the nations, if possible, into some new form of world
organization, gives peculiar interest in these terrible days to the
manner in which the American people solved a similar problem more than a
century ago.

Then, as now, a world war had ended. Then, as now, half the world was
prostrated by the wounds of fratricidal strife. As Washington said: "The
whole world was in an uproar," and he added that the task "was to steer
safely between Scylla and Charybdis." The problem, then as now, was not
only to make "the world safe for democracy," but to make democracy, for
which there is no alternative, safe for the world. The thirteen colonies
in 1787, while small and relatively unimportant, were, however, a little
world in themselves, and, relatively to their numbers and resources,
this problem, which they confronted and solved, differed in degree but
not in kind from that which now confronts civilization. Impoverished in
resources, exhausted by the loss of the flower of their youth,
demoralized by the reaction from feverish strife, the forces of
disintegration had set in in the United States between 1783 and 1787.
Law and order had almost perished and the provisional government had
been reduced to impotence. A few wise and noble spirits, true Faithfuls
and Great Hearts, led a despondent people out of the Slough of Despond
till their feet were again on firm ground and their faces turned towards
the Delectable Mountains of peace, justice, and liberty. Let it be
emphasized that they did this, not by seeking more power, but by
imposing restraints upon themselves. That spirit of self-restraint is
the essence of the American Constitution.

So enduring was their achievement that to-day the Constitution of the
United States is the oldest comprehensive written form of government now
existing in the world. Few, if any, forms of government have better
withstood the mad spirit of innovation, or more effectively proved their
merit by the "arduous greatness of things done."

For this reason, as the nations of the world are now trying in a cosmic
form and under similar conditions to do that which the founders of the
American Republic in 1787 did in a microcosmic form, a short narration
of that earlier achievement may not be unprofitable in this day and
generation, when we are blindly groping towards some common basis for
international co-ordination.

One of England's greatest Prime Ministers, William Pitt, shortly after
the adoption of the