Towards an enduring peace : $b A symposium of peace proposals and programs 1914-1916
History
Towards an enduring peace : $b A symposium of peace proposals and programs 1914-1916
Peace; World War, 1914-1918 -- Peace
In the sphere of science and invention, of industry and economics, as
Norman Angell and others have taught us, the world is already one Great
Society. For the merchant, the banker, and the stockbroker political
frontiers have been broken down. Trade and industry respond to the
reactions of a single, world-wide, nervous system. Shocks and panics
pass as freely as airmen over borders and custom-houses. And not “big
business” only, but the humblest citizen, in his search for a livelihood,
finds himself caught in the meshes of the same world-wide network.
“The widow who takes in washing,” says Graham Wallas, in his deep and
searching analysis of our contemporary life, “fails or succeeds according
to her skill in choosing starch or soda or a wringing machine under the
influence of half a dozen competing world-schemes of advertisement....
The English factory girl who is urged to join her Union, the tired old
Scotch gatekeeper with a few pounds to invest, the Galician peasant when
the emigration agent calls, the artisan in a French provincial town whose
industry is threatened by a new invention, all know that unless they
find their way among world-wide facts, which only reach them through
misleading words, they will be crushed.” The Industrial Revolution of the
past century, steam-power and electricity, the railway and the telegraph,
have knit mankind together, and made the world one place.
[Sidenote: But it lacks a common will and emotion.]
But this new Great Society is as yet formless and inarticulate. It is
not only devoid of common leadership and a common government; it lacks
even the beginnings of a common will, a common emotion, and a common
consciousness. Of the Great Society, consciously or unconsciously,
we must all perforce be members; but of the Great State, the great
World-Commonwealth, we do not yet discern the rudiments. The economic
organization of the world has outstripped the development of its
citizenship and government—the economic man, with his far-sighted vision
and scientific control of the resources of the world, must sit by and
see the work of his hands laid in ashes by contending governments and
peoples. No man can say how many generations must pass before the
platitudes of the market and the exchange pass into the current language
of politics.
In the great work which lies before the statesmen and peoples of the
world for the extension of law and common citizenship and prevention of
war there are two parallel lines of advance.
[Sidenote: The ideal of Inter-State Law must be revived.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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