can unification are
not so certain that we can apply them to a world unification. The doubt
could be expressed in a great many ways and by a great many examples.
For that matter, it is already being felt that the supremacy of the
Middle West in politics is inflicting upon other localities exactly the
sort of local injustice that turns provinces into nations struggling to
be free. It has already inflicted what amounts to religious persecution,
or the imposition of an alien morality, on the wine-growing civilisation
of California. In a word, the American system is a good one as
governments go; but it is too large, and the world will not be improved
by making it larger. And for this reason alone I should reject this
second method of uniting England and America; which is not only
Americanising England, but Americanising everything else.

But the essential reason is that a type of culture came out on top in
America and England in the nineteenth century, which cannot and would
not be tolerated on top of the world. To unite all the systems at the
top, without improving and simplifying their social organisation below,
would be to tie all the tops of the trees together where they rise
above a dense and poisonous jungle, and make the jungle darker than
before. To create such a cosmopolitan political platform would be to
build a roof above our own heads to shut out the sunlight, on which only
usurers and conspirators clad in gold could walk about in the sun. This
is no moment when industrial intellectualism can inflict such an
artificial oppression upon the world. Industrialism itself is coming to
see dark days, and its future is very doubtful. It is split from end to
end with strikes and struggles for economic life, in which the poor not
only plead that they are starving, but even the rich can only plead that
they are bankrupt. The peasantries are growing not only more prosperous
but more politically effective; the Russian moujik has held up the
Bolshevist Government of Moscow and Petersburg; a huge concession has
been made by England to Ireland; the League of Nations has decided for
Poland against Prussia. It is not certain that industrialism will not
wither even in its own field; it is certain that its intellectual ideas
will not be allowed to cover every field; and this sort of cosmopolitan
culture is one of its ideas. Industrialism itself may perish; or on the
other hand industrialism itself may survive, by some searching and