A Postscript Chapter
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 such an organised endeavour should be
launched at all and proceed on its way for some time without an early breakdown
was in itself an event of capital importance and meant the initiation of a new
era in world history; especially, it was an initiative which, even if it
failed, could not be allowed to remain without a sequel but had to be taken up
again until a successful solution has safeguarded the future of mankind, not
only against continued disorder and lethal peril but against destructive
possibilities which could easily prepare the collapse of civilisation and
perhaps eventually something even that could be described as the suicide of the
human race. Accordingly, the League of Nations disappeared but was replaced by
the United Nations Organisation which now stands in the forefront of the world
and struggles towards some kind of secure permanence and success in the great
and far-reaching endeavour on which depends the world's future.
This is the
capital event, the crucial and decisive outcome of the world-wide tendencies
which Nature has set in motion for her destined purpose. In spite of the
constant shortcomings of human effort and its stumbling mentality, in spite of
adverse possibilities that may baulk or delay for a time the success of this
great adventure, it is in this event that lies the determination of
Page-556
what
must be. All the catastrophes that have attended this course of events and seem
to arise of purpose in order to prevent the working out of her intention have
not prevented, and even further catastrophes will not prevent, the successful
emergence and development of an enterprise which has become a necessity , for
the progress and perhaps the very existence of the race. Two stupendous and
world-devastating wars have swept over the globe and have been accompanied or
followed by revolutions with far-reaching consequences which have altered the
political map of the earth and the international balance, the once fairly
stable equilibrium of five continents, and changed the whole '", future. A third still more
disastrous war with a prospect of the use of weapons and other scientific means
of destruction far more fatal and of wider reach than any ever yet invented,
weapons, whose far-spread use might bring down civilisation with a crash
and whose effects might tend towards something like extermination on a large
scale, looms in prospect; the constant apprehension of it weighs upon the mind
of the nations and stimulates them
towards further preparations for war and creates an atmosphere of prolonged antagonism, if not
yet of conflict, extending to what is called "cold war" even in times
of peace. But the two wars that
have come and gone have not prevented the formation of the first and second
considerable efforts towards the beginning of an attempt at union and the
practical formation of a concrete
body, an organised instrument with that object: rather they have caused and hastened this new
creation. The League of Nations came into being as a direct consequence of the
first war, the D.N.O. similarly as a consequence of the second world-wide
conflict. If the third war which is regarded by many if not by most as
inevitable does come, it is likely to precipitate as inevitably a further step
and perhaps the final outcome of this great world-endeavour. Nature uses such
means, apparently opposed and dangerous {to her intended purpose, to bring
about the fruition of that
purpose. As in the practice of the spiritual science and art of Yoga one has to
raise up the psychological possibilities which are there in the nature and
stand in the way of its spiritual perfection and fulfilment so as to eliminate
them, even, it may be, the sleeping possibilities which might arise in
Page-557
future to break the work that has been done, so too
Nature acts with the world-forces that meet her on her way, not only calling up
those which will assist her but raising too, so as to finish with them, those
that she knows to be the normal or even the unavoidable obstacles which cannot
but start up to impede her secret will. This one has often seen in the history
of mankind; one sees it exampled today with an enormous force commensurable
with the magnitude of the thing that has to be done. But always these
resistances turn out to have assisted by the resistance much more than they
have impeded the intention of the great Creatrix and her Mover.
We may then
look with a legitimate optimism on what has been hitherto achieved and on the
prospects of further achievement in the future. This optimism need not and
should not blind us to undesirable features, perilous tendencies and the
possibilities of serious interruptions in the work and even disorders in the
human world that might possibly subvert the work done. As regards the actual
conditions of the moment it may even be admitted that most men nowadays look
with dissatisfaction on the defects of the United Nations Organisation and its
blunders and the malignancies that endanger its existence and many feel a
growing pessimism and regard with doubt the possibility of its final success.
This pessimism it is unnecessary and unwise to share; for such a psychology
tends to bring about, to make possible the results which it predicts but which
need not at all ensue. At the same time, we must not ignore the danger. The
leaders of the nations, who have the will to succeed and who will be held
responsible by posterity for any avoidable failure, must be on guard against
unwise policies or fatal errors; the deficiencies that exist in the organisation
or its constitution have to be quickly remedied or slowly and cautiously
eliminated; if there are obstinate oppositions to necessary change, they have
somehow to be overcome or circumvented without breaking the institution;
progress towards its perfection, even if it cannot be easily or swiftly made,
must yet be undertaken and the frustration of the world's hope prevented at any
cost. There is no other way for mankind than this, unless indeed a greater way
is laid open to it by the Power that guides through some delivering turn
Page-558
or change in human will or human nature or some sudden
evolutionary progress, a not easily foreseeable leap, saltus, which will
make another and greater solution of our human destiny feasible.
In the first
idea and form of a beginning of world-union which took the shape of the League
of Nations, although there were errors in the structure such as the insistence
on unanimity which tended to sterilise, to limit or to obstruct the practical
action and effectuality of the League, the main defect was inherent in its
conception and in its general build, and that again arose naturally and as a
direct consequence from the condition of the world at that time. The League of
Nations was in fact an oligarchy of big Powers each drawing behind it a retinue
of small States and using the general body so far as possible for the
furtherance of its own policy much -more than for the general interest and the
good of the world at large. This character came out most in the political
sphere, and the manoeuvres and discords, accommodations and compromises
inevitable in this condition of things did not help to make the action of the
League beneficial or effective
as it purposed or set out to be. The absence of America and the position of
Russia had helped to make the final ill-success of this first venture a natural
consequence, if not indeed unavoidable. In the constitution of the D.N.O. an
attempt was made, in principle at least, to escape from these errors; but the
attempt was not thorough-going and not altogether successful. A strong
surviving element of oligarchy remained in the preponderant place assigned to
the five great Powers in the
Security Council and was clinched by the device of the veto; these were
concessions to a sense of realism and the necessity of recognising the actual
condition of things and the results of the second great war and could not
perhaps have been avoided, but they have clone more to create trouble, hamper
the action and diminish the success of the new institution than any- 1 thing
else in its make-up or the way of action forced upon it by the world situation
or the difficulties of a combined working inherent in its very structure. A too
hasty or radical endeavour to get rid of these defects might lead to a crash of
the whole edifice; to leave them unmodified prolongs a malaise, an absence of
harmony and smooth working and a consequent discredit and
Page-559
a sense of limited and abortive action, cause of the widespread feeling
of futility and the regard of doubt the world at large has begun to cast on
this great and necessary institution which was founded with such high hopes and
without which world conditions would be infinitely worse and more dangerous,
even perhaps irremediable. A third attempt, the substitution of a differently
constituted body, could only come if this institution collapsed as the result
of a new catastrophe: if certain dubious portents fulfil their menace, it might
emerge into being and might even this time be more successful because of an
increased and a more general determination not to allow such a calamity to
occur again; but it would be after a third cataclysmal struggle which might
shake to its foundations the international structure now holding together after
two upheavals with so much difficulty and unease. Yet, even in such a
contingency, the intention in the working of Nature is likely to overcome the
obstacles she has herself raised up and they may be got rid of once and for
all. But for that it will be necessary to build, eventually at least, a true
World-State without exclusions and on a principle of equality into which
considerations of size and strength will not enter. These may be left to
exercise whatever influence is natural to them in a well-ordered harmony of the
world's peoples safeguarded by the law of a new' international order. A sure
justice, a fundamental equality and combination of rights and interests must be
the law of this World-State and the basis of its entire edifice.
The real danger at the present
second stage of the progress towards unity lies not in any faults, however
serious, in the building of the United Nations Assembly but in the division of
the peoples into two camps which tend to be natural opponents and might at any
moment become declared enemies irreconcilable and even their common existence
incompatible. This is because the so-called Communism of Bolshevist Russia came
to birth as the result, not of a rapid evolution, but of an unprecedentedly
fierce and prolonged revolution sanguinary in the extreme and created an
autocratic and intolerant State system founded upon a war of classes in which
all others except the proletariat were crushed out of existence,
"liquidated," upon a "dictatorship of
Page-560
the
proletariat” or rather of a narrow but all-powerful party system acting
in its name, a police state, and a
mortal struggle with the outside world; the fierceness of this struggle
generated in the minds of the organisers of the new state a fixed idea of the
necessity not only of survival but of continued struggle and the spread of its
domination until the new order had destroyed the old or evicted it, if not from
the whole earth, yet from the greater part of it and the imposition of a new
political and social gospel or its general acceptance by the world’s peoples.
But this condition of things might change, lose its acrimony and full
consequence, as it has done to some degree, with the arrival of security and the cessation of the first ferocity,
bitterness and exasperation of the conflict; the most intolerant and oppressive
elements of the new order might have been moderated and the sense of
incompatibility or inability to live together or side by side would then have
disappeared and a more secure modus vivendi been made possible. If much
of the unease, the sense of inevitable struggle, the difficulty of mutual
toleration and economic accommodation till exists, it is rather because the
idea of using the ideological struggle as a means for world domination is there
and keeps the nations in a position of mutual apprehension and preparation for
armed defence and attack than because the coexistence of the two ideologies is
impossible. If this element is eliminated, a world in which these two
ideologies could live together, arrive at an economic interchange, draw closer
together, need not be at all out of the question; for the world is moving
towards a greater development of the principle of State control over the life
of the community, and a congeries of socialistic States on the one hand, and on
the other, of States co-ordinating and controlling a modified Capitalism might
well come to exist side by side and develop friendly relations with each other.
Even a World-State in which both could keep their own institutions and sit in a
common assembly might come into being and a single world-union on this
foundation would not be impossible. This development is indeed the final
outcome which the foundation of the U.N.O. presupposes; for the present
organisation cannot be itself final, it is only an imperfect beginning useful
and necessary as a primary nucleus of that larger
Page-561
institution in which all the peoples of the earth can
meet each other in a single international unity: the creation of a World- State
is, in a movement of this kind, the one logical and inevitable ultimate
outcome.
This view
of the future may under present circumstances be stigmatised as a too facile
optimism, but this turn of things is quite as possible as the more disastrous
turn expected by the pessimists, since the cataclysm and crash of civilisation
some- times predicted by them need not at all be the result of a new war.
Mankind has a habit of surviving the worst catastrophes created by its own
errors or by the violent turns of Nature and it must be so if there is any
meaning in its existence, if its long history and continuous survival is not
the accident of a fortuitously self. organising Chance, which it must be in a
purely materialistic view of the nature of the world. If man is intended to
survive and carry forward the evolution of which he is at present the head and,
to some extent, a half-conscious leader of its march, he must come out of his
present chaotic international life and arrive at a beginning of organised
united action; some kind of World-State, unitary or federal, or a confederacy
or a coalition he must arrive at in the end; no smaller or looser expedient
would adequately serve the purpose. In that case, the general thesis advanced
in this book would stand justified and we can foreshadow with some confidence
the main line of advance which the course of events is likely to take, at least
the main trend of the future history of the human peoples.
The question now put by evolving
Nature to mankind is whether its existing international system, if system it
can be called, a sort of provisional order maintained with constant
evolutionary or revolutionary changes, cannot be replaced by a willed and
thought-out fixed arrangement, a true system, eventually a real unity serving
all the common interests of the earth's peoples. An original welter and chaos
with its jumble of forces forming, wherever it could, larger or smaller masses
of civilisation and order which were in danger of crumbling or being shaken to
pieces by attacks from the outer chaos was the first attempt at cosmos
successfully arrived at by the genius of humanity. This was finally replaced by
something like an international system
Page-562
with the elements of what could be called international
law or fixed habits of intercommunication and interchange which allowed the
nations to live together in spite of antagonisms and conflicts, a security
alternating with precariousness and peril and permitting of too many ugly
features, however local, of oppression, bloodshed, revolt and disorder, not to
speak of wars which sometimes devastated large areas of the globe. The
indwelling deity who presides
over the destiny of the race has raised in man's mind and heart the idea, the
hope of a new order which will ,\
replace the old unsatisfactory order, and substitute for it conditions of the
world's life which will in the end have a reasonable chance of establishing
permanent peace and well-being. This would for the first time turn into an
assured fact the ideal of human unity which, cherished by a few, seemed for so
long a noble chimera; then might be created a firm ground of peace and harmony
and even a free room for the realisation of the highest human dreams, for the
perfectibility of the race, a perfect society, a higher upward evolution of the
human soul and human nature. It is for the men of our day and, at the most, of
tomorrow to give the answer. For, too long a postponement or too continued a
failure will open the way to a series of increasing catastrophes which might
create a too prolonged and disastrous confusion and chaos and render a solution
too difficult or impossible; it might even end in something like an
irremediable crash not only of the present world-civilisation but of all
civilisation. A new, a difficult and uncertain beginning might have to be made
in the midst of the chaos and ruin after perhaps an extermination on a large
scale, and a more successful creation could be predicted only if a way was
found to develop a better humanity or perhaps a greater, a superhuman race.
The central
question is whether the nation, the largest natural unit which humanity has
been able to create and maintain for its collective living, is also its last
and ultimate unit or whether a greater aggregate can be formed which will
englobe many and even most nations and finally all in its united- totality. The
impulse to build more largely, the push towards the creation of considerable
and even very vast supranational aggregates has not been wanting; it has even
been a permanent feature in the
Page-563
life-instincts of the race. But the form it took was
the desire of a strong nation for mastery over others, permanent possession of
their territories, subjugation of their peoples, exploitation of their
resources: there was also an attempt at quasi-assimilation, an imposition of
the culture of a dominant race and, in general, a system of absorption
wholesale or as complete as possible. The Roman Empire was the classic example
of this kind of endeavour and the Graeco-Roman unity of a single way of life and
culture in a vast framework of political and administrative unity was the
nearest approach within the geographical limits reached by this civilisation to
something one might regard as a first figure or an incomplete suggestion of a
figure of human unity. Other similar attempts have been made though not on so
large a scale and with a less consummate ability throughout the course of
history, but nothing has endured for more than a small number of centuries. The
method used was fundamentally unsound inasmuch as it contradicted other
life-instincts which were necessary to the vitality and healthy evolution of
mankind and the denial of which must end in some kind of stagnation and
arrested progress. The imperial aggregate could not acquire the unconquerable vitality
and power of survival of the nation-unit. The only enduring empire-units have
been in reality large nation-units which took that name like Germany and China
and these were not forms of the supranational State and need not be reckoned in
the history of the formation of the imperial aggregate. So, although the
tendency to the creation of empire testifies to an urge in Nature towards
larger unities of human life, - and we can see concealed in it a will to unite
the disparate masses of humanity on a larger scale into a single coalescing or
combined life-unit, - it must be regarded as an unsuccessful formation without
a sequel and un- serviceable for any further progress in this direction. In
actual fact a new attempt of world-wide domination could succeed only by a new
instrumentation or under novel circumstances in englobing all the nations of
the earth or persuading or forcing them into some kind of union. An ideology, a
successful combination of peoples with one aim and a powerful head like
Communist Russia, might have a temporary success in bringing about such an
objective. But such an outcome, not very desirable in
Page-564
itself, would not be likely to ensure the creation of
an enduring World-State. There would be tendencies, resistances, urges towards other developments which would
sooner or later bring about its collapse or some revolutionary change which
would mean its disappearance.
Finally, any such stage would have to be overpassed; only the formation of a
true World-State, either of a unitary but still elastic kind, - for a rigidly
unitary State might bring about stagnation and decay of the springs of life, - or a union of free peoples could
open the prospect of a sound and lasting world-order.
It is not necessary to repeat or
review, except in certain directions, the considerations and conclusions set
forward in this book with regard to the means and methods or the lines of
divergence or successive development which the actual realisation of human
unity may take. But still on some sides possibilities have arisen which call for some modification of what has been
written or the conclusions arrived at in these chapters. It had been concluded,
for instance, that there was no likelihood of the conquest and unification of
the world by a single dominant people or empire. This is no longer altogether
so certain, for we have just had to admit the possibility of such an attempt
under certain circumstances. A dominant Power may be able to group round itself
strong allies subordinated to it but still considerable in strength and
resources and throw them into a world struggle with other Powers and peoples.
This possibility would be in- creased if the dominating Power managed to
procure, even if only for the time being, a monopoly of an overwhelming superiority
in the use of some of the tremendous means of aggressive military action which
Science has set out to discover and effectively utilise. The terror of
destruction and even of large-scale extermination created by these ominous
discoveries may bring about a will in the governments and peoples to ban and
prevent the military use of these inventions, but, so long as the nature of
mankind has not changed, this prevention must remain uncertain and precarious
and an unscrupulous ambition may even get by it a chance of secrecy and
surprise and the utilisation of a decisive moment which might conceivably give
it victory and it might risk the tremendous chance. It may be argued that the
history of
Page-565
the last war runs counter to this possibility, for in conditions
not quite realising but approximating to such a combination of circumstances
the aggressive Powers failed in their attempt and underwent the disastrous
consequences of a terrible defeat. But after all, they came for a time within a
hair's breadth of success and there might not be the same good fortune for the
world in some later and more sagaciously conducted and organised ad- venture.
At least, the possibility has to be noted and guarded against by those who have
the power of prevention and the welfare of the race in their charge.
One of the
possibilities suggested at the time was the growth of continental agglomerates,
a united Europe, some kind of a combine of the peoples of the American
continent under the leadership of the United States, even possibly in the
resurgence of Asia and its drive towards independence from the dominance of the
European peoples a drawing together for self-defensive combination of the
nations of this continent; such an eventuality of large continental combinations
might even be a stage in the final formation of a world-union. This possibility
has tended to take shape to a certain extent with a celerity that could not
then be anticipated. In the two American continents it has actually assumed a
predominating and practical form, though not in its totality. The idea of a
United States of Europe has also actually taken shape and is assuming a formal
existence, but is not yet able to develop into a completed and fully realised
possibility because of the antagonism based on conflicting ideologies which
cuts off from each other Russia and her satellites behind their iron curtain
and Western Europe. This separation has gone so far that it is difficult to
envisage its cessation at any foreseeable time in a predictable future. Under
other circumstances a tendency towards such combinations might have created the
apprehension of huge continental clashes such as the collision, at one time
imagined as possible, between a resurgent Asia and the Occident. The acceptance
by Europe and America of the Asiatic resurgence and the eventual total
liberation of the Oriental peoples, as also the downfall of Japan which figured
at one time and in- deed actually presented itself to the world as the
liberator and leader of a free Asia against the domination of the West, have
Page-566
removed this dangerous possibility. Here again, as
elsewhere, the actual danger presents itself rather as a clash between two
opposing ideologies, one led by Russia and Red China and trying to impose the
Communistic extreme partly by military and partly by forceful political means
on a reluctant or at least an infected but not altogether willing Asia and
Europe, and on , the other side a combination of peoples, partly capitalist,
partly moderate socialist who still cling with some attachment to the idea of
liberty, - to freedom of thought and some remnant of the free life of the
individual. In America there seems to be a push, especially in the Latin
peoples, towards a rather intolerant completeness of the Americanisation of the
whole continent and the adjacent islands, a s9rt of extended Monroe Doctrine,
which might create friction with the European Powers still holding possessions
in the northern part of the continent. But this could only generate minor
difficulties and disagreements and not the possibility of any serious
collision, a case perhaps for arbitration or arrangement by the U.N.O., not any
more serious consequence. In Asia a more perilous situation has arisen,
standing sharply across the way to any possibility of a continental unity of
the peoples of this part of the world, in the emergence of Communist China.
This creates' a gigantic bloc which could easily englobe the whole of Northern
Asia in a combination between two enormous Communist Powers, Russia and China,
and would overshadow with a threat of absorption South- Western Asia and Tibet
and might be pushed to overrun all up to the whole frontier of India, menacing
her security and that of , Western Asia with the possibility of an invasion and
an over- running and subjection by penetration or even by overwhelming military
force to an unwanted ideology, political and social institutions and dominance
of this militant mass of Communism whose push might easily prove irresistible.
In any case, the continent would be divided between two huge blocs which might
enter into active mutual opposition and the possibility of a stupendous
world-conflict would arise dwarfing anything previously experienced: the
possibility of any world-union might even with- out any actual outbreak of
hostilities be indefinitely postponed by the incompatibility of interests and
ideologies on a scale
Page-567
which would render their inclusion in a single body
hardly realisable. The possibility of a coming into being of three or four continental
unions, which might subsequently coalesce into a single unity, would then be
very remote and, except after a world- shaking struggle, hardly feasible.
At one time
it was possible to regard as an eventual possibility the extension of Socialism
to all the nations; an inter- national unity could then have been created by
its innate tendencies which turned naturally towards an overcoming of the
dividing force of the nation-idea with its separatism and its turn towards
competitions and rivalries often culminating in open strife; this could have
been regarded as the natural road and could have turned in fact into the
eventual way towards world- union. But, in the first place, Socialism has under
certain stresses proved to be by no means immune against infection by the
dividing national spirit and its international tendency might not survive its
coming into power in separate national States and a resulting inheritance of
competing national interests and necessities: the old spirit might very well survive
in the new socialist bodies. But also there might not be or not for a long time
to come an inevitable tide of the spread of Socialism to all the peoples of the
earth: other forces might arise which would dispute what seemed at one time and
perhaps still seems the most likely outcome of existing world tendencies; the
conflict between Communism and the less extreme socialistic idea which still
respects the principle of liberty, even though a restricted liberty, and the
freedom of conscience, of thought, of personality of the individual, if this
difference perpetuated itself, might create a serious difficulty in the
formation of a World-State. It would not be easy to build a constitution, a
harmonised State-law and practice in which any modicum of genuine freedom for
the individual or any continued existence of him except as a cell in the
working of a rigidly determined automatism of the body of the collectivist
State or a part of a machine would be possible or conceivable. It is not that
the principle of Communism necessitates any such results or that its system
must lead to a termite civilisation or the suppression of the individual; it
could well be, on the contrary, a means at once of the fulfilment of the
individual and the
Page-568
perfect
harmony of a collective being. The already developed systems which go by the name are not really Communism but
constructions of an inordinately rigid State Socialism. But Socialism itself
might well develop away from the Marxist groove and evolve less rigid modes; a
co-operative Socialism, for in- stance, without any bureaucratic rigour of a
coercive administration, of a Police State, might one day come into existence,
but the generalisation of Socialism throughout the world is not under ~ existing circumstances easily
foreseeable, hardly even a predominant possibility: in spite of certain
possibilities or tendencies r created by recent events in the Far
East, a division of the earth between
the two systems, capitalistic and socialistic, seems for the present a more likely
issue. In America the attachment to "
individualism and the capitalistic system of society and a strong antagonism
not only to Communism but to even a moderate Socialism remains complete and one
can foresee little possibility of any abatement in its intensity. The extreme
success of Communism creeping over the
continents of the Old World, which we have had to envisage as a possibility, is
yet, if we consider existing
circumstances and the balance of opposing Powers, highly improbable and, even
if it occurred, some accommodation would still be necessary, unless one of the
two forces gained an overwhelming eventual victory over its opponent. A
successful accommodation would demand the creation of a body in which all questions
of possible dispute could be solved as they arose without any breaking out of open conflict, and this would be a successor of the League of
Nations and the U.N.O. and move in the same direction. As Russia and America,
in spite of the constant opposition of policy and ideology, have avoided so far any step that would make the
preservation of the U.N.O. too difficult or impossible, this third body would
be preserved by the same
necessity or imperative utility of its continued existence. The same forces
would work in the same direction and a creation of an effective world-union would still be possible; in the end
the mass of general needs of the race and its need of self- preservation could
well be relied on to make it inevitable.
There is
nothing then in the development of events since the establishment of the United
Nations Organisation, in the sequel
Page-569
to the great initiation at San Francisco of the
decisive step to- wards the creation of a world-body which might end in the
establishment of a true world-unity, that need discourage us in the expectation
of an ultimate success of this great enterprise. There are dangers and
difficulties, there can be an apprehension of conflicts, even of colossal
conflicts that might jeopardise the future, but total failure need not be
envisaged unless we are disposed to predict the failure of the race. The thesis
we have undertaken to establish of the drive of Nature towards larger
agglomerations and the final establishment of the largest of all and the ultimate
union of the world's peoples still remains unaltered: this is evidently the
line which the future of the human race demands and which conflicts and
perturbations, however immense, may delay, even as they may modify greatly the
forms it now promises to take, but are not likely to prevent; for a general
destruction would be the only alternative destiny of mankind. But such a
destruction, whatever the catastrophic possibilities balancing the almost
certain beneficial results, hardly limitable in their extent, of the recent
discoveries and inventions of Science, has every chance of being as chimerical
as any early expectation of final peace and felicity or a perfected society of
the human peoples. We may rely, if on nothing else, on the evolutionary urge and,
if on no other greater hidden Power, on the manifest working and drift or
intention in the World-Energy we call Nature to carry mankind at least as far
as the necessary next step to be taken, a self-preserving next step: for the
necessity is there, at least some general recognition of it has been achieved
and of the thing to which it must eventually lead the idea has been born and
the body of it is already calling for its creation. We have indicated in this
book the conditions, possibilities, forms which this new creation may take and
those which seem to be most desirable without dogmatising or giving prominence
to personal opinion; an impartial consideration of the forces that work and the
results that are likely to ensue was the object of this study. The rest will
depend on the intellectual and moral capacity of humanity to carry out what is
evidently now the one thing needful.
We conclude
then that in the conditions of the world at present, even taking into
consideration its most disparaging
Page-570
features and dangerous possibilities, there is nothing
that need alter the view we have
taken of the necessity and inevitability of some kind of world-union; the drive
of Nature, the compulsion of circumstances and the present and future need of
mankind make it inevitable. The general conclusions we have arrived at will
stand and the consideration of the modalities and possible forms or lines of
alternative or successive development it may take. The ultimate result must be
the formation of a World-State and the most desirable form of it would be a
federation of free nationalities in which all subjection or forced inequality
and subordination of one to another would have disappeared and, though some
might preserve a greater natural influence, all would have an equal status. A confederacy would give the greatest
freedom to the nations constituting the World-State, but this might give too
much room for fissiparous or centrifugal tendencies to operate; a federal order
would then be the most desirable. All else would be determined by the course of
events and by general agreement or the shape given by the ideas and necessities
that may grow up in the future.
A world-union of this kind would have the greatest chances of long survival or
permanent existence. This is a mutable world and uncertainties and dangers
might assail or trouble for a time; the formed structure might be subjected to
revolutionary tendencies as new ideas and forces emerged and produced their
effect on the general mind of humanity, but the essential step would have been
taken and the future of the race assured or at least the present era overpassed
in which it is threatened and disturbed by unsolved needs and difficulties,
precarious conditions, immense upheavals, huge and sanguinary world-wide
conflicts and the threat of others to come. The ideal of human unity would be
no longer an unfulfilled ideal but an accomplished fact and its preservation
given into the charge of the united human peoples. Its future destiny would lie
on the knees of the gods and, if the gods have a use for the continued
existence of the race, may be left to lie there safe.
THE END
Page-571
Home