civilized authority within it to stop them through its
police. To shut off a backward people from all contact with
the outside world by a kind of blockade is not only
unpracticable, but is artificially to deny them the chances
of education and progress. The establishment of a genuine
government by a people strong enough and liberal enough to
ensure freedom under the law and justice for all is the only
solution.... They must undertake this duty, not from any
pride of dominion, or because they wish to exploit their
resources, but in order to protect them alike from
oppression and corruption, by strict laws and strict
administration, which shall bind the foreigner as well as
the native, and then they must gradually develop, by
education and example, the capacity in the natives to manage
their own affairs.

Thus we see that the progress in knowledge and in the control of their
environment made by the civilized peoples has, in fact and inevitably,
led to their leadership in government also, and given them the
predominant voice in laying down the lines along which the common life
of mankind is to develop. If we are to look for the mainspring of the
world's activities, for the place where its new ideas are thought out,
its policies framed, its aspirations cast into practical shape, we must
not seek it in the forests of Africa or in the interior of China, but in
those busy regions of the earth's surface where the knowledge, the
industries, and all the various organizations of government and control
find their home. Because organization is embodied knowledge, and because
knowledge is power, it is the Great Powers, as we truly name them,[58]
who are predominantly responsible for the government of the world and
for the future of the common life of mankind.

In the exercise of this control the world has already, in many respects,
become a single organism. The conquest of distance in the fifteenth
century was the beginning of a process which led, slowly but inevitably,
to the widening of the boundaries of government. Two discoveries made
about the same time accentuated the same tendency. By the invention of
gunpowder the people of Europe were given an overwhelming military
superiority over the dwellers in other continents. By the invention of
printing, knowledge was internationalized for all who had the training
to use it. Books are the tools of the brain-worke