Article June 3, 1916 Issue

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with contributions from Richard Roberts, W. E. Orchard, Henry Kingman

[Richard Roberts in The Constructive Quarterly]

There are those who tell us that nations cannot from the nature of the case act unselfishly. That this is a perfectly gratuitous and unwarranted assumption needs no serious proof. There is no reason why, if any group of people can act from unselfish motives, a nation should not likewise be able so to act. The national nexus is not in its nature essentially different from the social nexus which binds any group of people together; and to deny that groups of people can act Christianly is to decline into the kind of pessimism which summarily hands the world over to the devil.

It is true, as any observer of human phenomena knows, that a group of people may in certain circumstances act collectively on a plane morally lower than any individual in the group would by himself be likely to do; but this is only one halff of an important truth. Groups may no less act collectively on a plane and reach a height far higher than would be possible to the individual. The sense of solidarity may reinforce the timid and wavering motives of individuals and enable them to act together with a force and a consistency which would otherwise be beyond their power. The problem of Christianizing a nation is not that of converting every individual in it.

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