All the conditions of the world at the present time point to the conclusion that further progress must be safe-guarded in the same way. On the one hand, we see an extraordinary organization of military power and a widening of military combination among European nations to which the past furnishes no parallel, and which suggest hitherto unheard-of possibilities of conflict or aggression. On the other hand, the vast extension of industrial and commercial interests among British people, without any parallel in the previous history of the world, seems to demand a corresponding widening of the political combination which is required to give them security. Meanwhile the amazing spread of the race has become the main fact of modern history--the one which assuredly will have the most decisive influence on the future of mankind. Only within the last hundred years, one might almost say within a still narrower limit of time, has this been fully realized. The tentative efforts of Spaniards, Portuguese, Dutch, and French to dominate the new continents opened up by the discoveries at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries did not {4} receive a decisive check till towards the end of the eighteenth. Then the new tide fairly began to flow. The flux of civilized population, by which new and great centres of human activity are created, has since that time been so overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon that nearly all minor currents are absorbed or assimilated by it. Teuton, Latin, Scandinavian, with one or two limited but well-defined exceptions, lose their identity and tend to disappear in the dominant mass of British population which has flowed, and continues in scarcely abated volume to flow, steadily away from the mother islands to occupy those temperate regions which are manifestly destined to become in an increasing degree centres of the world's force. With abundant space on which to expand, increase has been rapid, and it would seem that in mere mass of numbers English-speaking people are destined at no distant date to surpass any other branch of the human stock. That an expansion so vast should bring in its train a new set of political problems, with a range wider than any that had gone before, is only natural. That new hopes should be conceived from this wonderful change in the balance of the world's forces; that new plans should be devised to utilize it, as other expansions have been utilized, for the good of our race and of mankind, is equally natural.