icans have heard of the President. I think the
mass of ordinary Americans do really elect their President; and even
where they cannot control him at least they watch him, and in the long
run they judge him. I think, therefore, that the American Constitution
has a real popular institution in the Presidency. But Mr. Wells would
appear to want the American Constitution without the Presidency. If I
understand his words rightly, he seems to want the great democracy
without its popular institution. Alluding to this danger, that the
World State might be a world tyranny, he seems to take tyranny entirely
in the sense of autocracy. He asks whether the President of the World
State would not be rather too tremendous a person, and seems to suggest
in answer that there need not even be any such person. He seems to imply
that the committee controlling the planet could meet almost without any
one in the chair, certainly without any one on the throne. I cannot
imagine anything more manifestly made to be a tyranny than such an
acephalous aristocracy. But while Mr. Wells's decision seems to me
strange, his reason for it seems to me still more extraordinary.

He suggests that no such dictator will be needed in his World State
because 'there will be no wars and no diplomacy.' A World State ought
doubtless to go round the world; and going round the world seems to be a
good training for arguing in a circle. Obviously there will be no wars
and no war-diplomacy if something has the power to prevent them; and we
cannot deduce that the something will not want any power. It is rather
as if somebody, urging that the Germans could only be defeated by
uniting the Allied commands under Marshal Foch, had said that after all
it need not offend the British Generals because the French supremacy
need only be a fiction, the Germans being defeated. We should naturally
say that the German defeat would only be a reality because the Allied
command was not a fiction. So the universal peace would only be a
reality if the World State were not a fiction. And it could not be even
a state if it were not a government. This argument amounts to saying,
first that the World State will be needed because it is strong, and
then that it may safely be weak because it will not be needed.

Internationalism is in any case hostile to democracy. I do not say it is
incompatible with it; but any combination of the two will be a
compromise between the two. The only purely popular go