f a great Low German synthesis pass utterly out of being.
(In those days Low Germany stretched to Arras and Douay.) They
positively dragged the English into the number of their enemies. And
to-day the Germans invade the sea with a threat and intention that will
certainly create a countervailing American navy, fundamentally modify
the policy of Great Britain, such as it is, and very possibly go far to
effect the synthesis of the English-speaking peoples.

So involved, I do not see that the existing Germanic synthesis is likely
to prevail in the close economic unity, the urban region that will arise
in Western Europe. I imagine that the German Empire--that is, the
organized expression of German aggression to-day--will be either
shattered or weakened to the pitch of great compromises by a series of
wars by land and sea; it will be forced to develop the autonomy of its
rational middle class in the struggles that will render these
compromises possible, and it will be finally not Imperial German ideas,
but central European ideas possibly more akin to Swiss conceptions, a
civilized republicanism finding its clearest expression in the French
language, that will be established upon a bilingual basis throughout
Western Europe, and increasingly predominant over the whole European
mainland and the Mediterranean basin, as the twentieth century closes.
The splendid dream of a Federal Europe, which opened the nineteenth
century for France, may perhaps, after all, come to something like
realization at the opening of the twenty-first. But just how long these
things take, just how easily or violently they are brought about,
depends, after all, entirely upon the rise in general intelligence in
Europe. An ignorant, a merely trained or a merely cultured people, will
not understand these coalescences, will fondle old animosities and stage
hatreds, and for such a people there must needs be disaster, forcible
conformities and war. Europe will have her Irelands as well as her
Scotlands, her Irelands of unforgettable wrongs, kicking, squalling,
bawling most desolatingly, for nothing that any one can understand.
There will be great scope for the shareholding dilettanti, great
opportunities for literary quacks, in "national" movements, language
leagues, picturesque plotting, and the invention of such "national"
costumes as the world has never seen. The cry of the little nations
will go up to heaven, asserting the inalienable right of all little
na