Our Country's Part Among the Nations
Preceding chapters have indicated our present national unfitness
in so many things concerning our domestic public life. Yet, until
recently, we were enabled to concentrate what public mind and spirit
we had upon such problems as arose among ourselves from the conditions
of our internal growth. Now, being weak, hesitant, and our wills
quite unformed, we are suddenly hurled into the very center of the
international whirlpool. In the preparation for and in the execution of
our part in the Great War, we were, no doubt, quite magnificent. But no
one ever doubted our ability to fight. It is in the execution of the
greater tasks of peace that we falter and fail.
With the close of the war there was presented to us, in the urge to
world leadership, the most difficult and dangerous problem of all.
Here, again, we were offered no alternative. We must go. We must
help to "settle order once again." We drew back from Paris, only to
reassemble the nations at Washington.
Two opposite opinions have settled in the minds of the majority of
Americans with reference to the subject matter of this chapter. One
would have us move far out and lose ourselves in a mad mixing world.
The other would withdraw us from the world utterly and hide us like a
"hermit crab" in any rotting shell we find. I shall here show that one
of these policies is impossible to execute. I shall prove, also, that
the other, if fully carried out, would destroy us as a people. Between
the two, surely, there lies a way in which our ship may move more
safely towards its appointed haven.
Changed international relationships are largely the result of new
forces, physical forces, in the economic and social life of the world.
These forces were drawing and pushing all the nations of the world
very close together. The first wireless message has only recently been
sent entirely around the world. Commercial aviation, already widely
in vogue upon land, will presently span the Atlantic and then the
Pacific. The commercial and financial dependence of each modernized
country upon the other is too commonly realized to need much emphasis
here. If Europe does not buy cotton, the Oklahoma farmer can not pay
his taxes or his grocery bill. If the Germans can not borrow money in
New York and London, they can not buy raw material to work upon; hence,
France, Belgium and Italy, getting no reparations, will not be able to
pay their American creditors. So runs the system into every counting
house, factory and cow stable of the civilized world. Railway lines now
penetrate the deserts of Asia and the jungles of Africa. Everywhere
the half-naked savage is trained to work at strangely modern tasks.
So is his labor interwoven by the machine process into our gigantic
fabric of international industrialism. All the world unites because it
is impossible to any longer stay divided. He who does not understand
these things of the world's work can not begin to think intelligently
concerning international relationship.
Our large American part in the life of the world is, and is to be,
determined by a number of factors. These include our wealth, our
comparative numbers, our national state of mind, and the place we hold
in the opinions of other peoples. We are seven per cent of the world's
population and sixteen per cent of the world's white population. At the
table of the great International Disarmament Conference at Washington
we sat with Britain, France, Italy, and Japan. Our wealth is probably
greater than that of all these combined, including the white colonies
of the British Empire. In power to make war we undoubtedly stand alone.
These elements of physical greatness indicate our natural part in the
reorganization of the shattered world. We can not leave the world to
its ways and build a Chinese wall around America; nor would we if we
could. No wonder our old-fashioned American citizen was deeply worried
in the year of 1920. "Whither," he asked, and "how far are we going?"
So he decided to pause and wait awhile. Deep within the national mind
was the terrible knowledge that, with our feet entering strange and
devious ways, our lamp was untrimmed.
We cannot accept an internationalism that would compromise the
immigration issue either in the East or West. We can not serve Japan
by permitting her to annex California as she has already annexed
Hawaii. We can not save the world by seeking first our own dissolution.
An international market for money and goods is one thing. A free
international market for wage-laborers is quite another. If we are to
undertake our international task, we must ever more jealously guard
the strength which is ours by inheritance. Let us cleave even more
firmly to those things of mind and character that have created us a
nation. As a unified and democratic people, as a successful, happy and
educated people, we can no doubt play a leading part in organizing the
world for better things. All the world cries out for this leadership
of America. But we are as yet unfit to lead. The nations, which are
sinking, stretch out their hands to lay hold of ours, but we ourselves
are falling into the pit. One who reaches down his hand to rescue a man
falling into Niagara's current must first be sure of his own footing.
If we are to save others we must begin by first saving ourselves. It is
impossible to resist the influences that make for internationalism. But
it is possible, it is absolutely necessary, to save and make perfect
our nationalism upon which any useful internationalism must be based.
To speak of internationalism as taking the place of nationalism is to
deny the very meaning of the word from the start. The separate nation,
in its world relationships, may be compared to a separate home in a
community. The citizen joins with his neighbors to construct a road,
to build a village school, to maintain a police and fire service. But
the community effort is not undertaken for the purpose of dissolving
and destroying the home. Just the contrary. The community protects and
serves the home. It accomplishes what the single can not undertake.
Eventually there will come, if we learn to lead, a great world
community. It will come slowly, growing through the centuries. Our own
country, ever more positive of her individuality, of the deeper things
of her own personality, of the true worth of her inmost soul, and with
a realizing sense of the value she can so contribute, may yet aspire to
the privilege and the honor of that world leadership which will make
for the peace, unity and well-being of all.