THE FEDERATION OF THE WORLD
HAMILTON HOLT
Managing Editor the Independent
The foreign relations committee has just reported back favorably to the House of Representatives a bill bearing the name of Congressman Bennet of New York providing for the appointment of a commission "to consider the expediency of utilizing existing international agencies for the purpose of limiting the armaments of the nations of the world by international agreement, and of constituting the combined navies of the world an international force for the preservation of universal peace." This bill is a ways and means measure to bring about a world federation, limited to the maintenance of peace, so that our recommendations to the Third Hague Conference of 1915 may be well considered and far-reaching. It is indorsed by the New York Peace Society, the International School of Peace of Boston, and the New England Arbitration and Peace Congress held at Congress held at Hartford, Conn., on May 11. If passed it will be the first time in history that a government has officially recognized that the true philosophy of the peace movement requires world federation as a prerequisite for universal peace.
In his famous essay Perpetual Peace published in 1795, Emanuel Kant declared that we can never have universal peace until the world is politically organized, and it will never be possible to organize the world politically until the majority of the nations have a representative form of government. At last all the peoples of the world have achieved in some measure representative government. Russia has its Duma; China has announced that shortly it will promulgate a constitution, while Turkey and Persia have each just gone through the throes of revolution and emerged with a vigorous parliament. If Kant's philosophy is sound, therefore, the world is at last ready for world organization and universal peace.
The only two powers that ever have or ever can govern human beings are force and reason-war and law. If we do not have one we must have the other. The problem before the world is how to decrease the area of war and increase the area of law until war vanishes and law envelopes the world. At the present moment the world is organized into fiftynine nations claiming independence and within their territories-nominally at least-organization, law and peace prevail. We have already learned to substitute law for war in cities and states and even up to the fifty-nine nations; but in that international realm over and above each nation in which each nation is equally sovereign, the only way at the present moment for a nation to secure its rights is by the use of force. Force, therefore, or war, as it is called when exerted by a nation against another nation, is at present the only legal and final method of settling international differences. In other words the nations are in that stage of civilization today where without a qualm they claim the right to settle their disputes in a manner they would put their own subjects to death for imitating. The peace movement, therefore, is nothing but the process of substituting law for war.
But how can we best create law in the international realm. Certainly not by the cumbrous methods of the present. Today there is no such thing as a code of international law which is binding on the nations. What passes under the name of international law is simply a series of arguments, maxims, precedents and opinions. It is the work, not of legislators, but of scholars. The nations are at perfect liberty to accept it or reject it as they wish. Before we can have a real international law we must have behind it some conscious political organization to give it sanction and validity, and that implies a federation of the world.
The history of international law presents striking analogies to the history of private law. Likewise, the history of the organization of the "United Nations," which is to give sanction to international law, will correspond to the history of the organization of the thirteen American colonies into the United States. The United States, therefore, furnishes the model for the United Nations. The Declaration of Independence foreshadows the declaration of interdependence.