Apart from trade, the interests of nations coincide in all that makes what we call civilization.  Inventions and discoveries bring benefit to all.  The progress of science is a matter of equal concern to the whole civilized world.  Whether a man of science is an Englishman, a Frenchman, or a German is a matter of no real importance.  His discoveries are open to all, and nothing but intelligence is required in order to profit by them.  The whole world of art and literature and learning is international; what is done in one country is not done for that country, but for mankind.  If we ask ourselves what are the things that raise mankind above the brutes, what are the things that make us think the human race more valuable than any species of animals, we shall find that none of them are things in which any one nation can have exclusive property, but all are things in which the whole world can share.  Those who have any care for these things, those who wish to see mankind fruitful in the work which men alone can do, will take little account of national boundaries, and have little care to what state a man happens to owe allegiance.

The importance of international cošperation outside the sphere of politics has been brought home to me by my own experience.  Until lately I was engaged in teaching a new science which few men in the world were able to teach.  My own work in this science was based chiefly upon the work of a German and an Italian.  My pupils came from all over the civilized world:  France, Germany, Austria, Russia, Greece, Japan, China, India, and America.  None of us was conscious of any sense of national divisions.  We felt ourselves an outpost of civilization, building a new road into the virgin forest of the unknown.  All cošperated in the common task, and in the interest of such a work the political enmities of nations seemed trivial, temporary, and futile.

But it is not only in the somewhat rarefied atmosphere of abstruse science that international cošperation is vital to the progress of civilization.  All our economic problems, all the questions of securing the rights of labor, all the hopes of freedom at home and humanity abroad, rest upon the creation of international good-will.

So long as hatred, suspicion, and fear dominate the feelings of men toward each other, so long we cannot hope to escape from the tyranny of violence and brute force.  Men must learn to be conscious of the common interests of mankind in which all are at one, rather than of those supposed interests in which the nations are divided.  It is not necessary, or even desirable, to obliterate the differences of manners and custom and tradition between different nations.  These differences enable each nation to make its own distinctive contribution to the sum total of the world’s civilization.