rced to fight for physical
predominance in the world. The whole trend of forces in the world is
against the preservation of _local_ social systems however greatly and
spaciously conceived. Yet it is quite possible that several or all of
the cultures that will arise out of the development of these
Pan-this-and-that movements may in many of their features survive, as
the culture of the Jews has survived, political obliteration, and may
disseminate themselves, as the Jewish system has disseminated itself,
over the whole world-city. Unity by no means involves homogeneity. The
greater the social organism the more complex and varied its parts, the
more intricate and varied the interplay of culture and breed and
character within it.

It is doubtful if either the Latin or the Pan-Slavic idea contains the
promise of any great political unification. The elements of the Latin
synthesis are dispersed in South and Central America and about the
Mediterranean basin in a way that offers no prospect of an economic
unity between them. The best elements of the French people lie in the
western portion of what must become the greatest urban region of the Old
World, the Rhine-Netherlandish region; the interests of North Italy draw
that region away from the Italy of Rome and the South towards the Swiss
and South Germany, and the Spanish and Portuguese speaking halfbreeds
of South America have not only their own coalescences to arrange, but
they lie already under the political tutelage of the United States.
Nowhere except in France and North Italy is there any prospect of such
an intellectual and educational evolution as is necessary before a great
scheme of unification can begin to take effect. And the difficulties in
the way of the pan-Slavic dream are far graver. Its realization is
enormously hampered by the division of its languages, and the fact that
in the Bohemian language, in Polish and in Russian, there exist distinct
literatures, almost equally splendid in achievement, but equally
insufficient in quantity and range to establish a claim to replace all
other Slavonic dialects. Russia, which should form the central mass of
this synthesis, stagnates, relatively to the Western states, under the
rule of reactionary intelligences; it does not develop, and does not
seem likely to develop, the merest beginnings of that great educated
middle class, with which the future so enormously rests. The Russia of
to-day is indeed very little more than