PROPOSAL

CHAPTER I

What This Book Is About


Now it is proposed to form a Government for men and not for Societies of
men or States. -- George Mason in the American Union's Constitutional
Convention.

I am convinced that this is the safest course for your liberty, your
dignity and your happiness. ... I frankly acknowledge to you my
convictions, and I will freely lay before you the reasons on which they
are founded. ... My arguments will be open to all, and may be judged of
by all. They shall at least be offered in a spirit which will not
disgrace the cause of truth. -- Alexander Hamilton, opening The
Federalist.

Now when man's future seems so vast, catastrophe threatens to cut us
from it. The dangers with which depression, dictatorship, false recovery
and war are hemming us in have become so grave and imminent that we no
longer need concern ourselves with proving how grave and near they are.
We need concern ourselves instead with the problem of escaping them and
the cruel dilemma we face; Whether to risk peace or freedom? That is the
problem with which this book is concerned. I believe there is a way
through these dangers, and out of the dilemma, a way to do what we all
want, to secure both peace and freedom securely, and be done with this
nightmare. It promises not only escape, but life such as I, too, never
hoped could be lived in my time.

It is not an easy way -- who expects one? -- and to many it will seem at
first too hard to be practical. But this is because its difficulties and
dangers are greatest at the start; other ways that seem easier and safer
to begin with, grow increasingly hard and dangerous, and lead nowhere.
How could we feel hemmed in if the way through were so easy to take, or
even see at first? For my part, to find it I had to stumble on it. Once
found it soon opened so widely that I wondered how I had failed so long
to see it. I shall not be surprised, then, if you begin by being
skeptical or discouraged. But I ask you to remember that the essential
question is: Which way will really lead us through?

Since 1933 when I stumbled on this way I have been exploring it all I
could and trying, in the writing of this book, to clear away the things
hiding it. By all the tests of common sense and experience I find it to
be our safest, surest way. It proves in fact to be nothing new but a
forgotten way which our fathers opened up and tried out successfully
long ago when they were hemmed in as we are now.

The way through is Union now of the democracies that the North Atlantic
and a thousand other things already unite -- Union of these few peoples
in a great federal republic built on and for the thing they share most,
their common democratic principle of government for the sake of
individual freedom.

This Union would be designed (a) to provide effective common government
in our democratic world in those fields where such common government
will clearly serve man's freedom better than separate governments, (b)
to maintain independent national governments in all other fields where
such government will best serve man's freedom, and (c) to create by its
constitution a nucleus world government capable of growing into
universal world government peacefully and as rapidly as such growth will
best serve man's freedom.

By (a) I mean the Union of the North Atlantic democracies in these five
fields:

a union government and citizenship
a union defense force
a union customs-free economy
a union money
a union postal and communications system.

By (b) I mean the Union government shall guarantee against all enemies,
foreign and domestic, not only those rights of man that are common to
all democracies, but every existing national or local right that is not
clearly incompatible with effective union government in the five named
fields. The Union would guarantee the right of each democracy in it to
govern independently all its home affairs and practice democracy at home
in its own tongue, according to its own customs and in its own way,
whether by republic or kingdom, presidential, cabinet or other form of
government, capitalist, socialist or other economic system.

By (c) I mean the founder democracies shall so constitute The Union as
to encourage the nations outside it and the colonies inside it to seek
to unite with it instead of against it. Admission to The Union and to
all its tremendous advantages for the individual man and woman would
from the outset be open equally to every democracy, now or to come, that
guarantees its citizens The Union's minimum Bill of Rights.

The Great Republic would be organized with a view to its spreading
peacefully round the earth as nations grow ripe for it. Its Constitution
would aim clearly at achieving eventually by this peaceful, ripening,
natural method the goal millions have dreamed of individually, but never
sought to get by deliberately planning and patiently working together to
achieve it. That goal would be achieved by The Union when every
individual of our species would be a citizen of it, a citizen of a
disarmed world enjoying world free trade, a world money and a world
communications system. Then Man's vast future would begin.

This goal will seem so remote now as to discourage all but the strong
from setting out for it, or even acknowledging that they stand for it.
It is not now so remote, it does not now need men so strong as it did
when Lincoln preserved the American Union "for the great republic, for
the principle it lives by and keeps alive, for man's vast future." It
will no longer be visionary once the Atlantic democracies unite. Their
Union is not so remote, and their Union is all that concerns us here and
now.

THE AMERICAN WAY THROUGH

These proceedings may at first appear strange and difficult; but, like
other steps which we have already passed over, will in a little time
become familiar and agreeable. -- Thomas Paine in Common Sense.

One hundred and fifty years ago a few American democracies opened this
Union way through. The dangers of depression, dictatorship and war, and
the persuasiveness of clear thinking and courageous leadership, led them
then to abandon the heresy into which they had fallen. That heresy
converted the sovereignty of the state from a means to individual
freedom into the supreme end itself, and produced the wretched "League
of Friendship" of the Articles of Confederation. Abandoning all this the
Americans turned back to their Declaration of Independence -- of the
independence of Man from the State and of the dependence of free men on
each other for their freedom -- the Declaration:

That all mon are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator
with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and
the pursuit of happiness, that to secure these rights governments are
instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the
governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of
these ends it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and
to institute new government, laying its foundations on such principles
and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely
to effect their safety and happiness.

Finding they had wrongly applied this philosophy to establish Thirteen
"free and independent States" and organize them as the League of
Friendship so that "each State retains its sovereignty, freedom and
independence," they applied it next as "We the people of the United
States" to "secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our
posterity." To do this they invented and set up a new kind of interstate
government. It has worked ever since as the other, league, type has
never worked. It has proved to be an "astonishing and unexampled
success," as Lord Acton said, not only in America but wherever
democracies have tried it regardless of conditions, -- among the
Germans, French and Italians of Switzerland, the English and French of
Canada, the Dutch and English of the Union of South Africa. It is the
kind of interstate government that Lincoln, to distinguish it from the
opposing type of government of, by and for states, called "government of
the people, by the people, for the people." It is the way that I call
Union.

To follow this way through now our Atlantic democracies -- and first of
all the American Union -- have only to abandon in their turn the same
heresy into which they have fallen, the heresy of absolute national
sovereignty and its vain alternatives, neutrality, balance of power,
alliance or League of Nations. We the people of the Atlantic have only
to cease sacrificing needlessly our individual freedom to the freedom of
our nations, be true to our democratic philosophy and establish that
"more perfect Union" toward which all our existing unions explicitly or
implicitly aim.

Can we hope to find a safer, surer, more successful way than this? What
democrat among us does not hope that this Union will be made some day?
What practical man believes it will ever be made by mere dreaming, or
that the longer we delay starting to make it the sooner we shall have
it? All it will take to make this Union -- whether in a thousand years
or now, whether long after catastrophe or just in time to prevent it,
-- is agreement by a majority to do it. Union is one of those things
which to do we need but agree to do, and which we can not possibly ever
do except by agreeing to do it. Why, then, can we not do it now in time
for us to benefit by it and save millions of lives? Are we so much
feebler than our fathers and our children that we can not do what our
fathers did and what we expect our children to do? Why can not we agree
on Union now?

Are not liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable as in
Webster's day? We can not be for liberty and against Union. We can not
be both for and against liberty and Union now. We must choose.

DEFINITIONS

Democracy I would define more closely than the dictionary that defines
it as "government by the people," (though I would not attempt needless
precision and would indicate an ideal rather than an average). I would
add with Lincoln, and I would stress, that democracy is also government
for the people and of the people -- the people being composed of
individuals all given equal weight, in principle.

Democracy to me is the way to individual freedom formed by men
organizing themselves on the principle of the equality of man. That is,
they organize government of themselves, in the sense that their laws
operate on them individually as equals. They organize government by
themselves, each having an equal vote in making law. They organize
government for themselves, to secure equally the freedom, in the
broadest sense of the term, of each of them.

By democracy I mean government of the totality by the majority for the
sake equally of each minority of one, particularly as regards securing
him such rights as freedom of speech, press and association. (If merely
these three rights are really secured to all individuals they have the
key, I believe. to all the other rights in all the other fields,
political, juridical, economic, etc., that form part of individual
freedom.)

Union to me is a democracy composed of democracies -- an interstate
government organized on the same basic principle, by the same basic
method, and for the same basic purpose as the democracies in it, and
with the powers of government divided between the union and the states
the better to advance this common purpose, individual freedom.

Union and league I use as opposite terms. I divide all organization of
interstate relations into two types, according to whether man or the
state is the unit, and the equality of man or the equality of the state
is "the principle it lives by and keeps alive." I restrict the term
union to the former, and the term league to the latter. To make clearer
this distinction and what I mean by unit, these three points may help:

First, a league is a government of governments: It governs each people
in its territory as a unit through that unit's government. Its laws can
be broken only by a people acting through its government, and enforced
only by the league coercing that people as a unit, regardless of whether
individuals in it opposed or favored the violation. A union is a
government of the people: It governs each individual in its territory
directly as a unit. Its laws apply equally to each individual instead of
to each government or people, can be broken only by individuals, and
can be enforced only by coercing individuals.

Second, a league is a government by governments: Its laws are made by
the peoples in it acting each through its government as a unit of equal
voting power regardless of the number of individuals in it. A union is
a government by the people: Its laws are made by the individuals in it
acting, each through his representatives, as a unit of equal voting
power in choosing and changing them, each state's voting power in the
union government being ordinarily in close proportion to its population.
A union may allow in one house of its legislature (as in the American
Senate) equal weight to the people of each state regardless of
population. But it provides that such representatives shall not, as in a
league, represent the state as a unit and be under the instructions of,
and subject to, recall by its government, but shall represent instead
the people of the state and be answerable to them.

Third, a league is a government for governments or states: It is made to
secure the freedom of each of the states in it, taken as units equally.
A union is a government for the people: It is made for the purpose of
securing the freedom of each of the individuals in it taken as units
equally. To secure the sovereignty of the state a league sacrifices the
rights of men to justice (as in the first point) and to equal voting
power (as in the second point), whereas a union sacrifices the
sovereignty of the state to secure the rights of men: A league is made
for the state, a union is made for man.

This may suffice to explain the sense in which the terms democracy,
union and league are meant in this book.[1]

FIFTEEN FOUNDER DEMOCRACIES

In the North Atlantic or founder democracies I would include at least
these Fifteen (or Ten): The American Union, the British Commonwealth
(specifically the United Kingdom, the Federal Dominion of Canada, the
Commonwealth of Australia, New Zealand, the Union of South Africa,
Ireland), the French Republic, Belgium, the Netherlands, the Swiss
Confederation, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland.

These few include the world's greatest, oldest, most homogeneous and
closely linked democracies, the peoples most experienced and successful
in solving the problem at hand -- the peaceful, reasonable establishment
of effective interstate democratic world government. Language divides
them into only five big groups and, for all practical political
purposes, into only two, English and French. Their combined citizenry of
nearly 300,000,000 is well balanced, half in Europe and half overseas.
None of these democracies has been at war with any of the others since
more than 100 years.

These few democracies suffice to provide the nucleus of world government
with the financial, monetary, economic and political power necessary
both to assure peace to its members peacefully from the outset by sheer
overwhelming preponderance and invulnerability, and practically to end
the monetary insecurity and economic warfare now ravaging the whole
world. These few divide among them such wealth and power that the
so-called world political, economic and monetary anarchy is at bottom
nothing but their own anarchy -- since they can end it by uniting to
establish law and order among themselves.

Together these fifteen own almost half the earth, rule all its oceans,
govern nearly half mankind. They do two-thirds of the world's trade, and
most of this would be called their domestic trade once they united, for
it is among themselves. They have more than 50 per cent control of
nearly every essential material. They have more than 60 per cent of such
war essentials as oil, copper, lead, steel, iron, coal, tin, cotton,
wool, wood pulp, shipping tonnage. They have almost complete control of
such keys as nickel, rubber and automobile production. They possess
practically all the world's gold and banked wealth. Their existing armed
strength is such that, once they united it, they could reduce their
armaments and yet gain a two-power standard of security.

The Union's existing and potential power from the outset would be so
gigantic, its bulk so vast, its vital centers so scattered, that all the
autocracies even put together could not dream of defeating it. Once
established the Union's superiority in power would be constantly
increasing simply through the admission to it of outside nations. A
number would no doubt be admitted immediately. By this process the
absolutist powers would constantly become weaker and more isolated.

When the really powerful members of a community refuse to organize
effective government in it, when each insists on remaining a law unto
himself to the degree the democracies, and especially the United States,
have done since the war, then anarchy is bound to result, and the first
to feel the effects of the chaos are bound to be the weaker members of
the community. When the pinch comes the last to be hired are the first
to be laid off, and the firms working on the narrowest margin are the
first to be driven to the wall or to desperate expedients. That makes
the pinch worse for the more powerful and faces them with new dangers,
with threats of violence. It is human for them to blame those they have
unwittingly driven to desperation, but that does not change the source
of the evil.

So it has been in the world. The younger democracies have been the first
to go. The first of the great powers driven to desperate and violent
measures have been those with the smallest margin. There is no doubt
that their methods have since made matters worse and that there is no
hope in following their lead. Their autocratic governments are adding to
the world's ills but they are not the real cause of them. They are
instead an effect of the anarchy among the powerful democracies.

The dictators are right when they blame the democracies for the world's
condition, but they are wrong when they blame it on democracy. The
anarchy comes from the refusal of the democracies to renounce enough of
their national sovereignty to let effective world law and order be set
up. But their refusal to do this, their maintenance of the state for its
own sake, their readiness to sacrifice the lives and liberties of the
citizens rather than the independence of the state, -- this we know is
not democracy. It is the core of absolutism. Democracy has been waning
and autocracy waxing, the rights of men lessening and the rights of the
state growing everywhere because the leading democracies have themselves
led in practicing, beyond their frontiers, autocracy instead of
democracy.

The rising power of autocracy increases the need for Union just as the
spread of a contagious disease increases the need for quarantine and for
organizing the healthy. But it is essential to remember that though the
victims carry the disease they did not cause it, and that quarantine of
the victims and organization of the healthy are aimed not against the
victims but against the epidemic, the purpose being to end it both by
restricting its spread and by curing its victims.

It is wrong, all wrong, to conceive of Union as aimed against the
nations under autocracy. There is a world of difference between the
motives behind Union and those behind either the present policy in each
democracy of arming for itself or the proposals for alliance among the
democracies. For such armament and such alliance are meant to maintain
the one thing Union does attack in the one place Union does attack it --
the autocratic principle of absolute national sovereignty in the
democracies. Unlike armament and alliance policies, Union leads to no
crusade against autocracy abroad, to no attempt to end war by war or
make the world safe for democracy by conquering foreign dictatorship.
Union is no religion for tearing out the mote from a brother's eye --
and the eye, too -- while guarding nothing so jealously, savagely, as
the beam in one's own eye.

Union calls on each democracy to remove itself the absolutism governing
its relations with the other democracies, and to leave it to the people
of each dictatorship to decide for themselves whether they will maintain
or overthrow the absolutism governing them not only externally but
internally. Union provides equally for the protection of the democracies
against attack by foreign autocracy while it remains, and for the
admission of each autocratic country into The Union once it becomes a
democracy in the only possible way -- by the will and effort of its own
people.

The attraction membership in The Union would have for outsiders would be
so powerful, and the possibility of conquering The Union would be so
hopeless that, once The Union was formed, the problem the absolutist
powers now present could be safely left to solve itself. As their
citizens turned these governments into democracies and entered The
Union, the arms burden on everyone would dwindle until it soon
disappeared.

Thus, by the simple act of uniting on the basis of their own principle,
the democracies could immediately attain practical security, and could
proceed steadily to absolute security and disarmament.

They could also increase enormously their trade and prosperity, reduce
unemployment, raise their standard of living while lowering its cost.
The imagination even of the economic expert can not grasp all the saving
and profit democrats would realize by merely uniting their democracies
in one free trade area.

They need only establish one common money to solve most if not all of
today's more insoluble monetary problems, and save their citizens the
tremendous loss inherent not only in depreciation, uncertainty, danger
of currency upset from foreign causes, but also in the ordinary
day-to-day monetary exchange among the democracies.

Merely by the elimination of excessive government, needless bureaucracy,
and unnecessary duplication which Union would automatically effect, the
democracies could easily balance budgets while reducing taxation and
debt. To an appalling degree taxes and government in the democracies
today are devoted only to the maintenance of their separate
sovereignties as regards citizenship, defense, trade, money and
communications. To a still more appalling degree they are quite
unnecessary and thwart instead of serve the purpose for which we
established those governments and voted those taxes, namely, the
maintenance of our own freedom and sovereignty as individual men and
women.

By uniting, the democracies can serve this purpose also by greatly
facilitating the distribution of goods, travel and the dissemination of
knowledge and entertainment. With one move, the simple act of Union, the
democrats can make half the earth equally the workshop and the
playground of each of them.

Creation of The Union involves difficulties, of course, but the
difficulties are transitional, not permanent ones. All other proposals
in this field, even if realizable, could solve only temporarily this or
that problem in war, peace, armaments monetary stabilization. These
proposals would, be as hard to achieve as Union, yet all together they
could not do what the one act of Union would -- permanently eliminate
all these problems. These are problems for which the present dogma of
national sm is to blame. We can not keep it and solve them. We can not
eliminate them until we first eliminate it.

WHICH WAY ADVANCES FREEDOM MORE?

This does not mean eliminating all national rights. It means eliminating
them only where elimination clearly serves the individuals concerned,
and maintaining them in all other respects, -- not simply where
maintenance clearly serves the general individual interest but also in
all doubtful cases. The object of Union being to advance the freedom and
individuality of the individual, it can include no thought of
standardizing or regimenting him, nor admit the kind of centralizing
that increases governmental power over him. These are evils of
nationalism, and Union would end them. Union comes to put individuality
back on the throne that nationality has usurped.

Everywhere nationalism, in its zeal to make our nation instead of
ourselves, self-sufficing and independent, is centralizing government,
giving it more and more power over the citizen's business and life,
putting more and more of that power in one man's hands, freeing the
government from its dependence on the citizen while making him more and
more dependent on it -- on the pretext of keeping him independent of
other governments. Everywhere the national state has tended to become a
super-state in its power to dispose of the citizen, his money, job, and
life. Everywhere nationalism has been impoverishing the citizen with
taxes, unemployment, depression; and it is poverty -- the desert, not
the jungle, -- that stunts variety, that standardizes. Everywhere
nationalism is casting the citizen increasingly in war's uniform robot
mold.

Union would let us live more individual lives. Its test for deciding
whether in a given field government should remain national or become
union is this: Which would clearly give the individual more freedom?
Clearly the individual freedom of Americans or Frenchmen would gain
nothing from making Union depend on the British converting the United
Kingdom into a republic. Nor would the British be freer for making Union
depend on the Americans and French changing to a monarchy. There are
many fields where it is clear that home rule remains necessary for
individual freedom, where the maintenance of the existing variety among
the democracies helps instead of harms the object of Union.

It is clear too that a Union so secure from foreign aggression as this
one would not need that homogeneity in population that the much weaker
American Union feels obliged to seek. Our Union could afford to
encourage the existing diversity among its members as a powerful
safeguard against the domestic dangers to individual freedom. Just as
the citizen could count on The Union to protect his nation from either
invasion or dictatorship rising from within, he could count on his
nation's autonomy to protect him from a majority in The Union becoming
locally oppressive. The existence of so many national autonomies in The
Union would guarantee each of them freedom to experiment politically,
economically, socially, and would save this Union from the danger of
hysteria and stampede to which more homogeneous unions are exposed.

Clearly, individual freedom requires us to maintain national autonomy in
most things, but no less clearly it requires us to abolish that autonomy
in a few things. There is no need to argue that you and I have nothing
to lose and much to gain by becoming equal citizens in The Union while
retaining our national citizenship. Clearly you and I would be freer had
we this Great Republic's guarantee of our rights as men, its security
against the armaments burden, military servitude, war. It is
self-evident that you and I would live an easier and a richer life if
through half the world we could do business with one money and postage,
if through half the world we were free to buy in the cheapest market
what we need to buy, and free to sell in the dearest market what we have
to sell.

In five fields -- citizenship, defense, trade, money, and communications
-- we are sacrificing now the individual freedom we could safely, easily
have. On what democratic ground can we defend this great sacrifice? We
make it simply to keep our democracies independent of each other. We can
not say that we must maintain the state's autonomy in these few fields
in order to maintain it in the many fields where it serves our freedom,
for we know how to keep it in the latter without keeping it in the
former. We have proved that in the American Union, the Swiss Union, and
elsewhere.

What then can we say to justify our needless sacrifice of man to the
state in these five fields, a sacrifice made only to maintain the nation
for the nation's sake? How can we who believe the state is made for man
escape the charge that in these five fields we are following the
autocratic principle that man is made for the state? How can we plead
not guilty of treason to democracy? Are we not betraying our principles,
our interests, our freedom, ourselves and our children? We are
betraying, too, our fathers. They overthrew the divine right of kings
and founded our democracies not for the divine right of nations but for
the rights of Man.

Clearly absolute national sovereignty has now brought us to the stage
where this form of government has become destructive of the ends for
which we form government, where democrats to remain democrats must use
their right "to abolish it, and to institute new government."

Clearly prudence dictates that we should lay our new government's
foundations on such principles and organize its powers in such form as
have stood the test of experience. Clearly democracy bids us now unite
our unions of free men and women in The Union of the Free.

THE ALTERNATIVES TO UNION

Fantastic? Visionary? What are the alternatives? There are only these:
Either the democracies must try to stand separately, or they must try to
stand together on some other basis than Union; that is, they must
organize themselves as a league or an alliance.

Suppose we try to organize as a league. That means seeking salvation
from what Alexander Hamilton called "the political monster of an
imperium in imperio." We adopt a method which has just failed in the
League of Nations, which before that led the original thirteen American
democracies to a similar failure, and failed the Swiss democracies, the
Dutch democracies, and the democracies of ancient Greece. We adopt a
method which has been tried time and again in history and has never
worked, whether limited to few members or extended to many; a method
which, we shall see, when we analyze it later, is thoroughly
undemocratic, untrustworthy, unsound, unable either to make or to
enforce its law in time. Is it not fantastic to expect to get the
American people, after 150 years of successful experience with union and
after their rejection of the League of Nations, to enter any league?

Suppose we try to organize instead an alliance of the democracies. But
an alliance is simply a looser, more primitive form of league, one that
operates secretly through diplomatic tunnels rather than openly through
regular assemblies. It is based on the same unit as a league, -- the
state, -- and on the same principle, -- that the maintenance of the
freedom of the state is the be-all and the end-all of political and
economic policy. It is at most an association (instead of a government)
of governments, by governments, for governments. It has all the faults
of a league with most of them intensified and with some more of its own
added.

The lack of machinery for reaching and executing international agreement
in the economic, financial and monetary fields in time to be effective
did much to cause the depression that led us through Manchuria and
Hitler and Ethiopia to where we are today. What could be more fantastic
than the hope that any conceivable alliance could provide this
machinery, or that without this machinery we can long avoid depression
and war?

Only one thing could be more visionary and fantastic, and that is the
third possible alternative to Union, the one that would seek salvation
in rejecting every type of interstate organization and in pursuing a
policy of pure nationalism, -- the policy of isolationism, neutrality,
of each trusting to his own armaments, military and economic. For if the
democracies are not to try to stand together by union or league or
alliance, the only thing left for them is to try to stand alone.

The experience of the United States shows that even the most powerful
nations can not get what they want by isolationism. The United States
sought through the nineteen twenties to preserve its peace and
prosperity by isolationism.

The United States has never armed in peace time as it has since it
adopted this policy. And the end is not near.

The balance of power theory that prepared catastrophe now as then --
there is no more sterile, illusory, fantastic, exploded and explosive
peace policy than the balance of power. Look at it. Take it apart. What
does it mean in common words? It means seeking to get stability by
seeking to equalize the weight on both sides of the balance. One can
conceive of reaching stability this way -- but for how long and at the
cost of what violent ups and downs before? And when the scales do hang
in perfect balance it takes but a breath, only the wind that goes with a
word spoken or shrieked in the Hitlerian manner, to end at once the
stability, the peace that was achieved. Stability can never be more in
danger, more at the mercy of the slightest mistake, accident or act of
ill will than at the very moment when the ideal of the balance of power
is finally achieved.

We do not and can not get peace by balance of power; we can and do get
it by unbalance of power. We get it by putting so much weight surely on
the side of law that the strongest law-breaker can not possibly offset
it and is bound to be overwhelmed. We get lasting stability by having
one side of the balance safely on the ground and the other side high in
the air.

Even the moment's stability which the balance of power may theoretically
attain is a delusion since each side knows it can not last. Therefore
neither can believe in it and the nearer they come to it the harder both
must struggle to prevent it by adding more weight on their side so as to
enjoy the lasting peace that unbalance of power secures, -- and the race
is to the strongest.

The race is to the strongest, and the democracies to win need only scrap
this balance of power and neutrality nonsense and directly seek peace in
the unbalance of power that Union alone can quickly and securely give
them.

THE TEST OF COMMON SENSE

Because Union is a fresh solution of the world problem it appears to be
something new. The deeper one goes into it however, the better one may
see that there is in it nothing new, strange, untried, nothing utopian,
mystic. The fact is that we democrats have already strayed away from the
road of reason and realism into the desert of make-believe and
mysticism. We strayed away seeking the mirage utopia of a world where
each nation is itself a self-sufficing world, where each gains security
and peace by fearing and preparing war where law and order no longer
require government but magically result from keeping each nation a law
unto itself. where the individual's freedom is saved by abandoning at
the national frontier the principle that the state is made for man and
adopting there the dogma that man is made for the nation. It is proposed
here that we have done with these dangerous delusions, that we return to
the road of reason and seek salvation by tested methods, by doing again
what we know from experience we can do. I ask nothing better than that
we stick to the common interests of us individual men and women and to
the simpler teachings of common sense.

Common sense tells us that it is in our individual interest to make the
world safe for our individual selves, and that we can not do this while
we lack effective means of governing our world.

It tells us that the wealthier, the more advanced in machinery, the more
civilized a people is and the more liberties its citizens enjoy, the
greater the stake they have in preventing depression, dictatorship, war.
The more one has, the more one has to lose.

Common sense tells us that some of the causes of depression,
dictatorship, war, lie inside the nation and that others lie outside it.
It tells us that our existing political machinery has let us govern
strongly the conditions of life within the nation but not outside it;
and that all each people has done to overcome the dangers inside it has
been blighted by its failure to reach the dangers outside it, or remains
at the mercy of these ungoverned forces.

Common sense reminds us Americans that we are part of the world and not
a world apart, that the more we keep our lead in the development of
machines the more important to us we make the rest of the world, that we
can not, without catastrophe, continue, through good times and bad,
improving these machines while refusing to develop political machinery
to govern the world we are thus creating. It tells us that the
principles of this Union of the Free are the principles that America was
born to champion, that Americans can not deny them and still remain
Americans. For the loyalty of the American is not to soil or race. The
oath he takes when he enters the service of the American Union, is
altogether to the principles of Union, "to support and defend the
Constitution." That Constitution is already universal in its scope. It
allows for the admission to its Union of any state on earth. It never
even mentions territory or language. It mentions race and color only to
provide that freedom shall never on that account be denied to any man.

American opinion has always been remarkable for seeing from afar danger
to democracy and quickly adopting the common sense solution, however
remote and radical and difficult and dangerous it seemed to be. What
other people ever revolted at less oppression? Independence was so
remote from American thought at the start of 1776 that it was not even
proposed seriously until Jan. 10, when Paine came out for it. Yet his
Common Sense then so swept the country that within six months the
Declaration of Independence was adopted.

To understand how difficult and remote the Union of the Thirteen States
really was when 1787 began, and how encouragingly the example they set
applies to our democracies today, common sense suggests that we turn
back and see the situation then as contemporaries saw it.

"If there is a country in the world where concord, according to common
calculation, would be least expected, it is America," wrote Paine
himself. "Made up as it is of people from different nations, accustomed
to different forms and habits of Government, speaking different
languages, and more different in their modes of worship, it would appear
that the union of such a people was impracticable."

Conditions among the American democracies of the League of Friendship
were such that John Fiske wrote, "By 1786, under the universal
depression and want of confidence, all trade had well-nigh stopped, and
political quackery, with its cheap and dirty remedies, had full control
of the field." Trade disputes threatened war among New York, Connecticut
and New Jersey. Territorial disputes led to bloodshed and threat of war
among New York, New Hampshire and Vermont, and between Connecticut and
Pennsylvania.

War with Spain threatened to break the League of Friendship in two
camps. The League could not coerce its members. Threats of withdrawal
from it were common. Its Congress rarely had money in the treasury,
could no longer borrow.

The total membership of Congress under the League of Friendship was
ninety-one, but the average attendance in the six years preceding Union
was only about twenty-five. Often Congress could not sit because no
quorum came. Things reached the point where little Delaware, though it
had the same voting power in Congress as the largest state and though it
was not thirty miles from Philadelphia, where Congress met, decided it
was no longer worth the expense to send a delegate.

The states issued worthless currency, misery was rife, and courts were
broken up by armed mobs. When these troubles culminated early in 1787
with the attempt of Shays's rebels to capture the League arsenal in
Massachusetts, so strong was state sovereignty and so feeble the League
that Massachusetts would not allow League troops to enter its territory
even to guard the League's own arsenal. Jay had already written to
Washington in 1786, "I am uneasy and apprehensive, more so than during
the war."

Everything seemed to justify the words of the contemporary liberal
philosopher, Josiah Tucker, Dean of Gloucester:

As to the future grandeur of America, and its being a rising empire
under one head, whether republican or monarchical, it is one of the
idlest and most visionary notions that ever was conceived even by
writers of romance. The mutual antipathies and clashing interests of the
Americans, their differences of governments, habitudes, and manners,
indicate that they will have no center of union and no common interest.
They never can be united into one compact empire under any species of
government whatever; a disunited people till the end of time, suspicious
and distrustful of each other, they will be divided and subdivided into
little commonwealths or principalities, according to natural boundaries,
by great bays of the sea, and by vast rivers, lakes, and ridges of
mountains.

The idea of turning from league to union was so remote in 1787 that it
was not even seriously proposed until the end of May when the Federal
Convention opened. And the opening of the Convention had to wait ten
days in order to have even the bare majority of the Thirteen States
needed for a quorum. The Convention itself had been called by Congress
merely to reform the League -- "for the sole and express purpose of
revising the Articles of Confederation." It was not deflected away from
patching and into building anew until the eve of its session, -- and
then thanks only to George Washington's personal intervention. Even then
the Union as we know it now was more than remote: It was unknown, it
still had to be invented.

Yet, once the Convention decided to build anew, it completed this
revolutionary political invention within 100 working days. Within two
years -- two years of close votes and vehement debate in which Hamilton,
Madison and others, now called "men of vision," were derided as
"visionary young men" even by Richard Henry Lee, the revolutionist who
had moved the Declaration of Independence in 1776, -- within two years
the anarchy-ridden, freedom-loving American democracies agreed to try
out this invention on themselves. Twenty months after they read its text
the American people established the Constitution that still governs
them, -- but now governs four times as many democracies and forty times
as many free men and women.

Can it be hard-headed reason that holds it easier for the American
democracies to invent and agree to try out Union in the infancy of
self-government than it is for our more mature democracies to adopt it
now?

It does seem practical to ask first how all the difficulties in changing
from national sovereignty to Union are. to be met. Yet the makers of the
first Union were not delayed by such considerations. They abolished each
State's rights to levy tariffs, issue money, make treaties, and keep an
army, and they gave these rights to the Union without waiting for a plan
to meet the difficulties of changing from protection to free trade, etc.
They did not even bother trying to work out plans to meet all these
difficulties of transition.

Yet they lived in a time when New York was protecting its fuel interests
by a tariff on Connecticut wood, and its farmers by duties on New Jersey
butter, when Massachusetts closed while Connecticut opened its ports to
British shipping, when Boston was boycotting Rhode Island grain and
Philadelphia was refusing to accept New Jersey money, when the money of
most of the States was depreciated and that of Rhode Island and Georgia
was so worthless that their governments sought to coerce the citizens
into accepting it. In those days New York was massing troops on its
Vermont frontier while the army of Pennsylvania was committing
atrocities in the Wyoming valley against settlers from Connecticut.

Some factors, of course, made Union easier for the American democracies
than for us; others made it harder. It can be urged that they were all
contiguous states that had been colonies of the same country. Their
peoples, though much more divided than we now assume, did have a common
language, a predominantly British background and nationality, the same
pioneering traditions and problems. It can be urged on the other hand
that they lacked some tremendous advantages our fifteen democracies now
enjoy. One of them is political experience, another is speed of
communications.

They lived in the infancy of modern democracy, when it was a bold
experiment to let men vote even with a property qualification. They had
to invent federal union. We have behind us now 150 years of experience
with democracy and federal union which they lacked. It took a month then
for a message to go by the fastest means from Philadelphia to the most
remote state; a delegate took still longer. A delegate can now reach
Philadelphia in one-fourth that time from the most distant of the
fifteen democracies; a message can be broadcast to them all in a flash.

Although it does seem to me, on balance, that Union is easier now than
then, I would grant that it is hard to strike this balance. But we can
not have it both ways. Those who say that I am wrong, that conditions
were so much more favorable to Union of the American democracies then
than they are for Union in our day, are also saying implicitly that
conditions then were also much more favorable than now to all the
alternative solutions -- league, alliance, or isolationism. If a common
language, a common mother country, a common continent and all the other
things the American democracies had in common, made Union easier for
them than us, they also made it easier for them to make a league
succeed. If even they could not make a league work, then how in the name
of common sense can we expect to do better with a league than they did?
Even if Union is harder now than then, we know we can succeed with it.

Common sense leads to this conclusion: If we the people of the American
Union, the British Commonwealth, the French Republic, the Lowlands,
Scandinavia and the Swiss Confederation can not unite, the world can
not. If we will not do this little for man's freedom and vast future, we
can not hope that Europe will; catastrophe must come, and there is no
one to blame but ourselves. But the burden is ours because the power is
ours, too. If we will Union we can achieve The Union, and the time we
take to do it depends only on ourselves.

____

1. All that has been said here about leagues applies with still greater
force to alliances and cooperative associations of states, for these,
too, take the state as unit.

