The nation is organized. Its logic was shaped finally in the fiery forge
of war.
The nation is the largest thing we have yet got organized. We must
organize the world. Unending jealousies, commercial clash, friction of
law, paralysis of industry, financial disorder, the misdirection and
miscarriage of good energy, mischievous ignorance and prejudice,
incalculable waste, chronic alarm, and devastating wars are before us
until we do it. That is the lesson of the hour. The relations and
interdependence of the nations of Christendom have become, by the
amazing advance of civilization in the century, closer, complexer, and
more imperious far than the relations of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania,
and Georgia, when Washington from the heights of the Alleghanies looked
into the West and thought of the continent. Yet France and Germany,
England and Russia, America and Spain, in their great burrs of guns,
jealous of each other, distrustful, envious, afraid, go on in their
separate, incooeperant, abortive ways, keeping God's earth in chaos, when
a great wisdom and great virtue like Washington's a hundred years ago
would convert them into a family of nations, into a federation and
fraternity, with a comprehensive law, an efficient police, and a
purposeful economy.
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