discovery, our
trade and intercommunication, especially the international congresses of
workingmen, who are the carriers of the new social order and to whose
moral influence was mainly due the international congress for factory
legislation in the interest of the workingmen, assembled in Berlin in
the spring of 1890 upon the invitation of the German Empire,--these and
many other phenomena testify to the international character that,
despite national demarcations, the relations between the various
civilized nations have assumed. National boundary lines are being broken
through. The term "world's economy" is taking the place of "national
economy": an increasing significance is attaching to it, seeing that
upon it depends the well-being and prosperity of individual nations. A
large part of our own products is exchanged for those of foreign
nations, without which we could no longer exist. As one branch of
industry is injured when another suffers, so likewise does the
production of one nation suffer materially when that of another is
paralyzed. Despite all such transitory disturbances as wars and race
persecutions, the relations of the several nations draw ever closer,
because material interests, the strongest of all, dominate them. Each
new highway, every improvement in the means of intercommunication, every
invention or improvement in the process of production, whereby goods are
made cheaper, strengthens these relations. The ease with which personal
contact can be established between distantly located countries and
peoples is a new and powerful link in the chain that draws and holds the
nations together. Emigrations and colonizations are additional and
powerful levers. One people learns from the other. Each seeks to excel.
Along with the interchange of material products, the interchange of the
products of the mind is going on, in the original tongue as well as in
translations. To millions the learning of foreign living languages
becomes a necessity. Next to material advantages, nothing contributes
more towards removing antipathies than to penetrate into the language
and the intellectual products of a foreign people.

The effect of this process of drawing together, that is going on upon an
international scale, is that the several nations are resembling one
another ever more in their social conditions. With the most advanced,
and therefore pace-setting nations, the resemblance is now such that he
who has learned to understand