Suchergebnisse

The first thirty years of the nineteenth century saw the beginnings of a great revolution in transportation and communication. Improvements were introduced which in time greatly changed the daily lives of people throughout the world, and made it possible for their efforts to reach out as never before in human history. The change was nowhere more significant than in its effect on international society. A century ago, the railroad, the steamship and the telegraph so extended the range of human action that national organization ceased to correspond with the activities of many peoples, and the state system upon which the nineteenth century dawned was greatly modified by the progress made in international organization before the century had passed. Certainly no period up to that time had produced such changes as those which began in the decades between 1800 and 1830.

At the Imperial Conference of 1926, the participating British governments agreed that the Dominions and Great Britain " are autonomous communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations"

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.