those complex
international arrangements concerning Post Offices, shipping, banking,
codes, sanctions of law, criminal research, and the rest, on which so
much of our civilized life depends. This world State is unorganized,
incoherent. It has neither a centre nor a capital, nor a meeting place.
The shipowners gather in Paris, the world's bankers in Madrid or Berne,
and what is in effect some vital piece of world regulation is devised in
the smoking room of some Brussels hotel. The world State has not so much
as an office or an address, The United States should give it one. Out of
its vast resources it should endow civilization with a Central Bureau of
Organization--a Clearing House of its international activities as it
were, with the funds needed for its staff and upkeep.

If undertaken with largeness of spirit, it would become the capital of
the world. And the Old World looks to America to do this service,
because it is the one which it cannot do for itself. Its old historic
jealousies and squabbles, from which America is so happily detached,
prevent any one power taking up and putting through this work of
organization, but America could do it, and do it so effectively that
from it might well flow this organization of that common action of all
the nations against any recalcitrant member of which I have spoken as a
means of enforcing non-militarily a common decision.

It is this world State which it should be the business of America during
the next decade or two to co-ordinate, to organize. Its organization
will not come into being as the result of a week-end talk between
Ambassadors. There will be difficulties, material as well as moral,
jealousies to overcome, suspicions to surmount. But this war places
America in a more favorable position than any one European power. The
older powers would be less suspicious of her than of any one among their
number. America has infinitely greater material resources, she has a
greater gift for improvised organization, she is less hidebound by old
traditions, more disposed to make an attempt along new lines.

That is the most terrifying thing about the proposal which I make--it
has never been tried. But the very difficulties constitute for America
also an immense opportunity. We have had nations give their lives and
the blood of their children for a position of supremacy and superiority.
But we are in a position of superiority and supremacy which for the most
part would be welcomed