o more than the claim of a man to live
in a parish without observing sanitary precautions or paying rates
because he had an excellent great-grandfather. Against all these old
isolations, these obsolescent particularisms, the forces of mechanical
and scientific development fight, and fight irresistibly; and upon the
general recognition of this conflict, upon the intelligence and courage
with which its inflexible conditions are negotiated, depends very
largely the amount of bloodshed and avoidable misery the coming years
will hold.

The final attainment of this great synthesis, like the social
deliquescence and reconstruction dealt with in the earlier of these
anticipations, has an air of being a process independent of any
collective or conscious will in man, as being the expression of a
greater Will; it is working now, and may work out to its end vastly, and
yet at times almost imperceptibly, as some huge secular movement in
Nature, the raising of a continent, the crumbling of a mountain-chain,
goes on to its appointed culmination. Or one may compare the process to
a net that has surrounded, and that is drawn continually closer and
closer upon, a great and varied multitude of men. We may cherish
animosities, we may declare imperishable distances, we may plot and
counter-plot, make war and "fight to a finish;" the net tightens for all
that.

Already the need of some synthesis at least ampler than existing
national organizations is so apparent in the world, that at least five
spacious movements of coalescence exist to-day; there is the movement
called Anglo-Saxonism, the allied but finally very different movement of
British Imperialism, the Pan-Germanic movement, Pan-Slavism, and the
conception of a great union of the "Latin" peoples. Under the outrageous
treatment of the white peoples an idea of unifying the "Yellow" peoples
is pretty certain to become audibly and visibly operative before many
years. These are all deliberate and justifiable suggestions, and they
all aim to sacrifice minor differences in order to link like to like in
greater matters, and so secure, if not physical predominance in the
world, at least an effective defensive strength for their racial, moral,
customary, or linguistic differences against the aggressions of other
possible coalescences. But these syntheses or other similar synthetic
conceptions, if they do not contrive to establish a rational social
unity by sanely negotiated unions, will be fo