Dostoyevsky claimed that the yearning for union with mankind—pan-Humanism—is a Russian and a Slav characteristic. But this yearning is to be found in all men and races. They cannot bear isolation. What I have often called “world-humanity” is but another name for the inborn desire and striving of men for general friendship and union. Like individuals, nations need sympathy. The course of history runs in the direction of a more unitary organization of mankind as a whole, a trend accentuated by the evolution of democratic States. The League of Nations is now the weightiest and widest international institution and is becoming a real organ of internationality. Alongside of it stand a goodly number of organizations like the Red Cross and the Postal Union. The “Statesman’s Year Book” enumerates twenty-five such, but the “Handbook of International Organizations” gave a list of 437 others, even in 1922. The very conception, substance and dimensions of State sovereignty are undergoing transformation. In the era of what was still, at bottom, theocratic absolutism after the Reformation, the conception of sovereignty was strictly circumscribed, for at that time States were self-contained and, to use a current expression, self-sufficing, by reason of the sparseness of their population and of the lack of means of communication. Nowadays, international relations have developed in such a degree that no State can live regardless of others. Nationally and internationally, the independence of a State is to-day only relative. States are inder-dependent, the reciprocity of their relations is increasing and is being organized, even juridically, in ever clearer and more definite fashion.
Economic Democracy.
Genuine democracy will be economic and social as well as political.
Economic questions are so important to-day because war and revolution have, by destroying the wealth and the accumulated resources of nations, brought about a condition of want that is economically primitive. The crisis throughout Europe, nay, throughout the world, necessitates economic reconstruction, but it is a mistake to take this situation, which arose out of the war, as confirming the Marxist doctrine of historical materialism and as a sign that our task is solely economic. The war and the social and economic position which it entailed prove, on the contrary, that, as Marx rightly said, hunger is
