Nationalism and the League of Nations Today

The world today is appallingly interesting. It is interesting, because it is changing so fast. It is appalling, because almost every change we have witnessed in the course of the last years has been a change for the worse. As mankind is ever proceeding from the past, through the present, toward the future, all change may, in the purely dynamic sense of the term, be called progress. If, however, we seek to estimate the value of change in terms of human welfare, as also if we consider it in the light of the goals pursued, the most significant recent changes in the political and economic spheres are clearly reactionary.For generations, and in some cases for centuries, ail nations within the orbit of our Western civilization have, through wars and revolutions, been striving to secure for all their members greater physical and moral security, greater political equality, greater individual freedom. Greater security—that is, more assured protection against the violence of their fellow-citizens and against the arbitrary oppression of their governments. Greater equality—that is, less discrimination on grounds of race, of sex, of religious and philosophical creed and of social position. Greater freedom—that is, more latitude for the self-expression and self-assertion of the individual in the face of the authority of tradition and of the state. Guarantees for the protection of the fundamental rights of man, the abolition of arrest without trial and of imprisonment for debt, the suppression of slavery, the extension of the suffrage to all and thereby the subordination of the government to the will of the people (that is, of the majority of all the people), parliamentary control of the budget (that is, no taxation without representation), the recognition of freedom of thought, of speech, of assembly, of the press, the independence of the judiciary and the autonomy of the university—such are some of the ideals for which our fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers fought, bled, and died. Such are some of the conquests of human dignity over barbarism, of knowledge over ignorance, of right over might, which they triumphantly achieved and which they proudly bequeathed to us.