The thinking majority of people in America and among other nations know
very well what they want. A designing minority may be willing to continue
the bloodthirsty ways of the past for reasons of either personal gain or
private preference. The thoughtful majority, however, desire some
reasonable assurance that the peace of the world will not again be broken.
An intelligible plan for world peace has for a long while been taking
shape in the minds of unselfish national leaders. The war and the new
world conditions occasioned by it have crystallized that plan into a
purpose. We call it the League of Nations. It will be, so to speak,
a kind of United States of the World.
The plan is a promising one. Many far-seeing thinkers wished for it years
before the outstanding national leaders were influenced by a world
emergency to become champions of it. It simply means the extension of our
organization for common protection, welfare, and progress into
international proportions.
Between individuals we have succeeded in reducing brawling to a minimum.
The same means, internationally applied, will reduce it to a minimum
between nations. We have declared that individuals shall not carry
weapons to the menace of others. We can tell nations that they too must
lay aside their guns for the good of the public peace. We have
established means whereby offenders can be brought to justice and
disputes settled between individual litigants. We can establish the same
means for preventing lawbreaking and for the settlement of disputes in
the case of nations. We have established police power to enforce the
decrees of our local, state, and national courts. International law can
be given the same authority in the same way.
We will not be wise to conclude, however, that all we need is a League of
Nations. No mere material organization can constitute complete assurance
that men will henceforth live at peace with one another. Such an
organization would be a great force. As in the case with local, state, and
federal laws, its mandates would keep some people at peace through their
good will and others through their fear of the consequences of
disobedience. It will take more than a League of Nations, however, to make
the peace of the world certain and permanent.
This is true because the issues of life are spiritual. The strongest
forces are not physical. The force of opinion is greater than the power of
guns, and the union of spiritual attitudes and standards is stronger than
any bond of mere organization.
The value of whatever solution for our problem we may adopt will be
determined not so much by the plan itself as by the spiritual basis of the
plan. If the hearts of men are not right toward one another, the vision of
peace will be as idle a dream as it was in the past years. If the
relations of men, one with another, are right, then we may feel that the
peace of the world is already assured.
We may have an organized super-state. The true super-state will exist,
however, not in the outward form of any organization but in the spiritual
attitude of the hearts of men. In other words, if it is to exist at all,
it must exist in the fact of brotherhood and in the conditions generated
by the fraternal spirit. The true super-state might as well be called the
kingdom of love. It can be nothing else and fulfil its mission.
The wreck of the German Empire is the ruin of an attempt to found a
super-state upon the wrong basis. Germany smothered the fraternal spirit,
prostituted genius, reduced her schools to media for her propaganda, and
killed the idea of unselfishness in the minds of her people. She bent
everything to the making of an empire which was to be the wonder of the
world in power, wealth, and efficiency. Like the presumptuous Babel of an
older day, this audacious plan fell in scattered ruins, after having been
the means of drenching the world in blood.
Whoever allows his mind to harbor a dream of power, wealth, efficiency, or
commercial supremacy on any other basis than that of brotherhood should
remember the name of Germany and take due warning. A new world is now in
process of building. Whatever we may have in it, we should permit the
presence of nothing which does not rest upon a fraternal foundation. If we
have to choose between being a people of tender hearts and possessing the
glory and dominion of the world, we can best afford to choose to be people
of tender hearts.
The spirit of malice and distrust was the powder train by which the
magazine of the world’s fury was exploded. The hands of both the crafty
and the foolish helped to lay it. It has always been so, and will always
be so until such work is done no more. While men distrust one another,
look for unworthy motives in one another, or talk of and prepare for war
with one another, there will be no end of strife. When men of all classes,
nations, and races learn to genuinely love one another, the day of strife
will cease.
Some wars have been wars of punishment, but when the people of the earth
learn to do right, there will be nothing to punish. With the life of the
world actuated by unselfish motives, there will be no need for the avenger
to march on errands of death, made necessary by some outrage or injustice.
Until that time, peace will remain dim in the promise of any plan that we
can formulate. Is there any reason why men should not do right? If duty
were impossible, all creation would be a mockery and a
moral contradiction.
Other wars have been wars of contention, but when men deal justly there
will be no longer anything for which to contend. The goods of the world
may be very rich and lovely, but they are worth neither the price of life
nor the stigma of murder. It is better, even for nations, to have less and
have it honestly, to possess less and live in a world safe for each
generation and its posterity. When the hearts of men are right, our
economic systems will also be right. Every man will get his share and be
content with it when he gets it.
When the dream of world brotherhood has become a fact, we shall often
think with a bitter surprise of the bickerings and misunderstandings of
yesterday. The path to that time is the road of the heart. The only way to
realize such an age is to begin to live its spirit. We shall have a world
fraternity only when we all begin to be brothers. This will be a happy
world when it becomes a kindly-hearted world, and it will never be a
wholly happy one until it fulfills this law. The formula is simple and
the conditions are plain.
The time has come for selfish men to surrender their selfish ways and
purposes. The service of self and the road of malice have been proven
failures. They offer nothing which is permanently worth while, and they
lead to endless trouble. For ages we have talked love. Our words will
remain a mockery until we adopt it as a principle and apply it in
life’s affairs.
The time has come to take that forward step. The world is ready for
anything that spells deliverance, and nothing will deliver humanity save
rightness of heart. We had better make a garden of the world than to turn
it into a vast cemetery for the bodies of the slain. Let us have a League
of Nations, but let us build it on a safe foundation.