Section 1

In this chapter I propose to speculate a little about the future development of these four great States, whose destinies are likely to be much more closely interwoven than their past histories have been.  I believe that the stars in their courses tend to draw these States together into a dominant peace alliance, maintaining the peace of the world.  There may be other stars in that constellation, Italy, Japan, a confederated Latin America, for example; I do not propose to deal with that possibility now, but only to dwell upon the development of understandings and common aims between France, Russia, and the English-speaking States.

They have all shared one common experience during the last two years; they have had an enormous loss of self-sufficiency.  This has been particularly the case with the United States of America.  At the beginning of this war, the United States were still possessed by the glorious illusion that they were aloof from general international politics, that they needed no allies and need fear no enemies, that they constituted a sort of asylum from war and all the bitter stresses and hostilities of the old world.  Themselves secure, they could intervene with grim resolution to protect their citizens all over the world.  Had they not bombarded Algiers?...

I remember that soon after the outbreak of the war I lunched at the Savoy Hotel in London when it was crammed with Americans suddenly swept out of Europe by the storm.  My host happened to be a man of some diplomatic standing, and several of them came and talked to him.  They were full of these old-world ideas of American immunity.  Their indignation was comical even at the time.  Some of them had been hustled; some had lost their luggage in Germany.  When, they asked, was it to be returned to them?  Some seemed to be under the impression that, war or no war, an American tourist had a perfect right to travel about in the Vosges or up and down the Rhine just as he thought fit.  They thought he had just to wave a little American flag, and the referee would blow a whistle and hold up the battle until he had got by safely.  One family had actually been careering about in a cart—­their automobile seized—­between the closing lines of French and Germans, brightly unaware of the disrespect of bursting shells for American nationality....  Since those days the American nation has lived politically a hundred years.

The people of the United States have shed their delusion that there is an Eastern and a Western hemisphere, and that nothing can ever pass between them but immigrants and tourists and trade, and realised that this world is one round globe that gets smaller and smaller every decade if you measure it by day’s journeys.  They are only going over the lesson the British have learnt in the last score or so of years.  This is one world and bayonets are a crop that spreads.  Let them gather and seed, it matters not how far from