FINAL CHAPTER 255 



thought and mutual conditions of work and co-operation under 

 peaceable conditions of government. In the past it has been 

 local evolution that has led the world forward. We have now 

 progressed one step better. Steam, Telegraphy, universal 

 postal and news agencies, universal commerce, etc., have in 

 the words of Shakespeare, " put a girdle around the world 

 in forty minutes/' and made united action on the part of man 

 not only a possibility but a necessity. It is one of the curio- 

 sities of human nature that when there is only a right and 

 wrong way of doing things we always choose the wrong first, 

 because it is only by doing wrong that we learn to do right. 

 In the last hundred years of peace among nations our indi- 

 vidual governments have been doing all they can to destroy 

 peace amongst men, by means of trade unions and selfish 

 combines. The outcome of this has been a general Euro- 

 pean War, that is to place the control of Government in the 

 hands of those best calculated to protect universal interests 

 (mind, I use the word control), those who control wealth, for 

 under modern customs the possession of wealth is daily be- 

 coming not the result of might but of right, and every day's 

 advance in this direction is making the possession of wealth 

 nothing more than the right to control it for the good of 

 others ; when this war has decided what nations or federa- 

 tion of nations are best ?ble to protect the rights of free- 

 dom and capital against the infringements by one nation on 

 the rights of another in territory and commerce. We will 

 have next to turn our attention to deciding how far one indi- 

 vidual may infringe upon one or other of the liberties of 

 another individual. This will produce a period of civil war, 

 then the unprecedented poverty of these wars will cripple 

 business and destroy the luxury that the last century has 

 produced. It will bring mankind to the realisation that with 

 the end of the Epoch of Hope, the Age of Wars, we should 

 arrive at the Age of Peace, after which the struggle will be 

 to establish a local form of democratic municipal government 

 on an open franchise to control industrial legislation and an 

 aristocratic form of central or federated Government elected 

 by a highly restricted franchise or, better still, elected by and 

 from the local governing bodies, supplemented by the highest 

 hereditary ability and genius. Powers of central federated 

 Governments must be of the most limited nature com- 



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