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THE AMERICAN-SC AN DIN A VI AN REVIEW 
witnessed during the last few years—our labor for that deathless 
ideal, the brotherhood of nations. 
It is surely unnecessary for me in this connection to enter at 
lengdh into the chapter of nationalism and internationalism. The in¬ 
ternationalism which denies the rights of the nations within their own 
sphere, and which if consistently carried out would end in their obliter¬ 
ation and absorption in a cosmopolitan mass, has never been anything 
but a caricature of true internationalism. Even when it appealed to 
a sentence torn out of its logical connection such as that famous phrase 
from a communist manifesto, “The workingman has no country,” or 
when Gustav Hervee (who during the war became a violent nation¬ 
alist) a few years earlier urged the French workingmen to plant the 
French flag on the refuse heap, such sentiments have never had any 
real root in the national soul. 
Whatever applause these phrases might win depended upon a 
confusion of the mother country itself with certain temporary social 
conditions. “How often,” says Jaures in his book The New Army . 
“have not the socially or politically privileged classes assumed or pre¬ 
tended to assume that their interests were those of the mother country! 
The instincts of habit, tradition, and primitive solidarity which con¬ 
tribute to form the idea of country, and which are perhaps its physio¬ 
logical basis, often appear under the guise of reactionary forces. The 
revolutionary and creative spirits, the men who represent a higher 
right, must often labor hard to liberate a new and finer patriotism 
from the shell of the old. . . . When the workingmen curse their 
country, they really mean the social injustice which disgraces it, and 
their apparent curse is only an expression of their longing for a 
regenerated country.” 
Who can deny, after the revelations of the World War, that this 
statement of the case is correct? There is, in fact, no such conflict 
between nationalism and internationalism as those who hold a biased 
and one-sided view of the duties and significance of either the one or 
the other would lead us to believe. “The same workingmen,” wrote 
the great departed, “who now misuse paradoxical phrases and hurl 
their anathema against the very idea of country would rise as one man 
if the national independence were threatened.” Prophetic words!—- 
equally prophetic on both sides of the fighting line, for on both sides 
people honestly believed, before it was possible to take a general view 
of the whole situation, that their own country was the one which was 
attacked without provocation. It is in this deep-rooted sense of 
nationality that we must seek a point of departure for true inter¬ 
nationalism and for a humanity built up, not from atoms without a 
country, but as a free alliance of self-governing peoples. 
I have already spoken of how our illusions as to how far hu¬ 
manity had attained were shattered by the war. Yet I am not sure that 
