Races and nations as functions of the world whole

itself is growing older and its problems are changing. The human uncertainty about ‘which way to go’, and the need for a different conception of leadership, of guidance, can be seen from the wars and catastrophes of the present age, which in the lifetime of many of us have become, for the first time in history, world-wide, and we can see that local troubles become world concerns just as a local sickness in the human body affects the whole person.

* * * * * *

The text of the 1920-21 series of World Affairs runs to more than 100,000 words, so it is difficult to give a fair idea of the searching way in which Mitrinovié carries out his survey of the world’s and Man’s present situation and crisis, often recapitulating, as the serial form of publication makes advisable. The themes weave in and out in a manner which it is impossible to convey in brief extracts.

It would be dangerous to yield to the temptation to quote liberally from Mitrinovi¢’s statements about particular races and nations, since most of these were made over half a century ago, and it is too much to expect that we can all make the necessary adjustments in historic perspective which such a length of such a crowded time demands. Any partial quotation involves the risk of misunderstanding it to be a total and final judgement; for his method is to show us the worst and the best of a race or nation. When he discusses Japan as the Prussian Germany of the East, or the English as the Chinese of the West, we have to look beyond the effects of the style to the significance of the correspondence in the context of the whole conception at the time when it was written. No part of the world is overlooked, and there are many detailed illuminations. In particular there is intense concentration on the world role of the British and of the Jews, confronting the negatives as well as the positives in both peoples.

The second series of World Affairs, published twelve years later, expresses an even greater urgency of appeal, with sharper definition of the immediate issues, and a shift of emphasis from the wholeness of the world and Universal Humanity to the individual human person—these two polarised extremes being the only two Absolutes in this anthropo-sociological view of the world. There had been in this period an intensification of many

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