World War, 1914-1918 -- Atrocities; World War, 1914-1918 -- Hospitals; World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
Until liberals are willing to think through on foreign policy,
studying European and world history, defining the meaning of the State
and visualizing its relationship to other States, we shall have a
skimmed-milk pacifism as their largest contribution to the problems of
nation-States, submerged nationalities, backward races, exploitable
territory and international straits, canals and ports of call. That is
unfortunate. For, unless the liberal mind is brought to bear on foreign
policy, we shall continue to have that policy manipulated by little
groups of expert imperialists. These inner cliques present a program
of action based on fact-study, which wins public opinion, because the
instinct of the people trusts men who know what they want more than it
trusts a bland benevolence without direction of aim.
Our social workers and other liberals would not think of advocating a
policy of "Christianizing" the employer as the sole remedy for social
maladjustment. But this is precisely the sort of thing they advocate in
inter-State relationship. They seek to work by spiritual conversion,
turning the hearts of the rulers to righteousness and softening the
mood of the bellicose mass-people. And the chaos of the outer world
will continue to pour into our tight little domestic compartments of
nicely-adjusted social relationships.
In a word, foreign policy and domestic policy are of one piece, and
the same realism must be applied to questions like the neutrality of
Belgium and the internationalization of Constantinople which we apply
to wage-scales. Until men of liberal tendency are willing to devote the
same hard study to the map which they put on social reform and internal
development, the world will continue to turn to its only experts on
foreign policy, who unfortunately are largely imperialists.
V
THE HYPHENATES
A famous American president once said to a distinguished ambassador:
"We make them into Americans. They come in immigrants of all
nationalities, but they rapidly turn into Americans and make one
nation."
And the ambassador thought within himself and later said to me:
"But a nation is a people with a long experience, who have lived and
suffered together. There is a bell in a great church, which if you
lightly flick it with the fingernail, gives out one single tone which
goes echoing through the Cathedral. If you stand at the far end,
you can hear that tone. So it is with a nation. If it is struck, it
responds as one man to its furthest border. At the stroke of crisis it
answers with one tone."
No. We are not a nation. We are a bundle of nationalities, and some day
we shall be a Commonwealth if we deal wisely with these nations who
dwell among us.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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