A Just International Order
(XXI)
Before I go further may I draw attention to a very comical misprint in last week's note by which I was made to speak of something called " the value of Roman personality." I trust readers did not think that I was starting a new and particularly idiotic heresy, but guessed the correct reading of these words which should, of course, have been " the value of human personality."
I said in that note that I would try to draft this week the preamble to " the Chart of Human Value " on which I think agreement is so necessary. I have endeavoured to do this in such a manner as will, I think, appeal to the instinctive morals of a large number of people not only outside the Church but outside any Christian communion.
While I have omitted all reference to the supernatural, I have tried to avoid writing as though man himself were a god and I do not think that the preamble as now drafted contains anything to which a Catholic cannot subscribe. The whole argument, of course, is based on the mystical dogma of human equality, and, as I think I have said before, this purely mystical dogma is held and held ardently by large numbers of people despite the fact that they lack the intellectual foundation for holding it.
If you think you can improve on what I have written (and I have very little doubt
that you can), do please write in. I am asking the editor to send on to me any letters on this matter that he cannot publish in the correspondence columns, and though I may not be able to answer them, I promise to study them all most carefully.
Here is the preamble.
Since the purpose of every just war is to create a peace more 'perfect than existed at its outbreak, the formulation of the principles of such a peace is a necessary part of the prosecution of such a war, and since peoples must accept responsibility for the acts of governments which they either choose or endure it is the duty of all men to concern themselfes with this matter.
MI durable peace must repose upon concord. But we believe that no concord is possible unless men subscribe to the doctrine commonly called " the equality of men." This means that the human family is one and that all belonging to it have, irrespective of race, colour, aptitude or even moral character, an absolute value which cannot be measured by any standard other than Man therefore having this value, it must be the end of all legislation and all economic activity to enable each man in every place to develop to the utmost his faculties and powers of perceptions and so attain his fullest possible stature.