together made a nation of
respectable power. Even the wonderful progress we have made in a century
has not essentially changed this relation of things. Our greatest state,
New York, taken singly, is about the equivalent of Belgium; our weakest
state, Nevada, would scarcely be a match for tha county of Dorset; yet
the United States, taken together, are probably at this moment the
strongest nation in the world.

Now a century hence, with a population of six hundred millions in the
United States, and a hundred and fifty millions in Australia and New
Zealand, to say nothing of the increase of power in other parts of the
English-speaking world, the relative weights will be very different from
what they were in 1788. The population of Europe will not increase in
anything like the same proportion, and a very considerable part of the
increase will be transferred by emigration to the English-speaking world
outside of Europe. By the end of the twentieth century such nations as
France and Germany can only claim such a relative position in the
political world as Holland and Switzerland now occupy. Their greatness
in thought and scholarship, in industrial and aesthetic art, will
doubtless continue unabated. But their political weights will severally
have come to be insignificant; and as we now look back, with historic
curiosity, to the days when Holland was navally and commercially the
rival of England, so people will then need to be reminded that there was
actually once a time when little France was the most powerful nation on
the earth. It will then become as desirable for the states of Europe to
enter into a federal union as it was for the states of North America a
century ago.

It is only by thus adopting the lesson of federalism that Europe can do
away with the chances of useless warfare which remain so long as its
different states own no allegiance to any common authority. War, as we
have seen, is with barbarous races both a necessity and a favourite
occupation. As long as civilization comes into contact with barbarism,
it remains a too frequent necessity. But as between civilized and
Christian nations it is a wretched absurdity. One sympathizes keenly
with wars such as that which Russia has lately concluded, for setting
free a kindred race endowed with capacity for progress, and for humbling
the worthless barbarian who during four centuries has wrought such
incalculable damage to the European world. But a sanguinary struggle