At the bottom of this moral hesitation is an unconscious realization of the extent of each nation’s dependence upon the world partnership.  It is not a fear of physical chastisement; any nation will go to war against desperate odds if a foreign nation talks of chastising it.  It is not that consideration which operates, as a thousand examples in history prove to us.  There are forces outside military power more visible and ponderable than these.

There exists, of course, already a world State which has no formal recognition in our paper constitutions at all, and no sanction in physical force.  If you are able to send a letter to the most obscure village of China, a telegram to any part of the planet, to travel over most of the world in safety, to carry on trade therewith, it is because for a generation the Post Office Departments of the world have been at work arranging traffic and communication details, methods of keeping their accounts; because the ship owner has been devising international signal codes; the banker arranging conditions of international credit; because, in fact, not merely a dozen but some hundreds of international agreements, most of them made not between Governments at all, but between groups and parties directly concerned, have been devised.

There is no overlord enforcing them, yet much of our daily life depends upon their normal working.  The bankers or the shipowners or the makers of electric machinery have met in Paris or Brussels and decided that such shall be the accepted code, such the universal measurement for the lamp or instrument, such the conditions for the bill of exchange and from the moment that there is an agreement you do not need any sanction.  If the instrument does not conform to the measurement it is unsalable and that is sanction enough.

[Illustration:  ANTONIO SALANDRA

Minister of the Interior and President of the Italian Ministry

(Photo from Bain)]

[Illustration:  JAMES W. GERARD

American Ambassador to the German Empire]

We have seen in the preceding article that the dependence of the nations goes back a good deal further than we are apt to think; that long before the period of fully developed intercommunication, all nations owed their civilization to foreigners.  It was to their traffic with Gaul and the visits of the Phoenician traders that the early inhabitants of the British Isles learned their first steps in arts and crafts and the development of a civilized society, and even in what we know as the Dark Ages we find Charlemagne borrowing scholars from York to assist him in civilizing the Continent.

The civilization which our forefathers brought with them to America was the result of centuries of exchange in ideas between Britain and the Continent, and though in the course of time it had become something characteristically Anglo-Saxon, its origins were Greek and Arabic and Roman and Jewish.  But the interdependence of nations today is of an infinitely more vital and insistent kind, and despite superficial setbacks becomes more vital every day.  As late as the first quarter of the nineteenth century, for instance, Britain was still practically self-sufficing; her very large foreign trade was a trade in luxuries.  She could still produce her own food, her population could still live on her own soil.