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The Federation of Mankind
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To take but one instance. How confident were the assertions
made in the days preceding the unification of the states of the North
American continent regarding the insuperable barriers that stood
in the way of their ultimate federation! Was it not widely and
emphatically declared that the conflicting interests, the mutual distrust,
the differences of government and habit that divided the states
were such as no force, whether spiritual or temporal, could ever hope
to harmonize or control? And yet how different were the conditions
prevailing a hundred and fifty years ago from those that characterize
present-day society! It would indeed be no exaggeration to say
that the absence of those facilities which modern scientific progress
has placed at the service of humanity in our time made of the problem
of welding the American states into a single federation, similar
though they were in certain traditions, a task infinitely more complex
than that which confronts a divided humanity in its efforts to
achieve the unification of all mankind.
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Who knows that for so exalted a conception to take shape a
suffering more intense than any it has yet experienced will have to
be inflicted upon humanity? Could anything less than the fire of a
civil war with all its violence and vicissitudes--a war that nearly
rent the great American Republic--have welded the states, not only
into a Union of independent units, but into a Nation, in spite of all
the ethnic differences that characterized its component parts? That
so fundamental a revolution, involving such far-reaching changes in
the structure of society, can be achieved through the ordinary processes
of diplomacy and education seems highly improbable. We
have but to turn our gaze to humanity's blood-stained history to
realize that nothing short of intense mental as well as physical agony
has been able to precipitate those epoch-making changes that constitute
the greatest landmarks in the history of human civilization.
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