664: POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS. 



prevent, or else neutralize, changes in the direction of more 

 equitable institutions and laws ; while permanent peace will of 

 necessity be followed by social ameliorations of every kind. 



From war has been gained all that it had to give. Tho 

 peopling of the Earth by the more powerful and intelligent 

 races, is a benefit in great measure achieved ; and what 

 remains to be done, calls for no other agency than the 

 quiet pressure of a spreading industrial civilization on a 

 barbarism which slowly dwindles. That integration of simple 

 groups into compound ones, and of these into doubly com 

 pound ones, which war has effected, until at length great 

 nations have been produced, is a process already carried as 

 far as seems either practicable or desirable. Empires formed 

 of alien peoples habitually fall to pieces when the coercive 

 power which holds them together fails ; and even could they 

 be held together, would not form harmoniously-working 

 wholes : peaceful federation is the only further consolidation 

 to be looked for. Such large advantage as war has yielded 

 by developing that political organization which, beginning 

 with the leadership of the best warrior has ended in complex 

 governments and systems of administration, has been fully 

 obtained ; and there only remains for the future to preserve 

 and re-mould its useful parts while getting rid of those no 

 longer required. So, too, that organization of labour initiated 

 by war an organization which, setting out with the relation 

 of owner and slave and developing into that of master and 

 servant, has, by elaboration, given us industrial structures 

 having numerous grades of officials, from head-directors down 

 to foremen has been developed quite as far as is requisite 

 for combined action ; and has to be hereafter modified, not 

 in the direction of greater military subordination, but rather in 

 the opposition direction. Again, the power of continuous 

 application, lacking in the savage and to be gained only under 

 that coercive discipline which the militant type of society 

 establishes, has been already in large measure acquired by 

 the civilized man; and such further degree of it as is needed, 



