more profitable items. Why should the unsuccessful nation be loaded up with unsaleable merchandise and its factories cease to operate? Why should it make too much profit on one item and suffer a loss on another? Why should the United States and the nations of Europe look with so much dread upon the enterprise of Japan and the low-priced labor of the far East? Why should Japan look upon the commerce of Europe and America as so much prey? In short, why foster unnatural competition, over-production and the unnecessary cheapening of products which have an economic value for the world? Why not standardize the value of the world's commodities, prohibit excessive production and leave the production of all items exclusively to those nations who are in the most advantageous position to produce them?
The problems of world-trade cannot be solved by armies and navies. They can only be solved by the world’s best hearts and minds acting co-operatively with a view to giving to each and every nation its quid pro quo even to the last match or grain of wheat in an absolute adjustment between its natural productions, wants and the requirements of the rest of the world. Values, after all, are artificial creations. Why not adjust values so that they will tend to supply instead of deny the needs of human beings? The economic problems of one nation are the economic problems of all. The world is indeed sick. But when a human being becomes ill do we call in the aid of the executioner? Can the world as a whole do with less of the tender care and the solicitude which we bestow upon and individual.
VI.
The great war, which has swept over the world like a devastating blast % cosmic fury so that we are still numb with the shock thereof, has caught the spiritual side of man unawares. The stricken consciousness of the world asks, Will it leave a better, more democra- tized world? Do the recesses of this astounding, infernal visitation hide perhaps a compensation for mankind? Or must:we consider ourselves the conscious spectators of a reversion of the world to the medaeval darkness of an earlier epoch in the brogd day of modernity? For we are hardly prepared to accept the evidence of our senses at its face value.
But whatever the aftermath of the war may be, certain it ıs that its immediate effect is to plunge the moral standards of the world down the abysmal scale from which they were mounting but yesterday with such difficulty to greater heights! Certain it is that a current of unbelief in the best aspirations of mankind has bounded through the world overnight like a revived Lucifer! Certain it is that the heart of the world has
contracted and hardened so that even in those fields that are the furthest removed from the zone of carnage and deviltry the covert spirit of narrow calculation and merciless self-interest is emerging with the soft but dreadful foothills of the jackal in the wake of the human chaos of the battlefield. The worst instincts of the world are called forth from their hiding-places and become bold, while the white angels of mankind shrink and cower in the by-ways of indecision.
What is the world to be after the war? To be sure, the governments at war have their own ideas as to whät the world is to be like after the deluge of horror and, doubtless, there is not wanting in the ofhcial files plans and covenants covering the alottment of each bloody province to this one and to that. But I repeat, what is the world to be? The war-spirit will not ultimately decide this question nor will the men in the trenches give permanency of title to any of the nations at war however victorious this or the other belligerent now in the field may prove to be. The white angels of mankind, too, must marshal their forces, and all that can bear arms must fight for the tust partition of the earth.
But one asks, How can we fight—how can we marshal our forces—how can we do anything, if we ourselves do not know which side is right and we do not know what to fight or whom to fight for?
What are the peace-proposals which a right-feeling human being would lay before the warring nations of the world if he could formulate them? I think they would be about as follows:
One: That every nation be allowed the unhampered government and development of its own national life upon its own soil.
Two: That all expatriated and subject peoples be restored to their possessions.
Three: That no nation shall be permitted to impose its way of life upon another save through the free and normal channels of culture.
Four: That the economic needs and potentialities of all nations be tabulated and recognized by competent tribunals with a view to the regulation and localization of all production in order to eliminate national trade-wars and to meet the normal requirements of the world upon the most advantageous basis for all.
It follows that with the adoption of the foregoing proposals, the abolishment of war must result as a foregone conclusion because there can be left no reason for its maintenance. Hence whatever may be the outcome of the war, the heart of the world will never be satisfied with less than the universal adoption, in one form or another, of the foregoing fundamental demands. Until they are adopted there can be no peace worthy of the name; and there will be none.