For precisely similar reasons it seems to me incredible that the two great Central European Powers should ever fall into sustained conflict again with one another.  They, too, will be forced to create some overriding body to prevent so suicidal a possibility.  America too, it may be, will develop some Pan-American equivalent.  Probably the hundred millions of Latin America may achieve a method of unity, and then deal on equal terms with the present United States.  The thing has been ably advocated already in South America.  Whatever appearances of separate sovereignties are kept up after the war, the practical outcome of the struggle is quite likely to be this:  that there will be only three great World Powers left—­the anti-German allies, the allied Central Europeans, the Pan-Americans.  And it is to be noted that, whatever the constituents of these three Powers may be, none of them is likely to be a monarchy.  They may include monarchies, as England includes dukedoms.  But they will be overriding alliances, not overriding rulers.  I leave it to the mathematician to work out exactly how much the chances of conflict are diminished when there are practically only three Powers in the world instead of some scores.  And these new Powers will be in certain respects unlike any existing European “States.”  None of the three Powers will be small or homogeneous enough to serve dynastic ambitions, embody a national or racial Kultur, or fall into the grip of any group of financial enterprises.  They will be more comprehensive, less romantic, and more businesslike altogether.  They will be, to use a phrase suggested a year or so ago, Great States....  And the war threat between the three will be so plain and definite, the issues will be so lifted out of the spheres of merely personal ambition and national feeling, that I do not see why the negotiating means, the standing conference of the three, should not ultimately become the needed nucleus of the World State for which at present we search the world in vain.

There are more ways than one to the World State, and this second possibility of a post-war conference and a conference of the Allies, growing almost unawares into a pacific organisation of the world, since it goes on directly from existing institutions, since it has none of the quality of a clean break with the past which the idea of an immediate World State and Pax Mundi involves, and more particularly since it neither abolishes nor has in it anything to shock fundamentally the princes, the diplomatists, the lawyers, the statesmen and politicians, the nationalists and suspicious people, since it gives them years in which to change and die out and reappear in new forms, and since at the same time it will command the support of every intelligent human being who gets his mind clear enough from his circumstances to understand its import, is a far more credible hope than the hope of anything coming de novo out of Hague Foundations or the manifest logic of the war.