Reconstruction and International Law

Extract

There is a general disposition to assume that four years of dreadful war have so altered men’s minds and characters and the underpinnings of organized society, that the world will be quite a different place from that which our observations and our studies have made familiar. This belief does not altogether carry conviction to my mind. The civilized world was threatened with an evil domination and combined to defend itself. This instinct and combination for defense are as old as the Greek Republics. For a generation to come the world will see less movement because of the war’s exhaustion; it will have less money to spend and must economize; it will have higher taxes and therefore higher costs of production; here and there it will experience such change of governmental forms as should insure larger self-government.