American Responsibilities for Peace

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THERE are some platitudes that are so much platitudes that they serve to deaden thought when it ought to be provoked. No one, for example, refers to the unity of civilized mankind -- or of mankind civilized and uncivilized for that matter -- except as a truism too obvious to be discussed. And, of course, it is a truism. Mankind is one. But even a truism may mean something to those who trouble to think it out. It means much more than merely that "God hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth." It means that mankind is one in its emotions and desires, in its aspirations, in its self-revelations, in its forms of expression, despite all its differences of language and idea and national tradition. The great figure in literature and art, in science and philosophy, the great religious teacher, is the common possession of the world, not the monopolized mouthpiece of any single nation.

That unity may from time to time be temporarily and partially shattered by some great cataclysm. We have only very lately bridged again the gulfs the war opened between men of like purpose and like endeavor in different lands. Not all indeed are bridged yet, for Russia is still almost wholly cut off from contact with the thought and the scientific progress of Europe and America. But it is broadly true none the less that in the things of the mind, the things that together constitute what we call culture, the world is one. As I write these lines, the man who till two days ago was the greatest living novelist of the English-speaking world is awaiting his burial in Westminster Abbey. Thomas Hardy belonged essentially to his native Dorset, but Dorset could not keep him for herself. Nor could England. Nor could the Anglo-Saxon races. He was part of the culture of the world (though less so than some men not intrinsically greater, because in some ways he deliberately localized the expression of his genius) just as Pasteur was, or Wagner or Lincoln or William James...