UNION NOW
A Proposal for a Federal Union of the Democracies of the North Atlantic
By
Clarence K. Streit
For the Great Republic, For the Principle
It Lives By and Keeps Alive, For
Man's Vast Future. —Lincoln
This took was first made public in essence in three Cooper Foundation lectures at Swarthmore College.
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
New York 1939 London
UNION NOW
Fourth Printing
To the Memory of Emma Kirshman, My Mother
And to all those for whom she spoke when with two sons away in the war she wrote:
Surely some great good will come out of so much suffering... Our home is broken and empty, but I am not without hope. Some day you will return improved by this awful experience, for by experiences we grow bigger and get a deeper insight in life and its mysteries.
Printed in the United States of America
Foreword
Today the problem of securing individual freedom, democracy, peace and prosperity is a problem in organizing world government, and to that problem this book brings a fresh solution backed by fresh analysis. Its essence may be found in the first chapter. This may lead some to assume that in writing this book I began with this chapter, too. The opposite occurred. The first chapter was written last. The conclusions it expresses are not to be taken as a thesis which the book was written to prove. Instead I have drawn them from it and have sought for the reader's convenience to say at the start as concisely as I could the essence — not the summary — of what I have to say.
I have drawn these conclusions from much more than this book, in fact from all my experience. They have grown in me since youth — "this is what I have learnt from America" — and especially since the war, particularly during the period since 1920 which I have spent working as an American newspaper correspondent in a score of countries of the Old and New Worlds, and more particularly since 1929. This last period I have spent reporting mainly from Geneva and Basle the efforts of mankind to solve the problem of living together less precariously and meanly, to organize and apply world government and law. I have followed these efforts day in and out for more than 3,000 days; I would give in this book not my experiences but what I have learned from them.
In writing this book, however, I was unable to begin with the gist of what experience had taught me. I had first to write this book through four times, not to mention revisions. When I began it in 1933 as a newspaper article most of these convictions were as vague and formless as the old prospector's conviction, "There's gold in them thar hills!" I count the writing and rewriting of this book as no small part of my experience. It was the part of finding the mother lode amid the rocks and fool's gold, of digging down to it, of separating it from the quartz, of reducing "them thar hills" down to a form where the man in the street might recognize the gold in them, and of blazing a trail back. I could not find my gold as nuggets of pure logic nor by the divining rod of mysticism.
In reporting what I have found I have followed broadly the American rules of my profession which require the reporter to pick out, boil down and tell at the start in the order of importance the essentials he has to tell. My method may be criticized as journalistic, but the quantity of speeches and documents and volumes I have had to wade through in my daily newspaper work in order to find the essentials their authors had to say has convinced me that the ideal for the presentation of all serious thought is the ideal that American news reporters seek, far from it though we fall. In a world so full and with a life so short as ours it seems to me to be highly in the interest of everyone — layman or expert — to get and give his essentials in every field as quickly as the dangers of oversimplifying permit. Since everyone reads much more than he writes and has far more to learn than teach, it seems to me that this journalistic method is to the general advantage — though it does make the writer's work much harder. Certainly I have encountered the difficulty that Pascal expressed long ago: "The last thing that we find in making a book is to know what we must put first."
And having mentioned one of my difficulties, I would mention too that I have enjoyed the enduring advantage of my wife's unending help and firm faith, and generous encouragement from a number of friends at times when I most needed it.
Oct. 14, 1938.
C. K. S.
Introduction by de Tocqueville
Among the new things that drew my attention during my sojourn in the United States none struck me so strongly as the equality of conditions ... The more I studied American society the more I saw the equality of conditions as the generating fact from which each detail descended ... Then I turned my thoughts to our hemisphere, and it seemed to me that I distinguished something similar to the spectacle the new world offered ...
A great democratic revolution is at work among us. Some hope still to stop it. Others judge it to be irresistible because it seems to them the most continuous, ancient and permanent fact known to history ...
The crusades and the English wars decimated the nobles and divided their lands, the institution of the communes introduced democratic liberty in the bosom of feudal monarchy; the discovery of firearms equalized the villain and the noble on the battlefield; the printing press offered equal resources to their intelligence; the postman came to bring light to the door of the poor man's hut as to the palace gate; protestantism maintained that all men are equally qualified to find the road to heaven. The discovery of America presented a thousand new roads to fortune ... Everywhere we have seen the divers incidents of the life of peoples turn to the profit of democracy ...
Shall democracy stop now that it is so strong and its adversaries so weak? ...
The grandeur already achieved keeps us from seeing what yet may come.
The entire book one is about to read has been written in a sort of religious awe produced in the author's soul by the sight of this irresistible revolution which has marched on through so many centuries and through every obstacle, and which we see today yet advancing ...
The ... peoples seem to me to present today a terrifying spectacle; ... their fate is in their hands; but soon it will escape them.
To instruct the democracy, to revive, if possible, its beliefs, purify its practices, regulate its movements; to replace little by little its inexperience with science and its blind instincts with knowledge of its true interests; to adapt its government to the times and conditions, to modify it according to circumstances and men: such is the first of the duties our times impose on those who lead society.
A world quite new needs a new political science ...
This book does not follow precisely in the wake of any one. In writing it I have sought neither to serve nor combat any party; I have sought to see not other but farther than the parties, and while they were busy with tomorrow I have tried to think of the future. — Alexis de Tocqueville, in the Introduction to his Democracy in America, 1835.
Contents
FOREWORD ix
INTRODUCTION BY DE TOCQUEVILLE xi
Proposal
I WHAT THIS BOOK IS ABOUT 1
UNION 1
THE AMERICAN WAY THROUGH 3
DEFINITIONS 5
FIFTEEN FOUNDER DEMOCRACIES 6
POWER AND RESPONSIBILITY 8
WHICH WAY ADVANCES FREEDOM MORE? 11
THE ALTERNATIVES TO UNION 13
THE WORST ALTERNATIVE 16
THE MUNICH METHOD 19
LEAVING "EUROPE" TO THE EUROPEANS 22
THE PERIL RETURNS — ONLY GREATER AND NEARER 25
BALANCE OR UNBALANCE OF POWER? 28
THE TEST OF COMMON SENSE 30
THE AMERICAN EXAMPLE 31
II PUBLIC PROBLEM No. 1: WORLD GOVERNMENT 36
THE MACHINE THAT REQUIRES WORLD GOVERNMENT 37
THE INTERNAL OR THE EXTERNAL PROBLEM? 39
WHAT THE RECORD SHOWS 41
THE WIDENING GAP 42
WHAT REASON SHOWS 45
MORE URGENT THAN TREATY OR ECONOMIC ISSUES 48
III URGENT MOST FOR AMERICANS 53
THE PRESENT AMERICAN POSITION 54
WHERE WE ARE MORE EXPOSED THAN EUROPE 57
MORE THAN MONEY TO LOSE 59
HERMIT OR PIONEER? 61
IV PATCHING WON'T DO 65
PATCHING THE WORLD GOLD STANDARD 66
The Fact to be Retained 69
PATCHING THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS 70
The Two Schools 71
The Futility of Universal Conference 73
The Futility of the Big Collective Alliance 73
The Futility of Small Regional Pacts 76
GEORGE WASHINGTON COULD NOT MAKE A LEAGUE WORK 82
THE NEED TO START AFRESH 84
V WHY START WITH THE DEMOCRACIES 86
NEEDED: A NUCLEUS WORLD GOVERNMENT 86
THE NUCLEUS NEEDS TO BE DEMOCRATIC 87
FIFTEEN DEMOCRACIES AS NUCLEUS 89
The Close Cohesion of the Fifteen 90
The Overwhelming Power of the Fifteen 94
THE TWO ESSENTIALS 104
Twelve to Twenty Founders 105
Fewer than Fifteen? 105
More than Fifteen? 107
What of Soviet Russia? 109
Universality the Ultimate Goal 111
Cooperation Meanwhile with Non-Members 113
VI HOW TO ORGANIZE THE DEMOCRACIES 116
WHY THE CHOICE IS BETWEEN TWO UNITS 117
WHY THE UNIT SHAPES THE END 121
NATION — THE MODERN JANUS 123
VII LEAGUE OR UNION? THREE TESTS 128
1. THE SUPER-STATE TEST 128
Why Leagues are Undemocratic 128
Why Unions are Democratic 130
Investing in Union 132
Today's Super-state: The Nation 134
2. THE PRACTICAL TEST 136
Why Leagues Can Not Work 136
Why Leagues Can Not Act in Time 137
Why Leagues Can Not Escape the Unanimity Rule 139
Why Unions Can Act Swiftly 140
3. THE ACID TEST 142
Why Leagues Can Not Enforce Law 143
Why Lawbreakers are Immortal 145
Where Trial Precedes Arrest 147
The Fallacy of Bloodless Sanctions 149
Judge, Sheriff, Criminal — All in One 150
Result: No League Can be Trusted 152
Why Unions Can Enforce Law 153
How Unions Eliminate Inter-state War 155
VIII HOW THE UNION REMEDIES OUR ILLS 160
MILITARY DISARMAMENT AND SECURITY 160
ECONOMIC DISARMAMENT 162
MONETARY STABILIZATION 163
COMMUNICATIONS 165
MEN, JOBS, TAXES, GOVERNMENT 166
DYING TOGETHER OR LIVING TOGETHER? 168
IX ISOLATION OF THE GERM 171
X THE UNION 175
HOW FAR SHALL WE UNITE? 176
The Great Federal Problem 178
Uniting to Decentralize 180
HOW SHALL WE UNITE? 183
The Constitution of the Union 183
What of India? 185
Shall Colonies be Ceded to the Union? 186
The Union Legislature 187 Parliamentary or Presidential Government? 189
The Executive 190
The Judiciary 191
The Amending Machinery 191
Too "Eighteenth Century" 192
XI OF TIME AND FREEDOM 196
THE ETERNAL QUESTION 196
1789 AND TODAY 200
XII TO GET UNION NOW 202
LET UNIONISTS UNITE 202
POSTCARD PLEBISCITE 204
IN MAN OUR TRUST 205
MAN'S WORST WEAKNESS 206
DECLARATION OF DEPENDENCE 208
Philosophy
XIII OF FREEDOM AND UNION 211
OF FREEDOM 213
OF CAIN AND ABEL, SOCRATES, JESUS AND MOHAMMED 224
OF UNION 231
Poem
MAN 240
Annexes
1. ILLUSTRATIVE CONSTITUTION 243
2. TRANSITIONAL AND TECHNICAL PROBLEMS OF
UNION 252
CITIZENSHIP 252
DEFENSE 253
MONEY AND DEBTS 256
COMMUNICATIONS 257
FREEING $50,000,000,000 OF TRADE 258
3. HOW NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY WRECKED THE GOLD STANDARD 269
THE SHORT TERM FLAW 273
WHAT BRITAIN DID TO CONFIDENCE 276
WHAT THE UNITED STATES DID TO CONFIDENCE 280
4. HOW NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY WRECKED THE LOCARNO TREATY 282
5. MY OWN ROAD TO UNION 288
LAST WORD 303
INDEX 305
MAP AND SPHERE BY MARTHE RAICHMAN.
PROPOSAL
CHAPTER I
What This Book Is About
Now it is proposed to form a Government for men and not for Societies of men or States. — George Mason in the American Union's Constitutional Convention.
I am convinced that this is the safest course for your liberty, your dignity and your happiness ... I frankly acknowledge to you my convictions, and I will freely lay before you the reasons on which they are founded ... My arguments will be open to all, and may be judged of by all. They shall at least be offered in a spirit which will not disgrace the cause of truth. — Alexander Hamilton, opening The Federalist.
UNION
Now when man's future seems so vast catastrophe threatens to cut us from it. The dangers with which depression, dictatorship, false recovery and war are hemming us in have become so grave and imminent that we no longer need concern ourselves with proving how grave and near they are, certainly not since the September that reeled from Nuremberg through Berchtesgaden and Godesberg to end at Munich. We need concern ourselves instead with the problem of escaping them and the cruel dilemma Munich found and left democracy facing: Whether to risk peace or freedom? That is the problem with which this book is concerned. I believe there is a way through these dangers, and out of the dilemma, a way to do what we all want, to keep both peace and freedom, and keep them securely and be done with this nightmare. It promises not only escape but life such as I, too, never hoped could be lived in my time.
It is not an easy way — who expects one? — and to many it will seem at first too hard to be practical. But this is because its difficulties are greatest at the start; other ways that seem easier and more obvious to begin with grow increasingly hard and lead to frustration. How could We feel hemmed in if the way through were so easy to take or even see at first? For my part to find it I had to stumble on it, but once found it soon opened so widely as to make me wonder how I had ever failed so long to see it. I shall not be surprised then if you begin by being skeptical or discouraged by the difficulties at the start, but I ask you to remember that the essential question is: Which way will really lead us through, not, which way starts most like a valley, least like a crack in the wall?
Since 1933 when I stumbled on this way I have been exploring it all I could and trying, in the writing of this book, to clear away the things hiding it. By all the tests of common sense and experience I find it to be our safest, surest way; it proves in fact to be nothing new but a forgotten way which our fathers opened up and tried out successfully long ago when they were hemmed in as we are now. I believe it will lead us through in time to avoid catastrophe if only we make the most of the brief respite gained at Munich to agree to set out on it without delay.
The way through is Union now of the democracies that the North Atlantic and a thousand other things already unite — Union of these jew peoples in a great federal republic built on and for the thing they share most, their common democratic principle of government for the sake of individual freedom.
This Union would be designed (a) to provide effective common government in our democratic world in those fields where such common government will clearly serve man's freedom better than separate governments, (b) to maintain independent national governments in all other fields where such government will best serve man's freedom, and (c) to create by its constitution a nucleus world government capable of growing into universal world government peacefully and as rapidly as such growth will best serve man's freedom.
By (a) I mean the Union of the North Atlantic democracies in these five fields:
a union citizenship
a union defense force
a union customs-free economy
a union money
a union postal and communications system.
By (b) I mean the Union government shall guarantee against all enemies, foreign and domestic, not only those rights of man that are common to all the democracies but every existing national or local right that is not clearly incompatible with effective union government in the five named fields. The union would guarantee the right of each democracy in it to govern independently all its home affairs and practise democracy at home in its own tongue, according to its own customs and in its own way, whether by republic or kingdom, presidential, cabinet or other form of government, capitalist, social or other economic system.
By (c) I mean the founder democracies shall so constitute the Union as to encourage the nations outside it and the colonies inside it to seek to unite with it instead of against it. Admission to the Union and to all its tremendous advantages for the individual man and woman would from the outset be open equally to every democracy, now or to come, that guarantees its citizens the Union's minimum Bill of Rights.
The Great Republic would be organized with a view to its spreading peacefully round the earth as nations grow ripe for it. Its Constitution would aim clearly at achieving eventually by this peaceful, ripening, natural method the goal millions have dreamed of individually but never sought to get by deliberately planning and patiently working together to achieve it. That goal would be achieved by Union when every individual of our species would be a citizen of it, a citizen of a disarmed world enjoying world free trade, a world money and a world communications system. Then Man's vast future would begin.
This goal will seem so remote now as to discourage all but the strong from setting out for it or even acknowledging that they stand for it. It is not now so remote, it does not now need men so strong as it did when Lincoln preserved the American Union "for the great republic, for the principle it lives by and keeps alive, for man's vast future." It will no longer be visionary once the Atlantic democracies unite. Their Union is not so remote, and their Union is all that concerns us here and now.
THE AMERICAN WAY THROUGH
These proceedings may at first appear strange and difficult; but, like other steps which we have already passed over, will in a little time become familiar and agreeable. — Thomas Paine in Common Sense.
One hundred and fifty years ago a few American democracies opened this union way through. The dangers of depression, dictatorship and war, and the persuasiveness of clear thinking and courageous leadership led them then to abandon the heresy into which they had fallen. That heresy converted the sovereignty of the state from a mere means to individual freedom into the supreme end itself and produced the wretched "League of Friendship" of the Articles of Confederation. Abandoning all this the democrats of America turned back to their Declaration of Independence — of the independence of Man from the State and of the dependence of free men on each other for their freedom, the Declaration:
That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
Finding they had wrongly applied this philosophy to establish Thirteen "free and independent States" and organize them as the League of Friendship so that "each State retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence," they applied it next as "We the people of the United States" to "secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity." To do this they invented and set up a new kind of inter-state government. It has worked ever since as the other, league type has never worked. It has proved to be an "astonishing and unexampled success," as Lord Acton said, not only in America but wherever democracies have tried it regardless of conditions, — among the Germans, French and Italians of Switzerland, the English and French of Canada, the Dutch and English of the Union of South Africa. It is the kind of interstate government that Lincoln, to distinguish it from the opposing type of government of, by and for states, called "government of the people, by the people, for the people." It is the way that I call Union.
To follow this way through now our Atlantic democracies — and first of all the American Union — have only to abandon in their turn the same heresy into which they have fallen, the heresy of absolute national sovereignty and its vain alternatives, neutrality, balance of power alliance or League of Nations. We the people of the Atlantic have only to cease sacrificing needlessly our individual freedom to the freedom of our nations, be true to our democratic philosophy and establish that "more perfect Union" toward which all our existing unions explicitly or implicitly aim.
Can we hope to find a safer, surer, more successful way than this? What democrat among us does not hope that this Union will be made some day? What practical man believes it will ever be made by mere dreaming or that the longer we delay starting to make it the sooner we shall have it? All it will take to make this Union — whether in a thousand years or now, whether long after catastrophe or just in time to prevent it, — is agreement by a majority to do it. Union is one of those things which to do we need but agree to do, and which we can not possibly ever do except by agreeing to do it. Why then can we not do it now in time for us to benefit by it and save millions of lives? Are we so much feebler than our fathers and our children that we can not do what our fathers did and what we expect our children to do? Why can not we agree on Union now?
Are not liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable as in Webster's day? We can not be for liberty and against Union. We can not be both for and against liberty and Union now. We must choose.
DEFINITIONS
Democracy I would define more closely than the dictionary that defines it as "government by the people" (though I would not attempt needless precision and would indicate an ideal rather than an average). I would add with Lincoln, and I would stress, that democracy is also government for the people and of the people — the people being composed of individuals all given equal weight in principle.
Democracy to me is the way to individual freedom formed by men organizing themselves on the principle of the equality of man. That is, they organize government of themselves in the sense that their laws operate on them individually as equals. They organize government by themselves, each having an equal vote in making law. They organize government for themselves, to secure equally the freedom, in the broadest possible sense of the term, of each of them. By democracy I mean government of the totality by the majority for the sake equally of each minority of one, particularly as regards securing him such rights as freedom of speech, press and association. (If merely these three rights are really secured to all individuals they have the key, I believe, to all the other rights in all the other fields, political, juridical, economic, etc., that form part of individual freedom.)
Union to me is a democracy composed of democracies — an interstate government organized on the same basic principle, by the same basic method and for the same basic purpose as the democracies in it, and with the powers of government divided between the union and the states the better to advance this common purpose, individual freedom.
Union and league I use as opposite terms. I divide all organization of inter-state relations into two types, according to whether man or the state is the unit and the equality of man or the equality of the state is "the principle it lives by and keeps alive." I restrict the term union to the former, and the term league to the latter. To make clearer this distinction and what I mean by unit, these three points may help:
First, a league is a government of governments: It governs each people in its territory as a unit through that unit's government. Its laws can be broken only by a people acting through its government, and enforced only by the league coercing that people as a unit, regardless of whether individuals in it opposed or favored the violation. A union is a government of the people: It governs each individual in its territory directly as a unit. Its laws apply equally to each individual instead of to each government or people, can be broken only by individuals and can be enforced only by coercing and punishing individuals found guilty of having not simply favored but caused the violation.
Second, a league is a government by governments: Its laws are made by the peoples in it acting through its government, or the delegate of that government, as a unit of equal voting power regardless of the number of individuals in it. A union is a government by the people: Its laws are made by the individuals in it acting each through his representatives as a unit of equal voting power in choosing and changing them, each state's voting power in the union government being ordinarily in close proportion to its population. A union may allow in one house of its legislature (as in the American Senate) equal weight to the people of each state regardless of population. But it provides that such representatives shall not, as in a league, represent the state as a unit and be under the instructions of and subject to recall by its government, but shall represent instead the people of the state and be answerable to them.
Third, a league is a government for governments or states: It is made for the purpose of securing the freedom, rights, independence, sovereignty of each of the states in it taken as units equally. A union is a government for the people: It is made for the purpose of securing the freedom, rights, independence, sovereignty of each of the individuals in it taken as units equally. To secure the sovereignty of the state a league sacrifices the rights of men to justice (as in the first point) and to equal voting power (as in the second point), whereas a union sacrifices the sovereignty of the state to secure the rights of men: A league is made for the state, a union is made for man.
This may suffice to explain the sense in which the terms democracy, union and league are meant in this book.
FIFTEEN FOUNDER DEMOCRACIES
In the North Atlantic or founder democracies I would include at least these Fifteen (or Ten): The American Union, the British Commonwealth (specifically the United Kingdom, the Federal Dominion of Canada, the Commonwealth of Australia, New Zealand, the Union of South Africa, Ireland), the French Republic, Belgium, the Netherlands, the Swiss Confederation, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland.
These few include the world's greatest, oldest, most homogeneous and closely linked democracies, the peoples most experienced and successful in solving the problem at hand — the peaceful, reasonable establishment of effective inter-state democratic world government. Language divides them into only five big groups and for all practical political purposes, into only two, English and French. Their combined citizenry of nearly 300,000,000 is well balanced, half in Europe and half overseas. None of these democracies has been at war with any of the others for more than 100 years. Each now fears war, but not one fears war from the others.
These few democracies suffice to provide the nucleus of world government with the financial, monetary, economic and political power necessary both to assure peace to its members peacefully from the outset by sheer overwhelming preponderance and invulnerability, and practically to end the monetary insecurity and economic warfare now ravaging the whole world. These few divide among them such wealth and power that the so-called world political, economic and monetary anarchy is at bottom nothing but their own anarchy — since to end it they need only unite in establishing law and order among themselves.
Together these fifteen own almost half the earth, rule all its oceans, govern nearly half mankind. They do two-thirds of the world's trade, and most of this would be called their domestic trade once they united, for it is among themselves. They have more than 50 per cent control of nearly every essential material. They have more than 60 per cent control of such war essentials as oil, copper, lead, steel, iron, coal, tin, cotton, wool, wood pulp, shipping tonnage. They have almost complete control of such keys as nickel, rubber and automobile production. They possess practically all the world's gold and banked wealth. Their existing armed strength is such that once they united it they could radically reduce their armaments and yet gain a two-power standard of armed superiority over the powers whose aggression any of them now fears.
The Union's existing and potential power from the outset would be so gigantic, its bulk so vast, its vital centers so scattered, that Germany, Italy and Japan even put together could no more dream of attacking it than Mexico dreams of invading the American Union now. Once established the Union's superiority in power would be constantly increasing simply through the admission to it of outside nations. A number would no doubt be admitted immediately. By this process the absolutist powers would constantly become weaker and more isolated.
POWER AND RESPONSIBILITY
Tremendous world power brings with it tremendous responsibility for the world. It is no use blaming today's chaos or tomorrow's catastrophe on Mussolini and Hitler and the Japanese militarists. It is still less use to blame the Japanese and German and Italian peoples. It has never been in their combined power to establish law and order and peace in the world. They are not the source of the danger our whole species now faces, they are only its first victims. They are already living on war bread, going without butter and meat, dressing in shoddy, suffering censorship, hysterical patriotism, propaganda, forced loans, loss of liberty. They are today where we dread to be tomorrow. The anarchy among the democracies is already costing Germans, Italians and Japanese what it will cost us only if we let it go on. As Ambassador Bullitt put it in inaugurating the Lafayette monument at La Pointe-de-Grave Sept. 4, 1938:
It is not enough to observe with a sense of superiority the worst mistakes of the new fanaticisms. The origins of those fanaticisms lie in part in our own unwisdom. If our effort for peace is to achieve anything, it must be based on our ability to put ourselves in other men's shoes, and recognize the truth of the saying, "There, but for the grace of God, go I."
When the really powerful members of a community refuse to organize effective government in it, when each insists on remaining a law unto himself to the degree the democracies, and especially the United States, have done since the war, then anarchy is bound to result and the first to feel the effects of the chaos are bound to be the weaker members of the community. When the pinch comes the last to be hired are the first to be laid off, and the firms working on the narrowest margin are the first to be driven to the wall or to desperate expedients. That makes the pinch worse for the more powerful and faces them with new dangers, with threats of violence. It is human for them then to blame those they have unwittingly driven to desperation, but that does not change the source of the evil.
So it has been in the world. The younger democracies have been the first to go. The first of the great powers driven to desperate and violent measures have been those with the smallest margin. There is no doubt that their methods have since made matters worse and that there is no hope in following their lead. Their autocratic governments are adding to the world's ills but they are not the real cause of them. They are instead an effect of the anarchy among the powerful democracies.
The dictators are right when they blame the democracies for the world's condition, but they are wrong when they blame it on democracy. The anarchy comes from the refusal of the democracies to renounce enough of their national sovereignty to let effective world law and order be set up. But their refusal to do this, their maintenance of the state for its own sake, their readiness to sacrifice the lives and liberties of the citizens rather than the independence of the state, — this we know is not democracy. It is the core of absolutism. Democracy has been waning and autocracy waxing, the rights of men lessening and the rights of the state growing everywhere because the leading democracies have themselves led in practising beyond their frontiers autocracy instead of democracy.
Now many argue that the democracies must organize themselves or at least arm more heavily because the autocracies have formed the Triangular Pact. It is true that the rising power of autocracy increases the need for Union just as the spread of a contagious disease increases the need for quarantine and for organizing the healthy. But it is essential to remember that though the victims carry the disease they did not cause it, and that quarantine of the victims and organization of the healthy are aimed not against the victims but against the epidemic, the purpose being to end it both by restricting its spread and by curing its victims. Union does not seek to put the autocracies even in quarantine in any material sense; it seeks primarily to organize the healthy so as to overcome the disease.
It is wrong, all wrong, to conceive of Union as aimed against the nations of the Triangle. There is a world of difference between the motives behind Union and those behind either the present policy in each democracy of arming for itself or the proposals for alliance among the democracies. For such armament and such alliance are meant to maintain the one thing Union does attack in the one place Union does attack it — the autocratic principle of absolute national sovereignty in the democracies. Unlike armament and alliance policies, Union leads to no crusade against autocracy abroad, to no attempt to end war by war or make the world safe for democracy by conquering foreign dictatorship. Union is no religion for tearing out the mote from a brother's eye — and the eye, too — while guarding nothing so jealously, savagely, as the beam in one's own eye.
Union calls on each democracy to remove itself the absolutism governing its relations with the other democracies, and to leave it to the people of each dictatorship to decide then for themselves whether they will maintain or overthrow the absolutism governing them not only externally but internally. Union provides equally for the protection of the democracies against attack by foreign autocracy while it remains and for the admission of each autocratic country into the Union once it becomes a democracy in the only possible way — by the will and effort of its own people.
The problems the Triangular powers now raise, — equality, treaty revision, raw materials, a place in the sun, the have and have-not struggle, — Union would put on a new basis, that of equality among individual men instead of nations, thereby rendering these problems infinitely simpler and less dangerous. To attain the equality they crave the citizens of these absolutist nations would no longer need to sacrifice their individual freedom to their nation's military power, they would need instead to sacrifice dictatorship and military power to the restoration of their own individual liberties. By gaining membership for their nation in the Great Republic they would gain the equality they now demand and more, for they would enjoy precisely the same status, rights and opportunities as all citizens of this Union just as do the citizens of a state admitted to the American Union. But, to become thus equal sovereigns of the world, they would first have to prove, by overthrowing their autocrats and establishing democracies at home, that they believe in and hold supreme the equality and freedom of individual Man, regardless of the accident of birth. The attraction membership in the Union would have for outsiders would be so powerful and the possibility of conquering the Union would be so hopeless that once Union was formed the problem the absolutist powers now present could be safely left to solve itself. As their citizens turned these governments into democracies and entered the Union the arms burden on everyone would dwindle until it soon completely disappeared.
Thus, by the simple act of uniting on the basis of their awn principle, the democracies today could immediately attain practical security while reducing armaments, and could proceed steadily to absolute security and absolute disarmament.
They could also increase enormously their trade and prosperity, reduce unemployment, raise their standard of living while lowering its cost. The imagination even of the economic expert can not grasp all the saving and profit democrats would realize by merely uniting their democracies in one free trade area.
They need only establish one common money to solve most if not all of today's more insoluble monetary problems, and save their citizens the tremendous loss inherent not only in depreciation, uncertainty, danger of currency upset from foreign causes, but also in the ordinary day-to-day monetary exchange among the democracies. The Union's money would be so stable that it would at once become the universal medium of exchange — a world money far more than was the pound sterling before the war.
Merely by the elimination of excessive government, needless bureaucracy, and unnecessary duplication which Union would automatically effect, the democracies could easily balance budgets while reducing taxation and debt. To an appalling degree taxes and government in the democracies today are devoted only to the maintenance of their separate sovereignties as regards citizenship, defense, trade, money and communications. To a still more appalling degree they are quite unnecessary and thwart instead of serve the purpose for which we established those governments and voted those taxes, namely the maintenance of our own freedom and sovereignty as individual men and women.
By uniting, the democracies can serve this purpose also by greatly facilitating the distribution of goods, travel and the dissemination of knowledge and entertainment. With one move, the simple act of Union, the democrats can make half the earth equally the workshop and the playground of each of them.
Establishment of Union involves difficulties, of course, but the difficulties are transitional, not permanent ones. All other proposals in this field even if realizable could solve only temporarily this or that problem in war, peace, armaments, tariffs, monetary stabilization. These proposals would be as hard to achieve as Union, yet all together they could not do what the one act of Union would — permanently eliminate all these problems. These are problems for which the present dogma of nationalism is to blame. We can not keep it and solve them. We can not eliminate them until we first eliminate it.
WHICH WAY ADVANCES FREEDOM MORE?
This does not mean eliminating all national rights. It means eliminating them only where elimination clearly serves the individuals concerned, and maintaining them in all other respects, — not simply where maintenance clearly serves the general individual interest but also in all doubtful cases. The object of Union being to advance the freedom and individuality of the individual, it can include no thought of standardizing or regimenting him, nor admit the kind of centralizing that increases governmental power over him. These are evils of nationalism, and Union would end them. Union comes to put individuality back on the throne that nationality has usurped.
Everywhere nationalism in its zeal to make our nations instead of ourselves self-sufficing and independent is centralizing government, giving it more and more power over the citizen's business and life, putting more and more of that power in one man's hands, freeing the government from its dependence on the citizen while making him more and more dependent on it — on the pretext of keeping him independent of other governments. Everywhere the national state has tended to become a super-state in its power to dispose of the citizen, his money, job and life. Everywhere nationalism has been impoverishing the citizen with taxes, unemployment, depression, and it is poverty — it is the desert, not the jungle, — that stunts variety in life, that standardizes. Everywhere nationalism is casting the citizen increasingly in militarism's uniform robot mold.
Union would let us live more individual lives. Its test for deciding whether in a given field government should remain national or become union is this: Which would clearly give the individual more freedom? Clearly the individual freedom of Americans or Frenchmen would gain nothing from making Union depend on the British converting the United Kingdom into a republic. Nor would the British be the freer for making Union depend on the Americans and French changing to a monarchy. There are many fields where it is clear that home rule remains necessary for individual freedom, where the maintenance of the existing variety among the democracies helps instead of harms the object of Union.
It is clear too that a Union so secure from foreign aggression as this one would be would not need that homogeneity in population that the much weaker American Union feels obliged to seek. Our Union could afford to encourage the existing diversity among its members as a powerful safeguard against the domestic dangers to individual freedom. Just as the citizen could count on the Union to protect his nation from invasion or from dictatorship rising from within, he could count on his nation's autonomy to protect him from a majority in the Union becoming locally oppressive. The existence of so many national autonomies in the Union would guarantee each of them freedom to experiment politically, economically, socially and would save this Union from the danger of hysteria and stampede to which more homogeneous unions are exposed.
Clearly, individual freedom requires us to maintain national autonomy in most things but no less clearly it requires us to abolish that autonomy in a few things. There is no need to argue that you and I have nothing to lose and much to gain by becoming equal citizens in the Union while retaining our national citizenship. Clearly you and I would be freer had we this Great Republic's guarantee of our rights as men, its security against the armaments burden, military servitude, war. It is self-evident that you and I would live an easier and a richer life if through half the world we could do business with one money and postage, if through half the world we were free to buy in the cheapest market what we need to buy and free to sell in the dearest market what we have to sell.
In five fields — citizenship, defense, trade, money, and communications — we are sacrificing now the individual freedom we could safely, easily have. On what democratic ground can we defend this great sacrifice? We make it simply to keep our democracies independent of each other. We can not say that we must maintain the state's autonomy in these few fields in order to maintain it in the many fields where it serves our freedom, for we know how to keep it in the latter without keeping it in the former. We have proved that in the American Union, the Swiss Union, and elsewhere.
What then can we say to justify our needless sacrifice of man to the state in these five fields, a sacrifice made only to maintain the nation for the nation's sake? How can we who believe the state is made for man escape the charge that in these five fields we are following the autocratic principle that man is made for the state? How can we plead not guilty of treason to democracy? Are we not betraying our principles, our interests, our freedom, ourselves and our children? We are betraying too our fathers. They overthrew the divine right of kings and founded our democracies not for the divine right of nations but for the rights of Man.
Clearly absolute national sovereignty has now brought us to the stage where this form of government has become destructive of the ends for which we form government, where democrats to remain democrats must use their right "to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its power in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness."
Clearly prudence dictates that we should lay our new government's foundations on such principles and organize its powers in such form as have stood the test of experience. Clearly democracy bids us now Unite our unions of free men and women in one world Union of the free.
THE ALTERNATIVES TO UNION
Fantastic? Visionary? What are the alternatives? There are only these: Either the democracies must try to stand separately or they must try
to stand together on some other basis than union, that is, they must organize themselves as a league or an alliance.
Suppose we try to organize as a league. That means seeking salvation from what Alexander Hamilton called "the political monster of an imperium in imperio." We adopt a method which has just failed in the League of Nations, which before that led the original thirteen American democracies to a similar failure, and failed the Swiss democracies, the Dutch democracies, and the democracies of ancient Greece. We adopt a method which has been tried time and again in history and has never worked, whether limited to few members or extended to many, a method which, we shall see, when we analyze it later, is thoroughly undemocratic, untrustworthy, unsound, unable either to make or to enforce its law in time. Is it not fantastic to expect to get the American people, after 150 years of successful experience with union and after their rejection of the League of Nations, to enter any league? Can any but the visionary expect us to go through the difficulty that organization of the democracies on any basis entails — all for what we know to be a political monstrosity?
Suppose we try to organize instead an alliance of the democracies. But an alliance is simply a looser, more primitive form of league, one that operates secretly through diplomatic tunnels rather than openly through regular assemblies. It is based on the same unit as a league, — the state, — and on the same principle, — that the maintenance of the freedom of the state is the be-all and the end-all of political and economic policy. It is at most an association (instead of a government) of governments, by governments, for governments. It has all the faults of a league with most of them intensified and with some more of its own added.
Though possible as a temporary stopgap an alliance, as a permanent organization, has never been achieved and is practically impossible to achieve among as many as fifteen states. The fact that the states are democracies makes a permanent alliance among them not less but more impractical and inconceivable. For the more democratic a state is, then the more its government is dependent on public opinion and the more its people are loath to be entangled automatically in the wars of governments over which they have not even the control a league gives, and the more its foreign policy is subject to change. But the more all this is true of a state the harder it is either for it to enter an alliance or for its allies to trust it if it does.
A big alliance being looser than a league, the fact that the democracies preferred the former would show the strength of their desire to keep apart. That would further encourage their enemies to gamble on exploiting this separatist tendency till they overcame them and their satellites one by one. It would not encourage them so much as the existing nationalism among the democracies which has already led the autocrats to invade China, Ethiopia, Spain, Austria and, practically, Czechoslovakia, but the difference would not be enough to matter.
The best way to prevent war is to make attack hopeless. It will not be hopeless while the autocrats, who by their nature are gamblers with abnormal confidence in themselves and their luck, have any ground left to gamble either that the democracies can be divided or that the inter-democracy organization is too cumbersome and loose to resist surprise attack. An alliance can not long make this gamble hopeless.
The basic flaw in an alliance of democracies is the nationalist philosophy responsible for it. If the desire to avoid commitments is strong enough to prevent a democracy from forming a union or even a league with the others, it will also prevent its allying with them until the danger is so great and imminent that the alliance comes too late to prevent war. The alliance may come in time to promise to win a war that pure nationalism could not hope to win, and to win it at greater cost than could a league. But it can not promise, as Union can, to prevent the war — and that is the main thing.
Even the war danger before 1914 failed to drive the British and French democracies into a real alliance; they got no further than a "cordial understanding." It took three years of war then to bring them to agree on a supreme command. Now the war danger has driven the British to a much closer understanding with the French than in 1914, and they have already agreed on a supreme command. But by the time the rising threat from the other side drove them to this, Germany, Italy and Japan already felt too strong to be discouraged by it. And so the Anglo-French accord has utterly failed to remove the war danger.
Even the world war after it engulfed the United States could not persuade the United States to ally with the other democracies; it would only "associate" itself with them. If it is not visionary to expect the United States to enter an "entangling alliance" now, what is it?
"It is necessary," declared Secretary Hull, Aug. 16, 1938, "that as a nation we become increasingly resolute in our desire and increasingly effective in our efforts to contribute along with other peoples — always within the range of our traditional policies of non-entanglement — to the support of the only program which can turn the tide of lawlessness and place the world firmly upon the one and only roadway that can lead to enduring peace and security." By excluding all solutions contrary to "our traditional policies of non-entanglement" this champion of world law and order did not exclude union, for there can be no more traditional American policy than this; no American considers as an entanglement the union of the Thirteen democracies nor the union of their Union with the Republic of Texas. By entanglement Americans mean alliances and leagues; these are the solutions which Secretary Hull warns are excluded.
But suppose the United States could be brought into an alliance. On what reality rests the belief that this would prevent war with the opposing alliance? The lack of machinery for reaching and executing international agreement in the economic and financial and monetary fields in time to be effective did much to throw the world into the depression that led us through Manchuria and Hitler and Ethiopia to where we are today. What could be more fantastic than the hope that any conceivable alliance could provide this machinery, or that without this machinery we can long avoid depression and war?
THE WORST ALTERNATIVE
Only one thing could be more visionary and fantastic, and that is the third possible alternative to Union, the one that would seek salvation in rejecting every type of interstate organization and in pursuing a policy of pure nationalism, — the policy of isolationism, neutrality, of each trusting to his own armaments, military and economic. For if the democracies are not to try to stand together by union or league or alliance, the only thing left for them is to try to stand alone. Consider the experience of the powers that have tried this alternative.
Once each of the Triangular powers believed so much in its ability to stand alone and insisted so much on its right to be a law unto itself that each defied the League and left it. Each seemed at first to prove its case and win by the operation. Yet in fact they proved and won so little that they have all had to recant their principle of standing alone and organize themselves in a Triangular pact. They found that neither the things they seized alone — Chinese territory, Ethiopian territory, Austria, the demilitarized Rhineland and the right to arm without limit, — nor the fact that they acted each for self made them more secure. Each instead now feels much more exposed than it did before. That has been shown by the way they each sought security, first, by increasing their armaments and then, when that failed to give them security, by organizing themselves more and more. When Mussolini took care to step into the Triangular pact before daring to step out of the Geneva Covenant he gave a vivid example of how impossible nationalism has become and how much nations need to work together.
At most the efforts of the Triangular powers to become politically and economically independent are not making them more independent, they are simply making them less dependent on one group of states, the democracies, and more dependent on another group, the Triangle. The more they develop these relations among themselves the more they will need to organize them. Every state they succeed in adding to this group can only involve them more deeply in the problem of how to organize it, — and they too have only these alternatives: alliance, league or union.
The experience of the United States shows that even the most powerful nations can not get what they want by isolationism. The United States sought through the nineteen twenties to preserve its peace and prosperity by isolationism. It did remain in peace, but isolationism can not be given the credit for this since Britain and France followed the Opposite policy of cooperation through the League of Nations and they, too, kept out of war. As for prosperity, isolationism failed to preserve it; depression struck the United States hardest.
Hard times led to war dangers which the United States in 1935 sought to lessen by the neutrality variation of isolationism. It adopted the policy of advising potential aggressors and victims that it not merely would not attempt to distinguish between them but would furnish supplies only to the belligerent who could come, get and pay cash for them. What has happened since this policy was adopted? Italy invaded Ethiopia and conquered with poison gas. Militarism and fascism began fighting it out with democracy and communism in Spain. Japan invaded a huge part of China, bombing almost indiscriminately. Germany violated the Locarno treaty, and got by bullying all of Austria and much of Czechoslovakia. The naval limitation treaties broke down, the League broke down, the Peace Pact and the Nine Power Pact broke down, all the world's peaceful machinery broke down, and "recovery" sagged into "recession."
No "peaceful" years in modern times, not even those preceding 1914, have been so full of war and so charged with accumulating dangers to peace as those since 1935. Even if it could be argued that the adoption of the American neutrality policy did not help bring on the disasters that followed, the point is that it was adopted to lessen the war danger. It must be admitted that there is much more danger of war now than there was when this policy was adopted, and so it must be admitted that it has already failed.
The neutrality policy, moreover, was designed to require the least armaments; it left only the American continent to be protected against the raids of belligerents who had the ships to carry off American goods but lacked the gold with which to pay for them. Yet the United States has never armed so heavily in peace time as it has since it adopted this policy. And the end is not near.
In proposing, Jan. 4, 1938, that Congress spend $990,000,000 on armaments, President Roosevelt referred "specifically to the possibility that, due to world conditions over which this nation has no control, I may find it necessary to request additional appropriations for national defense."
Clearly he did not expect this huge expenditure to remove the cause for it and put under control those "world conditions over which this nation has no control." By the time Congress adjourned in June this expenditure had not only passed the billion dollar mark but the Vinson Act had called for another billion to be spent on naval construction alone. By Oct. 14 the press was reporting Washington's intention to add another and bigger increase to this program. Yet has the United States come nearer to controlling world conditions? What reason is there to hope that it will gain control of them by spending still more on its armaments? Need it not fear the opposite? It is now spending twice as much on arms as it did in 1933 and its control over world conditions has meanwhile lessened.
"Furthermore," President Roosevelt added in his January message, "the economic situation may not improve and if it does not I expect the approval of Congress and the public for additional appropriations" — additional to those of $1,138,000,000 he then proposed for "recovery and relief." Again there was no promise, only fear of failure. Within a few months President Roosevelt had tripled this figure, but still without a promise of success. What promise could there be since obviously the billions already spent had not achieved their purpose? Plainly those world conditions beyond the control of even the United States endanger it economically as well as politically, plainly the only hope for recovery as well as for security lies in gaining control over them, and plainly there is no hope of gaining it by national action alone.
Here is a policy which has had the overwhelming support of the American people, most of all in its basic isolationist principle. It has resulted in the national debt reaching $38,000,000,000 while the national and world situations have darkened, and so it is proposed to add more billions to the debt — and the proposal is accompanied with a warning that the failure may continue. Is not this proposal "fantastic," and is it not sane to propose instead that the democracies gain control of their common world by organizing effective government in it, by each bringing its part of the conditions now outside the control of the others under the common control of them all through Union?
THE MUNICH METHOD
I for one am firmly resolved to hold to this vow: So long as I am where I am there shall not be war. — Aristide Briand, addressing the Assembly of the League of Nations, Sept. 11, 1930.
We are in the presence of a disaster of the first magnitude ... There was no difficulty at all in having cordial relations between the British and German peoples ... Never could there be friendship between the British democracy and the Nazi Power, that power which spurned Christian ethics, which cheered its onward course by a barbarous paganism, which vaunted the spirit of aggression and conquest, which derived strength and perverted pleasure from persecution, and used with pitiless brutality the threat of murderous force ... The policy of submission will carry with it restrictions upon the freedom of speech and debate in Parliament, on public platforms, and discussions in the Press. — Winston Churchill, House of Commons, Oct. 6, 1938.
Suppose we dilute this policy so that only some democracies, such as the United States, Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland seek peace and freedom in neutrality while others, notably Britain and France, depend on alliance. This is what we are now doing. Suppose we continue on this road that led to Munich and put our trust in a Four Power pact or any other variant of the balance of power theory.
Those to whom Munich brought hope of peace in our time seem to have gained it chiefly from these sources: The intense desire for peace and dread of war every people showed in the Sudeten crisis, the part this feeling played in preventing war, and the belief that Munich removed the most dangerous of the European causes for war. This belief seems based on Chancellor Hitler's statement that this was his last European territorial demand, or on belief that all the remaining questions can be settled now by further great power "consultations" or by a "general settlement" through conference of everyone on everything, or on belief that since the great democracies would not fight for Czechoslovakia they will not fight for states which do not have that democracy's claim on their sympathies and which are now in the line of German expansion, — Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, Rumania, Russia.
There is no doubt that the immediate popular reception of Prime Minister Chamberlain's flight to Berchtesgaden and of the Munich agreement proved the existence everywhere of a powerful desire for peace. This helped prevent war then, and it remains a power that must be taken into account in future as contributing both positively to facilitate the trend toward appeasement and negatively to brake the trend toward war. But if the mere existence of power sufficed to get results we could run our factories simply by making water steam; we would not need to bother about making machinery to center the steam on the piston-head. If the quantity of power available is the main thing we should be satisfied with turbines so crude that they will work only when the river is at flood.
The Sudeten German crisis proved how deeply defective is our machinery for harnessing to peace mankind's will for peace. It was so defective that time and again that month millions thought war inevitable. Each time they found themselves saved by a miracle only to find themselves next week in need of a greater miracle to save them from its consequences. The magician who pulls rabbit after rabbit from an empty hat is sure to be applauded by the famished, and when he has nothing left to pull out except a rabbit's foot the applause will be greater because the hunger and the willingness to believe in magic have grown greater too.
By returning repeatedly to tremble on the brink of an abyss we may learn to balance better but we do not avoid the danger of falling. As Pope wrote of vice:
War is a monster of so frightful mien,
As to be hated needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.
The fact is that as the war danger has grown the readiness of every people to plunge into it has grown, too. When Germany occupied the Rhineland with a relatively small force in 1936 France did not call two classes to the colors, Britain did not mobilize the fleet and the United States did not intervene to pin responsibility on Chancellor Hitler. They made these moves in 1938 after all the horrors of war in Spain and China had been drummed into them and after they faced a semi-mobilized Germany. How can we hope that we shall avoid war because we lived all September with the spectre of war, when the American people was not kept out of war but drawn into it by living for three years with world war itself?
Not only psychologically but militarily the world is readier for war now than it was before the Munich meeting. No aggressor will go to war in the hope of its being long-drawn-out; to attack he must gamble on winning quickly by overwhelming surprise. This gamble has proved wrong in Spain and China but that will no more keep others from trying their luck than deaths of climbers kept other men from trying to scale the Eiger Wall until they did succeed.
To win a lightning war one must have a military force that is at once exceptionally well-prepared, exceptionally well-trained and exceptionally numerous; to defeat a lightning war all this is needed, too. Because this is the kind of war for which Europe must prepare and because neither side had had the dress rehearsal that is the sine qua non of success in such a fast and dangerous enterprise, I said to any who asked my opinion before and at the worst of the September crisis that I believed there would be no general European war this year but a dress rehearsal that would leave the danger of war next year much greater. Where governments once could be content with the practice given by war games on the scale of a division or an army corps, they must now practice on a far greater scale and test out too their machinery for mobilizing their army, their industry and their public opinion. The Sudeten German crisis allowed every great power in Europe to make these tests. Since then leaders in every country have been showing that Prime Minister Chamberlain spoke for them all when he told Parliament Oct. 6, 1938:
One good thing at any rate has come out of this emergency through which we have passed. It has thrown a vivid light on our preparations for defence, on their strength and their weakness. I would not think we were doing our duty if we had not already ordered that a prompt and thorough inquiry should be made to cover the whole of our preparations, military and civil, in order to see, in the light of what happened during these hectic days, what further steps may be necessary to make good our deficiencies in the shortest possible time.
I do not say that the September scene was consciously staged by Machiavellians, nor do I mean that it was never in danger of getting out of hand. I say only that the underlying situation tended at that time to produce a dress rehearsal and to keep it one, and that as one result every government is now correcting the faults this test revealed in its war machine. Each is already much better prepared than it was in July for the lightning war it seeks to save itself with or from.
There remains the belief that Munich ended the most dangerous European cause for war. How can democrats base their hope for peace in our time on Chancellor Hitler's statement that the Sudetenland is his last European territorial demand? Before anschluss he promised to respect Austrian independence, during anschluss he had Marshall Goering reassure President Benes as he himself reassured the British Prime Minister in September — and then at Saarbruecken Oct. 9, 1938 he boasted that he had made a New Year's vow to himself to bring both Austria and Sudetenland into Germany. "At the beginning of this year," he said, "I reached the determination to bring back to the Reich the 10,000,000 Germans who stood apart from us." How can one trust a man who can keep his secret vows to himself only by breaking his public vows to others? Suppose that despite such questions as the Polish corridor we can trust Herr Hitler this time; can we reasonably expect one in his shoes to trust that Mr. Chamberlain will long remain Prime Minister? Does he not have reason for his fear in that Saarbruecken speech that "a Duff Cooper or an Eden or a Churchill" may come to power? Herr Hitler obviously does not believe that even the Germans would keep his own regime in power were they free to choose; how can he trust the British people not to use their freedom to choose leaders who will stand against him? How can peace be made on a basis of mutual trust between democracies and dictatorships when the democracies can have no guarantee that the dictator will keep his word, and the dictator can have no guarantee that the democracies will keep in power those whose word strengthens him?
Shall we depend on Four Power pacts and/or conferences to impose and/or negotiate a general settlement of all remaining questions? A Four Power pact excludes Russia from the meeting room but not from the world that the pact must work in. The same is true of Japan and the United States. To omit Russia from the pact practically means removing Russia's weight from the Franco-British side while neither replacing it with the United States nor removing Japan's weight from the other side. It also means freeing Germany and Japan to absorb as much of Russia as they can. This would seem to be making not peace but the kind of power against which Mr. Chamberlain himself said he would fight. And what faith can we Americans have in such a method, even if it leaves us on the sidelines at our own demand?
LEAVING "EUROPE" TO THE EUROPEANS
It is important that our people should not overlook problems and issues which, though they lie beyond our borders, may, and probably will, have a vital influence on the United States of the future. — President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Aug. 14, 1936.
In "leaving Europe to the Europeans," do we not leave our peace and freedom to them too? We see that if peace is upset in Europe we shall suffer too, but we do not seem to see that by the present policy we entrust our future blindly to Britain and France, we depend on their statesmanship to keep us out of war and on their arms to keep autocracy from invading America. We see the advantage of keeping our peace and freedom, but from the way we talk about never fighting again off American soil it is clear we do not see the advantage of the policy that has kept invasion from British soil since 1066. That is a policy of not waiting till the conqueror comes to lay waste one's home but of going out to stop him while he is far away and relatively weak. If we think it wise to warn the world that we will fight for our freedom, is it not still wiser to add the warning that we will begin to fight for it on its European frontiers? It is better not to fight if one can help it, but if one must fight is it not better to fight away from home?
If we could trust the British and French governments to preserve our peace and freedom safely for us, yet to leave the burden to them alone would still be unworthy of us. And can we have this faith in them? Obviously we do not have it. We made that clear after what we called the "Hoare-Laval deal." But did we improve things for ourselves by the paradoxical policy we then adopted of leaving our fate all the more in their hands by keeping ours tied with the neutrality act? Has it not led us straight to Munich?
We may prove to the hilt that the European democracies are not up to our standards, but if so is that an argument for trusting the future of our freedom to them as we are doing? It may be that we are in position to sit by and find fault with others who are at the danger point, it may be that it is better that those in our position should find fault than keep still — after all, if those who are in the most secure position do not speak out for what is right, who will? — all this may be true, but the position it leaves us in is not always becoming to a man.
I can not say the British and French "sold out" Prague when they sought nothing for it except a peace that benefits me too. I can only say that if they sacrificed Czechoslovakia to save themselves from war they followed a lead we gave them long before. For was it not partly to save ourselves from having to go to war for Czechoslovakia that we refused the Wilsonian Covenant? I can not condemn Messrs. Chamberlain and Daladier, but I must ask those Americans who condemn them as being both knaves and fools how they can then urge on us an isolationist policy that means trusting more than ever Europeans to save us from the consequences of war?
Suppose that, instead of everyone depending for peace on a Four Power pact, we all turn back to the general conference method. It failed before under easier circumstances, but suppose it will succeed now — though this is supposing to the point of dreaming. Success means the restoration to Germany of the Polish corridor, Memel, Eupen, colonies, also the restoration of the international gold standard, the return to normal trade barriers, and so on. What guarantee of peace is all that dream if realized? All that dream was already real once — in July, 1914.
We come to those who believe that the corner is turned for better or worse since democracies that would not fight for the only democracy east of Switzerland can not go to war to protect the oil wells of Rumania, or to save a Poland that resorts to partition from perishing again by partition. Is this idea well-founded either as fact or as a basis for expecting peace in our time? Consider but one thing:
Munich leaves Europe with two "Belgiums," No. 1 southwest and No. 2 southeast of Germany, and Britain has now promised to guarantee the neutrality and integrity of No. 2 — though it is almost surrounded by Germany — as well as the frontiers of No. I. Belgium No. 2 is stripped down now on the moral side to a democracy that is purely Czechoslovak. The self-determination principle is now all on its side and it is strengthened by its self-sacrificing acceptance of the wrongs done it for the sake of peace. On the strategic side it is stripped down to the bones of the Bohemian quadrilateral round Prague of which Bismarck said, "Who holds that, holds Europe." That is why Czechoslovakia is to be neutralized. Its neutrality is made and is liable to be broken for the same considerations that led to the creation and then to the violation of the neutrality of Belgium No. 1.
Czechoslovakia remains a strongly armed base in position to endanger on the left flank German aggressive expansion toward Rumania and the Ukraine and to endanger on the right flank German aggressive expansion toward the Polish corridor. Czechoslovakia can be turned in a twinkling into an air base from which the warplanes of Russia — excluded at Munich from the pledge to respect Czech neutrality — can attack the heart of Germany and harass or cut the communications of a German force attacking Russia through Rumania or Poland. At the teeth of the upper jaw of Germany lies the great mining and industrial area of Silesia, at the teeth of the lower jaw lies Vienna. The distance between these teeth — if they cut violently through Czechoslovakia — is about ten times shorter than their line of communications while they go respectfully round the Bohemian quadrilateral. In these circumstances can one reasonably expect Chancellor Hitler, who has openly proclaimed his aggressive intentions against Russia, to treat his Czech neutrality pledge as other than a scrap of paper the day his war with Russia starts?
If he violates Czech neutrality Britain must then either follow suit and treat as a scrap of paper its own guarantee of Czech neutrality against this very danger, or it must go to war against the violator. If it does the former its moral position is almost as bad as Germany's and its political and military positions become much worse than Germany's. Its position as the chief bulwark of democracy in Europe goes down, down and down. By this course it is accepting the one thing that Prime Minister Chamberlain in his moving radio broadcast Sept. 27, 1938, said he himself would go to war rather than accept:
I am myself a man of peace to the depths of my soul. Armed conflict between nations is a nightmare to me. But if I were convinced that any nation had made up its mind to dominate the world by fear of its force, I should feel that it must be resisted. Under such a domination life for people who believe in liberty would not be worth living; but war is a fearful thing and we must be very clear, before we embark on it that it is really the great issues that are at stake.
By the other course Britain and France would fight — but they would be fighting no more for Rumania or Poland than they fought in 1914 for Serbia. They would be fighting for the neutrality of the Czech democracy, for the respect of treaties, for the defense of individual freedom everywhere. Can we really base our hopes for peace in our time on the assumption that there is now nothing left for which the great democracies would fight?
THE PERIL RETURNS — ONLY GREATER AND NEARER
For our own people the issue becomes terrifying. They desire peace ardently and sincerely. They are ready to make sacrifices in order to strengthen the foundations of peace. They seek freedom of thought, of race, of worship, which every week become more restricted in Europe. The conviction is growing that continual retreat can only lead to ever-widening confusion. They know that a stand must be made. They say "Let it be not made too late." — Anthony Eden, speaking at Stratford-on-Avon, Sept. 21, 1938.
How can we but be alarmed at the Munich method of appeasement when its German partner who rose to power by tracing the evils we suffer to the Treaty of Versailles seeks to remedy them by practising in turn what he condemned? Germany was at least consulted at Versailles before the signature of the treaty; Czechoslovakia was not even invited to Munich. If Versailles can be called a diktat, what must Munich be called? How can those who believe events have proved that peace can not be made by diktat, believe that peace in our time can be secured by the Munich method?
How can we but be still more alarmed when the great champions of the Munich method have themselves made clear that their alarm now is greater than it was before Munich? When in indorsing Munich Lord Baldwin came out in favor of the mobilization of British industry for war? When the great London newspaper that opened September, 1938, with a plea for a plebiscite in Sudetenland ended September by announcing and upholding the Munich accord in one column while opening in the adjoining column a campaign for conscription in Britain? Most alarming of all, Mr. Chamberlain himself told the House of Commons Oct. 4, 1938: "For a long period now we have been engaged in this country on a great program of rearmament which is daily increasing in pace and in volume. Let no one think that because we have signed this agreement between the four Powers at Munich we can afford to relax our efforts in regard to that program at this moment."
In finishing the debate Oct. 7 all he could answer to the comments this provoked was to edge closer to conscription ("I would not like to commit myself now until I have had a little time for reflection as to what further it may seem good to ask the nation to do"), after saying:
"I am told that the policy which I have tried to describe is inconsistent with the continuance, and much more inconsistent with the acceleration, of our present program of armaments. I am asked how I can reconcile an appeal to the country to support the continuance of this program with the words which I used when I came back from Munich the other day and spoke of my belief that we might have peace for our time.
"I hope that hon. members will not be disposed to read into words used in moments of some emotion, after a long and exhausting day, after I had driven through miles of excited, enthusiastic, cheering people, something more than they were intended to convey. (Ministerial cheers.) I do indeed believe that we may yet secure peace in our time (No cheers), but I never meant to suggest that we would do that by disarming until we can induce others to disarm too."
How is this to be done? In the same speech Mr. Chamberlain said, "I say that it is no use to call a conference of the world, including these totalitarian Powers, until you are sure that they are going to attend, and not only that they are going to attend but that they are going to attend with the intention of aiding you in the policy on which you have set your heart." Apart from trusting in "the universal aversion to war" as "the strongest argument against the inevitability of war," Mr. Chamberlain in this speech based his hopes as regards disarmament and peace in general on the following policy:
"What is the alternative to this bleak and barren policy of the inevitability of war? In my view it is that we should seek, by every means in our power, to avoid war by analyzing its possible causes and by trying to remove them by discussing in a spirit of collaboration and good trill. I can not believe that such a program would be rejected by the people of the country even if it does mean the establishment of personal contact with dictators, and talk, man to man, on the basis that each is free to maintain his own ideas of the internal government of his country, willing to allow that other systems may suit better other people."
This is the sort of thing in which British peace-lovers put their trust before the World War. They were arming then too, they were talking, then too, with Berlin man to man about disarmament and trying to remove the causes of war — by, for example, secretly dickering to satisfy Germany's demand for "a place in the sun" with part of the colonies of Portugal, Britain's oldest ally. The parallel today with the period that preceded World War once before in our time is only too clear.
There is the same political and strategic balance between the war-breeding grounds of eastern Europe and the western Mediterranean, between the Danube valley and the Straits of Gibraltar. But where peace then trembled between the annexation of Bosnia and the Balkan wars to the East and the conflict over Morocco in the West, it now trembles between Czechoslovakia and Spain. The main difference is that the danger has moved North, closer to the heart of civilization.
There are the same dramatic "peace" agreements, reached only more melodramatically now because of more modern methods of communication and mass propaganda, with the same net results. But where the Agadir peace resulted in France making service for three years obligatory for every man, the Munich peace is no sooner signed than Britain itself moves toward conscription. The main difference is that military servitude is moving West, closer to the heart of individual freedom.
There are the same frantic and vain last minute appeals for a conference by a power that allows the aggressor to hope that it will not fight against him if he goes to war. But where these appeals were made in 1914 by London, they are made now by Washington. This time they succeeded? When did Chancellor Hitler answer President Roosevelt's second appeal? When was the "conference of all the nations directly interested in the present controversy" that he then suggested held? The main change is that this time to get even to Agadir a President West of the Atlantic instead of a Foreign Minister West of the Channel had to beg for a conference.
The outstanding change is that all along the line the catastrophe is developing on a greater scale and at a faster rate and moving North and West, — nearer, nearer, nearer to ourselves.
BALANCE OR UNBALANCE OF POWER?
Never in post-war history has the menace that hangs over European economy made itself felt more, the menace of grave disorders capable, if we do not promptly remedy them, of leading us in the end to a dangerous rupture of the balance to the detriment of all ...
At this moment the hope of millions expects from us more than an affirmation, it expects the demonstration of a will for peace, effective and constructive ... — Aristide Briand, addressing the Commission of Enquiry for European Union, Jan. 16, 1931.
The balance of power theory that is preparing catastrophe now as then — there is no more sterile, illusory, fantastic, exploded and explosive peace policy than the balance of power. Look at it. Take it apart. What does it mean in common words? It means seeking to get stability by seeking to equalize the weight on both sides of the balance. One can conceive of reaching stability this way — but for how long and at the cost of what violent ups and downs before? And when the scales do hang in perfect balance it takes but a breath, only the wind that goes with a word spoken or shrieked in the Hitlerian manner, to end at once the stability, the peace that has been achieved. Stability can never be more in danger, more at the mercy of the slightest mistake, accident or act of ill will than at the very moment when the ideal of the balance of power is finally achieved.
Who would ever suggest that we seek to keep the peace in our town or state or nation by striving to arrange a perfect balance of power between law-keepers and law-breakers, between G-men and gangsters? It is only when we let our fancies roam beyond the nation and out into the world that we indulge in such blundering buncombe — and it is precisely in this great field that a mistake is worse than a murder.
We do not and can not get peace by balance of power; we can and do get it by unbalance of power. We get it by putting so much weight surely on the side of law that the strongest possible law-breaker can not possibly offset it and is bound to be overwhelmed. We get lasting stability by having one side of the balance safely on the ground and the other side high in the air.
Even the moment's stability which the balance of power may theoretically attain is a delusion since each side knows it can not last. Therefore neither can believe in it and the nearer they come to it the harder both must struggle to prevent it by adding more weight on their side so as to enjoy the lasting peace that unbalance of power secures, — and the race is to the strongest.
The race is to the strongest, and the democracies, by scrapping all this balance of power and neutrality nonsense and directly seeking peace in the unbalance of power that Union alone can quickly and securely give them, can still win, for they need but unite their strength to be by far the strongest.
The problem facing the democracies is simply one of uniting their existing power, but the problem before the autocracies is to get that much power, and more, to unite. The speed at which Germany, Japan and Italy have increased their power in recent years has blinded many to this basic difference, and to the fact that despite all their gains the power of the three put together remains feeble compared to the combined power of the fifteen democracies.
The democracies can secure world control overnight without doing violence to any one or to any democratic principle. They need merely change their own minds, decide to stand together as the Union instead of apart, accomplish this simple act of reason. The autocracies can do nothing of the kind. They can not possibly gain world control overnight. None of them can add to its territory without doing violence to some one, and thereby offsetting the gain by making possession precarious and increasing opposition everywhere, as each of them has been doing. None of them can keep the power they have gained nor even that which they began with except by force, — not one of them can stand free speech even in his own capital.
The autocracies can not unite their power under a common government without each violating the totalitarian state's basic principle of the supremacy of the state above all else. Their problem in gaining world control is infinitely harder than ours, and they can not possibly solve it by their own strength, reason or genius. They are like an outclassed football team that can not hope to score — let alone win — except through the errors of the other side.
Now that I have said why I am convinced that there is no hope for peace in the Chamberlain policy, I would express my admiration for his courage and sincerity and my gratitude to him for having gone to Berchtesgaden and Godesberg and Munich. I would express this no less strongly to Premier Daladier who encouraged and supported him and to President Benes and the Czech people who paid the bill. If I have my . own reasons for believing that the continuance of this policy will be fatal both to our peace and freedom, I have also reasons others do not have for being grateful that this policy was followed in September.
Its great merit then was the reasoning in which Messrs. Chamberlain, Daladier and Benes really placed their faith, — that we all want both our peace and freedom, that we shall have sacrificed our peace once we go to war for our freedom, that by averting war this time there will still remain the possibility of finding somehow a means of saving our peace and freedom both together. That reasoning is unanswerable, but it means that we must lose no time now in finding that way through.
The greatness of Mr. Chamberlain will be judged in the end by whether the catastrophe is definitely averted or only made greater in the breathing space he gained. It will be a tragedy if the courage Mr. Chamberlain showed in rescuing a drowning world in September should come to be forgotten through his having then finished it off by doing the wrong thing when he sought to revive it. I who believe I know the way to revive it must remain grateful to him and to all the others who have kept open the possibility of preserving peace and freedom through Union now.
THE TEST OF COMMON SENSE
Who knoweth not such things as these? — Job
Because Union is a fresh solution of the world problem it appears to be something new. The deeper one goes into it, however, the better one may see that there is in it nothing new, strange, untried, nothing Utopian, mystic. The fact is that we democrats have already strayed away from the road of reason and realism into the desert of make-believe and mysticism. We have strayed away seeking the mirage Utopia of a world where each nation is itself a self-sufficing world, where each gains security and peace by fearing and preparing war, where law and order no longer require government but magically result from keeping each nation a law unto itself, where the individual's freedom is saved by abandoning at the national frontier the principle that the state is made for man and adopting there the dogma that man is made for the nation. It is proposed here that we have done with these dangerous delusions, that we return to the road of reason and seek salvation by tested methods, by doing again what we know from experience we can do. I ask nothing better than that we stick to the common interests of us individual men and women and to the simpler teachings of common sense.
Common sense tells us that it is in our individual interest to make the world safe for our individual selves, and that we can not do this while we lack effective means of governing our world.
It tells us that the wealthier, the more advanced in machinery, the more civilized a people is and the more liberties its citizens enjoy, the greater the stake they have in preventing depression, dictatorship, war. The more one has, the more one has to lose.
Common sense tells us that some of the causes of depression, dictatorship, war, lie inside the nation and that others lie outside it. It tells us that our existing political machinery has let us govern strongly the conditions of life within the nation but not outside it, and that all each people has done to overcome the dangers inside it has been blighted by its failure to reach the dangers outside it, or remains at the mercy of these ungoverned forces.
Common sense advises us to turn our attention now to finding means of governing the forces still beyond our control, to constituting effective world government. It warns us that no matter how strong or perfect we each make our national government, it can never end those outside dangers, and that we individuals can not know how long we can wait to end those dangers before they end us.
Common sense reminds us Americans that we are part of the world and not a world apart, that the more we keep our lead in the development of machines the more important to us we make the rest of the world, that we can not, without catastrophe, continue through good times and bad improving these machines while refusing to develop political machinery to govern the world we are thus creating. It tells us that the principles of this Union of the free are the principles that America was born to champion, that Americans can not deny them and still remain Americans. For the loyalty of the American is not to soil or race. The oath he takes when he enters the service of the American Union, is altogether to the principles of Union, "to support and defend the Constitution," — a constitution that is already universal in its scope, that allows for the admission to its Union of any state on earth, that never even mentions territory or language, and that mentions race and color only to provide that freedom shall never on that account be denied to any man.
THE AMERICAN EXAMPLE
Common sense may seem to say that the American example does not apply, that it was much easier for the Thirteen States to unite than it would be for the Fifteen Democracies today, that the possibility of their forming a Union is now too remote to justify practical men trying to solve the immediate problem this way. It may seem to say that one needs only consider current American public opinion to realize that unlike 1787 Union now is a dream that cannot possibly be realized for many years, let alone in time to save us now. This seems convincing but is it so?
American opinion has always been remarkable for seeing from afar danger to democracy and quickly adopting the common sense solution, however remote and radical and difficult and dangerous it seemed to be. What other people ever revolted at less oppression? Independence was so remote from American thought at the start of 1776 that it was not even proposed seriously until January 10, when Paine came out for it. Yet his Common Sense then so swept the country that within six months the Declaration of Independence was adopted.
To understand how difficult and remote the Union of the Thirteen States really was when 1787 began and how encouragingly the example they set applies to our democracies today, common sense suggests that we turn back and see the situation then as contemporaries saw it.
"If there is a country in the world where concord, according to common calculation, would be least expected, it is America," wrote Paine himself. "Made up as it is of people from different nations, accustomed to different forms and habits of Government, speaking different languages, and more different in their modes of worship, it would appear that the union of such a people was impracticable."
Conditions among the American democracies of the League of Friendship were if anything worse than among ours today. As John Fiske put it, "By 1786, under the universal depression and want of confidence, all trade had well-nigh stopped, and political quackery, with its cheap and dirty remedies, had full control of the field." Trade disputes threatened war among New York, Connecticut and New Jersey. Territorial disputes led to bloodshed and threat of war among New York, New Hampshire and Vermont, and between Connecticut and Pennsylvania. War with Spain threatened to break the League of Friendship in two camps. The League could not coerce its members. Threats of withdrawal from it were common. Its Congress often had no quorum, rarely had any money in the treasury, could no longer borrow. The states issued worthless currency, misery was rife, and courts were broken up by armed mobs. When these troubles culminated early in 1787 with the attempt of Shays's rebels to capture the League arsenal in Massachusetts so strong was state sovereignty and so feeble the League that Massachusetts would not allow League troops to enter its territory even to guard the League's own arsenal. Washington had already written to Jay in 1786, "I am uneasy and apprehensive, more so than during the war." Everything seemed to justify the words of the contemporary liberal philosopher, Josiah Tucker, Dean of Gloucester:
As to the future grandeur of America, and its being a rising empire under one head, whether republican or monarchical, it is one of the idlest and most visionary notions that ever was conceived even by writers of romance. The mutual antipathies and clashing interests of the Americans, their differences of governments, habitudes, and manners, indicate that they will have no centre of union and no common interest. They never can be united into one compact empire under any species of government whatever; a disunited people till the end of time, suspicious and distrustful of each Other, they will be divided and sub-divided into little commonwealths or principalities, according to natural boundaries, by great bays of the sea, and by vast rivers, lakes, and ridges of mountains.
The idea of turning from league to union was so remote in 1787 that it was not even seriously proposed until the end of May when the Federal Convention opened. How remote it was may be inferred from the fact that the opening of the Convention had to wait ten days in order to have even the bare majority of the Thirteen States needed for a quorum. The Convention itself had been called by Congress merely to reform the League — "for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation." It was not deflected away from patching and into building anew until the eve of its session, — and then only thanks to George Washington's personal intervention. Even then Union as we know it now was more than remote: It was unknown, it still had to be invented.
Yet once the Convention decided to build anew it completed this revolutionary political invention within 100 working days. Within two years — two years of close votes and vehement debate in which Hamilton, Madison and others, now called "men of vision," were derided as "visionary young men" even by Richard Henry Lee, the revolutionist who had moved the Declaration of Independence in 1776, — within two years the anarchy-ridden, freedom-loving American democracies agreed to try out this invention on themselves. Twenty months after they read its text the American people established the Constitution that still governs them, — but now governs four times as many democracies and forty times as many free men and women.
Is it really visionary to believe that the American people can still be trusted quickly to understand and act upon the common sense of Union?
Can it be hard-headed reason that holds it easier for the American democracies to invent and agree to try out Union in the infancy of self-government than it is for our more mature democracies to adopt it now?
It does seem practical to ask first how all the difficulties in changing from national sovereignty to Union are to be met. Yet the makers of the first Union were not delayed by such considerations. They abolished each State's right to levy tariffs, issue money, make treaties, and keep an army, and they gave these rights to the Union without waiting for a plan to meet the difficulties of changing from protection to free trade, etc. They did not even bother trying to work out plans to meet all these difficulties of transition. And they were right in treating all this as secondary and leaving it to the Union itself to solve, for the lack of such plans neither prevented the swift adoption of Union nor caused any serious difficulty thereafter.
Yet they lived in a time when New York was protecting its fuel interests by a tariff on Connecticut wood and its farmers by duties on New Jersey butter, when Massachusetts closed while Connecticut opened its ports to British shipping, when Boston was boycotting Rhode Island grain and Philadelphia was refusing to accept New Jersey money, when the money of Connecticut, Delaware and Virginia was sound, that of all other States was variously depreciated and that of Rhode Island and Georgia was so worthless that their governments sought to coerce the citizens into accepting it. In those days New York was massing troops on its Vermont frontier while the army of Pennsylvania was committing the atrocities of the "Wyoming massacre" against settlers from Connecticut.
Can it still be said that the difficulties of transition to Union were simpler then than now? That it was then more practical to risk establishing Union without a transition plan than to risk delaying Union until such a plan was made? That it is now more practical to delay Union at the risk of catastrophe than to adopt it at the risk of having some transition difficulties? Common sense answers, No.
Some factors, of course, made Union easier for the American democracies than it is for us just as others made it harder for them. Though it seems to me on balance that Union is much easier now than then, I would grant that it is hard to strike such a balance. But we can not have it both ways. Those who say that I am wrong, that conditions were so much more favorable to union of the American democracies then than they are for Union now, they are also saying implicitly that conditions then were also much more favorable than now to all the alternative solutions — league, alliance, or isolationism. If a common language, a common mother country, a common continent and all the other things the American democracies had in common made union easier for them than us, they also made it easier for them to make a league succeed. If even they could not make a league work, then how in the name of common sense can we expect to do better with a league than they did? Even if Union is harder now than then we know, at least, that we can succeed with it.
Common sense leads to this conclusion: If we the people of the American Union, the British Commonwealth, the French Republic, the Lowlands, Scandinavia and the Swiss Confederation can not unite, the world can not. If we will not do this little for man's freedom and vast future, we can not hope that others will; catastrophe must come and there is no one to blame but ourselves. But the burden is ours because the power is ours, too. If we will Union we can achieve Union, and the time we take to do it depends only on ourselves.
In the democracies of Europe — in the little democracies in the danger zones; in the more fortunate democracies of Scandinavia; above all, in the great democracies of France and Britain — the average American finds a way of life which he knows instinctively to be the way of life which he himself has chosen.
He knows that these democracies are the outposts of our own kind of civilization, of the democratic system, of the progress we have achieved through the methods of self-government and of the progress we still hope to make tomorrow. He knows that if these outposts are overrun by the dictatorships of either Right or Left we shall find ourselves deprived of friends. He knows that, despite geographical remoteness and a traditional desire to avoid entanglement in other peoples' quarrels, we are inevitably the natural allies of the democracies of Europe ...
In any ultimate test of strength between democracy and dictatorship, the good-will and the moral support — and in the long run more likely than not the physical power of the United States — will be found on the side of those nations defending a way of life which is our own way of life and the only way of life which Americans believe to be worth living. — The New York Times, editorial, A Way of Life, June 15, 1938.
CHAPTER II
Public Problem No. I: World Government
Transport, education and rapid development of both spiritual and material relationships by means of steam power and the telegraph, all this will make great changes. I am convinced that the Great Framer of the World will so develop it that it becomes one nation, so that armies and navies are no longer necessary. — President Grant, 1873.
During my journey in Europe I have been more deeply impressed than ever with the gravity of the situation with which we are faced. When I perceive that in one or two days a degree of devastation can be effected which no lapse of time could ever make good, again I realize that we must make provision for a form of security which is dynamic and not static, and which rests on reason and not on force. — Lindbergh, at the German Air Ministry, July 24, 1936.
Is the future of the world to be determined by universal reliance upon armed force and frequent resort to aggression, with resultant autarchy, impoverishment, loss of individual independence and international anarchy? Or will practices of peace, morality, justice and order under law, resting upon sound foundations of economic well-being, security and progress, guide and govern in international relations? As modern science and invention bring nations ever closer together, the time approaches when, in the very nature of things, one or the other of these alternatives must prevail. In a smaller and smaller world it will soon no longer be possible for some nations to choose and follow the way of force and for other nations to choose and follow the way of reason. All will have to go in one direction and by one way ... The re-establishing of order under law in relations among nations has become imperatively necessary. — Secretary of State Hull, Aug. 16, 1938.
PLAN OF CHAPTER
The proposition we begin with is this: The most urgent problem of civilized mankind is to constitute effective means of governing itself where its civilization has already made its world practically one.
We reach this conclusion in this chapter by examining first the relation between the development of machinery and the needs of government.
We find that the characteristic of the machine is, as it develops, to bring the individual man into closer relation with the rest of mankind and both to enlarge the circle of men with whom he needs to reach agreements in order to govern his conditions of life and also to speed the tempo with which the instrument for reaching such agreements, government, must work. We find this process has already reached the point requiring constitution of effective government on a world scale, and that the urgency of this problem is greatest for the peoples most advanced in the development of the machine. To find whether this world or external problem in government is more urgent to them than the national or internal problem in government which the development of the machine also raises, we then consider both problems from the standpoints of experience and theory.
The objections of those who find other things more urgent than the problem of constituting effective world government are then examined. Special attention is paid to the argument that the economic problem, particularly the conflict between capital and labor, is more urgent than the world constitutional problem.
THE MACHINE THAT REQUIRES WORLD GOVERNMENT
Politics can be separated from the machine no more than can civilization. The machine I would define broadly as anything made by man that frees man even a little from any of his natural limitations or that extends his powers. The machine's nature is such that to use it or make the most of it men need more of the world than they needed before its invention. To do their work well or to exist an increasing number of machines today need the whole planet.
A wooden plow needs little land, and few men, whether to make it, work it or consume the harvest. A steel plow needs more land, a bigger world. It needs many men to make — prospectors, miners, iron puddlers, blast-furnace men, tool-makers, transporters, salesmen. It brings greater surplus than the wooden plow: It needs more consumers. A tractor gang plow requires a still wider world. Horses may feed on the farm, but one may need to bring fuel to a tractor thousands of miles. And one needs a world of consumers if tractor wheat is to be sold.
Any one can make himself a megaphone and extend his voice a little. But to make a telephone that will extend his voice anywhere one needs generations of inventors and scientists of many nations. One needs to comb the world to get all the little things required to make a telephone. If a man could find them all in his backyard and invent the whole thing himself, to use it he would need another man, and to make the most of it he would need all mankind. One can telephone round the world today but one does not telephone to oneself. The more civilised and civilizing the machine, the more we must depend on all the planet and all mankind to make and use it.
In the world our machines have made us, distance is no more a thing of miles, but of minutes. New York is closer to England now than to Virginia in George Washington's time. Men fly round the globe today in one tenth the time once needed to send news of the Monroe Doctrine from the White House to Buenos Ayres. Rumor, panic and millions in money can now cross oceans even faster — in a flash.
Our world is now practically one in many respects. Even the Ethiopians who rate low in machines and civilization have had this fact forced upon them. An early Ethiopian statement to the League lamented the hopelessness of making their case known to the world: Italy had all the machinery for reaching daily mankind's eye and ear and Ethiopia had none. Yet such is the world we live in that it spent millions merely to satisfy its own need of knowing the Ethiopian side. The League broadcast it round the world while Americans carried a microphone to the Emperor. New York overnight became willing to pay many times more for a word from Addis Ababa than from Washington. Suddenly it became possible to see in Paris the bombing of the then unheard of down of Dessié only a few days after it happened. While the Ethiopians were learning that there was a vast incalculable world outside, the more civilized world was learning that there was a backward Ethiopia and that it could upset many a plan made far from it. We all live in the same world now, but the more civilized we are the more we live together in it, the more we depend on each other, the more our world is one.
Does this bring to civilized mankind the problem of constituting effective means of governing itself?
We can not give our world the tendons that mass production and consumption give it, the blood circulation that steamships, railways, automobiles and airplanes supply, and the nervous system with which electricity permeates it, and expect it still to function as it did before we made it one organism. When our common organism begins to ail we can not reasonably expect to cure it by each nation seeking to cure its portion of the nerves, blood and tendons separately, whether by its own devices or its own dervishes.
Nor can we now dispense with tendons, blood and nerves. True, we got on without them once. That was when we were, politically, like the amoeba — one-celled creatures. But once the germ from which we start develops tendons, blood, nerves, we can no longer live without them, nor without a head, an effective means of governing the whole. These are thereafter vital.
The idea that we need not bother much about these connecting common things while they are relatively small is as unsound as the idea that since we did without them once we can do without them again. Those who argue that we can do without world trade because it is a mere fraction of national trade should argue too that we can do without the tendons because they are smaller than the muscles. The blood and nervous systems do not give the body its weight, but so long as they remain the rest can be starved down almost to skin and bones, and yet recover. It is the fraction that pours over the spillway that keeps a whole lake fit to drink, and it is the lack of even a trickling outlet that makes the Dead Sea. Except under penalty of stagnation poisoning us we can no more dispense with world trade, communications, contact, than we can uninvent our steam, gasoline, electric and other machines.
These world-machines, these world-made, world-needing and world-making machines, inevitably bring our nations many problems in living together. Such problems in human relations can be solved only (a) by one imposing his solution on the rest by force, or (b) by mutual agreement. While machines were crude the way of force was possible. There is no possibility now of some modern Rome imposing law on all mankind. Our choice is not between law through conquest and law through agreement. It is between agreed law and no law, between self-government and no government. Before we can agree on how to solve any of the problems of living together, we need to agree on how to reach and enforce and interpret and revise such agreements or laws in time. Our first problem in mutual agreement is the constitutional problem of creating effective world government.
THE INTERNAL OR THE EXTERNAL PROBLEM?
The more intelligent among civilized people seem ready to agree that we do face a problem in world government. They question only whether this is the most urgent problem now, particularly for themselves. Many deny that it is, and more act as if it could wait more safely than other problems.
It is true that there is no end of problems, world, national, local, individual crowding in on us. We can neither give them all equal attention nor safely drop all but one to concentrate on it. We need to give our best attention to what is most urgent, without letting the rest get out of hand. But first we need to decide which problem is really most urgent.
Problems in living can be divided in two, internal and external. Whether we are concerned with a nation, or any organized group in it, or with the individual, or with any single organic cell, there is always this division. To live it is not enough that a cell should be so organized that all within works together, there is also the problem of its relations with other cells, with all the outside world. For the individual man life depends on keeping healthy not simply the relations among the cells in his body but also his relations with other men, with all his outside world. We turn from physiology to economics when we turn from man to the nation, and we speak of self-government where we spoke of self-control; the words change, not their meaning. We can then boil down our choice to this: Which is the more urgent, the internal or the external side of our problem in government?
Before answering, one general remark: The degree to which the external directly affects cells, men or nations, is in proportion to their reach, that is to say, to their powers of movement and communication. The machines that are said to make the world smaller really make it larger. They extend to the antipodes the world within reach of a man's eye, ear, tongue, and thought. They free him from barriers that hemmed in his fathers. The world that was small was that of the cave man: His world was his cave and as far as he could reach, throw, walk, look, listen, yell. Machines have made the civilized man's world today the planet. Men have never had anything like the reach that men have today. That means that the external side of human problems has never been nearly as great as it is now.
Europe was no problem to the men of America nor America to the Europeans until the machines of the fifteenth century let Columbus establish communication between them, and made the Old and New worlds one. But this did not make them one world to all men at once, but at first only to those whose machines gave them the greatest reach. America was no more a part of the external problem of the Tibetans in 1692 than in 1491. One can concede that the internal problem remains even now more important than the external one for the Tibetan, and certainly his world is smaller and his life less dependent on the rest of mankind than are, say, the American's.
It seems safe to formulate the rule that the poorer, weaker, remote and more backward generally a people is, the more self-sufficing it therefore is, the higher the ratio of its internal to its external problem and the less urgent the problem of world government to it. Conversely, the richer, stronger, the faster in communications and generally the more developed mechanically and more educated and civilized a people is, the less self-sufficing it therefore is, the more dependent on all mankind, the higher the ratio of its external to its internal problem and the more urgent its need of world government.
If this problem is not more urgent than the national one for us who are citizens of the advanced nations it can not be for any one else. We can confine to ourselves, then, the question: Which is the more urgent, the problem in national or in world government?
WHAT THE RECORD SHOWS
To answer it, consider first the record. At the start one thing stands out. The one important problem that has nowhere been accorded urgent treatment is the problem of world government. It came nearest to urgent status, perhaps, in 1919 when the Covenant was drafted. But even then when catastrophe was still smouldering President Wilson was damned everywhere, and not least in the United States, for delaying what the world generally deemed most urgent — the winding up of that particular war — in Order to secure the establishment of a first attempt at world government, the League. The Covenant had to be drafted after office hours and such men as Lloyd George and Clemenceau never had time for it.
Since the League's foundation what has been done about this world constitutional problem? Briand's committee to inquire into European Union was merely an attempt to establish European government along League lines. What little political discussion his committee dared indulge in added nothing new to inter-state or world constitutional thinking. The Bank for International Settlements was, like the League, a by-product of the conference that gave it birth. Thereafter there was no sign of political activity in the constitutional field of world government until the 1936 League Assembly, and it showed little evidence of any fresh thinking about this problem.
External affairs generally have received much more attention than has this constitutional problem, but even they have not been treated as most urgent since the war. The relative importance everywhere attached to national and to world government is reflected by budgets; the whole world has never spent more than $10,000,000 a year on all the activities of the League. For the equal of the League budgets one has to get down to such budgets as that of the tiny canton of Geneva.
Many international meetings have attempted to solve this or that specific external problem by the existing machinery. Not even in such great ones as the Disarmament Conference and the Monetary and Economic Conference did the attempt at a world solution receive as urgent treatment as the attempt at a national solution simultaneously made by each nation. Compare the effort and money spent on arming by each power in any day, month or year of the Disarmament Conference with the amount it spent seeking disarmament agreement. Here was a thing that had always defied man, success in it was worth immeasurably more than victory in war, yet governments, press, and public seemed to assume that disarmament could be had for only a shade of the attention they would give to winning a war. There seems no need to draw the contrast between the noisy show the nations gave at the London Monetary and Economic Conference and the huge efforts they were making at the same time to strengthen national policies. Still less need is there to contrast the energy governments are devoting now to reform at Geneva and to rearmament at home.
On the other hand the theory that the internal side of our problem deserves the most urgent treatment has had as fair a trial as any theory can hope to have. The record may thus be summarized:
First, in the golden middle nineteen twenties when times were good and war danger relatively small all the nations acted as if the urgent thing was (a) to extract, each for itself, the most profit from the situation at the least cost in preparations to meet the changes, internal and especially external, this golden age was rapidly making, and (b) to try to continue this golden age by maintaining unchanged whatever national constitution laws, administration, machinery or general political condition happen to be accompanying prosperity.
Second, when this policy