tion the exact shares. Opposition may dissolve, antagonistic cults flatten out to a common culture, almost imperceptibly. The bold idealism of to-day may seem mere common sense to-morrow. And the problem of a forecast is complicated by the possibilities of interludes and backwaters. History has never gone simply forward. More particularly are the years after a great war apt to be years of apparent retrocession; men are too weary to see what has been done, what has been cleared away, and what has been made possible.
Among the things that seem to move commandingly towards an adequate world control at the present time are these:—
(1) The increasing destructiveness and intolerableness of war waged with the new powers of science.
(2) The inevitable fusion of the world's economic affairs into one system, leading necessarily, it would seem, to some common control of currency, and demanding safe and uninterrupted communications, and a free movement of goods and people by sea and land throughout the whole world. The satisfaction of these needs will require a world control of very considerable authority and powers of enforcement.
(3) The need, because of the increasing mobility of peoples, of effectual controls of health everywhere.
(4) The urgent need of some equalization of labour conditions, and of the minimum standard of life throughout the world. This seems to carry with it, as a necessary corollary, the establishment of some minimum standard of education for everyone.
(5) The impossibility of developing the enormous benefits of flying without a world control of the air-ways.
The necessity and logic of such diverse considerations as these push the mind irresistibly, in spite of the clashes of race and tradition and the huge difficulties created by differences in language, towards the belief that a conscious struggle to establish or prevent a political world community will be the next stage in human history. The things that require that world community are permanent needs, one or other of these needs appeals to nearly everyone, and against their continuing persistence are only mortal difficulties, great no doubt, but mortal; prejudices, passions, animosities, delusions about race and country, egotisms, and such-like fluctuat-
