ion of laws and coinage
and measures, and the mitigation of monopolies and special claims, by
which the final peace of the world may be assured for ever. Such a
synthesis, at any rate, of the peoples now using the English tongue, I
regard not only as a possible, but as a probable, thing. The positive
obstacles to its achievement, great though they are, are yet trivial in
comparison with the obstructions to that lesser European synthesis we
have ventured to forecast. The greater obstacle is negative, it lies in
the want of stimulus, in the lax prosperity of most of the constituent
states of such a union. But such a stimulus, the renascence of Eastern
Asia, or a great German fleet upon the ocean, may presently supply.

Now, all these three great coalescences, this shrivelling up and
vanishing of boundary lines, will be the outward and visible
accompaniment of that inward and social reorganization which it is the
main object of these Anticipations to display. I have sought to show
that in peace and war alike a process has been and is at work, a process
with all the inevitableness and all the patience of a natural force,
whereby the great swollen, shapeless, hypertrophied social mass of
to-day must give birth at last to a naturally and informally organized,
educated class, an unprecedented sort of people, a New Republic
dominating the world. It will be none of our ostensible governments that
will effect this great clearing up; it will be the mass of power and
intelligence altogether outside the official state systems of to-day
that will make this great clearance, a new social Hercules that will
strangle the serpents of war and national animosity in his cradle.

Now, the more one descends from the open uplands of wide generalization
to the parallel jungle of particulars, the more dangerous does the road
of prophesying become, yet nevertheless there may be some possibility of
speculating how, in the case of the English-speaking synthesis at least,
this effective New Republic may begin visibly to shape itself out and
appear. It will appear first, I believe, as a conscious organization of
intelligent and quite possibly in some cases wealthy men, as a movement
having distinct social and political aims, confessedly ignoring most of
the existing apparatus of political control, or using it only as an
incidental implement in the attainment of these aims. It will be very
loosely organized in its earlier stages, a mere movement of a n