THE SCIENTIFIC

MONTHLY

JULY, 1917

EDUCATIONAL PREPAREDNESS FOR PEACE

THE

By Professor JOSEPH ALEXANDER LEIGHTON

THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

HE word "preparedness," like other catchwords of the time, is frequently used without definition of the ends for which the country should prepare. This country is now, and somewhat belatedly, engaged in preparing to throw its full weight into the scales of battle in order to maintain and extend the principles of democratic and responsible government and to bring about a just peace in the only way now open to the world's free states, that is by beating to its knees as a suppliant German militaristic imperialism. The plans already set in train to achieve this end are fair and wise. Conscription, based on universal liability to service, is the only efficient, just and democratic means of raising a great army. Incomes should be conscripted by graduated taxation to meet the chief part of the costs of war.

But we, as a nation, should even now strive to take a longer view of things international. We should look beyond the war. The United States is in the strategic position where it can, if its citizens intelligently will, do more than any other state towards building on the results of this war the foundations of a new international order. The rudimentary beginnings of "A League of Nations to preserve Peace" already exist in the official conferences with our allies. Our cooperation involves much more than military and naval assistance. It involves international financial understandings, the international regulation of commercial shipping, of food production and distribution, of labor, of communications and news, and international scientific and technical cooperation. If we go about it in the right way, with an intelligent international mind and good will, our part in the war may be the most potent factor in bringing to an end exclusive, political and economic nationalism as a constantly disturbing factor in world-affairs. We may take the

lead in the establishment of a system of international organizations through which, in matters of banking and finance, trading, the migrations of labor, social legislation and administrative regulation of production and distribution, in fact, the internationalization of the chief material arteries and sinews of civilization, may be carried out far beyond the expectations of ante-bellum thinkers in the field of planetary politics. The internationalization of finance, commerce, the movement of labor, news-gathering, science and even art and letters was proceeding apace before the war broke out and largely without political organization. Does not the future peace and progress of humankind require the post-bellum acceleration of the process of internationalization by organization? Surely the cosmopolitan origins of our citizenry, our freedom from hereditary animosities and from the dead weight of outworn traditions, our quickness and openness of mind, our own rapid development in the socialization of democracy, and our active cooperation with all the foremost of the earth's progressive democracies, all conspire to mark out the United States as the nation which, having after long deliberation and without either racial animosity, traditional prejudice or the lust of exploitation, answered the battle call of freedom and justice, will give responsive ear and soul to the cries of the world-spirit of a humanity in travail and will take the leadership in bringing to birth the new international order built up around the AngloAmerican principles of political freedom and responsibility and the French spirit of equality and comradeship. Is it not the duty of every American who can think, speak and write with a vision, however faint and vague, of a more rational future for humanity based on the principles and ideals which have nourished him, to do so without ceasing?

The supreme and ever urgent problem of world-politics is the mutual adjustment of nationalism, internationalism and democracy. And I think democracy has the key to this adjustment. The proposal to abolish nationalism is a vain and foolish dream. It can not be done and, if it could be done, the loss to mankind would be irreparable. For "humanity" without local habitation and name, without spiritual and political traditions and memories, without individuality of life, gifts, occupations and achievements, is a vicious abstraction, a barren phrase bathed in the mists of vacuous sentimentalism. The geographical, historical, cultural, and spiritual individuality of the nation is the familiar and nourishing soil on which the highest personal individuality develops and makes its specific contributions

to the life of the race. Only where the sense of social and spiritual solidarity has been strong in states and peoples have great and significant contributions been made to civilization. It was thus in the city-states of ancient Greece, especially Athens. It was thus in the Hebrew state and in republican Rome, in the renaissance city-states of Italy, in France, in England and in the German states. It is through the nurture and stimulation derived from interwoven group-individualities or spiritual wholes-the family, the school, the church, the craft, the community, the nation-that the human person grows to his full spiritual and intellectual stature, leads a full life and makes a worthy contribution to the race's material and spiritual wealth and welfare. Civilization does not grow in deserts, in dense forests, or in the eremite's cell. Not through the cult of the vague and formless abstract of "humanity" in general, but through life and action in the specific concrete and individual relations of definite social wholes, do rich and harmonious personalities, full-bodied happiness, and progressive cultures come into being and grow. The proposal to eliminate or ignore nationality, because of the evils of nationalism running riot, is on a par with the proposal to abolish the family and substitute free love and public nurseries, because of the failure of the institution of the family to attain universal perfection.

It is the nation seeking to live as an exclusive competing and dominating economic and political unit, the nation seeking territorial and commercial aggrandizement at the expense of other national units, the nation striving by foul means to get the best of the bargain, the nation puffed up with arrogance, fortified by ignorance and blindness to the worth of other nations that engenders in these days the evils of war.

The principle of democracy is the key to the situation. Democracy within the state means the equalization of opportunity for all members of the state, in order that they may be able to develop and exercise their several individualities, their native powers, in the way most effective to bring individual well-being and social welfare. The same principle must be applied to the relations of those more comprehensive individualities called "nations" and "peoples." Nations must have equal opportunities to develop and exercise their inherited and native powers (natural resources, political social and cultural traditions, the native qualities of their peoples); in short, their own specific individualities, with due regard to the like rights on the part of other peoples and to recognized standards of humane civilization and progress.

The democratization of international relations, which means their fuller moralization and humanization, will require that the nations which compose "The League to preserve a Just Peace" shall exhibit, running through their diverse cultural, geographical and economic individualities, a community of humanistic aims, interests and ideals, and that degree of similarity in political instruments and methods without which common aims and ideals can not be furthered. Only those nations in which the governmental agencies are completely responsible to the representatives, elected by vote of the whole people, for the conduct of international affairs, including the making of war and peace, will be qualified to cooperate in an International League of Peace. Only those nations in which small capitalistic groups seeking fields for exploitation, and munition makers, are powerless to influence international policies will be safe members of such a league.

An international league of peace will be nearly as powerless and ineffective in the face of a great international crisis as were the Hague Conferences, unless it has the backing of a powerful and intelligent public opinion. The development of an international and democratized public opinion, able to express itself effectively through the agencies of state in responsible governments is the only permanently effective way to reduce the chances of war. International organization, like national organization, should be the instrument of a common will; but the instrument will rust from disuse or be perverted by misuse, if there be not a common will in constant action. And a common will is nothing but a community of sentiment, thought and purpose among individual human beings and groups thereof. The sources of all volitions are blendings of instincts, emotions, ideas and images, from which arise new psychical complexes-sentiments or permanent tendencies to feel and act. The sources of public volitions are the interacting, conflicting and reinforcing sentiments of individuals. Public opinion is only the more definite articulation and forceful expression by speakers, writers, and leaders in action, of a community of dynamic sentiment in the masses. Where there is no congenital or nurtured community of sentiment there is no real public opinion, and action is then determined by the wills of small groups who hang together by community of sentiment and specific purpose playing upon the brute lusts and fears, gregariousness and pugnacity of the mass. Any oligarchy, whether it be a militaristic Junkerdom in Germany, a corrupt bureaucracy in Russia, a plutocratic group or just a gang of