The Salvaging Of Civilisation Part 4

Many people will say, you _must_ have a head of the state. But _must_ you? Is not this idea a legacy from the days when states were small communities needing a leader in war and diplomacy?

In the World State we must remember there will be no war--and no diplomacy as such.

I would even question whether in such a great modern state as the U.S.A.

the idea and the functions of the president may not be made too important. Indeed I believe that question has been asked by many people in the States lately, and has been answered in the affirmative.

The broad lines of the United States const.i.tution were drawn in a period of almost universal monarchy. American affairs were overshadowed by the personality of George Washington, and as you know, monarchist ideas were so rife that there was a project, during the years of doubt and division that followed the War of Independence, for importing a German King, a Prussian Prince, in imitation of the British Monarchy. But if the United States were beginning again to-day on its present scale, would it put so much power and importance upon a single individual as it put upon George Washington and his successors in the White House? I doubt it very much.

There may be a limit, I suggest, to the size and complexity of a community that can be directed by a single personal head. Perhaps that limit may have been pa.s.sed by both the United States and by the British Empire at the present time. It may be possible for one person to be leader and to have an effect of directing personality in a community of millions or even of tens of millions. But is it possible for one small short-lived individual to get over and affect and make any sort of contact with hundreds of millions in thousands of towns and cities?

Recently we have watched with admiration and sympathy the heroic efforts of the Prince of Wales to shake hands with and get his smile well home into the hearts of the entire population of the British Empire of which he is destined to become the "golden link." After tremendous exertions a very large amount of the ground still remains to be covered.

I will confess I cannot see any single individual human head in my vision of the World State.

The linking reality of the World State is much more likely to be not an individual but an idea--such an idea as that of a human commonweal under the G.o.d of all mankind.

If at any time, for any purpose, some one individual had to step out and act for the World State as a whole, then I suppose the senior judges of the Supreme Court, or the Speaker of the Council, or the head of the a.s.sociated Scientific Societies, or some such person, could step out and do what had to be done.

But if there is to be no single head person, there must be at least some sort of a.s.sembly or council. That seems to be necessary. But will it be a gathering at all like Congress or the British Parliament, with a Government side and an opposition ruled by party traditions and party ideas?

There again, I think we may be too easily misled by existing but temporary conditions. I do not think it is necessary to a.s.sume that the council of the World State will be an a.s.sembly of party politicians. I believe it will be possible to have it a real gathering of representatives, a fair sample of the thought and will of mankind at large, and to avoid a party development by a more scientific method of voting than the barbaric devices used for electing representatives to Congress or the British Parliament, devices that play directly into the hands of the party organizer who trades upon the defects of political method.

Will this council be directly elected? That, I think, may be found to be essential. And upon a very broad franchise. Because, _firstly_, it is before all things important that every adult in the world should feel a direct and personal contact between himself and the World State, and that he is an a.s.senting and partic.i.p.ating citizen of the world; and _secondly_, because if your council is appointed by any intermediate body, all sorts of local and national considerations, essential in the business of the subordinate body, will get in the way of a simple and direct regard for the world commonweal.

And as to this council: Will it have great debates and wonderful scenes and crises and so forth--the sort of thing that looks well in a large historical painting? There again we may be easily misled by a.n.a.logy. One consideration that bars the way to anything of that sort is that its members will have no common language which they will be all able to speak with the facility necessary for eloquence. Eloquence is far more adapted to the conditions of a Red Indian pow-wow than to the ordering of large and complicated affairs. The World Council may be a very taciturn a.s.sembly. It may even meet infrequently. Its members may communicate their views largely by _notes_ which may have to be very clear and explicit, because they will have to stand translation, and short--to escape neglect.

And what will be the chief organs and organizations and works and methods with which this Council of the World State will be concerned?

There will be a Supreme Court determining _not_ International Law, but World Law. There will be a growing Code of World Law.

There will be a world currency.

There will be a ministry of posts, transport and communications generally.

There will be a ministry of trade in staple products and for the conservation and development of the natural resources of the earth.

There will be a ministry of social and labour conditions.

There will be a ministry of world health.

There will be a ministry, the most important ministry of all, watching and supplementing national educational work and taking up the care and stimulation of backward communities.

And instead of a War Office and Naval and Military departments, there will be a _Peace Ministry_ studying the belligerent possibilities of every new invention, watching for armed disturbances everywhere, and having complete control of every armed force that remains in the world.

All these world ministries will be working in co-operation with local authorities who will apply world-wide general principles to local conditions.

These items probably comprehend everything that the government of a World State would have to do. Much of its activity would be merely the co-ordination and adjustment of activities already very thoroughly discussed and prepared for it by local and national discussions. I think it will be a mistake for us to a.s.sume that the work of a world government will be vaster and more complex than that of such governments as those of the United States or the British Empire. In many respects it will have an enormously simplified task. There will be no foreign enemy, no foreign compet.i.tion, no tariffs, so far as it is concerned, or tariff wars. It will be keeping order; it will not be carrying on a contest.

There will be no necessity for secrecy; it will not be necessary to have a Cabinet plotting and planning behind closed doors; there will be no general policy except a steady attention to the common welfare. Even the primary origin of a World Council must necessarily be different from that of any national government. Every existing government owes its beginnings to force and is in its fundamental nature militant. It is an offensive-defensive organ. This fact saturates our legal and social tradition more than one realizes at first. There is, about civil law everywhere, a faint flavour of a relaxed state of siege. But a world government will arise out of different motives and realize a different ideal. It will be primarily an organ for keeping the peace.

And now perhaps we may look at this project of a World State mirrored in the circ.u.mstances of the life of one individual citizen. Let us consider very briefly the life of an ordinary young man living in a World State and consider how it would differ from a commonplace life to-day.

He will have been born in some one of the United States of the World--in New York or California, or Ontario or New Zealand, or Portugal or France or Bengal or Shan-si; but wherever his lot may fall, the first history he will learn will be the wonderful history of mankind, from its nearly animal beginnings, a few score thousand years ago, with no tools, but implements of chipped stone and hacked wood, up to the power and knowledge of our own time. His education will trace for him the beginnings of speech, of writing, of cultivation and settlement.

He will learn of the peoples and nations of the past, and how each one has brought its peculiar gifts and its distinctive contribution to the acc.u.mulating inheritance of our race.

He will know, perhaps, less of wars, battles, conquests, ma.s.sacres, kings and the like unpleasant invasions of human dignity and welfare, and he will know more of explorers, discoverers and stout outspoken men than our contemporary citizen.

While he is still a little boy, he will have the great outlines of the human adventure brought home to his mind by all sorts of vivid methods of presentation, such as the poor poverty-struck schools of our own time cannot dream of employing.

And on this broad foundation he will build up his knowledge of his own particular state and nation and people, learning not tales of ancient grievances and triumphs and revenges, but what his particular race and countryside have given and what it gives and may be expected to give to the common welfare of the world. On such foundations his social consciousness will be built.

He will learn an outline of all that mankind knows and of the fascinating realms of half knowledge in which man is still struggling to know. His curiosity and his imagination will be roused and developed.

He will probably be educated continuously at least until he is eighteen or nineteen, and perhaps until he is two or three and twenty. For a world that wastes none of its resources upon armaments or soldiering, and which produces whatever it wants in the regions best adapted to that production, and delivers them to the consumer by the directest route, will be rich enough not only to spare the first quarter of everybody's life for education entirely, but to keep on with some education throughout the whole lifetime.

Of course the school to which our young citizen of the world will go will be very different from the rough and tumble schools of to-day, understaffed with underpaid a.s.sistants, and having bare walls. It will have benefited by some of the intelligence and wealth we lavish to-day on range-finders and submarines.

Even a village school will be in a beautiful little building costing as much perhaps as a big naval gun or a bombing-aeroplane costs to-day. I know this will sound like shocking extravagance to many contemporary hearers, but in the World State the standards will be different.

I don't know whether any of us really grasp what we are saying when we talk of greater educational efficiency in the future. That means--if it means anything--teaching more with much less trouble. It will mean, for instance, that most people will have three or four languages properly learnt; that they will think about things mathematical with a quickness and clearness that puzzles us; that about all sorts of things their minds will move in daylight where ours move in a haze of ignorance or in an emotional fog.

This clear-headed, broad-thinking young citizen of the World State will not be given up after his educational years to a life of toil--there will be very little toil left in the world. Mankind will have machines and power enough to do most of the toil for it. Why, between 1914 and 1918 we blew away enough energy and destroyed enough machinery and turned enough good grey matter into stinking filth to release hundreds of millions of toilers from toil for ever!

Our young citizen will choose some sort of interesting work--perhaps creative work. And he will be free to travel about the whole world without a pa.s.sport or visa, without a change of money; everywhere will be his country; he will find people everywhere who will be endlessly different, but none suspicious or hostile. Everywhere he will find beautiful and distinctive cities, freely expressive of the spirit of the land in which they have arisen. Strange and yet friendly cities.

The world will be a far healthier place than it is now--for mankind as a whole will still carry on organized wars--no longer wars of men against men, but of men against malarias and diseases and infections. Probably he will never know what a cold is, or a headache. He will be able to go through the great forests of the tropics without shivering with fever and without saturating himself with preventive drugs. He will go freely among great mountains; he will fly to the Poles of the earth if he chooses, and dive into the cold, now hidden, deep places of the sea.

But it is very difficult to fill in the picture of his adult life so that it will seem real to our experience. It is hard to conceive and still more difficult to convey. We live in this congested, bickering, elbowing, shoving world, and it has soaked into our natures and made us a part of itself. Hardly any of us know what it is to be properly educated, and hardly any what it is to be in constant general good health.

To talk of what the world may be to most of us is like talking of baths and leisure and happy things to some poor hopeless, gin-soaked drudge in a slum. The creature is so devitalized; the dirt is so ingrained, so much a second nature, that a bath really isn't attractive. Clean and beautiful clothes sound like a mockery or priggishness. To talk of s.p.a.cious and beautiful places only arouses a violent desire in the poor thing to get away somewhere and hide. In squalor and misery, quarrelling and fighting make a sort of nervous relief. To mult.i.tudes of slum-bred people the prospect of no more fighting is a disagreeable prospect, a dull outlook.

Well, all this world of ours may seem a slum to the people of a happier age. They will feel about our world just as we feel about the ninth or tenth century, when we read of its brigands and its insecurities, its pestilences, its miserable housing, its abstinence from ablutions.

But our young citizen will not have been inured to our base world. He will have little of our ingrained dirt in his mind and heart. He will love. He will love beautifully. As most of us once hoped to do in our more romantic moments. He will have ambitions--for the world state will give great scope to ambition. He will work skilfully and brilliantly, or he will administer public services, or he will be an able teacher, or a mental or physical physician, or he will be an interpretative or creative artist; he may be a writer or a scientific investigator, he may be a statesman in his state, or even a world statesman. If he is a statesman he may be going up perhaps to the federal world congress. In the year 2020 there will still be politics, but they will be great politics. Instead of the world's affairs being managed in a score of foreign offices, all scheming meanly and cunningly against each other, all planning to thwart and injure each other, they will be managed under the direction of an educated and organized common intelligence intent only upon the common good.

Dear! Dear! Dear! Does it sound like rubbish to you? I suppose it does.

You think I am talking of a dreamland, of an unattainable Utopia?

Perhaps I am! This dear, jolly old world of dirt, war, bankruptcy, murder and malice, thwarted lives, wasted lives, tormented lives, general ill health and a social decadence that spreads and deepens towards a universal smash--how can we hope to turn it back from its course? How priggish and impracticable! How impertinent! How preposterous! I seem to hear a distant hooting....

Sometimes it seems to me that the barriers that separate man and man are nearly insurmountable and invincible, that we who talk of a world state now are only the pioneers of a vast uphill struggle in the minds and hearts of men that may need to be waged for centuries--that may fail in the end.

Sometimes again, in other moods, it seems to me that these barriers and nationalities and separations are so illogical, so much a matter of tradition, so plainly mischievous and cruel, that at any time we may find the common sense of our race dissolving them away....

Who can see into that darkest of all mysteries, the hearts and wills of mankind? It may be that it is well for us not to know of the many generations who will have to sustain this conflict.

Yes, that is one mood, and there is the other. Perhaps we fear too much.

Even before our lives run out we may feel the dawn of a greater age perceptible among the black shadows and artificial glares of these unhappy years.