Article August 12, 1922 Issue

"The people is one"

MABEL ALBERTA SPICER

The attitude of the average citizen everywhere toward those of other lands could scarcely be better put than in the words of Bunyan when describing Vanity Fair in "Pilgrim's Progress." Picturing the fair as composed of several streets and rows where the various nations displayed their vanities, he says that "from one end of the fair to the other, they seemed barbarians each to the other." The mutual disfavor and suspicion with which the inhabitants of different countries sometimes regard one another is one of the chief causes of strife and limitation among mankind. The traveler in foreign countries is frequently confronted with a double standard of ethics,—one for dealing with natives, the other for dealing with aliens. The even flow of international commerce and foreign trade is disturbed by national distrust and greed; diplomacy, instead of contributing impartially to the common welfare of all governments, not infrequently becomes synonymous with craftiness and national dishonesty. Yet we are told in Holy Writ: "Behold, the people is one."

Strangely enough, it is the vanities or frailties rather than the virtues of other nationalities that too often appear to loom before the foreign observer as characteristic; consequently, the literature of the different countries abounds with caricature of foreigners, where true characterization is intended. To be sure, there is much good-natured, intentional caricature of both the fellow-countryman and the foreigner; but that is different. Each nation has its outstanding virtues and vices, excellences and shortcomings; yet, at heart, humanity is one. From time to time through the centuries there appears a great genius, a Shakespeare, a Bunyan, who by his universality sees and portrays this fact. To the discerning traveler no fact is more apparent than the oneness of humanity. Kipling has expressed this so well in "The Ballad of East and West":—

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