wth of national
government. The great example of the United States has been followed by
Switzerland and Germany, by Mexico, Argentine, Brazil, and Venezuela,
and by the dominions of the British Empire in Canada, Australia, and
South Africa. I must not in this brief survey even touch upon the
different forms of federalism. It must suffice to remark that, whether
as a a principle of devolution, as in the case of the proposal of Home
Rule for the constituent parts of Great Britain, or as a principle of
closer union, as in the proposal for a federated British Empire,
federalism is very much alive. It furnishes a hopeful mode not only for
reconciling demands for local autonomy with effective central
sovereignty among the provinces or districts of a single national state,
but even for harmonizing the claims of separate nationality with those
of wider racial, linguistic, and traditional sympathy. But even more
important than these distinctively political movements and events, as a
pledge of the coming world-state, is the manifold structure of
industrial and commercial internationalism which has been growing during
the last few generations at an ever accelerating pace. The network of
material, financial, and intellectual communications, connecting all
parts of the developed world, and establishing quick, constant, cheap,
and reliable modes of transport for men, goods, money, and information,
form the actual basis of what may not improperly be called an economic
world-state. Though much of this machinery, with the great work of
international trade and capitalistic co-operation which it assists to
perform, lies outside the sphere of politics, there are innumerable
points of political contact and pressure. The realities of foreign
policy in every state are more and more concerned with issues of trade,
communications, and concessions, and the treaties and other formal
arrangements between states are to a growing extent the instruments and
the expressions of the internationalism of economic interests. The
imperialism and the colonial policy of each great Power, though composed
of various ingredients, are mainly directed by commerce and finance.
Most of the disagreements and conflicts between governments relate to
interferences with the free play of economic internationalism by states
whose policy is still dominated by foolish and obsolescent rules of a
narrowly national economy. An enlightened interpretation of the needs
and interest