Volume 6, No. 2, June, 1918

'
The Internationalist Page eleven
THE
The Menace of a United States
of the World
great abyss which now threatens to engulf the race
is the proposal for a United States of the World. It
is a vast and unthinkable conspiracy against human
life. Every free soul will resist with all his powers such an
attempt to organize life
into one final monopoly.
Such an outcome of the
war would mark the triumph
of that mechanical
genius which has made
civilization the greatest enemy
of man. It would
mean that in an attempt
to gain facility, life had
become dehumanized. It
would mean that shameful
capitulation of freedom
known as a "moral triumph."
It would signify
that man was fast losing
that most precious of all
rights—the right to be a
criminal.
For organization is the
great enemy of life. It
represents an invasion of
life for the purpose of
crushing out what is novel,
unique, eccentric and unforseeable—in
short, that
which is vital and personal.
Organization enlists in
the service of life with a
covert motive. With high
professions of humility and
willingness to serve, it enters
the realm of life, only
to spy out the land for an
eventual mechanical occupancy.
Once within that
vital realm, organization
extends its mechanical
sway to the outmost
bounds of human life, sets
up a mechanical tyranny
and touches life with static
death. Once organization
has invaded life, the finer
human gestures give way
to mechanical processes,
and the cry of the human
is lost in the rumbling of
the machine.
My brothers, this is
death. Unless men of all
races and nations rise in
universal revolt against the
tyranny of mechanical order
and form as seen in
nations and inter-nations,
the human cannot survive.
Written Specially for THE INTERNATIONALIST
The Outlook for a United States
The World
of
By George Bernard Shaw
•HERE is no outlook for a United States of the
World. A United States of the World is tomfool
nonsense. When Anacharsis Klootz made the
French Revolution ridiculous by his Deputation of The
Human Race, it became necessary to guillotine him.
His ghost is trying to walk at present; and the sooner
that, too, is guillotined, the better.
What is possible is a combination of the States which
accept Democracy, and are virtually homogeneous in
civilization, with the object of establishing international
and supernational law, and renouncing their "sovereign
rights" to the extent to which such law can be established,
the main immediate purpose beina to abolish
war, which now' threatens the very existence of civilization.
The combination, though it must be large
enough to make an armed attack on it an insane enterprise,
must not be too large to be manageable; and
it must be really homogeneous: mere alliances are no
use except for military purposes between men of different
color, different mind, different morals, and different
stages' of political evolution.
The obvious nucleus for the first combination (for
there will be more than one in the world) is the present
alliance between the United States of America, the
British Empire, and' the French Republic. To make
it effective, the German Empire must be added; and
the problem just now is how to qualify Germany for
admission by knocking Democracy into her and Imperialism
out of her. ' If we had completely knocked
the Imperialism out of ourselves, the task would be
easy; but as it is, we have not trusted Democracy
enough in our own countries to trust it in another, or
to ask others "to trust it. We must therefore wait until
the war knocks Imperialism out of all of us. When
that is done, the rest will almost do itself. With Democracy
solid from the Carpathians to the Rockies we
should have the material for quite as much supernationalism
as we could possibly handle to begin with.
The Federation of the World may be left to those who
are in a hurry to bite off more than they can chaw.
When States unite to "protect" men, humanity will become
a prostitute in their midst. Verily, the machines have become
"righteous," and are uniting to impose moral order upon
the world. Let us understand then, that when machines
become "moral" it is time
for men to become "immoral."
When organization
conspires with morality
to defeat life, then
"criminals" become the saviours
of the race.
The hour has struck
when free men everywhere
must espouse revolt as an
ultimate creed and proclaim
the absolute and divine
right of self.
—FLOYD HARDIN.
Taine on "The
State"
The State makes use
of the money which it extorts
from me to unjustly
impose fresh constraints
upon me; this is the case
when it prescribes for me
its theology or its philosophy,
when it prescribes for
me or denies me a special
form of religious observance,
when it pretends to
regulate my morals and my
manners, to limit my labor
or my expenditure, to fix
the price of my merchandise
or the rate of my
wages. With the coin
which I do not owe it and
which it steals from me it
defrays the expense of the
persecution which it inflicts
upon me. Let us beware
of the encroachments of
the State, and suffer it to
be nothing more than a
watch-dog.
The Rebel
For all of these my heart
with longing beats:
For wealth and beauty,
peace profound and
and wo-
rest;
But while men kill
men walk the streets,
I choose the life of strife
and of protest.
—E. Ralph Cheyney.