jolted them from their high estate. It
started the universal cataclysm. Centuries in the future some
perspective can be had and the results appraised.

"Meanwhile, we can see the beginning. The world is one. Humanity is one
and must be one. The war, at terrible cost, brought the peoples
together. The League of Nations is a faint and far-away evidence of this
solidarity. It merely points the way but it is something. It is not
academic formulas that will unite the peoples of the world but
intelligence."

Smuts now turned his thought to a subject not without interest for
America, for he said:

"The world has been brought together by the press, by wireless, indeed
by all communication which represents the last word in scientific
development. Yet political institutions cling to old and archaic
traditions. Take the Presidency of the United States. A man waits for
four months before he is inaugurated. The incumbent may work untold
mischief in the meantime. It is all due to the fact that in the days
when the American Constitution was framed the stagecoach and the horse
were the only means of conveyance. The world now travels by aeroplane
and express train, yet the antiquated habits continue.

"So with political parties and peoples, the British Empire included.
They need to be brought abreast of the times. The old pre-war British
Empire, for example, is gone in the sense of colonies or subordinate
nations clustering around one master nation. The British Empire itself
is developing into a real League of Nations,--a group of partner
peoples."

"What of America and the future?" I asked him.

"America is the leaven of the future," answered Smuts. "She is the
life-blood of the League of Nations. Without her the League is stifled.
America will give the League the peace temper. You Americans are a
pacific people, slow to war but terrible and irresistible when you once
get at it. The American is an individualist and in that new and
inevitable internationalism the individual will stand out, the American
pre-eminently."

Throughout this particular experience at _Groote Schuur_ I could not
help marvelling on the contrast that the man and the moment presented.
We walked through a place of surpassing beauty. Ahead brooded the black
mystery of the mountains and all around was a fragrant stillness broken
only by the quick, almost passionate speech of this seer and thinker,
animate with an inspiring ideal of public service, whose mind