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2. The Diplomatic Relations of Great Britain and the United States. By R. B. Mowat. Arnold, 1925.

And other works.

IN 334-5 B.C., Aristotle founded the Lyceum of Athens, and there won his peerless title, 'the master of them that know.' Man, he declared, possesses certain properties common to all mankind: the essential properties which distinguish him from other created beings. In addition, each man possesses incidental and unessential properties, in which he differs from other men. But the things which make men alike are more important than the things which make them different. Therefore, he added, all men are alike in what must be, though they differ in what may be. Such a generalisation is the key to international unity. When we add, however, the equally characteristic Aristotelian generalisation: what is most known is most real, we have the key to national or race prejudice. Men know best their own nations, their own races, their own localities, and very little of those which are distant. Therefore, the known things being for them the real things, they attach to local matters an exaggerated importance.

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Knowledge, of course, deals with both essentials and 'incidentals'; but with increasing knowledge comes also the consciousness of their relative importance. Knowledge can never remove differences, whether Vol. 247.-No. 490.

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essential or unessential; but it serves to make clear the superior importance of essentials' as compared with incidentals,' of the things which make all men alike as compared with the things which make them different. Thus the truly educated man appreciates the superior importance of the wider unity; the uneducated, or the improperly educated, concentrates his attention upon divergence and resents the suggestion that recognition of wider unity is desirable. America's national motto, E pluribus unum,' interpreted according to its historical meaning, represents the ideal of the unity which slowly became apparent between thirteen, and later between forty-eight states within one continent; but it might with equal logical propriety be taken as the motto of the wider unity which is now slowly becoming apparent among the nations, as these draw closer together in space, in commerce, in thought. Our present conception of the essential unity of races and nations is as vague as was that of American national unity a century and a half ago; but as the milestones pass, we believe they indicate progress. Unity which we once limited to areas called states or nations, we are now beginning to conceive as limited only by planetary boundaries. Old conceptions yield slowly, at times sullenly, to newer, broader conceptions, and it would be absurd even to hope that international chaos will suddenly yield to international unity. The truly educated of all nations, however, owe to the advancing vision this much at least, the resolution to think of every question in the largest possible terms. Viscount Grey was right when he said: 'the large view will bring them together where the small view has separated them.' And the large view is becoming ever more possible as increased knowledge makes men understand how much they have in common.

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History too must deal with 'essentials' and 'incidentals'; but here the meaning of the terms is different. Essentials in history are the forces, processes, or incidents which time has proved of lasting importance. 'Incidentals' are those which have not been found to matter much, if at all. Many men saw apples fall in Cambridge gardens before Sir Isaac Newton; but his view alone belongs to history, for it led to the comprehension

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of the laws governing a force not before understood. Many boats sailed from Palos, Spain, in 1492, but history remembers only three, the Nina,' the 'Pinta,' and the 'Santa Maria,' because they were later seen to have had a vital connexion with the process which later generations called the discovery of America. Thousands of children were born under the British flag on Feb. 22, 1732, but history associates that date with only one, George Washington. The chronicler is smothered by a myriad of incidents the meaning of which cannot appear until his day is past. The historian concentrates upon the essentials. For the chronicler, the sky-line is close at hand: for the historian it is as wide as organised society. Plato's genius discovered 'in every fact a germ of expansion'; but this is beyond the ordinary, or even the extraordinary mind. In that bold assertion, Plato stands alone; but it requires no genius to perceive that the things which are of lasting importance in Greek history, in Roman history, in English, French, or American history, are of value to every man who faces the perplexing problems which belong to organised society, if properly interpreted. The basic problems which each faced in discovering the essential unities that made it a nation are the basic problems which every group has faced in seeking to establish a national unity, and the same which the nations of the world must face in discovering the world-wide unity upon which alone real international law can be established.

The Romans complacently declared that all roads lead to Rome, and measured distances in their so-called world empire from one golden column erected in their own forum. To-day we begin to see that all roads lead to the unity all pervading'; but there is no golden column to show us the exact centre of that new unity. In consequence, each nation is crying: 'Lo, here it is, in the centre of our nation. Measure from that.' Thus we have as many centres as we have nations; and each, for its own people, is the centre of organised society, a centre which they stand ready to insist upon by force if necessary. This is not a criticism; it is the statement of a fact inevitable to a certain stage of progress.

The determination of justice by the exhibition of major force was a rational theory so long as men

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believed that God gave to justice always the major force; but it is supremely irrational after we have ceased to believe that God has so organised His world; and it becomes absurd when those who have impiously eliminated God from the picture continue to employ the terms of the old theory. Without God in the world, it is reasonable for men to elevate mere physical force to His despoiled throne; but to pretend that they fight for the right then becomes a grim jest. The only logic in such a situation is the logic which gives to force the right to rule by virtue of its physical power. To pretend to any other virtue is to mock intelligence.

Everywhere and always, men organised into smaller unities have shown a tendency to fight against the creation of larger unities. If we take America as an example, we find this tendency to have been the very centre of her history. The conscious aim of the American Revolution was not the creation of a nation; and America persistently refused to be a nation when the war was over. Each state had emerged from the common struggle possessed of a local government deemed sovereign, and a personality in International Law which it jealously cherished. Supremely local, supremely self-conscious, it was as fearful of control from a central American government supreme over all, as it had been resentful of parliamentary pretensions to

supremacy.

To picture the American Revolution as an attempt to erect a new nation in a new land is to write inverted history. The American patriots fought to protect their local governments, and their struggle produced conditions which forced nationality upon them. The creation of the nation was a slow and painful process, an unwilling yielding to the imperious demands of necessity, not the eager following of an ideal of 'liberty and union, now and for ever, one and inseparable,' as it slowly became. John Adams was writing sound history when he declared that the constitution was 'extorted from a reluctant people by grinding necessity.' Before the new form which we call the American nation emerged, it was necessary that new unities, common interests not before discerned, should become evident, not alone to the few, but to the many. A people which

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had thought in a political form called the state had to learn to think in terms of a larger unit called the nation; and that could be no sudden process.

When the British army departed after the battle of Yorktown, the American league of friendship and perpetual union at once began to emphasise the fact that localism was too strong as yet to permit the creation of a nation. Every national proposition which localism could interpret as a threat against the supremacy of state power was resisted, long with success, by the states which it appeared chiefly to menace. Did the central

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government suggest central taxation, each state stood indignant, pointing to the clause of the Articles of Confederation which declared: 'The taxes... shall be laid and levied by the authority and direction of the Legislatures of the Several States.' Even before the treaty of peace of 1783 was agreed upon, Rhode Island prevented Congress from imposing a duty on imports and prize goods, declaring it 'repugnant to her liberties'; and Congress answered in despair: The conduct of the war is entrusted to Congress . . . without any competent means at their command to satisfy the important trust.' In 1784 Congress, remembering the fact that Great Britain had 'adopted regulations destructive of our commerce with her West Indian Islands,' asked the legislatures of the several states to vest the United States in Congress assembled, for the term of fifteen years, with power to prohibit any goods, wares, or merchandise, from being imported into or exported from any of the states, in vessels belonging to or navigated by the subjects of any power with whom these states shall not have formed treaties of commerce,' the consent of nine states being gained. But localism was too strong and the request was denied.

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In 1785 Congress asked the states to give to the Central Government the sole and exclusive right and power... of regulating the trade of the States, as well with foreign nations as with each other, and of laying such impost and duties upon imports and exports as may be necessary,' thus depriving the states of the powers which were theirs by virtue of a clause of the Articles of Confederation which declared: 'No treaty of commerce shall be made whereby the legislative

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