Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/116

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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

cini, has inscribed in her code the principles of nationality and the consequences that flow therefrom. Mancini says there must be treaties in order that the interest of foreigners be maintained and full justice done them on an equal footing with the citizens. If he has not completely succeeded in his mission, it is because the times are not ripe for the realization of his ideas. This is not a new dream of perpetual peace, for the true ideal is not peace, but the reign of right; and certainly there is nothing Utopian in the hope that peoples will understand the regulation of interests purely private, and having little or no connection with these greater interests for which, it is to be feared, the resort to arms will always be a painful necessity. If this attempt of Mancini has been premature, it has not on that account been useless. It has opened the only way to a solution of the difficulties which every day increase as international relations multiply.

In our days, through the progress of the physical sciences, and their coöperation with modern diplomacy, international relations have undergone a veritable transformation. Communications between the most distant countries are now more sure and easy than they were in the last century between two provinces of the same state. A letter from any part of the United States to Rome now costs less than a letter from one town to another, ten miles distant, did sixty years ago. The merchants of New York, Cincinnati, and Chicago, and even San Francisco, negotiate as easily with the merchants of Paris, London, or Liverpool as with those of Buffalo, Philadelphia, or New Orleans. We employ each day, for the satisfaction of our wants, the products of the most distant countries with as much facility as those of our own soil. Undoubtedly science has done a vast amount in this prodigious development of international intercourse; it is science which has furnished us steam and electricity, for diminishing distances, and bringing peoples into closer relations. Science, it is true, can not do everything; it should be seconded by the law to produce all the advantages of which it is capable. The means of communication furnished by it—the railroads, the steamboats, and the telegraph-lines—would have but a limited sphere of action, if the States were isolated one from another. The legal barriers that formerly existed between peoples should be removed at the same time as the natural barriers, and this is really taking place, for, as science progresses and material interests become more developed, the ancient restrictive rules on immigration are successively modified, as also are the regulations on the legal condition of foreigners, on the necessity of passports, etc. But this alone will not suffice: sometimes it is necessary that governments mutually aid each other in the attainment of a result beneficial to all; such, for example, as the extradition of fugitives from justice. The tendency is to create or regulate the relations between civilized countries in such a way that, while the sovereignty and independence of each is guaranteed, the general interests, having a cosmopolitan char-