It is a reassuring fact to the internationalist at the same time that it is a justification for the continued existence of patriotism that there actually have been and are tendencies making not only for closer relations between nations, but also for the moralizing of those relations.[202] In material things countries have been drawn closer and closer together. They are not economic wholes. They are debtors and creditors of one another. They do not keep improved methods of industry in the country where they originated; even improved methods of war have not been so restricted. And they are interdependent in non-material things. Physicians and surgeons do not hide their ideas within their own group. And art and science, of course, have long been ties that have bound together associations of the citizens of diverse countries. There is, in short, a wide unofficial intercourse between the citizens of different countries, a fact which leads Burns to exclaim, “Nor will even diplomatic subtleties be able to keep us back: for trust between the citizens of diverse states is trust between the states, and the official governments will soon have to submit to the new situation.”[203] But states as such consider themselves to be in moral relations with one another. What else can it mean that they have foreign secretaries, and employ an extensive diplomatic service which does a continuous business; that they have been increasingly taking common action for the control of disease or the management of postal and telegraphic communication; that they have been more and more concluding such peace treaties as exist, for instance, between England and the United States?[204] The present war even is proving that the nations of the world are closely interrelated. The struggle is world-wide, and it could not have assumed such tremendous proportions were not every part of the world in close touch with all the rest. And it is significant that the contestants are alliances. Lippman well remarks: “The process of fusion has gone so far that war itself has ceased to be a national enterprise.”[205] The existence of alliance is portentous of the relations of the future. It will do something towards creating a feeling of sympathy between the citizens of the allied countries, and it will show that the nations can work together. And if they can coöperate in war, it ought to be fairly easy for them to draw the conclusion that they can act together in peace. Moreover, if the Allies win the present war, the peace that will result will be representative of the interests of a large group of very different peoples. It is encouraging, too, in the attitude of at least one nation that President Wilson, at the very time when he went to war, declared for a league of nations. We should do well to remind ourselves that one form of patriotism finds its satisfaction in its country as a good neighbor and a servant of humanity.