tion
by an astute people of the advantage of treating foreigners well--had
already made the lives and property of Britons as safe in that country
as in their own.

In the same way, no scheme of arming Protestants as against Catholics,
or Catholics as against Protestants (the method which gave us the wars
of religion and massacre of St. Bartholomew) could assure that general
security of spiritual and intellectual possessions which we now in large
measure enjoy. So indeed with the more material things, France, Great
Britain, and some of the older nations have sunk thousands of millions
in foreign investments, the real security of which is not in any
physical force which their Government could possibly exercise, but the
free recognition of foreigners that it is to their advantage to adhere
to financial obligations. Englishmen do not even pretend that the
security of their investments in a country like the United States or the
Argentine is dependent upon the coercion which the British Government is
able to exercise over these communities.

The reader will not, I think, misunderstand me. I am not pleading that
human nature has undergone or will undergo any radical transformation.
Rather am I asserting that it will not undergo any; that the intention
of the man of the tenth century in Europe was as good as that of the man
of the twentieth, that the man of the tenth century was as capable of
self-sacrifice--was, it may be, less self-seeking. But what I am trying
to hint is that the shrinking of the world by our developed
intercommunication has made us all more interdependent.

The German Government moves its troops against Belgium; a moratorium is
immediately proclaimed in Rio de Janeiro, a dozen American Stock
Exchanges are promptly closed and some hundreds of thousands of our
people are affected in their daily lives. This worldwide effect is not
a matter of some years or a generation or two. It is a matter of an
hour; we are intimately concerned with the actions of men on the other
side of the world that we have never seen and never shall see; and they
are intimately concerned with us. We know without having thought it out
that we are bound together by a compact; the very fact that we are
dependent upon one another creates as a matter of fact a partnership. We
are expecting the other man to perform his part; he has been doing so
uninterruptedly for years, and we send him our goods or we take his bill
of exchange, or our f