the more or less. Even in the eighteenth century the process
of real unification had effected so little, that not one of the larger
kingdoms of Europe escaped a civil war--not a class war, but a really
_internal_ war--between one part of itself and another, in that hundred
years. In spite of Rome's few centuries of unstable empire, internal
wars, a perpetual struggle against finally triumphant disruption seemed
to be the unavoidable destiny of every power that attempted to rule over
a larger radius than at most a hundred miles.

So evident was this that many educated English persons thought then, and
many who are not in the habit of analyzing operating causes, still think
to-day, that the wide diffusion of the English-speaking people is a mere
preliminary to their political, social, and linguistic disruption--the
eighteenth-century breach with the United States is made a precedent of,
and the unification that followed the war of Union and the growing
unification of Canada is overlooked--that linguistic differences,
differences of custom, costume, prejudice, and the like, will finally
make the Australian, the Canadian of English blood, the Virginian, and
the English Africander, as incomprehensible and unsympathetic one to
another as Spaniard and Englishman or Frenchman and German are now. On
such a supposition all our current Imperialism is the most foolish
defiance of the inevitable, the maddest waste of blood, treasure, and
emotion that man ever made. So, indeed, it might be--so, indeed, I
certainly think it would be--if it were not that the epoch of post-road
and sailing-ship is at an end. We are in the beginning of a new time,
with such forces of organization and unification at work in mechanical
traction, in the telephone and telegraph, in a whole wonderland of
novel, space-destroying appliances, and in the correlated inevitable
advance in practical education, as the world has never felt before.

The operation of these unifying forces is already to be very distinctly
traced in the check, the arrest indeed, of any further differentiation
in existing tongues, even in the most widely spread. In fact, it is more
than an arrest even, the forces of differentiation have been driven back
and an actual process of assimilation has set in. In England at the
commencement of the nineteenth century the common man of Somerset and
the common man of Yorkshire, the Sussex peasant, the Caithness cottar
and the common Ulsterman, would