hing that is foreign tends to belong
in our categories merely to the world of objects. Moral feeling
towards objects is manifestly impossible. International law fails to
have moral force because nations are in general aware of one another
only in these external ways. The world of foreign objects must be
changed to a world of persons having history and internal meaning.
When we can interpret and understand international law in terms of
relations within human experience and as affecting individuals, it
will begin perhaps to seem real and hence morally obligatory.

There is another aspect of the work of creating and directing the wider
social consciousness and giving it ethical purpose and form, which is
still more fundamental, and at the same time, to casual thought,
perhaps still more remote from definite moral improvement in the world
and from all the immediately practical problems of internationalism. It
is the mood of our social life which we call the democratic spirit, and
which, made universal, is the substratum of internationalism that most
of all needs to be controlled and educated. At the same time this
democratic spirit is least of all susceptible to definite and routine
discipline, of all the factors of internationalism. This democratic
spirit contains possibilities of the greatest good and of the greatest
evil. Out of it may grow international order, or international anarchy
and internal disruption. How to keep this democratic spirit progressive
and constructive in its temper, broad in sympathy and full of
enthusiasm, how to free it from infection by all the poisons that are
prone to attack the popular consciousness is one of our great problems
of education.

This democratic spirit is the real power behind internationalism. It
is as the mood of the city, the whole spirit of the modern urban life,
that it is most significant. The mood of the city contains on one side
the possibility of an internationalism which is nothing more than a
surrender of all patriotism, and is at heart only a mass interest in
rights and needs. On the other hand all the interests and impulses
that make internationalism necessary and possible seem to have their
origin in the city. The city represents, with all its evil, the higher
life and the line of progress. Progress passes through the city. The
city is the symbol of creativeness and achievement. Industrialism, the
essential spirit of the city, is the condition, normal and necessary