The post office and its story an interesting account of the activities of a great government department

CHAPTER XVI THE POSTAL UNION In spite of desolating wars and quarrels between rival nations, there has been growing in Europe during the last fifty or sixty years a sense of the need for international action. The Great Exhibition of 1851 raised hopes of universal brotherhood and of the turning of spears into pruning-hooks, but in a few short years the nations were again engaged in the fiercest conflicts, and at the present time European countries are armed in a way that is a constant danger to peace. Still the fact remains that during the whole time international movements have been developing, and a spirit of unity is spreading among the nations. Governments are usually the last bodies of men to feel such influences. The movements come from below— from the workers, who realise that the problems they have to face are the same as those of every other country, and from the men of business, who have long since realised that co-operation with the foreigner is better for trade than any attempts to hamper his action. The doctrines of universal brotherhood and of love have no doubt exercised a certain influence on European thought: the message of the poets and of religious enthusiasts has usually taken this form; but the verdict of the men who pride themselves on their common sense has in the past been, that the ideas do not belong to practical politics. The discovery of modern times is that the message of the poets is good business. Solidarity among the nations is the discovery of the commercial man, and although the sentiment of nationality and the instinct for war are too deeply engrained in the human mind to be uprooted at once, the fact remains that the avoidance of war at all hazards is now the avowed object of European peoples, just as in former times the rushing into war seemed the easiest and most profitable way of settling difficulties.