Page:Jay William Hudson - America's International Ideals (1915).djvu/21

 that nations and races are the real units of civilization, the fact is, as Norman Angell has so well pointed out, that all the things fundamentally worth while to the life of the average person have become international and interracial property and can exist only in terms of international and interracial co-operation. In the very methods of modern warfare the individual is denied as never before: for these methods involve the use of a sort of machinery of slaughter that almost ignores individual bravery and prowess, and thus gives less chance for the breeding of individual heroism than has been true in the wars of the past. Thus, no matter from what angle one looks at the European conflict, whether it be from the standpoint of politics, economics, ethics, or the very conduct of the war itself, the rights of the individual for which America stands are ignored or repudiated.

Thus again, America has an unequivocal message to Europe, and calls upon Europe's nations to realize that there is no excuse for any function of government save as it gives the greatest number of individuals the chance to achieve self-realization to the utmost: to realize that the true difference between men is not the difference created by the accident of nativity, citizenship or race, but is to be found in their variations in development toward that common human ideal of culture and of welfare which fundamentally unites all men. America calls upon Europe to substitute for autocracy, equality; for oppression, freedom; and for the doctrine that the individual is a thing to be used, the great truth that the human soul, with its body—every human soul, with its bodyis sacred and priceless and shall not be violated by the capricious or permanent will of any society or of any government.