Men will harvest in Saskatchewan and come down in great liners to spend the winter working in the forests of Yucatan.

People have hardly begun to speculate about the consequences of the return of humanity from a closely tethered to a migratory existence.  It is here that the prophet finds his chief opportunity.  Obviously, these great forces of transport are already straining against the limits of existing political areas.  Every country contains now an increasing ingredient of unenfranchised Uitlanders.  Every country finds a growing section of its home-born people either living largely abroad, drawing the bulk of their income from the exterior, and having their essential interests wholly or partially across the frontier.

In every locality of a Western European country countless people are found delocalised, uninterested in the affairs of that particular locality, and capable of moving themselves with a minimum of loss and a maximum of facility into any other region that proves more attractive.  In America political life, especially State life as distinguished from national political life, is degraded because of the natural and inevitable apathy of a large portion of the population whose interests go beyond the State.

Politicians and statesmen, being the last people in the world to notice what is going on in it, are making no attempt whatever to re-adapt this hugely growing floating population of delocalised people to the public service.  As Mr. Marriott puts it in his novel, “Now," they “drop out” from politics as we understand politics at present.  Local administration falls almost entirely—­and the decision of Imperial affairs tends more and more to fall—­into the hands of that dwindling and adventurous moiety which sits tight in one place from the cradle to the grave.  No one has yet invented any method for the political expression and collective direction of a migratory population, and nobody is attempting to do so.  It is a new problem....

Here, then, is a curious prospect, the prospect of a new kind of people, a floating population going about the world, uprooted, delocalised, and even, it may be, denationalised, with wide interests and wide views, developing no doubt, customs and habits of its own, a morality of its own, a philosophy of its own, and yet from the point of view of current politics and legislation unorganised and ineffective.

Most of the forces of international finance and international business enterprise will be with it.  It will develop its own characteristic standards of art and literature and conduct in accordance with its new necessities.  It is, I believe, the mankind of the future.  And the last thing it will be able to do will be to legislate.  The history of the immediate future will, I am convinced, be very largely the history of the conflict of the needs of this new population with the institutions, the boundaries the laws, prejudices, and deep-rooted traditions established during the home-keeping, localised era of mankind’s career.