Cooperative System Amongst Lower Animals 785 



people'* is not only possible, it is the only true pathway for 

 future advance. So the dukes, the counts, the barons, and 

 the knights were sent about their business as ordinary men, 

 and their Swiss strongholds were dismantled. 



But, while cooperative government with gradual growth of 

 the Initiative and Referendum in Switzerland proved that the 

 people could think and be trusted, there still remained the 

 essentially Semitic and unchristian individualistic competition, 

 that Switzerland inherits almost as keenly today as any other 

 country. 



Centuries after that which included Morgarten had to roll 

 by; the world had to be explored, surveyed, and estimated 

 in its capacity; industrial inventions had to be perfected; 

 commercialism had to be sampled alike in its pleasant and in 

 its bitter draughts; knights of industry had to show their 

 ability and also their fangs; knights of labor had to show broth- 

 erly union, solidarity, and sympathy, as well as discords and 

 disintegrating jealousies; noble spirits had to arise who might 

 prove not merely the abstract but equally the concrete applica- 

 bility of the proenvironal principles of Zarathushtra, of Plato, 

 of Christ, and of Paul to the life of humanity.* 



So the dawn of a new day, and therefore of a new human 

 order, was ushered in gradually as a slow evolutionary pro- 

 cess, by the teachings of the four great reformers above named; 

 by their followers — open or unconfessed — who thought over, 

 were guided by, and inclined others to their teachings; by 

 those who even in restricted and local manner tried to put 

 these teachings into practice as a means of knitting together 



* The most gigantic and successful experiment, not alone in national but 

 even in international cooperative action, is now being witnessed as a result 

 of the present iniquitous war. Kings, politicians, and financiers have steadily 

 and doggedly resisted cooperative action for the benefit of the mass of the 

 people, when it was urged by the more noble and far-seeing minds in the dif- 

 ferent nations. Witness for example the antipathy shown by British aristo- 

 cratic capitalists to Lloyd George's national pension scheme, and by Prussian 

 Junkers now to social reform in Germany. So the present war, though a scan- 

 dal to Twentieth Century civilization, has proved a valuable demonstration 

 of the ease with which the entire world of mankind can be provided for, if a 

 few governmental bureaus in each nation cooperate with those of other na- 

 tions toward a common beneficent end. 



