THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION
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has no precedent in the world's history; it is a new kind of occurrence. Such a community could not have come into existence before, and if it had it would, without railways, have certainly dropped to pieces long before now. Without railways or telegraph it would be far easier to administer California from Peking than from Washington. But this great population of the United States of America has not only grown outrageously; it has kept uniform. Nay, it has become more uniform. The man of San Francisco is more like the man of New York to-day than the man of Virginia was like the man of New England a century ago. And the process of assimilation goes on unimpeded. The United States is being woven by railway, by telegraph more and more into one vast human unity, speaking, thinking and acting harmoniously with itself. Soon aviation will be helping in the work.
Now this great community of the United States is, I repeat, an altogether new thing in history. There have been great empires before with populations exceeding a hundred millions, but these were associations of divergent peoples; there has never been one single people on this scale before. We want really a new term for this new thing. We call the United States a country, just as we call France or Holland a country. But really the two things are as different as an automobile and a one-horse shay. They are the creations of different periods and different conditions; they are going to work at a different pace and in an entirely different way. If you propose—as I gather some of the League of Nations people propose—to push the peace of the world along on a combination of these two sorts of vehicle, the peace of the world will be subjected to some very considerable strains.
Let me now make a brief comparison between the American and the European situation in relation to these vital matters, locomotion and the general means of communication. I said just now that the United States of America owes most to the revolution in locomotion and has felt it least. Europe, on the other hand, owes least to the revolution in locomotion and has felt it most. The revolution in locomotion found the United States of America a fringe of population on the sea margins of a great rich, virgin, empty country into which it desired to expand and into which it was free to expand. The steamboat and railway seemed to come as a natural part of that expansion. They came as unqualified blessings. But into Western Europe they came as a frightful nuisance.
No Room for Expansion
The states of Europe, excepting Russia, were already a settled, established and balanced system. They were living in final and conclusive boundaries, with no further possibility of peaceful expansion. Every extension of a European state involved a war; it was possible only through war. And while the limits of the United States have been set by the steamship and the railroad, the limits to the European sovereign states were drawn at a much earlier time. They were drawn by the horse, and particularly the coach horse, traveling along the highroad. If you will examine a series of political maps of Europe for the last two thousand years you will see that there has evidently been a definite limit to the size of sovereign states through all that time, due to the impossibility of keeping them together because of the difficulty of intercommunication if they grew bigger. And this was in spite of the fact that there were two great unifying ideas present in men's minds in Europe throughout that period, namely—the unifying idea of the Roman Empire and the unifying idea of Christendom. Both these ideas tended to make Europe one, but the difficulties of communication defeated that tendency. It is quite interesting to watch the adventures of what is called first the Roman Empire and afterwards the Holy Roman Empire in a series of historical maps. It keeps expanding and then dropping to pieces again. It is like the efforts of someone who is trying to pack up a parcel, which is much too big, in wet blotting paper. The cohesion was inadequate. And so it was that the eighteenth century found Europe still divided up into what I may perhaps call these highroad and coach-horse states, each with a highly developed foreign policy, each with an intense sense of national difference, and each with intense traditional antagonisms.
Then came this revolution in the means of locomotion, which has increased the normal range of human activity at least ten times. The effect of that in America was opportunity; the effect of it in Europe was congestion. It is as if some rather careless worker of miracles had decided suddenly to make giants of a score of ordinary men, and chose the moment for the miracle when they were all with one exception strap-hanging in a street car. The United States was that fortunate exception.
Now this is what modern civilization has come up against, and it is the essential riddle of the modern sphinx, which must be solved if we are to live. All the European boundaries of to-day are impossibly small for modern conditions. And they are sustained by an intensity of ancient tradition and patriotic passion.
Vexations of Travel
The citizens of the United States of America are not without their experience in this matter. The crisis of the national history of the American community, the war between Union and Secession, was essentially a crisis between the great state of the new age and the local feeling of an earlier period. But Union triumphed. Americans live now in a generation that has almost forgotten that there once seemed a possibility that the map of North America might be broken up at last into as many communities as the map of Europe. Except by foreign travel the present generation of Americans can have no idea of the net of vexations and limitations in which Europeans are living at the present time because of their political disunion.
Let me take a small but quite significant set of differences, the inconveniences of travel upon a journey of a little over a thousand miles. They are in themselves petty inconveniences, but they will serve to illustrate the net that is making free civilized life in Europe more and more impossible.
Take first the American case. An American wants to travel from New York to St. Louis. He looks up the next train, packs his bag, gets aboard a sleeper, and turns out at St. Louis next day ready for business.
Take now the European parallel. A European wants to travel from London to Warsaw. Now that is a longer distance by fifty or sixty miles than the distance from New York to St. Louis. Will he pack his bag, get aboard a train, and go there? He will not. He will have to get a passport, and getting a passport involves all sorts of tiresome little errands. One has to go to a photographer, for example, to get photographs to stick on the passport. The good European has then to take his passport to the French representative in London for a French visé, or, if he is going through Belgium, for a Belgian visé. After that he must get a German visé. Then he must go round to the Czecho-Slovak office for a Czecho-Slovak visé. Finally will come the Polish visé.
Each of these indorsements necessitates something vexatious—personal attendance, photography, stamps, rubber stamps, mysterious signatures, and the like, and always the payment of fees. Also they necessitate delays. The other day I had occasion to go to Moscow, and I learned that it takes three weeks to get a visé for Finland and three weeks to get a visé for Esthonia. You see you can't travel about Europe at all without weeks and weeks of preparation. The preparations for a little journey to Russia the other day took three whole days, cost me several pounds in stamps and fees, and five in bribery.
Ultimately, however, the good European is free to start. Arriving at the French frontier in an hour or so, he will be held up for a long customs examination. Also he will need to change some of his money into francs. His English money will be no good in France. The exchange in Europe is always fluctuating, and he will be cheated on
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