648 POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS. 



if the conditions are maintained ; and that they will go on 

 until they reach limits beyond which there is no scope for 

 them. 



Not indeed that any trustworthy forecast can be made 

 concerning proximate changes. All that has gone before 

 unites to prove that political institutions, fundamentally 

 determined in their forms by the predominance of one or 

 other of the antagonist modes of social action, the militant 

 and the industrial, will be moulded in this way or in that way 

 according as there is frequent war or habitual peace. Hence 

 we must infer that throughout approaching periods, every 

 thing will depend on the courses which societies happen to 

 take in their behaviour to one another courses which cannot 

 be predicted. On the one hand, in the present state of armed 

 preparation throughout Europe, an untoward accident may 

 bring about wars which, lasting perhaps for a generation, will 

 re-develop the coercive forms of political control. On the 

 other hand, a long peace is likely to be accompanied by so 

 vast an increase of manufacturing and commercial activity, 

 with accompanying growth of the appropriate political struc 

 tures within each nation, and strengthening of those ties 

 between nations which mutual dependence generates, that 

 hostilities will be more and more resisted and the organization 

 adapted for the carrying them on will decay. 



Leaving, however, the question What are likely to be the 

 proximate political changes in the most advanced nations ? 

 and inferring from the changes which civilization has thus far 

 wrought out, that at some time, more or less distant, the 

 industrial type will become permanently established, let us 

 now ask What is to be the ultimate political regime ? 



578. Having so recently contemplated at length the 

 political traits of the industrial type as inferable a priori, and 

 as partially exemplified a posteriori in societies most favour 

 ably circumstanced for evolving them, there remains only to 

 present these under a united and more concrete form, with 



