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satisfactorily, its judgments would have to be based upon & world-wide community
of values.
That community of values does not exist today.
To set up a central
machinery of force in the present state of the world might be to create a new
instrument of coercion which disaffected peoples would come to regard as intolerable,
It may be said in rejoinder that first attempts at
orld government or
world federation will necessarily be imperfect, that the way to develop the com
munity of valucs is by creating and operating 2 machinery of central justice,
Reference may be made to the expericnece of the United States first under the
Articles of Confederation and later under the Constitution in perfecting its
federal system,
This nation's experience in perfecting its federal system un=
fortunately includes the bitter, bloody, and protracted Civil War.
Could a
world government afford to perfect itsclf by expericncing a world-wide civil
war?
Not if it is true that any large-scale war in an cra of atomic warfare
threatens the whole future of civilization.
Unless the world, government from
the first promises to settic those cisputcs formerly scttlod by ver so uquitably
that there will be littic or no pressure to resist the enforcement of its dco
cisions, it offers no surc cure against the threatened oxtinction of civilization; it offers no certainty that other human values besides survival will be
protected any better, or indeed as well, as they are protected under the present
admittedly unsatisfactory system of regulating international affairs,
it is the threat of gencral war which provides the cxcuse for establishing
world governnent now.
To substitute the threat of world-wide civil war for the
threat of world-wide international war is to make very littic progress in atomic
cnergy control.
One can only conelude with Sceretary of State Byrnes that "wo
Tust not imagine that overnight there can arise fully grown a world government
wise and strong enough to protect all of us and tolcrant and denocratic enough
te command our willing loyalty .”°
" Charleston speech, Novenber 16, 195.