The Federation of the World

by Hamilton Holt

THE FEDERATION OF THE WORLD

HAMILTON HOLT

Managing Editor the Independent

The foreign relations committee has just reported back favorably to the House of Representatives a bill bearing the name of Congressman Bennet of New York providing for the appointment of a commission "to consider the expediency of utilizing existing international agencies for the purpose of limiting the armaments of the nations of the world by international agreement, and of constituting the combined navies of the world an international force for the preservation of universal peace." This bill is a ways and means measure to bring about a world federation, limited to the maintenance of peace, so that our recommendations to the Third Hague Conference of 1915 may be well considered and far-reaching. It is indorsed by the New York Peace Society, the International School of Peace of Boston, and the New England Arbitration and Peace Congress held at Congress held at Hartford, Conn., on May 11. If passed it will be the first time in history that a government has officially recognized that the true philosophy of the peace movement requires world federation as a prerequisite for universal peace.

In his famous essay Perpetual Peace published in 1795, Emanuel Kant declared that we can never have universal peace until the world is politically organized, and it will never be possible to organize the world politically until the majority of the nations have a representative form of government. At last all the peoples of the world have achieved in some measure representative government. Russia has its Duma; China has announced that shortly it will promulgate a constitution, while Turkey and Persia have each just gone through the throes of revolution and emerged with a vigorous parliament. If Kant's philosophy is sound, therefore, the world is at last ready for world organization and universal peace.

The only two powers that ever have or ever can govern human beings are force and reason-war and law. If we do not have one we must have the other. The problem before the world is how to decrease the area of war and increase the area of law until war vanishes and law envelopes the world. At the present moment the world is organized into fiftynine nations claiming independence and within their territories-nominally at least-organization, law and peace prevail. We have already learned to substitute law for war in cities and states and even up to the fifty-nine nations; but in that international realm over and above each nation in which each nation is equally sovereign, the only way at the present moment for a nation to secure its rights is by the use of force. Force, therefore, or war, as it is called when exerted by a nation against another nation, is at present the only legal and final method of settling international differences. In other words the nations are in that stage of civilization today where without a qualm they claim the right to settle their disputes in a manner they would put their own subjects to death for imitating. The peace movement, therefore, is nothing but the process of substituting law for war.

But how can we best create law in the international realm. Certainly not by the cumbrous methods of the present. Today there is no such thing as a code of international law which is binding on the nations. What passes under the name of international law is simply a series of arguments, maxims, precedents and opinions. It is the work, not of legislators, but of scholars. The nations are at perfect liberty to accept it or reject it as they wish. Before we can have a real international law we must have behind it some conscious political organization to give it sanction and validity, and that implies a federation of the world.

The history of international law presents striking analogies to the history of private law. Likewise, the history of the organization of the "United Nations," which is to give sanction to international law, will correspond to the history of the organization of the thirteen American colonies into the United States. The United States, therefore, furnishes the model for the United Nations. The Declaration of Independence foreshadows the declaration of interdependence.

The beginnings of world organization, however, have already taken place. In the Hague Court and the recurring Hague Conferences we see the germs of the international court and the parliament of man. The problem is how to develop these so that they will become the judicial and legislative departments. of a powerful world constitution, just as our Articles of Confederation and Continental Congress developed into the present United States Constitution, which a century of storm and stress has not broken and which still serves as a model to all the republics of the earth.

A careful study of existing arbitration. treaties and of the work of the first and second Hague Conferences shows that our international law is at the same stage of development as private law of about the tenth century while the organization of the "United Nations" has reached the same stage of progress that our thirteen states did before the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

The problem, therefore, before the world is to perfect the Hague Courts and Conferences so that finally, if it be deemed necessary, we may even add a world executive and thus create the united nations in the very image of the United States.

The peace advocates from Penn and Kant and Hugo and Burritt down to Hale and Bartholdt and Carnegie have long realized that world federation is the key to peace and disarmament. Even Mr. Roosevelt in his remarkable Nobel peace address the other day at Christiania goes so far as to urge a "league of peace" to abolish war, paradoxically, by force if necessary. The governments themselves, however, have not yet officially recognized that world organization is the goal of international effort, though they have unconsciously and inevitably been driven much faster and farther along this path than they realize. The passage of the Bennet bill, however, will remedy this. The creation of a world federation commission would guarantee to our own people as well as to the peoples of the world that the United States is in earnest and ready to take the lead in the only practical and promising method of obtaining international peace.

It seems the destiny of the United States to lead in the peace movement. The United States is the world in miniature. It is a demonstration that all the races of the world can live in peace under one government and its chief value to civilization is a demonstration of what this form of government is. We have settled more disputes by arbitration than any other nation. In all history no men have done more to spread the gospel of peace than the two Pennsylvanians, William Penn and Benjamin Franklin. David Low Dodge of New York in 1815 founded the first peace society of the world. Two generations ago Elihu Burritt and a dozen others in New York and New England went up and down this country, and even over to Europe, urging and prophesying the formation of an international court which Burritt declared when it came into existence "would constitute the highest court of appeals this side the bar of eternal justice." Coming down to more recent times it is probably a fact that the late Frederick W. Holls of New York had more to do with the establishment of the Hague Court than anyone else, while Mr. Carnegie has given it a palace in which it shall hereafter sit. The United States took the first case to the Hague Court that ever came before it and the American minister at Venezuela sent the second case there, which brought all the great powers before its bar, and established it in the estimation of civilization. Mr. Bartholdt was the first man who ever stood up in a national parliament and suggested turning the Hague Conferences into a real international parliament. Elihu Root planned the idea of having the Second Hague Conference create a world court modelled on the United States Supreme Court, and now Secretary Knox has announced its early estab lishment. President Roosevelt's Christiania address is nothing else than a plea for the federation of the world. Not since the "Great Design" of Henry IV of France proposed in 1602, has one who has represented a great people ever promulgated so comprehensive a plan for universal peace. Mr. Taft says that if the Bennet bill becomes a law he will appoint Theodore Roosevelt as chairman of the commission. Does not the last sentence of Mr. Roosevelt's address indicate that he would feel compelled to accept the honor? He says: "But the ruler or statesman who should bring about such a combination (league of peace) would have earned his place in history for all time and his title to the gratitude of all mankind."

If the world federation commission is appointed by the United States government with Theodore Roosevelt as chairman, can anyone believe that the day will not be brought measurably nearer, when as Victor Hugo prophesied in 1849, "the only battlefield will be the market opening to commerce and the human mind opening to new ideas?"

June 11, 1910.