32 THE CLASS STRUGGLE THE PASSING OF THE NATION 33 country; and nearly any part of the United States has more regular contact with New York or Chicago than with any other part of North America. Isolation is more a matter of time than of space, and common interests are due to the ease of transportation and communication more often than to geographical location.
What Prof Usher says about knowledge in New York about Buenos Aires as compared with the knowledge in Maine about Alabama is of almost universal application. Knowledge of and therefore similarity to other people has only the remotest relation to either distance or nationality and only a faint one to language. The dweller of your modern large city is informed daily and pretty accurately not only of the happenings in all other cities of the globe, but also of the state of mind of those cities on different subjects of interests. The mode of life in all modern large cities is almost identical in all important and even some unimportant respects. There is more diversity between the urban and rural populations of any given country, or even any given province, than there is between the urban populations of the world.
On the whole the world, or at least that part of it which we are pleased to call the civilized world, is one and indivisible and is becoming even more so from day to day. We are not only part of the same economic system, making of the entire world one economic race, but we are sharers in essentially the same culture and even partakers of the same amusements. We here in the United States are much more interested in proposed reform of the Prussian franchise than New Yorkers generally are in woman suffrage in North Dakota; and the proposed constitutional changes in the German Empire interest the average American outside of Massachusetts much more than the proposed changes in the Constitution of that State. They interest us more, because they affect us much more vitally.
This is one of the great lessons in internationalism which the World War has taught us, and which will never be unlearned again. We have ceased to be provincial, and so has the rest of the world.
The world has at last come to realize the fact we can no longer live in national isolation. The world has become one to such an extent that all of us are interested in everything that is going on the world over, including the question of how each country, and each important subdivision thereof, is being governed. It is no longer a mere matter of sympathy with alien people struggling for freedom and democracy, but of actual, live and even vital interest to our peace and prosperity. And it is only one step and a very logical as well as urgent step from such an interest to desire to promote that interest by intelligent action, which is possible only by and through world federation. appreciate, of course, that Internationalism such as we want is a shocking idea to the average man in the street. But shocks are the order of the day, and in times like these people learn very quickly. The important points to remember are these: the economic foundations of internationalism are there, and the nationalistic system of ideas has been damaged beyond repair. For a time, those who have been born and raised on them, and who have not as yet been shocked plumb into a new world, will attempt to hedge and compromise. Realizing that the nation has passed, they will, like Dr. Naumann and his friends, attempt to keep the world divided by dividing it into a few super states.
But such a makeshift could not succeed. It is not only highly undesirable, but quite impracticable, except, perhaps, as a temporary arrangement during a truce in the World War. It is quite impossible as a more or less permanent arrangement in a world really at peace. The only thing possible such a world, at the present stage of our economic and cultural development, is real internationalism and world federation.
In this connection, it may perhaps be well to remind my American readers that a similar situation confronted this country after the War of Independence. The thirteen colonies became through the Revolution thirteen independent states in theory as well as in fact. The differences between and their remoteness from each other were no less than the differences now existing between the different nations of the civilized world, with the single exception of language. There were then men who believed