While post-war thinking bears an important relation to our immediate war policy, we've got to be careful we understand exactly what that relation is. We can err just as much by leaping at a definite blue-print of the future like Union Now, as we can by completely ignoring the world that the war is moulding. What we've got to keep in mind is that we are working out principles, not setting up programs.

Union Now or any other of these propositions for World Government (one is being presented to Congress as a bill in the near future) conceive our ideal as completely formulated. "We know," they say, "exactly what the world should be like. The war is just clearing away the obstacles." The trouble is we don't know. We don't know either the sort of federation we want, or the sort that it is going to be possible to get when the war is over. If we try to superimpose a definite plan of world government based on our present ideas of the world, we are likely to fall into the same failures and inadequacies that the League of Nations did. To hitch our wagon to such a star as "world union of free people" is to put ourselves in the clouds, and make a really constructive policy towards the future world order impossible.

The principles that we do have are very few. Most of the methods we believed right have been swept away by the war and the history of the last twenty years. We are back to bedrock, trying to work out a world in which peace and security are possible. We've learned some lessons about what not to do, but when we immediately translate these lessons into a dogmatic plan like Union Now, we're ignoring their main part. We're forgetting the most important principle of all--that the world government must be based on the participation of all members, and by participation I mean real participation on the basis of interests and power.

The prosecution of the war is determining to a large extent exactly what the position of the participating members of the future world will be, and the relations between these powers during the war is determining the practical basis of any form of world cooperation. Here is where our ideas of the future can and should play an important part; here is where we can hook up our very general ideals with the actual facts of the situation; and here is where we are being short-sighted.

While we rightly go all-out for South American solidarity, we handle Russia, our chief ally, with gloved hands--for instance, leaving Litvinov out of the Roosevelt-Churchill grand strategy talks, and squawking about Russia's reluctance to start war with Japan. There's no point of deceiving ourselves with a dream of the future world without Russia; there's no point of thinking that we can sit over here and draw up the map of Central Europe without Russia; there's no point of planning the military prospectus of the war without Russia. We've got to work with them, understand their problems, and fit them into our scheme of the future as best we can. This is no mariage de convenance. Right now they're bearing the brunt of the war, and when the peace comes around they, quite justifiably, are going to be demanding their place.

By working closely with Russia now, by making them allies in this war against aggression, we have an opportunity to establish the principle of international morality as a common objective. We have a chance to lay a real foundation for a workable peace. By excluding them from our fullest confidence, by continually mistrusting their motives, we are only laying the seeds for future discord.

It is in this sort of practical policy that our post-war thinking can and should manifest itself, not in impractical schemes and constitutions that completely ignore the world of the present