Page:Jay William Hudson - A Practical International Program.pdf/31

 learn to ignore racial and national differences in the daily experience of the possession of a common humanity. After all, children are alike the world over. They like the same games. They laugh at the same things. They have the same ambitions, the same sorrows, the same tragedies and the same comedies in their everyday lives. Sharing these as they do in the schoolroom and on the playground, they tend to understand each other better. This understanding is precisely of the sort which the nations of the world need, and which our heterogeneous pupils working together with a common end well exemplify.

There is an insistent movement on foot for the teaching of citizenship in the schools. Those who are interested in this movement are not satisfied with teaching a pupil merely the rights and obligations of citizenship in our own country, but desire to impress upon the growing mind the duties and obligations of citizenship in the World State. Thus it is, a new sort of patriotism is capable of being developed in the minds of the young; a patriotism to humanity at large, regardless of national boundary; a patriotism which will by no means lessen the patriotism which one owes to his own country, but which will be a part of that patriotism, and which will thus transform the flag into a symbol of not merely national glory, but of international honor.

All that has been said easily makes it apparent that the attainment of international peace depends more upon a right attitude of mind than upon anything else. Friendship, whether personal or international, is much more a matter of right attitudes than of logic expressed in all sorts of social safeguards and machinery. Stress has been laid so far upon what might be called "the international mind" as part of the attitude men need to acquire, but one might also emphasize as equally indis-