To
surmount them on a great scale will soon become the political problem of
Europe; and it is America which has set the example and indicated
the method.
Thus we may foresee in general outline how, through the gradual
concentration of the preponderance of physical power into the hands of
the most pacific communities, the wretched business of warfare must
finally become obsolete all over the globe. The element of distance is
now fast becoming eliminated from political problems, and the history of
human progress politically will continue in the future to be what it has
been in the past,--the history of the successive union of groups of men
into larger and more complex aggregates. As this process goes on, it may
after many more ages of political experience become apparent that there
is really no reason, in the nature of things, why the whole of mankind
should not constitute politically one huge federation,--each little
group managing its local affairs in entire independence, but relegating
all questions of international interest to the decision of one central
tribunal supported by the public opinion of the entire human race. I
believe that the time will come when such a state of things will exist
upon the earth, when it will be possible (with our friends of the Paris
dinner-party) to speak of the UNITED STATES as stretching from pole to
pole,--or, with Tennyson, to celebrate the "parliament of man and the
federation of the world.
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