idual, but concerns itself
primarily with the nature of those essential relationships that must bind
all the states and nations as members of one human family. It does not
constitute merely the enunciation of an ideal, but stands inseparably
associated with an institution adequate to embody its truth, demonstrate
its validity, and perpetuate its influence. It implies an organic change
in the structure of present-day society, a change such as the world has
not yet experienced. It constitutes a challenge, at once bold and
universal, to outworn shibboleths of national creeds--creeds that have had
their day and which must, in the ordinary course of events as shaped and
controlled by Providence, give way to a new gospel, fundamentally
different from, and infinitely superior to, what the world has already
conceived. It calls for no less that the reconstruction and the
demilitarization of the whole civilized world--a world organically unified
in all the essential aspects of its life, its political machinery, its
spiritual aspiration, its trade and finance, its script and language, and
yet infinite in the diversity of the national characteristics of its
federated units.

It represents the consummation of human evolution--an evolution that has
had its earliest beginnings in the birth of family life, its subsequent
development in the achievement of tribal solidarity, leading in turn to
the constitution of the city-state, and expanding later into the
institution of independent and sovereign nations.

...

To take but one instance. How confident were the assertions made in the
days preceding the unification of the states of the North American
continent regarding the insuperable barriers that stood in the way of
their ultimate federation! Was it not widely and emphatically declared
that the conflicting interests, the mutual distrust, the differences of
government and habit that divided the states were such as no force,
whether spiritual or temporal, could ever hope to harmonize or control?
And yet how different were the conditions prevailing a hundred and fifty
years ago from those that characterize present-day society! It would
indeed be no exaggeration to say that the absence of those facilities
which modern scientific progress has placed at the service of humanity in
our time made of the problem of welding the American states into a single
federation, similar though they were in certain traditions, a task
infinitely more compl