But the reader may here begin not unnaturally to feel some impatience with the argument, and to think that he is being carried into a region of ideal imaginings quite out of touch with the realities of blood and hatred and starvation with which we have been actually surrounded at the end of our period.  It is well to be thus sharply reminded of the contrariety of facts, when we are sailing smoothly along on the current of any theory, whether of education or politics, religion or art.  To get right with our objector, to set our sail so that the rocks in the stream may not completely wreck us, we will go back to the point where we were insisting on the obvious truth that the collective resources and capacity of mankind have of late enormously increased.

The material fruits of science are among our most familiar wonders—­the motor-car, the aeroplane, wireless telegraphy.  But it is not sufficiently realized how all these things and the like are dependent upon the co-operation of a multitude of minds, the collective rather than the individual capacity of man.  Men had dreamt for ages of flying, but it was not until the invention of the internal combustion engine that bird-like wings and the mechanical skill of man could be brought together and made effective.  It is Humanity that flies, and not the individual man alone.  The German Daimler, the French Levassor, are the two names which stand out most prominently in this later development of engineering as our own 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,