INTRODUCTION   AT THE time when this book was being brought to its close, the first attempt at the foundation of some initial hesitating beginning of the new world-order which both governments and peoples had begun to envisage as a permanent necessity if there was to be any order in the world at all, was under debate and consideration but had not yet been given a concrete and practical form; but this had to come and eventually a momentous beginning was made. It took the name and appearance of what was called a League of Nations. It was not happy in its conception, well-inspired in its formation or destined to any considerable longevity or a supremely successful career. But that

CHAPTER VIII   THE PROBLEM OF A FEDERATED HETEROGENEOUS EMPIRE   IF THE building up of a composite nation in the British Isles was from the beginning a foregone conclusion, a geographical and economical necessity only prevented in its entire completion by the most violent and perverse errors of statesmanship, the same cannot be said of the swifter but still gradual and almost unconscious process by which the Colonial Empire of Great Britain has been evolving to a point at which it can become a real unity. It was not so long ago that the eventual separation of the Colonies and the evolution of Australia and Canada at least into young independent nation

CHAPTER VI   ANCIENT AND MODERN METHODS OF EMPIRE   A CLEAR distinction must be made between two political aggregates which go equally in current language by the name of empire. For there is the homogeneous national and there is the heterogeneous composite empire. In a sense, all empires are composites, at any rate, if we go back to their origins; but in practice there is a difference between the imperial aggregate in which the component elements are not divided from each other by a strong sense of their separate existence in the whole and the imperial aggregate in which this psychological basis of separation is still in vigour. Japan

CHAPTER XI   THE SMALL FREE UNIT AND THE LARGER CONCENTRATED UNITY   IF WE consider the possibilities of a unification of the human race on political, administrative and economic lines, we see that a certain sort of unity or first step towards it appears not only to be possible, but to be more or less urgently demanded by an underlying spirit and sense of need in the race. This spirit has been created largely by increased mutual knowledge and close communication, partly by the development of wider and freer intellectual ideals and emotional sympathies in the progressive mind of the race. The sense of need is partly due to the demand for the

CHAPTER X   THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE   WE HAVE had to dwell so long upon the possibilities of the Empire-group because the evolution of the imperial State is a dominating phenomenon of the modern world; it governs the political tendencies of the later part of the nineteenth and earlier part of the twentieth centuries very much as the evolution of the free democratised nation governed the age which preceded ours. The dominant idea of the French Revolution was the formula of the free and sovereign people and, in spite of the cosmopolitan element introduced into the revolutionary formula by the ideal of fraternity, this idea became in fact the a

CHAPTER V   NATION AND EMPIRE: REAL AND POLITICAL UNITIES   THE problem of the unification of mankind resolves itself into two distinct difficulties. There is the doubt whether the collective egoisms already created in the natural evolution of humanity can at this time be sufficiently modified or abolished and whether even an external unity in some effective form can he securely established. And there is the doubt whether, even if any such external unity can be established, it will not be at the price of crushing both the free life of the individual and the free play of the various collective units already created in which there is a real and active life and su

CHAPTER XXXV   SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION   IN OTHER words,—and this is the conclusion at which we arrive,—while it is possible to construct a precarious and quite mechanical unity by political and administrative means, the unity of the human race, even if achieved, can only be secured and can only be made real if the religion of humanity, which is at present the highest active ideal of mankind, spiritualises itself and becomes the general inner law of human life. The outward unity may well achieve itself,—possibly though by no means certainly, in a measurable time—because that is the inevitable final trend of the working of Nature in human soci

CHAPTER XIV   THE NEED OF MILITARY UNIFICATION   IN THE process of centralisation by which all the powers of an organised community come to be centred in one governing body—the process which has been the most prominent characteristic of national formations,—military necessity has played at the beginning the largest overt part. This necessity was both external and internal,—external for the defence of the nation against disruption or subjection from without, internal for its defence against civil disruption and disorder. If a common administrative authority is essential in order to bind together the constituent parts of a nation in the forming,

CHAPTER XVII   NATURE'S LAW IN OUR PROGRESS—UNITY IN DIVERSITY, LAW AND LIBERTY    FOR man alone of terrestrial creatures to live rightly involves the necessity of knowing rightly, whether, as rationalism pretends, by the sole or dominant instrumentation of his reason or, more largely and complexly by the sum of his faculties; and what he has to know is the true nature of being and its constant self-effectuation in the values of life, in less abstract language the law of Nature and especially of his own nature, the forces within him and around him and their right utilisation for his own greater perfection and happiness or for that and