So far I have been stating a situation and reviewing certain possibilities.  In the past half-century the United States has been developing a great system of universities and a continental production of literature and discussion to supplement the limited Press and the New England literature of the earlier phase of the American process.  It is one of the most interesting speculations in the world to everyone how far this new organisation of the American mind is capable of grasping the stupendous opportunities and appeals of the present time.  The war and the great occasions that must follow the war will tax the mind and the intellectual and moral forces of the Pledged Allies enormously.  How far is this new but very great and growing system of thought and learning in the United States capable of that propaganda of ideas and language, that progressive expression of a developing ideal of community, that in countries so spontaneous, so chaotic or democratic as the United States and the Pledged Allies must necessarily take the place of the organised authoritative Kultur of the Teutonic type of state?

As an undisguisedly patriotic Englishman, I would like to see the lead in this intellectual synthesis of the nations, that must be achieved if wars are to cease, undertaken by Great Britain.  But I am bound to confess that in Great Britain I see neither the imaginative courage of France nor the brisk enterprise of the Americans.  I see this matter as a question of peace and civilisation, but there are other baser but quite as effective reasons why America, France, and Great Britain should exert themselves to create confidences and understandings between their populations and the Russian population.  There is the immediate business opportunity in Russia.  There is the secondary business opportunity in China that can best be developed as the partners rather than as the rivals of the Russians.  Since the Americans are nearest, by way of the Pacific, since they are likely to have more capital and more free energy to play with than the Pledged Allies, I do on the whole incline to the belief that it is they who will yet do the pioneer work and the leading work that this opportunity demands.

Section 2

If beneath the alliances of the present war there is to grow up a system of enduring understandings that will lead to the peace of the world, there is needed as a basis for such understandings much greater facility of intellectual intercourse than exists at present.  Firstly, the world needs a lingua franca; next, the Western peoples need to know more of the Russian language and life than they do, and thirdly, the English language needs to be made more easily accessible than it is at present.  The chief obstacle to a Frenchman or Englishman learning Russian is the difficult and confusing alphabet; the chief obstacle to anyone learning English is the irrational spelling.  Are people likely to overcome these very serious difficulties in the future, and, if so, how will they do it?  And what prospects are there of a lingua franca?