Edwin Ginn's Commitment to World Government

Extract

Edwin Ginn's vision of world peace, as recorded in his last will and testament, involved him in a commitment to world government. World government, however, is an objective which seems to many mid-twentieth century observers of international politics excessively visionary. The nineteenth-century dream of a parliament of man, a federation of the world, fills a bright page in Victorian poetry. But much contemporary prose is written by men whose vision is obscured by space rockets, intercontinental ballistic missiles, atomic bombs, and other lethal weapons of ultramodern warfare. They see only a world of heavily armed, self-styled sovereign states bent on the protection of alleged vital interests and on the defense of so-called national honor with little patience for the restraints of any higher law designed to prevent them from making war upon one another.