vernment is local,
and founded on local knowledge. The citizens can rule the city because
they know the city; but it will always be an exceptional sort of citizen
who has or claims the right to rule over ten cities, and these remote
and altogether alien cities. All Irishmen may know roughly the same sort
of things about Ireland; but it is absurd to say they all know the same
things about Iceland, when they may include a scholar steeped in
Icelandic sagas or a sailor who has been to Iceland. To make all
politics cosmopolitan is to create an aristocracy of globe-trotters. If
your political outlook really takes in the Cannibal Islands, you depend
of necessity upon a superior and picked minority of the people who have
been to the Cannibal Islands; or rather of the still smaller and more
select minority who have come back.

Given this difficulty about quite direct democracy over large areas, I
think the nearest thing to democracy is despotism. At any rate I think
it is some sort of more or less independent monarchy, such as Andrew
Jackson created in America. And I believe it is true to say that the two
men whom the modern world really and almost reluctantly regards with
impersonal respect, as clothed by their office with something historic
and honourable, are the Pope and the President of the United States.

But to admire the United States as the United States is one thing. To
admire them as the World State is quite another. The attempt of Mr.
Wells to make America a sort of model for the federation of all the free
nations of the earth, though it is international in intention, is really
as narrowly national, in the bad sense, as the desire of Mr. Kipling to
cover the world with British Imperialism, or of Professor Treitschke to
cover it with Prussian Pan-Germanism. Not being schoolboys, we no longer
believe that everything can be settled by painting the map red. Nor do I
believe it can be done by painting it blue with white spots, even if
they are called stars. The insufficiency of British Imperialism does not
lie in the fact that it has always been applied by force of arms. As a
matter of fact, it has not. It has been effected largely by commerce, by
colonisation of comparatively empty places, by geographical discovery
and diplomatic bargain. Whether it be regarded as praise or blame, it is
certainly the truth that among all the things that have called
themselves empires, the British has been perhaps the least purely
milit