WORLD UNITY

The Armament Conference which opens in Washington today is a prominent phase of a great metamorphosis through which the world is passing. At no other time within the memory of man has the whole earth so nearly approached the status of a single unified community. Any comparisons, therefore, with past ages are fruitless; any judgments on the theory that "history repeats itself" are out of date; and any prophecy as to the future on the basis of what has gone before is entirely unsafe. For we live in the age of geographical-graphical distribution of industry, all parts of the globe being interdependent for the commodities of life, as well as for science and the arts. Australia supplies the wool that is spun and woven in England; Canada grows the wheat that Belgium consumes; American architects are rebuilding France; while Vienna sends her greatest surgeon to practice in New York. The principle of every nation for-itself has gone; just as individual craftsmanship gave way to large-scale production, so the group of nations that a hundred years ago consisted of similar, self-sufficient units has become the "family of nations" tied together by an ineradicable, mutual relationship.

"The change from incoherent homogeneity to coherent heterogeneity" was the way Herbert Spencer described this trend: and by it he meant Evolution. But we must not overlook the part that science has played in making this change possible. The advance in methods of communication has so greatly stimulated the exchange of ideas between people of different parts of the world that an event one hemisphere is known in the other within an hour: while by the very latest inventions, the words of the President in Washington are heard as he speaks, them in every part of the continent. The most recent stop towards coherency is the proposed plan to furnish light and power to eleven states from a single plant. It is obvious, then, that history in this age of world unity must differ from that of ages past. Those who claim that the Armament Conference will be just another convention of scheming diplomats are as mistaken as those who believe that the Russian upheaval is a glorious repetition of the French Revolution. We can expect more and better results from the congress that of a century ago at Vienna, for we are as aware of the change in the world since that time as we are of the difference between President Harding and the Emperor of Russia, or between General Foch and Metternich.