which progressive
nations are now fast moving away, and the laws and usages against which
the proletariat is up in arms are but its organic expression.

From the days of the building of the Pyramids down to those of the
digging of the Panama Canal the chasm between the two social orders
remained open. The abolition of slavery changed but little in the
arrangement--was, indeed, effected more in the interests of the old
economics than in deference to any strong religious or moral sentiment.
In substance the traditional ordering continued to exist in a form
better adapted to the modified conditions. But the filling up of that
chasm, which is now going forward, involves the overthrow of the system
in its entirety, and the necessity of either rearing a wholly new
structure, of which even the keen-sighted are unable to discern the
outlines, or else the restoration of the old one on a somewhat different
basis. And the only basis conceivable to-day is that which would start
from the postulate that some races of men come into the world devoid of
the capacity for any more useful part in the progress of mankind than
that which was heretofore allotted to the proletariat. It cannot be
gainsaid that there are races on the globe which are incapable of
assimilating the higher forms of civilization, but which might well be
made to render valuable services in the lower without either suffering
injustice themselves or demoralizing others. And it seems nowise
impossible that one day these reserves may be mobilized and
systematically employed in virtue of the principle that the weal of the
great progressive community necessitates such a distribution of parts as
will set each organ to perform the functions for which it is best
qualified.

Since the close of the war internationalism was in the air, and the
labor movement intensified it. It stirred the thought and warmed the
imagination alike of exploiters and exploited. Reformers and pacifists
yearned for it as a means of establishing a well-knit society of
progressive and pacific peoples and setting a term to sanguinary wars.
Some financiers may have longed for it in a spirit analogous to that in
which Nero wished that the Roman people had but one neck. And the
Conference chiefs seemed to have pictured it to themselves--if, indeed,
they meditated such an abstract matter--in the guise of a _pax
Anglo-Saxonica_, the distinctive feature of which would lie in the
transfer to the two principal