ch greeted the abortive scheme of the Geneva
Protocol; the ridicule poured upon the proposal for a United States of
Europe which was subsequently advanced, and the failure of the general
scheme for the economic union of Europe, may appear as setbacks to the
efforts which a handful of foresighted people are earnestly exerting to
advance this noble ideal. And yet, are we not justified in deriving fresh
encouragement when we observe that the very consideration of such
proposals is in itself an evidence of their steady growth in the minds and
hearts of men? In the organized attempts that are being made to discredit
so exalted a conception are we not witnessing the repetition, on a larger
scale, of those stirring struggles and fierce controversies that preceded
the birth, and assisted in the reconstruction, of the unified nations of
the West?

The Federation of Mankind

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 complex than that which confronts a divided humanity in
its efforts to achieve the unification of all mankind.

Who knows that for so exalted a conception to take shape a suffering more
intense than any it has yet experienced will have to be inflicted upon
humanity? Could anything less than the fire of a civil war with all its
violence and vicissitudes--a war that nearly rent the great American
Republic--have welded the states, not only into a Union of independent
units, but into a Nation, in spite of all the ethnic differences that
characterized its component parts? That so fundamental a revolution,
involving such far-reaching chan