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Joshua to the Hebrew people as they stood upon the bank of the Jordan just before they began their struggle to conquer the promised land. "Observe to do according to all that is written" in the "Book of the Law." Then and then only "thou shalt make thy way prosperous and have good success," and "the Lord thy God" be "with thee whithersoever thou goest."

This is the splendid duty to which we are called. To have any part in it, however small, is to have one of the most inspiring privileges that can come to the sons of men. As Whittier said a generation ago, so we may now say with even greater truth and with reference to this more stupendous crisis:

"Our fathers to their graves have gone;
Their strife is past, their triumph won;
But sterner trials wait the race
Which rises in their honoured place;
A moral warfare with the crime
And folly of an evil time.

"So let it be. In God's own might
We gird us for the coming fight,
And, strong in Him whose cause is ours
In conflict with unholy powers,

We grasp the weapons He has given,

The Light, and Truth, and Love of Heaven."

What Mordecai said of old to Esther at a crisis in the history of the Hebrew people, God is surely

saying to the American churches: "If thou altogether holdest thy peace at this time, then shall relief and deliverance arise from another place, but thou and thy father's house shall perish; and who knoweth whether thou art not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?"

VIII

THE PRESIDENT'S INTERNATIONAL

IDEAL

By WM. I. HULL, PH.D.

S we look out upon the world to-day, it is

A

obvious that the future will be ruled, at least

for a time, by one of four ideals.

These are the ideals of nationalities and of small nations to survive and to develop unhindered their own cultural ideals, of large nations to grow ever larger and more unified, of rival alliances among great powers, and of genuine internationalism.

The sentiment of nationality, in the first place, has received such strong stimulus during the present war, both from attacks upon and concessions to it, that it may assert itself far more strongly than ever before and, in its contest with nationalism, succeed in breaking up such nations as Austria-Hungary, Russia, Turkey, Germany, and the British Empire into their constituent elements. Whether these elements will become autonomous members of loose confederations, or politically independent, will depend on how far the pendulum swings back from

the nationalistic ideals of the Nineteenth Century. If the Bolsheviki succeed in making their revolution world-wide we may expect to see, in addition to an industrial transformation, a world made up politically of small self-governing communities similar to the city-states among the ancient Greeks.

On the other hand, if the nationalistic ideal of union is to be carried still further in the Twentieth Century, we may look forward to the complete suppression of the aspirations of small nationalities for civil, political, linguistic, religious and educational rights, and to their entire absorption in one or another of the Great Powers. This process may even apply to small nations which have hitherto been independent; for the world to-day and for some time in the past has been a very unsafe place for the little fellows in the Family of Nations. Even the Great Powers have felt none too secure in their bigness, and it is probable that they may strive to increase to the utmost both their size and their military strength. Hence a continuation and intensification of the competitive increase of armaments, and of all those rivalries in trade, commerce, foreign investment, and the exploitation of backward lands and peoples, which have made the nations of the world like a nest of African serpents, each striving fiercely to raise its head above its fellows and sting them to death or submission.

Again, since only one can be first, in such a struggle, and the other Great Powers must yield to the

first, the plan of alliances which gave rise to the Entente Cordiale and the Triple Alliance may be carried still farther and divide the earth and dominion over it among such world-centres as Central Europe, the British Empire, and Pan-America. Or, if the imperial dream of the extreme Pan-Germanists and Pan-Jingoes everywhere comes true, the earth may be divided politically as well as geographically into two hemispheres, with Central Europe joining hands with Islam, Russia, China, Japan and India, and lined up against the remnants of the British Empire allied with Pan-America. What the intensification of rivalry in militarism of every form and in economic imperialism would mean under such circumstances, and what an armageddon would probably result, the imagination and the moral sense refuse to contemplate.

Since our country is relatively free from the problems of nationality such as beset nearly all the other great powers, and we are optimistic about the forces which still threaten even our Union, we are more interested in the second and third alternatives noted above. Some of our fellow-countrymen foresee a future of unprecedented nationalistic assertion, and demand that, while still continuing to profess a trust in God, we shall "take our own part" and "keep our powder dry." Divested of persiflage, this counsel means that our navy shall exceed Great Britain's, our army Germany's, and our air-fleet that of France. It means, also, as German "efficiency"

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