The sessions were devoted to a discussion of education as a means of eliminating the ignorance and injustice causing hatred and misunderstanding among nations. The call which went out to one thousand contacts in 73 different countries contained the following objectives; to promote friendship, justice and good-will among the nations of the earth; to bring about a world-wide tolerance of the rights and privileges of all nations, regardless of race or creed; to develop an appreciation of the value of inherited gifts of nationality through the centuries of development and progress; to secure accurate and adequate information in text books used in the schools of the different nations; to produce a national comradeship; to inculcate in the minds and hearts of the rising generations the spiritual values necessary to carry forward the principles emphasized at the Washington Conference; and finally, to emphasize the essential unity of mankind, making clear the suicidal nature of war, and the necessity of peace.
The opening meetings were attended by from ten to eighteen thousand people interested in this movement. An eye-witness said: “To stand before the plenary conference and look into the faces of the world, a representation wide-spread, not a few leading countries but the nations of the world who sat together and earnestly deliberated, not for selfish interests but for a great humanistic motive, sent a thrill through one. Constantly one felt that it was here,—the greatest fundamental truths, the potent forces which can make humanity better, more tolerant, more faithful, more virtuous, more devout—will be set in motion.”
Many will be found to ridicule the idea that any real progress in unity has ever been made, or that the world can ever be envisaged except as an irksome enclosure of rival armed forces thirsting for the fray. But there is a quiet but well founded belief that the forces tending to unity in the world are different in quality, incomparably greater in scope than those which make for disruption. Discord is explosive and temporary; harmony rises slowly but dominates the final chord.
The great World War has certainly brought home the lesson of economic interdependence among nations, and although President Wilson’s ideal was not fully realized in the League of Nations, subsequent events have decidedly brought back to the thinking minds such works as Norman Angell’s “Great Illusion,” Fayle’s “The Great Settlement” and Keyne’s courageous attacks against the reparation provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, and recently even Kant’s Perpetual Peace had new editions brought out.
In a more recent work published by the Cambridge University Press, entitled, “The Wider Aspects of Education,” which contains papers by Dr. G. P. Gooch, he as a historian called the doctrine of the unfettered sovereignty of the individual state as “the curse of the modern world.” He said in part, “For a thousand years roughly from St. Augustine to Machiavelli, from the fifth century to the fifteenth, the conception of the unity of civilization dominated Europe. They called Europe the Res Publica Christiana—the Christian Commonwealth—and they believed in this great conception of the unity of civilized mankind. It was only about 400 years ago, when the great political thinker Machiavelli taught the conception of the sovereignty of the State, making every State supreme, responsible only to itself, without any obligations to other States, without any obligations to the community of mankind, and without paying any more than lip homage either to a
divine ruler of mankind
