AMERICA'S INTERNATIONAL IDEALS
itself an evil and from which peoples must be saved by the science of statesmanship." With the rise of democracy will come the decline of secret diplomacy, which has been one of the most insidious of the proximate causes beneath the present European conflict. For secret diplomacy, while almost indispensable to the war system, is inimical to the full spirit of democratic institutions. The International Peace Bureau at Berne rightly introduced the following as the fifth plank of its recent program for international order:
"Diplomacy in all countries is to be placed under the control of parliament and public opinion. Contentions which are not made public and to which the people's representatives in all the countries concerned do not agree are de facto null and void."
But America's message to Europe in behalf of the reign of reason is not expressed merely in terms of words and theories. Our country itself exemplifies to the world in its Union of States the way in which law may be made to replace war. The states of our Union do not settle their disputes by an appeal to arms, nor are their boundaries bristling with fortifications. The appeal to a federated reason has become so much of a common place in this country that the average citizen hardly appreciates what a significant triumph the American Union is and what a living example such a Union is of what may yet be achieved, however gradually, in the development of world politics. Let no individual nation lose its national integrity, any more than our individual states lose their integrity, though combining for purposes of common welfare. But let the world learn, as we have learned, that variety and unity can go together,—must go together if the highest things of human welfare are
[14]
