Aristotle and the great tradition of civilised political thought, “there men begin.  There, where the State ends, look thither, my brothers!  Do you not see the rainbow and the bridge to the Overman?” Ever since organised society began, the standards of the individual, the ideals of priest and teacher, the doctrines of religion and morality, have outstripped the practice of statesmanship.  For the polestar of the statesman has not been love, but law.  His not the task of exhorting men to love one another, but the simpler duty of enforcing the law, “Thou shalt not kill.”  And in that simple, strenuous, necessary task statesmen and political thinkers have watched the slow extension of the power of Law, from the family to the tribe, from the tribe to the city, from the city to the nation, from the nation to the Commonwealth.  When will Law take its next extension?  When will warfare, which is murder between individuals and “rebellion” between groups of citizens, be equally preventable between nations by the common law of the world?

[Footnote 1:  Also sprach Zarathustra, Speech xi. (end).]

The answer is simple.  When the world has a common will, and has created a common government to express and enforce that will.

In the sphere of science and invention, of industry and economics, as Norman Angell and others have taught us, the world is already one Great Society.  For the merchant, the banker, and the stockbroker political frontiers have been broken down.  Trade and industry respond to the reactions of a single, world-wide, nervous system.  Shocks and panics pass as freely as airmen over borders and custom-houses.  And not “big business” only, but the humblest citizen, in his search for a livelihood, finds himself caught in the meshes of the same world-wide network.  “The widow who takes in washing,” says Graham Wallas,[1] in his deep and searching analysis of our contemporary life, “fails or succeeds according to her skill in choosing starch or soda or a wringing machine under the influence of half a dozen competing world-schemes of advertisement....  The English factory girl who is urged to join her Union, the tired old Scotch gatekeeper with a few pounds to invest, the Galician peasant when the emigration agent calls, the artisan in a French provincial town whose industry is threatened by a new invention, all know that unless they find their way among world-wide facts, which only reach them through misleading words, they will be crushed.”  The Industrial Revolution of the past century, steam-power and electricity, the railway and the telegraph, have knit mankind together, and made the world one place.

[Footnote 1:  The Great Society (1914), p. 4.]