A PRACTICAL INTERNATIONAL PROGRAM
shouted their approval. The missionary, on account of this reaction in favor of the ideas he had combatted, feared that he might be made to contribute to a feast of reconciliation, so he took flight. It was to his prudence doubtless that we owe the advantage of having read the argument of the cannibal.
Besides, could he have made a decisive reply?
Nevertheless, the Caribs themselves no longer eat one another."
The application of this parody upon the usual argument for war is obvious. There is no human ideal which vitally involves the welfare and improvement of the human race that cannot be achieved if we will it. As Browning puts it:
"All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist. …
The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;
Enough that he heard it once: we shall hear it by and by."
IX
This, then, is the program of the new internationalism, in its broad outlines. These are the things that men and women must keep in mind constantly as ideals to attain and things to do. But the ideals must become living ideals, and the deeds must become earnest and effective deeds, or our dreams are naught. From what has been said it is easily apparent that this is no isolated movement, but that it involves the co-operation of all those manifold forces which belong to the sure progress of mankind toward the achievement of the hopes and struggles of the ages.
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