Page:Jay William Hudson - America's International Ideals (1915).djvu/15

 tion is to be thus accused, but only the selfish aggression of a single country or group of countries, which thus have only a secondary respect for a rational world order, one must, of course, modify his judgment of European culture as a whole in terms of this fact. However, the large truth which we contemplate is this: European nations are engaged in a desperate struggle of the primitive sort that endeavors to show not, through reason, which is right, but, through force, which is strongest. The dilemma is clear; either the issues of Europe should have been submitted to reason: or, if they were issues that were irrational to begin with, so that reason could not solve them, they should never have been allowed to prevail to the extent of causing the international anarchy which is Europe's situation at the present time. Thus, in either case, the European struggle represents a denial of the reign of reason in civilization,—the fundamental truth for which the American democracy has stood both nationally and internationally.

Furthermore, the European conflict violates the principle of reason in civilization through the fact that it indefinitely injures and retards that international co-operation in intellectual endeavors which has been one of the most signal expressions of the civilization of the last fifty years. Science, yea, culture of all sorts had become an achievement of the co-operation of all races and of all nations. One of the visible expressions of this cultural co-operation was to be found in the existence of the numerous international congresses and international journals, through which the leading thinkers of all peoples interchanged their thought and gained untold inspiration. For the time this is a thing of the past; and it will be years before this cordial international