Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1927-06-12
BY HI. C.. WELLS

ganized world peace and full and complete
patriot also. great number of worthy peo-
pie trying to achieve this impossibty.
If we substract them from the total of those
who ''are working for world peace" / doubt
If any large number of people remain
The patriotic attitude seems to be a much
more natural and satisfactory one than the
cosmopolitan. 1t is much easier to adhere to a
government that exists than to get at cross
purposes with all the honor and procedure Of
your own country in order to work for one
that does not and never may exist.
Patriotism is rich with associations; it Is 70.
mantle and poetic. 1t is always nice and
Strengthening to despise something. and patri.
otism gives you the whole outer world for
that sustaining Its chief drawback is that
1t takes you along roads that end sooner or
later in war, and that in spite Of the profess
sional soldiers. war becomes more frightful dis
gushing. destructive and futile every year.
And another drawback is that it restricts your
movements to your own dear country, and that
on the rest of this small planet you must travel
about as latent enemy and a potential spy.
Nor do the logical consequences of desire
for world peace end with the sacrifice of COM
plete national freedom in the matter of dis.
armament and in diplomatic action. These
concern merely the material and forms of war.
The underlying of most recent wars
seems to be the treatment of each sovereign
community or separate economic system in hos.
tile competition with all the rest, and the con.
sequent struggle to secure priority in markets
and exclusive or privileged access to supplies
of raw material
Arrangements for disarmament and arbitra-
ton may delay conflicts and render warfare
clumsier and more sluggish. exhausting and
painful; but they will do little nothing to
prevent the ultimate resort to war, long as
we are living under the assumption that there
is struggle for existence, an unavoidable COM
petition for vital material between foreign
states.
Unless people are prepared to accept the idea
that the economic life of the world can be re-
garded and controlled as one system to the
general advantage of the race, their aspiration
for a universal peace will remain the most
unreal of all possible aspirations. Separate
economic systems must compete, must jostle,
must forestall and must drive, for all their
virtuous protestations, toward a tussle No
doubt the reorganization of the worlds affairs
and the worlds ideas to the form of an eco.
nomic unity is gigantic task. But it is not
a bit of good preparing palm branches and
hosannas for the final pacihcation of mankind
unless we believe and intend that that gigantic
task will and shall be done.
When central body determines the distribu.
ton Of material and staple commodities
throughout the world; when these movements
are fabricated by transactions in a common
currency-then, and only then, is stable world
peace reasonable possibility.
And it is not only trade and business that
have to be brought to the scale of world af.
fairs, but the movements of population demand
a similar unified control We have to remem.
Der that the idea of world peace runs counter
TO the general processes of nature. Natures
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