We may, perhaps, look forward to Europe going through something of the same process which we have gone through in the United States. The colonies joined in a federal government. The union was something entirely apart from themselves. The men of Massachusetts were first and last men of Massachusetts. We belonged for good reasons to a larger unit, but it was only very slowly that we gained any actual feeling of belonging to the United States, of loving it because we were a constituent part of it, because we were helping to make it, not just as an external authority to which we had promised loyalty. The American colonies did not undertake to look pleasant and be kind to one another, they went to work and learned how to live together. And state jealousy has been diminished every year, not by any one preaching to us, but by the process of living together. This is what may happen in a league of nations. The great lesson of the group process, in which all others are involved, is that particularism, however magnified, is no longer possible. There is no magic by which selfishness becomes patriotism the moment we can invoke the nation. The change must be this: as we see now that a nation cannot be healthy and virile if it is merely protecting the rights of its members, so we must see that we can have no sound condition of world affairs merely by the protection of each individual nation—that is the old theory of individual rights. Each nation must play its part in some larger whole. Nations have fought for national rights. These are as obsolete as the individual rights of the last century. What raises this war to a place never reached by any war before is that the Allies are not fighting for national rights. As long as history is read the contribution of America to the Great War will be told as America’s taking her stand squarely and responsibly on the position that national particularism was in 1917 dead.