It is this conception of the history of the world during the last four centuries as being essentially, in its broadest aspects, a belated, forced, and largely unconscious process of political adaptation to changing conditions, of vast subconscious and unwilling trials and experiments in new and greater political associations to replace that formerly dominant Imperial idea, that I wish to put before the readers of the _Empire Review_. It carries us on to the further realisation that _since the process of change in communications is only now approaching some sort of limiting completion, the new political systems that have appeared cannot be considered as anything but preliminary and transitory systems_. The United States of America, the Spanish, Dutch and British colonial empires of the eighteenth century, the Russian Asiatic Empire and the second British Empire of the nineteenth century, the British Empire of the _Empire Review_ and of this present discussion, must all from the angle of this conception be seen as things experimental and transient, destined to the most extensive coalescences, readjustments and modifications in a few score years. The form to which these synthetic material forces, this constant abolition of distance between State and State and man and man, are driving us all, even in spite of ourselves, is a common Pax Mundi, a World Commonweal, a federal suppression of armaments, a federal money system, a federal postal system, a federal control of the production and distribution of staple products, a federal direction of main-line sea and land transport and of the movements of population. To these things it seems to me human affairs trend now inexorably. The economic and financial world net grows tighter and closer; war becomes so intimate and inconclusive and destructive as to become impossible. The old ideas may hold our race in a bloody and wasteful subjection for two or three centuries yet; but the Pax Mundi waits at the end of the passage.