30 THE CLASS STRUGGLE THE PASSING OF THE NATION 31 its independent judiciary, and yoke itself to a conglomeration of foreign nationalities, of different race and tongue, and with different history and traditions, was simply preposterous.
But Prof. Usher is not shocked at the thought of Pan America.
And what is more significant, although opposed to it, he fails to advance the argumentum ad nationem. It evidently never occurred to him that the fact that there is no Pan American nation would be a sufficient answer, or even any kind of an answer, to the proposal to erect a Pan American state. And the reason for it is very simple: That is an answer no longer, at least not among serious people, writing serious books on serious subjects.
Prof. Usher, like Dr. Naumann, recognizes the fact that the nation state is a thing of the past, or at least will be soon a thing of the past. Like Dr. Naumann, he evidently believes that the economic race is the thing, at least so far as the state building of the future is concerned, and not the historic nation as we know it. And so he derives his chief arguments against PanAmericanism from the fact that there is no such economic union of interests in the Americas as might serve as a proper foundation for the structure of a Pan American political union. The theoretical basis of Pan Americanism says he lies in the belief that the geographical proximity of the two continents of the Western Hemisphere has naturally created between their inhabitants mutual interests, and literally predicates different interests in the Western Hemisphere from those of Europe, and a more normal relationship between states located in the Western Hemisphere with one another than with Europe. We shall scarcely need to do more than glance at a map to see that the more developed regions of North America are in actual distance as far from South America as they are from Europe, and that South America is geographically more closely related to Africa and to Southern Europe than it is to New York and New England. Pan Americanism assumes a certain separation of interests between Europe and the Western Hemisphere and a certain identity of interests between the United States and LatinAmerica. Let us not mince matters in questions of such grave importance as these. This is a fiction the falsity of which has been exposed by the European War. It was not apparent sooner because of the lack of keen interest on the part of both Europe and the United States in South America. The significant interests of the United States, the indispensable interests, the prerequisites of economic well being, are those with Europe. The significant interests of Latin America, the predominant interests, indispensable to their economic well being, are those with Europe.
This argument against a separate Pan American Union is unanswerable. But what an argument for a world federation!
Incidentally, Professor Usher disposes very effectually, although perhaps quite unintentionally, of the argument often advanced against world federation: That the peoples of the different regions of the earth are so very different by reason of their remoteness as to make a common government impossible.
In speaking of the supposed isolation of some portions of the Western Hemisphere from Europe, Prof. Usher says. Real isolation results from a lack of communication and a lack of acquaintance, and is due nowadays almost entirely to the difficulty of communication or to a lack of common interests, neither of which seem to have any necessary relation to geographical distance of location. The railroad and the steamship, the telegraph and the newspaper, have tied together beyond the power of separation in the future places sundered by the length of continents and the width of oceans. Where communication exists, there is neither separation nor isolation; until it exists, even actual contiguity of boundaries will not break that silence and indifference between two countries in which lies complete isolation. Peru and Brazil communicate with each other infrequently and irregularly; both are in constant touch with affairs in London, Paris, and New York. Similarly, the information in New York about Buenos Aires is much more extended, accurate, and contemporaneous than the notions in Maine about Alabama.
The great commercial and political centers are inevitably in closer contact with one another than with the parts of their own