Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/434

 certain of my desires in him, and the recognition of a conflict between certain of my desires and certain of his. The spirit of union thus engenders three purposes: a purpose to partake in admirations, a purpose to impart them, a purpose to reconcile them. Were two minds in perfect union, each would be leader in the pursuit of its own independent purposes, each a cordial second to the independent purposes of the other, and each ready to settle their conflicts of purpose by any means which a sympathetic understanding of the purposes of the other would sanction, and only by such means. So a Christian and a Buddhist, had each a sympathetic grasp of the other's faith, might seek, the one to give, the other to receive, that joy in the Lord which Buddhism has lacked, and that interest in the fate of the whole animate creation which historical Christianity has lacked. So Russia, China and Mongolia, were the mind of each open to the mind of the others—a supposition still extravagant between any peoples—might weigh between them the question whether in the interest of all three Mongolia should remain under Chinese suzerainty, accept Russian rule, or become autonomous.

The spirit of union does not exclude the possibility that the end of a discussion between the parties may be disagreement, and change them from co-workers into opponents. But opponents each responsive to the interests of the other would fight, not for their own interests solely, but for what each believed to be the interests of both. This alone is righteous war. The saying of Benjamin Franklin: “There never was a good war or a bad peace”—was a pardonable exaggeration; but we make it a falsehood when we interpret it to mean that there never can be a good war or a bad peace. The spirit of union, which is the spirit of good will, aims at peace, but only in the interest of all; and may inexorably demand war, also in the interest of all.

To the lasting honor of this nation, the United States have been the first to enter into treaties embodying this third requisite of cultivated relations with other peoples. However infrequent the use of such machinery of discussion in advance of war, it will not rust ingloriously, for it is made of a metal that rust can not corrupt. No other machinery, thanks to man’s inventiveness, is needed to-day by the spirit of union. The freedom of intercourse between nations of the modern world in itself provides for the satisfaction of the two other impulses which make up the spirit of union—the impulse to offer to others our share, and to gain from them their share in the world’s ideals.

To which of these two spirits—empire, or union—does the future belong? To the spirit of union, for a reason partly psychological and partly mathematical. Conquests unite the conquered against the conqueror; and combinations tend to be stronger than individuals. Minds being what they are and numbers being what they are, a man is apt