases, what I may call
the mental turnover was immense.
I think if you will consider the spread of these very complex and
difficult religions, and compare the means at the disposal of their
promoters with the means at the disposal of intelligent people to-day,
you will find many reasons for believing that a recasting of people's
ideas into the framework of a universal state is by no means an
impossible project.
Those great teachings of the past were spread largely by word of mouth.
Their teachers had to travel slowly and dangerously. People were
gathered together to hear with great difficulty, except in a few crowded
towns. Books could be used only sparingly. Few people could read, fewer
still could translate, and MSS. were copied with extreme slowness upon
parchment. There was no printing, no paper, no post. And except for a
very few people there were no schools. Both Christendom and Islam had to
create their common schools in order to preserve even a minimum of their
doctrine intact from generation to generation. All this was done in the
teeth of much bitter opposition and persecution.
Now to-day we have means of putting ideas and arguments swiftly and
effectively before people all over the world at the same time, such as
no one could have dreamt of a hundred years ago. We have not only books
and papers, but in the cinema we have a means of rapid, vivid
presentation still hardly used. We have schools nearly everywhere. And
here in the need for an overruling world state, and the idea of world
service replacing combative patriotism, we have an urgent, a commanding
human need. We have an invincible case for this world state and an
unanswerable objection to the nationalisms and patriotisms that would
oppose it.
Is it not almost inevitable that some of us should get together and
begin a propaganda upon modern lines of this organized world peace,
without which our race must perish? The world perishes for the want of a
common political idea. It is still quite possible to give the world this
common political idea, the idea of a federal world state. We cannot help
but set about doing it.
So I put it to you that the most important work before men and women
to-day is the preaching and teaching, the elaboration and then at last
the realization of this Project of the World State. We have to create a
vision of it, to make it seem first a possibility and then an
approaching reality. This is a task that demands the work and thought of
thousands of minds. We have to spread the idea of a Federal World State,
as an approaching reality, throughout the world. We can do this nowadays
through a hundred various channels. We can do it through the press,
through all sorts of literary expression, in our schools, colleges, and
universities, through political mouthpieces, by special organizations,
and last, but not least, through the teaching of the churches. For
remember that all the great religions of the world are in theory
universalist; they may tolerate the divisions of men but they cannot
sanction them. We propose no religious revolution, but at most a
religious revival. We can spread ideas and suggestions now with a
hundred times the utmost rapidity of a century ago.
This movement need not at once intervene in politics. It is a
prospective movement, and its special concern will be with young and
still growing minds. But as it spreads it will inevitably change
politics. The nations, states, and kingdoms of to-day, which fight and
scheme against each other as though they had to go on fighting and
scheming for ever, will become more and more openly and manifestly
merely guardian governments, governments playing a waiting part in the
world, while the world state comes of age. For this World State, for
which the world is waiting, must necessarily be a fusion of all
governments, and heir to all the empires.
So far I have been occupied by establishing a case for the World State.
It has been, I fear, rather an abstract discussion. I have kept closely
to the bare hard logic of the present human situation.
But now let me attempt very briefly, in the barest outline, some
concrete realization of what a World State would mean. Let us try and
conceive for ourselves the form a World State would take. I do not care
to leave this discussion with nothing to it but a phrase which is really
hardly more than a negative phrase until we put some body to it. As it
stands World State means simply a politically undivided world. Let us
try and carry that over to the idea of a unified organized state
throughout the world.
Let us try to imagine what a World Government would be like. I find that
when one speaks of a World State people think at once of some existing
government and magnify it to world proportions. They ask, for example,
where will the World Congress meet; and how will you elect your World
President? Won't your World President, they say, be rather a tremendous
personage? How are we to choose him? Or will there be a World King?
These are very natural questions, at the first onset. But are they sound
questions? May they not be a little affected by false analogies? The
governing of the whole of the world may turn out to be _not_ a magnified
version of governing a part of the world, but a different sort of job
altogether. These analogies that people draw so readily from national
states may not really work in a world state.
And first with regard to this question of a king or president. Let us
ask whether it is probable that the world state will have any single
personal head at all?
Is the world state likely to be a monarchy--either an elective short
term limited monarchy such as is the United States, or an inherited
limited monarchy like the British Empire?
Many people will say, you _must_ have a head of the state. But _must_
you? Is not this idea a legacy from the days when states were small
communities needing a leader in war and diplomacy?
In the World State we must remember there will be no war--and no
diplomacy as such.
I would even question whether in such a great modern state as the U.S.A.
the idea and the functions of the president may not be made too
important. Indeed I believe that question has been asked by many people
in the States lately, and has been answered in the affirmative.
The broad lines of the United States constitution were drawn in a period
of almost universal monarchy. American affairs were overshadowed by the
personality of George Washington, and as you know, monarchist ideas were
so rife that there was a project, during the years of doubt and division
that followed the War of Independence, for importing a German King, a
Prussian Prince, in imitation of the British Monarchy. But if the United
States were beginning again to-day on its present scale, would it put so
much power and importance upon a single individual as it put upon George
Washington and his successors in the White House? I doubt it very much.
There may be a limit, I suggest, to the size and complexity of a
community that can be directed by a single personal head. Perhaps that
limit may have been passed by both the United States and by the British
Empire at the present time. It may be possible for one person to be
leader and to have an effect of directing personality in a community of
millions or even of tens of millions. But is it possible for one small
short-lived individual to get over and affect and make any sort of
contact with hundreds of millions in thousands of towns and cities?
Recently we have watched with admiration and sympathy the heroic efforts
of the Prince of Wales to shake hands with and get his smile well home
into the hearts of the entire population of the British Empire of which
he is destined to become the "golden link." After tremendous exertions a
very large amount of the ground still remains to be covered.
I will confess I cannot see any single individual human head in my
vision of the World State.
The linking reality of the World State is much more likely to be not an
individual but an idea--such an idea as that of a human commonweal under
the God of all mankind.