only railways make possible. France and Britain may perish
in the next two centuries or they may persist, but there can be no doubt
that two centuries ahead Russia and the United States will be two of the
greatest masses of fairly homogeneous population on the globe.

There are no countries with whom the people of the United States are so
likely to develop sympathy and a sense of common values and common
interests as with these three, unless it be with the Scandinavian
peoples. The Scandinavian peoples have developed a tendency to an
extra-European outlook, to look west and east rather than southwardly,
to be pacifist and progressive in a manner essentially American. From
any close sympathy with Germany the Americans are cut off at present by
the Hohenzollerns and the system of ideas that the Hohenzollerns have
imposed upon German thought. So long as the Germans cling to the tawdry
tradition of the Empire, so long as they profess militarism, so long as
they keep up their ridiculous belief in some strange racial superiority
to the rest of mankind, it is absurd to expect any co-operative feeling
between them and any other great people.

The American tradition is based upon the casting off of a Germanic
monarchy; it is its cardinal idea. These sturdy Republicans did not
fling out the Hanoverians and their Hessian troops to prepare the path
of glory for Potsdam. But except for the gash caused by the Teutonic
monarchy, there runs round the whole world a north temperate and
sub-arctic zone of peoples, generally similar in complexion, physical
circumstances, and intellectual and moral quality, having enormous
undeveloped natural resources, and a common interest in keeping the
peace while these natural resources are developed, having also a common
interest in maintaining the integrity of China and preventing her
development into a military power; it is a zone with the clearest
prospect of a vast increase in its already enormous population, and it
speaks in the main one or other of three languages, either French,
Russian, or English. I believe that natural sympathy will march with the
obvious possibilities of the situation in bringing the American mind to
the realisation of this band of common interests and of its
compatibility with the older idea of an American continent protected by
a Monroe doctrine from any possibility of aggression from the monarchies
of the old world.

As the old conception of isolation fades and the Am