Hardly less significant for our purpose has been the prominent assertion of the principle of federalism in the formation or growth of national government.  The great example of the United States has been followed by Switzerland and Germany, by Mexico, Argentine, Brazil, and Venezuela, and by the dominions of the British Empire in Canada, Australia, and South Africa.  I must not in this brief survey even touch upon the different forms of federalism.  It must suffice to remark that, whether as a a principle of devolution, as in the case of the proposal of Home Rule for the constituent parts of Great Britain, or as a principle of closer union, as in the proposal for a federated British Empire, federalism is very much alive.  It furnishes a hopeful mode not only for reconciling demands for local autonomy with effective central sovereignty among the provinces or districts of a single national state, but even for harmonizing the claims of separate nationality with those of wider racial, linguistic, and traditional sympathy.  But even more important than these distinctively political movements and events, as a pledge of the coming world-state, is the manifold structure of industrial and commercial internationalism which has been growing during the last few generations at an ever accelerating pace.  The network of material, financial, and intellectual communications, connecting all parts of the developed world, and establishing quick, constant, cheap, and reliable modes of transport for men, goods, money, and information, form the actual basis of what may not improperly be called an economic world-state.  Though much of this machinery, with the great work of international trade and capitalistic co-operation which it assists to perform, lies outside the sphere of politics, there are innumerable points of political contact and pressure.  The realities of foreign policy in every state are more and more concerned with issues of trade, communications, and concessions, and the treaties and other formal arrangements between states are to a growing extent the instruments and the expressions of the internationalism of economic interests.  The imperialism and the colonial policy of each great Power, though composed of various ingredients, are mainly directed by commerce and finance.  Most of the disagreements and conflicts between governments relate to interferences with the free play of economic internationalism by states whose policy is still dominated by foolish and obsolescent rules of a narrowly national economy.  An enlightened interpretation of the needs and interests of modern man demands that all such national economic barriers be removed and replaced by governmental co-operation to secure, by free trade and an open door, for capital and labour the fullest and best development and distribution of the economic resources of the world.