Motherhood, which is not only the oldest but the most important profession in the world, has received few of the benefits of civilization. It is a curious fact that a civilization devoted to mother-worship, that publicly professes a worship of mother and child, should close its eyes to the appalling waste of human life and human energy resulting from those dire consequences of leaving the whole problem of child-bearing to chance and blind instinct. It would be untrue to say that among the civilized nations of the world to-day, the profession of motherhood remains in a barbarous state. The bitter truth is that motherhood, among the larger part of our population, does not rise to the level of the barbarous or the primitive. Conditions of life among the primitive tribes were rude enough and severe enough to prevent the unhealthy growth of sentimentality, and to discourage the irresponsible production of defective children. Moreover, there is ample evidence to indicate that even among the most primitive peoples the function of maternity was recognized as of primary and central importance to the community.

The Oubangian capital sits on the shores of the river. Its houses nestle in clusters of greenery thrown into sharp relief by the red patches of laterite.

In today’s drugged orgy of boastfully self-righteous swinishness, the masks are coming down and you can hear all but explicit confessions of that hatred. For example, five years ago, on the occasion of the East Coast’s massive power failure and blackout, Life magazine published the following in its issue of November 19, 1965: “It shouldn’t happen every evening, but a crisis like the lights going out has its good points. In the first place, it deflates human smugness about our miraculous technology, which, at least in the area of power distribution and control, now stands revealed as utterly flawed … and it is somehow delicious to contemplate the fact that all our beautiful brains and all those wonderful plans and all that marvelous equipment has combined to produce a system that is unreliable.”

Dr. Fridjoff Nansen, appointed high commissioner at the Red Cross meeting in August, after a survey of the Russian Famine regions returned to Geneva for the opening of the Assembly on September 5th, in which he represented Norway, with a preliminary report of Russian conditions. He made a noble plea, which I was privileged to hear, that the delegates of the Assembly should urge upon their governments national loans which should be adequate to furnish the gigantic sums necessary to relieve twenty-five million starving people.

It cannot seem less than a blunder, whenever the exponents of a great reform or the harbingers of a noble advance in thought and effort allow themselves to seem distorted by a narrow view of their own aims and principles. All prejudices, whether of race, sect or sex, class pride and caste distinctions are the belittling inheritance and badge of snobs and prigs.

One hears much today about hemisphere unity. The press sends special correspondents to Latin America, South of the Border songs are wailed by the radio, educational institutions and literary circles speak the language of cultural cooperation, and, what is more important, labor unions are seeking the road of closer ties with the Latin American working people. The stage is set. A curtain rises. May we ask you to see behind the scenery and visualize a forgotten character in this great theater of the Americas?

The major issue that divides liberals (advocates of liberty) from “liberals” (statists) is the question of the importance of economic freedom. As the statist sees it, economic freedom is the “freedom” of the few to exploit the many. The right to vote, on the other hand, is common to all men. Hence, for statists, the dividing line between democracies and dictatorships is drawn in answer to the question: Are elections free or not? But it will be noticed that totalitarianism is the implicit criterion here: any situation which is not yet totalitarian would be described as “free” by the statist.

The international community is too often focused on responding to the latest cyber attack instead of addressing the reality of pervasive and persistent cyber conflict. From ransomware against the city government of Baltimore to state-sponsored campaigns targeting electrical grids in Ukraine and the United States, we seem to have relatively little bandwidth left over to ask what we can hope for in terms of “peace” on the Internet, and how to get there. It’s also important to identify the long-term implications for such pervasive cyber insecurity across the public and private sectors, and how they can be curtailed. This edited volume analyzes the history and evolution of cyber peace and reviews recent international efforts aimed at promoting it, providing recommendations for students, practitioners, and policymakers seeking an understanding of the complexity of international law and international relations involved in cyber peace. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

In this chapter, we use the new data to investigate which factors influence the allocation of Chinese development finance across countries, and how these motivations compare to those of traditional donors and creditors such as the World Bank. We specifically test the claim that Beijing is primarily using its economic largesse to cement alliances with political leaders, secure access to natural re- sources, and create exclusive commercial opportunities for Chinese firms. We run statistical models to examine the cross-country allocation of Chinese aid and debt, arguing that these two flows are motivated by different strategic objectives. Our results show that Chinese aid and debt are means to different ends. Like Western donors, Beijing allocates aid in response to levels of poverty and uses aid to reward countries that adopt its foreign policy positions and punish those that do not.Contrary to the conventional wisdom, Beijing is no more likely than major Western donors to provide aid to corrupt or authoritarian regimes. None of these findings are consistent with the notion that China is a “rogue donor” compared to its Western peers. However, Beijing’s loans issued at or near market rates are more likely to go to corrupt and authoritarian countries. The conflation of aid and credit seems to be at the heart of the confusion: Western politicians and journalists use “rogue donor” as a shorthand term for all of China’s overseas development projects, but many of these projects are not aid.

Mine own people, – mine in the common ideals which Vassar has bequeathed to her children; mine in the common training for life, no matter what its tasks may have proved to be; mine in the common purposes and hopes born of that good heritage and training: I should like to take you all into my arms, but unable to do that, I want to take you into the heart of my work. I invite you to green fields and pastures new, fields as broad as this great continent, stretching on across river and plain and mountain out to the wide Pacific; fields stretching on beyond the ocean and across the eastern hemisphere. This land is yours for the taking. Little of it has been pre-empted. Here you may stake out your claim and measure it by the square league, as the pioneers did on the colonial frontier of Argentine. Here you find a field rich and fertile, waiting for a labor force to develop it, promising an abundant harvest to the tiller.

New Orleans is now and has ever been the hoodoo capital of America. Great names in rites that vie with those of Hayti in deeds that keep alive the powers of Africa.

In his Thesis “Les Idées Égalitaires,” Monsieur Bouglé declares quite decisively that the notion of Equality manifests itself only in our Western Civilization. “It is only in two parts of the glove [sic], Europe and America, at points where Latin, German and Anglo Saxon Races have developed a certain culture known as Occidental Civilization that we discover a general evolution towards Democracy” (p. 37).

Women have the same emotions as men and with them are inflamed by nationalism, intoxicated by the glories of war, embittered by old rancors. But as we look through history we realize that in the mass they have taken little part in the political life of their peoples and have been mainly immersed in private affairs, in the household and in personal relations. Psychologically they have a less powerful instinctive pugnacity than men; and furthermore, in war they have always stood to lose even more than men, as Europe knew. In-place of the excitement of the great adventure they had the heavy hours of suspense and bereavement; dishonor and slavery were a worse lot than wounds or death itself.

[…] I am, as you see, an enthusiastic believer in the United Nations. I believe in its objectives. I believe in what it has done and is doing. I believe in what it can do.

What surer indication of a new spirit among the nations than the world-wide interest in the limitation of armaments, and in the establishment of an international congress, in which the nations may consider any and all subjects which concern their common relations! The passage of such measures would produce results of far-reaching significance. It is only a logical inference from past procedure that eventually the international congresses will culminate in a world legislature, where the representatives from every government will legislate for the common welfare. The legislative department of a world government is distined [sic] to develop side by side with the judicial; and it also follows that an executive department, formed to carry out the provisions of the world legislature, will complete the rounding out of a world republic; each department is a necessary complement to the other two.

There are and always have been just two basic objectives of all national governments: to secure the defence of the realm and the value of the currency. The kind and form of domestic order and justice is a matter of choice and therefore of wide variety. The standard of welfare which the government feels able and willing to provide for its citizens is a matter of individual choice within the state. But where foreign and economic policies are concerned, only military security and monetary stability are universally sought and pursued by states above all other aims. The wider international goals about which political speeches are endlessly written – the establishment of peace, the reduction of armaments, the increase of economic development, the pursuit of human rights and a fair deal for the poor, the black, the religious and racial minorities, the under-regarded of all kinds – are so far beyond the reach of individual governments and their policies that they are, by comparison with the two basic aims, mostly either rhetoric or dreams. We enact, as Conor Cruise O’Brien says, our sacred dramas on the international stage but they amount to a ritual and a prayer. They express our deepest longings; they do not necessarily bear very much upon our realistic ambitions in the world of everyday politics.