waved back from
perfection as from a pestilence. But my business is not with the
scientific dangers which alarm Mr. Wells, but with the remedy he
proposes for them; or rather with the relation of that remedy to the
foundation and the future of America. Now it is not too much to say that
Mr. Wells finds his model in America. The World State is to be the
United States of the World. He answers almost all objections to the
practicability of such a peace among states, by pointing out that the
American States have such a peace, and by adding, truly enough, that
another turn of history might easily have seen them broken up by war.
The pattern of the World State is to be found in the New World.

Oddly enough, as it seems to me, he proposes almost cosmic conquests for
the American Constitution, while leaving out the most successful thing
in that Constitution. The point appeared in answer to a question which
many, like myself, must have put in this matter; the question of
despotism and democracy. I cannot understand any democrat not seeing the
danger of so distant and indirect a system of government. It is hard
enough anywhere to get representatives to represent. It is hard enough
to get a little town council to fulfil the wishes of a little town,
even when the townsmen meet the town councillors every day in the
street, and could kick them down the street if they liked. What the same
town councillors would be like if they were ruling all their
fellow-creatures from the North Pole or the New Jerusalem, is a vision
of Oriental despotism beyond the towering fancies of Tamberlane. This
difficulty in all representative government is felt everywhere, and not
least in America. But I think that if there is one truth apparent in
such a choice of evils, it is that monarchy is at least better than
oligarchy; and that where we have to act on a large scale, the most
genuine popularity can gather round a particular person like a Pope or a
President of the United States, or even a dictator like Caesar or
Napoleon, rather than round a more or less corrupt committee which can
only be defined as an obscure oligarchy. And in that sense any oligarchy
is obscure. For people to continue to trust twenty-seven men it is
necessary, as a preliminary formality, that people should have heard of
them. And there are no twenty-seven men of whom everybody has heard as
everybody in France had heard of Napoleon, as all Catholics have heard
of the Pope or all Amer