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In national and political matters a good talker will be principled rather than partisan. Conversationally he will be less Democrat or Republican than an informal judge who weighs all the parties and their platforms on the scales of justice and wisdom, as against political expediency. One must feel of a good talker that he is never a partisan of anything but the good and the true. As soon as he seems to stand for any one party, right or wrong, he will degenerate from a conversationalist to a propagandist. Nationally and internationally, a Christian conversationalist will try to correct the prejudices and errors of history, the lies and misrepresentations of war propaganda. Remembering Goethe's words that "national hatred is something peculiar" and that a sufficiently cultured person "stands to a certain extent above nations" (Conversations with Ecker-mann, March 14, 1830), he will strive to minimize national, racial, and ideological hatreds. He will promote international peace and understanding by siding strictly with truth and justice, on whichever side or nation these happen to lie. He will realize that a prophet's hardest duty is to point out that justice does not always lie with one's own country. His motto must be that so wonderfully proclaimed by Carl Schurz in his anti-imperialist speech in Chicago, in 1899, "Our country — when right to be kept right; when wrong to be put right." |
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