Old time questions were of a kind that divided men. "Are you a Christian?" "Where were you born?" "Can you speak Spanish?" No matter how a man answered these questions he got himself into difficulty. If he was a Christian, he found two-thirds of the world confronting him with different religious beliefs. If he was born in France, he was compelled to assume all of the enmities, hatreds and antagonisms felt by Frenchmen for their rivals. If he spoke anything except Spanish, he was a "foreigner" in Spain. The old world was a separatist world, lined with walls, fences, boundary stakes and frontiers. Modern questions bring men into touch with one another. "Can you repair a locomotive?" "Do you understand coal mining?" "Can you carry us safely to Japan?" "Will you take shoes in exchange for petroleum?" "Are you able to get along with people?" "Have you any surplus wheat?" "How do you suppose we can get rid of the boll-weevil?" "Let us show you a new style tractor." If a man can repair an engine, he is wanted in an engine shop. If he can dig coal, he is needed in a coal mine. If he has shoes to exchange for fuel, he finds a ready customer. If he can get along with an odd assortment of his fellows, he is in demand everywhere. The new world is a co-operative world in which people are working together, living together, thinking together; and a test of man's capacity to take part in its activities lies in his ability to be an effective, co-operating member of a world group. [Footnote 1: Before the war Great Britain imported about half of her food. By 1920 she was importing about three-quarters of it. On the basis of the 1919-1920 harvests, British wheat sufficed for less than a third of the British population. See "The Fruits of Victory," Norman Angell, Glasgow. Collins, 1921, p. 9.] 4. _The Basis of a World Program_ With economic life established on a world scale, it is inevitable that the range of men's thoughts and the lines of their social groupings should assume the same general scope. The late war made it quite apparent that war means world war, and that a real peace is impossible unless it is a world peace. The post-war experience has shown with equal clearness, that prosperity means world prosperity, and that it is impossible to destroy the economic well-being of an integral part of the world without destroying the well-being of the whole world. These things were suspected before the war, when they formed the themes of moral dissertations and scholarly essays, of syndicalist pamphlets, socialist programs and revolutionary appeals. But it required the hard knocks of the past eight years to lift them so far out of the realm of theory into that of reality, that any thinking human being who faces the facts must admit their truth.[2]