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Moral Frustration. Americans never intended to reduce their armaments to the vanishing point or to give up defense of the Panama Canal. The North fought the South in a great civil war against the principle of self-determination.
Says Lippmann: "The cynicism which corroded the democracies jn the interval between the two German wars was engendered by a moral order which was in fact a moral frustration. . . . The moralists at Paris gave humanity a code of morality which no one could observe, which . . . was a preparation not for peace under the law, but for aggression in the midst of anarchy. The [Wilsonian] moral code failed because it was not a good moral code.
"We too shall fail to find a moral basis for the international order," Lippmann warns, "if we do not discern and then correct the spiritual error which underlies the Wilsonian misconception. It is the error of forgetting that we are men and of thinking that we are gods. . . . We shall collaborate best with other nations if we start with the homely fact that their families and their homes, their villages and lands, their countries and their own ways, their altars, their flags, and their hearths—not charters, covenants, blueprints and generalities—are what men live for and will, if it is necessary, die for."
* One of the many readers of 1943's political bestseller: Thomas E. Dewey.