tly how much the chances of conflict are
diminished when there are practically only three Powers in the world
instead of some scores. And these new Powers will be in certain respects
unlike any existing European "States." None of the three Powers will be
small or homogeneous enough to serve dynastic ambitions, embody a
national or racial Kultur, or fall into the grip of any group of
financial enterprises. They will be more comprehensive, less romantic,
and more businesslike altogether. They will be, to use a phrase
suggested a year or so ago, Great States.... And the war threat between
the three will be so plain and definite, the issues will be so lifted
out of the spheres of merely personal ambition and national feeling,
that I do not see why the negotiating means, the standing conference of
the three, should not ultimately become the needed nucleus of the World
State for which at present we search the world in vain.

There are more ways than one to the World State, and this second
possibility of a post-war conference and a conference of the Allies,
growing almost unawares into a pacific organisation of the world, since
it goes on directly from existing institutions, since it has none of the
quality of a clean break with the past which the idea of an immediate
World State and Pax Mundi involves, and more particularly since it
neither abolishes nor has in it anything to shock fundamentally the
princes, the diplomatists, the lawyers, the statesmen and politicians,
the nationalists and suspicious people, since it gives them years in
which to change and die out and reappear in new forms, and since at the
same time it will command the support of every intelligent human being
who gets his mind clear enough from his circumstances to understand its
import, is a far more credible hope than the hope of anything coming _de
novo_ out of Hague Foundations or the manifest logic of the war.

But, of course, there weighs against these hopes the possibility that
the Allied Powers are too various in their nature, too biased, too
feeble intellectually and imaginatively, to hold together and maintain
any institution for co-operation. The British Press may be too silly not
to foster irritation and suspicion; we may get Carsonism on a larger
scale trading on the resuscitation of dying hatreds; the British and
Russian diplomatists may play annoying tricks upon one another by sheer
force of habit. There may be many troubles of that sort. Even