It is part of the fantastic nationalism that still plays so astonishing a rôle in the political life of the world, to hold that every definable region of the earth’s surface belongs, from sky to centre, to the inhabitants it supports. But with ever increasing facilities of movement this becomes constantly more impossible. It would, for example, place the vast mineral wealth of Labrador at the disposal of a few hundred wandering Red Indians. The conception of a federated world system carries with it the idea that all the land and sea of the world, all the natural resources of the world, animal, vegetable or mineral, belong to all the people of the world, and that any assignation, reservation, mandate or monopolisation of this or that region is entirely a temporary arrangement to be superseded by that inevitable world control. The British “Empire” in respect to this class of possession is, therefore, in the position of a trustee for an unborn but inevitable heir. Any Federation of Peoples or League of Nations or whatnot that really undertakes the organisation of a world peace must, as a necessary function, inherit all the overseas and alien possessions that are not yet capable of an intelligent participation in world government, whether they are now “owned” by Great Britain or by any other State in the world. In any world federation that may arise in the course of the next century or so, the English-speaking communities, which already number over two hundred million people, must necessarily play a leading part. How far it will be the leading part, depends very much upon the educational and general creative energy of these communities during the years immediately before us and upon their power of casting aside crippling prejudices and outworn ideas. It needs no impossible effort to make the English language even now the _lingua franca_ of India and China, and the creative imagination embodied in English literature a fertilising power throughout the earth. If I as a consistent republican find little joy in being a subject of a King-Emperor, and if I find much of our British Imperialism repulsively base, narrow, short-sighted and suicidal, that is rather because I overestimate than underestimate the share that our English language and civilisation and peoples may play in the future of mankind. IX WINSTON 10.11.23