But it is not only in the somewhat rarefied atmosphere of abstruse
science that international co?peration is vital to the progress of
civilization. All our economic problems, all the questions of
securing the rights of labor, all the hopes of freedom at home and
humanity abroad, rest upon the creation of international good-will.
So long as hatred, suspicion, and fear dominate the feelings of men
toward each other, so long we cannot hope to escape from the tyranny
of violence and brute force. Men must learn to be conscious of the
common interests of mankind in which all are at one, rather than of
those supposed interests in which the nations are divided. It is not
necessary, or even desirable, to obliterate the differences of manners
and custom and tradition between different nations. These differences
enable each nation to make its own distinctive contribution to the sum
total of the world's civilization.
What is to be desired is not cosmopolitanism, not the absence of all
national characteristics that one associates with couriers,
_wagon-lit_ attendants, and others, who have had everything
distinctive obliterated by multiple and trivial contacts with men of
every civilized country. Such cosmopolitanism is the result of loss,
not gain. The international spirit which we should wish to see
produced will be something added to love of country, not something
taken away.
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