We fall into glib usage of words like democracy, and make fetiches of them without due understanding. Democracy is certainly inferior to autocracy from the aggressively national point of view; it is not necessarily superior to autocracy as a guarantee of general well-being; it might even turn out to be inferior unless we can improve it. But democracy is the rising tide; it may be dammed or delayed but cannot be stopped. It seems to be a law in human nature that where, in any corporate society, the idea of self-government sets foot it refuses ever to take that foot up again. State after State, copying the American example, has adopted the democratic principle; and the world’s face is that way set. Autocracy has, practically speaking, vanished from the western world. It is my belief that only in a world thus uniform in its principles of government, and freed from the danger of pounce by autocracies, have States any chance to develop the individual conscience to a point which shall make democracy proof against anarchy, and themselves proof against dissolution; and only in such a world can a League of Nations to enforce peace succeed. But though we have now secured a single plane for Western civilisation and ultimately, I hope, for the world, there will be but slow and difficult progress in the lot of mankind. And for this progress the solidarity of the English-speaking races is vital; for without that there is but sand on which to build. The ancestors of the American people sought a new country, because they had in them a reverence for the individual conscience; they came from Britain, the first large State in the Christian era to build up the idea of political freedom. The instincts and ideals of our two races have ever been the same. That great and lovable people the French, with their clear thought and expression, and their quick blood, have expressed those ideals more vividly than either of us. But the phlegmatic tenacity of the English and the dry tenacity of the American temperament have ever made our countries the most settled and safe homes of the individual conscience. And we must look to our two countries to guarantee its strength and activity. If we English-speaking races quarrel and become disunited, civilisation will split up again and go its way to ruin. The individual conscience is the heart of democracy. Democracy is the new order; of the new order the English-speaking nations are the ballast.