Municipal government -- United States; Peace; Political participation -- United States; Social justice; Working class -- United States
In illustration of this new determination one immediately thinks of
the international effort to rid the face of the earth of tuberculosis,
in which Germany, Italy, France, England and America are engaged with
such enthusiasm. This movement has its international congresses,
its discoverers and veterans, also its decorations and rewards for
bravery. Its discipline is severe; it requires self-control, endurance,
self-sacrifice and constant watchfulness. Its leaders devote hours to
careful teaching and demonstration, they reclaim acres of bad houses,
and make over the food supply of huge cities. One could instance
the determination to do away with neglected old age, which finds
expression in the Old Age Pension Acts of Germany and Australia, in the
State Savings Banks of Belgium and France, in the enormous number of
Mutual Benefit Societies in England and America. In such undertakings
as these, with their spontaneous and universal manifestations, are
we beginning to see the first timid forward reach of one of those
instinctive movements which carry onward the progressive goodness of
the race.
It is possible that this substitution of nurture for warfare is
analogous to that world-wide effort to put a limit to revenge which
one nation after another essayed as each reached a certain stage of
development. To compel the avenger to accept blood-money in lieu of
the blood of his enemy may have been but a short step in morals,
but at least it destroyed the stimulus to further shedding of blood
which each avenged death had afforded, and it laid the foundations
for court adjudications. The newer humanitarianism is more aggressive
and substitutes emotional stimuli as well as codes of conduct. We may
predict that each nation quite as a natural process will reach the
moment when virile good-will will be substituted for the spirit of
warfare. The process of extinguishing war, however, compared to the
limiting of revenge, will be amazingly accelerated. Owing to the modern
conditions of intercourse, each nation will respond, not to an isolated
impulse, but will be caught in the current of a world-wide process.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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