Page:The Public and Its Problems (1946).pdf/4

in the book regarding the public and the connection of the public with the political aspects of social life? In brief, it is as follows: The decline, (though probably not for a rather long future time the obliteration) of Isolationism is evidence that there is developing the sense that relations between nations are taking on the properties that constitute a public, and hence call for some measure of political organtzation. Just what the measure is to be, how far political authority is to extend, is a question still in dispute. There are those who would hold it to the strictest possible construction of the code for the United Nations adopted at San Francisco. There are others who urge the necessity of altering the code so as to provide for a World Federation having wide political authority.

It is aside from the point here under consideration to discuss which party is right. The very fact that there are two parties, that there is an active dispute, is evidence that the questzon of the relations between nations which in the past have claimed and exercised singular sovereignty has now definitely entered the arena of political problems. It is pointed out in the text of this book that the scope, the range, of the public, the question of where the public shall end and the sphere of the private begin, has long been a vital political problem in domestic affairs. At last the same issue is actively raised about the relations between national units, no one of which in the past has acknowledged political responsibility in the conduct of its policies toward other national units. There has been acknowledgment of