From the days of the building of the Pyramids down to those of the digging of the Panama Canal the chasm between the two social orders remained open. The abolition of slavery changed but little in the arrangement--was, indeed, effected more in the interests of the old economics than in deference to any strong religious or moral sentiment. In substance the traditional ordering continued to exist in a form better adapted to the modified conditions. But the filling up of that chasm, which is now going forward, involves the overthrow of the system in its entirety, and the necessity of either rearing a wholly new structure, of which even the keen-sighted are unable to discern the outlines, or else the restoration of the old one on a somewhat different basis. And the only basis conceivable to-day is that which would start from the postulate that some races of men come into the world devoid of the capacity for any more useful part in the progress of mankind than that which was heretofore allotted to the proletariat. It cannot be gainsaid that there are races on the globe which are incapable of assimilating the higher forms of civilization, but which might well be made to render valuable services in the lower without either suffering injustice themselves or demoralizing others. And it seems nowise impossible that one day these reserves may be mobilized and systematically employed in virtue of the principle that the weal of the great progressive community necessitates such a distribution of parts as will set each organ to perform the functions for which it is best qualified. Since the close of the war internationalism was in the air, and the labor movement intensified it. It stirred the thought and warmed the imagination alike of exploiters and exploited. Reformers and pacifists yearned for it as a means of establishing a well-knit society of progressive and pacific peoples and setting a term to sanguinary wars. Some financiers may have longed for it in a spirit analogous to that in which Nero wished that the Roman people had but one neck. And the Conference chiefs seemed to have pictured it to themselves--if, indeed, they meditated such an abstract matter--in the guise of a _pax Anglo-Saxonica_, the distinctive feature of which would lie in the transfer to the two principal peoples--and not to a board representing all nations--of those attributes of sovereignty which the other states would be constrained to give up. Of these three currents flowing in the direction of internationalism only one--that of finance--appears for the moment likely to reach its goal.... FOOTNOTES: [36] _L'Humanité,_ March 6 and 18, 1919. [37] Cf. _L'Humanité_, April 10,1919. [38] The sentence was subsequently commuted. [39] _La Gazette de Lausanne_, May 26, 1919. [40] 128th Division. [41] It was reproduced by the French Syndicalist organ, _L'Humanité_ of July 7, 1919. [42] R. de Saussure. Cf. _Journal de Genève_, August 18, and also May 26, 1919.