n the hour for unfolding them has struck.
In a word, when opportunity suddenly appears like the bridegroom of
the Gospel, the German will be found waiting, with girded loins and
trimmed lamp. He has distributed the parts of each nation in the
international drama, and if the roles cannot be taken over to-morrow,
he will wait until the day after.

[144] Cf. Friedrich Naumann, _Mitteleuropa_.

The world is henceforth no longer a field of labour for the
individual. Co-operation is the open sesame to the economic life of
the future. And co-operation means organization. Organization, then,
is the Alpha and Omega of the new era. That is the mysterious radium
which has enabled a single race to assail and hold its own against a
group of powers whose territory and population are many times greater
than its own. That race has demonstrated the quasi-omnipotence of
organized labour, and has thereby itself become almost omnipotent. On
the success or failure of its adversaries to create a like force and
rise to the same height depends the future of Europe and the British
Empire. One of the first corollaries of the new principle is the
enlargement of all great units, including political communities.
Germany and Austria, therefore, are bound, if not precisely to
coalesce in one whole, at least to co-operate and combine for their
common ends against common competitors, and thus to form the nucleus
of that federal state which is, our enemies hope, one day to be
commensurate with the continent of Europe.

At present, however satisfactory the military situation may be said to
be, the general outlook is far from bright. Our aims are impoverished,
our creative energies are clogged by prejudice, our political vision
is narrowed by party goals, and the forces inherent in the nation
which should be employed in readjusting its life to the new conditions
are being frittered away in abortive efforts to neutralize dissolvent
ideas that are sapping only those organs of our social and political
system which are already vicious or decayed. The waste of the empire's
resources has no parallel in history. Supreme confusion marks our
internal condition. Our leaders have done nothing to familiarize the
nation with the dangers that threaten it, the means by which they
should be met, or with the social and political ideas which are
destined to shape and sway the new order of things which is already
close at hand.

In the absence of constructive leade