tions to sit down firmly in the middle of the high-road, in the midst
of the thickening traffic, and with all their dear little toys about
them, play and play--just as they used to play before the road had
come....

And while the great states of the continent of Europe are hammering down
their obstructions of language and national tradition or raising the
educational level above them until a working unity is possible, and
while the reconstruction of Eastern Asia--whether that be under Russian,
Japanese, English, or native Chinese direction--struggles towards
attainment, will there also be a great synthesis of the English-speaking
peoples going on? I am inclined to believe that there will be such a
synthesis, and that the head and centre of the new unity will be the
great urban region that is developing between Chicago and the Atlantic,
and which will lie mainly, but not entirely, south of the St. Lawrence.
Inevitably, I think, that region must become the intellectual,
political, and industrial centre of any permanent unification of the
English-speaking states. There will, I believe, develop about that
centre a great federation of white English-speaking peoples, a
federation having America north of Mexico as its central mass (a
federation that may conceivably include Scandinavia) and its federal
government will sustain a common fleet, and protect or dominate or
actually administer most or all of the non-white states of the present
British Empire, and in addition much of the South and Middle Pacific,
the East and West Indies, the rest of America, and the larger part of
black Africa. Quite apart from the dominated races, such an
English-speaking state should have by the century-end a practically
homogeneous citizenship of at least a hundred million sound-bodied and
educated and capable _men_. It should be the first of the three powers
of the world, and it should face the organizing syntheses of Europe and
Eastern Asia with an intelligent sympathy. By the year 2000 all its
common citizens should certainly be in touch with the thought of
Continental Europe through the medium of French; its English language
should be already rooting firmly through all the world beyond its
confines, and its statesmanship should be preparing openly and surely,
and discussing calmly with the public mind of the European, and probably
of the Yellow state, the possible coalescences and conventions, the
obliteration of custom-houses, the homologizat