As we consider this crucial problem (upon which so much of the future peace of the world depends), we must make an effort to keep our own mental and national attitude well in the background and to see the emerging problem in the light of the Biblical statement that there is "one God and Father of all who is above all and through all and in us all". Let us regard that statement as a scientific one and not as a pious, religious hope. God has made us all of one blood and that God - under some name or aspect, whether transcendent or immanent, whether regarded as energy or intelligence, whether called God, Brahma, the Abstract or the Absolute - is universally recognized. Again, under the great [90] Law of Evolution and the process of creation, men are subject to the same reactions to their environment, to the same pain, to the same joys, to the same anxieties, to the same appetites and the same urges towards betterment, to the same mystical aspiration, to the same sinful tendencies and desires, to the same selfishness, and to the same amazing aptitude for heroic divine expression, to the same love and beauty, to the same innate pride, to the same sense of divinity and to the same fundamental efforts. Under the great evolutionary process, men and races differ in mental development, in physical stamina, in creative possibilities, in understanding, in human perceptiveness and in their position upon the ladder of civilization; this, however, is temporary, for the same potentialities exist in all of us without exception, and will eventually display themselves. These distinctions, which have in the past set peoples and races so far apart, are rapidly dying out with the spread of education, with the uniting discoveries of science bringing us all so close together and with the power to think, to read and to plan.

In considering our theme we need now to do two things: first of all consider what makes a people, a race or a nation a minority, and then consider along what lines a solution may lie. The world today is full of [91] clamoring minorities who - rightly or wrongly - are making claims upon the majority. Some of the majorities are sincerely concerned in seeing justice done to the struggling and appealing minorities; others are using them as "talking points" for their own ends or are championing the cause of the small and weak nations, not from any humanitarian reasons but for power politics.