l states and
holding them together there will still be in many cases the old
national or Imperial government and the old flag, a means of joint
action between associated and kindred municipalities with a common
language and a common history and a common temper and race. The nation
and the national government will be the custodian of the national
literature and the common law, the controller and perhaps the vehicle
of intermunicipal and international trade, and an intermediary between
its municipal governments and that great Congress to which all things
are making, that permanent international Congress which will be
necessary to insure the peace of the world.

That, at least, is my own dream of the order that may emerge from the
confusion of distrusts and tentatives and dangerous absurdities, those
reactions of fear and old traditional attitudes and racial
misconceptions which one speaks of as international relations to-day.
For I do not believe that war is a necessary condition to human
existence and progress, that it is anything more than a confusion we
inherit from the less organized phases of social development. I think
but a little advancement in general intelligence will make it an
impossible thing.

But suppose after all that I am wrong in my estimate in this matter,
and that war will still be possible in a Socialist or partly Socialist
world; suppose that the Socialist State in which I am imagining you to
live is threatened by some military power. Then I don't think the
military power that threatens it need threaten very long. Because
consider, here will be a State organized for collective action as
never a State has been organized before, a State in which every man
and woman will be a willing and conscious citizen saturated with the
spirit of service, in which scientific research will be at a maximum
of vigour and efficiency. What individualist or autocratic militarism
will stand a chance against it? It goes quite without saying from the
essential principles of Socialism that _if war is necessary_ then
every citizen will, as a matter of course, take his part in that war.
It is mere want of intellectual grasp that has made a few
working-class Socialists in England and France oppose military
service. Universal military service, given the need for it, is innate
in the Socialist idea, just as it is blankly antagonistic to the
"private individual" ideas of Eighteenth-Century Liberalism. It is
innate in the Sociali