The reader will not, I think, misunderstand me.  I am not pleading that human nature has undergone or will undergo any radical transformation.  Rather am I asserting that it will not undergo any; that the intention of the man of the tenth century in Europe was as good as that of the man of the twentieth, that the man of the tenth century was as capable of self-sacrifice—­was, it may be, less self-seeking.  But what I am trying to hint is that the shrinking of the world by our developed intercommunication has made us all more interdependent.

The German Government moves its troops against Belgium; a moratorium is immediately proclaimed in Rio de Janeiro, a dozen American Stock Exchanges are promptly closed and some hundreds of thousands of our people are affected in their daily lives.  This worldwide effect is not a matter of some years or a generation or two.  It is a matter of an hour; we are intimately concerned with the actions of men on the other side of the world that we have never seen and never shall see; and they are intimately concerned with us.  We know without having thought it out that we are bound together by a compact; the very fact that we are dependent upon one another creates as a matter of fact a partnership.  We are expecting the other man to perform his part; he has been doing so uninterruptedly for years, and we send him our goods or we take his bill of exchange, or our families are afloat in his ships, expecting that he will pay for his goods, honor the bill of exchange, navigate safely his ship—­he has undertaken to do these things in the world-wide partnership of our common labor and then he fails.  He does not do these things, and we have a very lively sense of the immorality of the doctrine which permits him to escape doing them.

And so there are certain things that are not done, certain lengths to which even in war time we cannot go.  What will stop the war is not so much the fighting, any more than Protestant massacres prevented Catholic massacres.  Men do not fear the enemy soldiers; they do fear the turning of certain social and moral forces against them.  The German Government does not hesitate for a moment to send ten thousand of its own people to certain death under enemy guns even though the military advantage of so doing may be relatively trifling.  But it dare not order the massacre of ten thousand foreign residents in Berlin.  There is some force which makes it sometimes more scrupulous of the lives of its enemy than of the lives of its own people.

Yet why should it care?  Because of the physical force of the armies ranged against it?  But it has to meet that force in any case.  It fears that the world will be stirred.  In other words, it knows that the world at large has a very lively realization that in its own interest certain things must not be done, that the world would not live together as we now know it, if it permitted those things to be done.  It would not so permit them.