Nor can I see any genuine alternative in what some advocate--reliance
by each nation on its own military strength as the sole effective
guarantee for its interests. After the military lessons of this war,
the concentration of scientific, economic, and even educational
attention upon military purposes would almost inevitably be vastly in
excess of anything previously conceived. What limits can be set to the
armies of France and Great Britain if these are to protect those
countries from a German empire already double its previous extent, and
taking steps to control the resources of eastern Europe and the near
East? What navy could guarantee German commerce against the combined
forces of Great Britain and the United States? What limits to the
frightfulness yet to be discovered by chemist and bacteriologist? What
guarantee against the insidious growth of a militarist attitude even in
democratically minded peoples if the constant terror of war exalts
military preparations to the supreme place? Something has changed the
Germany of other days which many of us loved even while we shrank from
its militarist masters. Is it absolutely certain that nothing can
change the spirit of democratic peoples? At any rate, America, which
has experimented on a larger scale with coöperation--political,
economic, and religious--than any other continent, may well assert
steadily and insistently that this is the more hopeful path. It may
urge this upon distrustful Europe.
The obstacles to coöperation are:
1. The survival of the principle of dominance, showing itself in desire
for political power and prestige, and in certain conceptions of
national honor.
2. The principle of non-social competition, exhibited in part in the
political policy of eliminating weaker peoples, and conspicuously in
foreign trade when the use of unfair methods relies upon national power
to back up its exploitation or monopoly.
3. The principle of nationalistic sentiment, itself based on
coöperation, on social tradition and common ideals, but bound up so
closely with political sovereignty and antagonisms as to become
exclusive instead of coöperative in its attitude toward other cultures.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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