amilies are afloat in his ships, expecting that he
will pay for his goods, honor the bill of exchange, navigate safely his
ship--he has undertaken to do these things in the world-wide partnership
of our common labor and then he fails. He does not do these things, and
we have a very lively sense of the immorality of the doctrine which
permits him to escape doing them.

And so there are certain things that are not done, certain lengths to
which even in war time we cannot go. What will stop the war is not so
much the fighting, any more than Protestant massacres prevented Catholic
massacres. Men do not fear the enemy soldiers; they do fear the turning
of certain social and moral forces against them. The German Government
does not hesitate for a moment to send ten thousand of its own people to
certain death under enemy guns even though the military advantage of so
doing may be relatively trifling. But it dare not order the massacre of
ten thousand foreign residents in Berlin. There is some force which
makes it sometimes more scrupulous of the lives of its enemy than of the
lives of its own people.

Yet why should it care? Because of the physical force of the armies
ranged against it? But it has to meet that force in any case. It fears
that the world will be stirred. In other words, it knows that the world
at large has a very lively realization that in its own interest certain
things must not be done, that the world would not live together as we
now know it, if it permitted those things to be done. It would not so
permit them.

At the bottom of this moral hesitation is an unconscious realization of
the extent of each nation's dependence upon the world partnership. It is
not a fear of physical chastisement; any nation will go to war against
desperate odds if a foreign nation talks of chastising it. It is not
that consideration which operates, as a thousand examples in history
prove to us. There are forces outside military power more visible and
ponderable than these.

There exists, of course, already a world State which has no formal
recognition in our paper constitutions at all, and no sanction in
physical force. If you are able to send a letter to the most obscure
village of China, a telegram to any part of the planet, to travel over
most of the world in safety, to carry on trade therewith, it is because
for a generation the Post Office Departments of the world have been at
work arranging traffic and communication detail