This is the key-note of a powerful article by H. G. Wells, in a recent
issue of the New York _Times_. His argument, is that “Man’s increasing
power of destruction, unchecked will overwhelm Hope, Beauty and Freedom
in the World.”
The submarine and the aircraft have made the horrors of war inescapable
by the civil population of any country. The development of destructive
weapons during the present war has been marvellous. It seems inevitable
that capacity for offense will be so developed in time that no ship will
be safe from torpedoes on ocean, river or lake, and that no city or
hamlet, or even remote farmhouse, will be exempt from destruction by
aërial bombs. What is to prevent a fleet of enemy’s aircraft from
burning up the crops of any given region, condemning the inhabitants to
starvation? This thought can be expanded ad libitum by those who keep
pace with the march of invention, and who realize that just now
destructive invention outpaces constructive invention and the science of
conservation.
The old scope of war was sufficiently horrible, when it mainly
threatened fortresses, battle-fields and men liable to military service.
But now its threat is universal, against whole populations, on land and
water.
Therefore the question of universal peace is now of vital interest not
alone to the statesman, the ruler, the general and the financier, but to
“the man in the street,” to the ordinary citizen, to every woman, and to
every little child. It always concerned all these in a general way, but
now it is brought intimately home to all, because war can at any moment
put any individual in imminent personal deadly peril of life or limb.
Is there a possibility of preventing wars in the future short of the
adoption of a counsel of perfection—that is to say, the substantial
regeneration of human nature to the moral elevation of the mind that was
in the Prince of Peace? There is manifestly only one way to approximate
universal peace among men so long as they remain in an unregenerate
state. And that is a union or welding of nations into what might be
called a World-State.
The model is the nation itself. Internal peace is preserved in a
civilized and virile nation by the establishment of constitutional
safeguards and of institutions of government. Not all the individuals of
a nation can be trusted to keep the peace. The non-peaceable are held in
check by laws and by the provisions made for the execution of the laws.
To this end nations have legislative bodies, executives and courts. The
executives have placed under their command armies and police forces to
restrain the wicked. With all the machinery of executives and courts and
police forces crime is not entirely prevented, nor violence suppressed.
People are assaulted and murdered, but in a well-ordered nation the
infractions of the law are trifling as compared with the aggregate of
peaceful life.
So in a World-State. War and violence might not be entirely prevented,
but the aggregate of peaceful life would be so extended as to save
civilization and permit moral and material progress. Mr. Wells well
says:
The course of human history is downward and very dark indeed unless
our race can give mind and will, now unreservedly in unprecedented
abundance, to the stern necessities that follow logically from the
aircraft bomb and the poison gas and that silent, invisible,
unattainable murderer, the submarine.
The way to achieve a World-State was clearly pointed out by the
Cleveland World Court Congress. It is doubtful if any other method is
workable than to begin with the establishment of a World Supreme Court
for Judicial Settlement backed by ample physical force to curb unruly
nations. No one contends that such a tribunal can be made effective
without the coöperation of the first class powers, or a decisive
majority of them. The task of the United States, after the conclusion of
the present bloody war, will be to bring these great nations together in
a world-conference to perfect the plan for a World-State.