At a Lenten service in Chicago, Episcopal Theologian Bernard Iddings Bell delivered a crisply crushing answer to advocates of immediate world government:
“It is impossible to have, today or in any near tomorrow, world government “.. because between the nations there is no unity of cultural aim, no shared conviction as to what life is about, no willingness to see mankind as other than atomistic and competitive. Each nation serves a particularistic ideology, follows its inherited prejudices, advances its own small self-interest. . . .
“U.N. . . .is only a trading-place for international deals. . . . That is all we deserve to have in the way of international agreement; it is all we really wish. If U.N. tried to become a true world government it would not last a week; it would be a government without the consent of the governed and as such would immediately be repudiated, by Americans as quickly as by any other group.”
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