Because he said, “Put up thy sword,” regarded no man as “foreigner,” and died for International Fraternalism.
Let us, too, brother, be social and international.
Let us bury the hatchet, break the rifle, spike the cannon, despise the sword, accept the Sermon on the Mount for its spirit of peace, and scorn any sermon that urges us to war against our own class brothers. Let us detest any sermon that stirs and fosters the tiger within us and arrests our social development.
“Social development,” did I say? Yes, reader, that is what we need, social development.
Man on his long march upward—up from the jungle—has been impeded by a heavy burden—in his blood. He has carried the menagerie—in his veins.
Here permit me to use a very homely metaphor, a figure of speech neither to your taste nor to mine, yet needed and defensible:
In its social development the world is hindered by too much bull-pup.
A bull-pup is at a disadvantage—socially. His social development is stunted. The malignant wrinkles of his prize-fighter face obstruct his vision. His outlook is restricted. Thus his notion of the world is small. Hence the bull-pup is narrow, local and unsocial. Being socially local and mean—and therefore petty and pugnacious—he enjoys a fight. In the world of dogs he is a tough, a “rough-rider” and a “war-lord.” All other dogs are “foreigners,” “guilty,” and “undesirable citizens.”
Peace is too large and fine for the bull-pup. War is “dee-lightful,” “just bully”—for the bull-pup.
Thus even the humble dog world is worried and hindered by the socially narrow and pugnaciously strenuous bull-pups—“great” and “successful,” in their estimation.
Thus littleness and localism hinder even brutes in their social development.
But Confucius is hindered—hindered by littleness—little Confucians.
Christ? Christ is great, fascinatingly, commandingly great.
But Christ is hindered—hindered by the pettiness of pugnacity, hindered by littleness, little Christians.
Not yet. We can’t. We must wait. Strange, but true, we must wait for the most reasonable thing in the world—peace.
From the warring tribes of the long, long ago, up, up, upward to the federated races of the world,—that is the first number on the program—a long steep climb for the human mind, up, up through the hundreds of centuries, a half million years consumed in expanding the human heart, in refining the human affections, in strengthening the social vision to see all the way ’round the world, in widening the diameter of Society, in creating, revising, and re-creating a definition of “Brother,”—the race generating the Social Man, the World Patriot, the International Citizen.