Watt and Stephenson stand in the history of the
steam-engine. Wireless telegraphy offers a similar story. Faraday,
Maxwell, Hertz, Lodge, Marconi; the names are international. In 1913,
before ever the League of Nations had been planned, Lord Bryce was
telling an International Congress in London that 'the world is becoming
one in an altogether new sense.... More than four centuries ago the
discovery of America marked the first step in the process by which the
European races have gained dominion over nearly the whole earth. As the
earth has been narrowed through the new forces science has placed at our
disposal, the movements of politics, of economics, and of thought, in
each of its regions, become more closely interwoven. Whatever happens in
any part of the globe has now a significance for every other part. World
History is tending to become one History.'

The war, tragically as it has shaken this growing oneness of mankind,
has not destroyed it. In some ways it has even stimulated growth.
Against a background of blood and fire the League of Nations has been
forced into actual being, and the long isolation alike of the ancient
East and the youthful West has been broken down at last. Within the
State, again, even allowing for all setbacks, the efforts at social
solidarity have on the whole been strengthened, not weakened. This war
his been an accelerator of, not, as the Napoleonic, a brake upon,
reform. Many reforms, especially in England, which had been long
discussed and partly attempted before the war, were carried out with
dispatch at its close. This was the case with education, with the
franchise and with measures affecting the health, the housing, and the
industrial conditions of the people. And there is now a greater and
stronger demand among us for a further advance, above all for making
every citizen not merely or even primarily a voting unit, but a
consciously active, consciously co-operative, member of the community.

Comte, who died in 1857 just before our period, was perhaps the clearest
voice in Europe to herald both movements: the advance to international
unity, and social reform within the State. It was he who, under the
title of _Western Republic_, proclaimed the existence of a real unity of
nations, whose business it was to strengthen themselves as a moral
force, to act as trustees for the weaker people and lead the world. It
was he who, in the phrase 'incorporation of the proletariate', summed up
all t