by entering into a federal union was their keen sense of their weakness when taken severally.  In physical strength such a state as Massachusetts at that time amounted to little more than Hamburg or Bremen; but the thirteen states taken together made a nation of respectable power.  Even the wonderful progress we have made in a century has not essentially changed this relation of things.  Our greatest state, New York, taken singly, is about the equivalent of Belgium; our weakest state, Nevada, would scarcely be a match for tha county of Dorset; yet the United States, taken together, are probably at this moment the strongest nation in the world.

Now a century hence, with a population of six hundred millions in the United States, and a hundred and fifty millions in Australia and New Zealand, to say nothing of the increase of power in other parts of the English-speaking world, the relative weights will be very different from what they were in 1788.  The population of Europe will not increase in anything like the same proportion, and a very considerable part of the increase will be transferred by emigration to the English-speaking world outside of Europe.  By the end of the twentieth century such nations as France and Germany can only claim such a relative position in the political world as Holland and Switzerland now occupy.  Their greatness in thought and scholarship, in industrial and aesthetic art, will doubtless continue unabated.  But their political weights will severally have come to be insignificant; and as we now look back, with historic curiosity, to the days when Holland was navally and commercially the rival of England, so people will then need to be reminded that there was actually once a time when little France was the most powerful nation on the earth.  It will then become as desirable for the states of Europe to enter into a federal union as it was for the states of North America a century ago.

It is only by thus adopting the lesson of federalism that Europe can do away with the chances of useless warfare which remain so long as its different states own no allegiance to any common authority.  War, as we have seen, is with barbarous races both a necessity and a favourite occupation.  As long as civilization comes into contact with barbarism, it remains a too frequent necessity.  But as between civilized and Christian nations it is a wretched absurdity.  One sympathizes keenly with wars such as that which Russia has lately concluded, for setting free a kindred race endowed with capacity for progress, and for humbling the worthless barbarian who during four centuries has wrought such incalculable damage to the European world.  But a sanguinary struggle for the Rhine frontier, between two civilized Christian nations who have each enough work to do in ithe world without engaging in such a strife as this, will, I am sure, be by and by condemned by the general opinion of mankind.  Such questions will have to be settled by discussion