It is impossible to form any guess whether England will keep to her traditional methods or will depart so far from them as to take a bold and comprehensive view of her present and her growing moral needs. A carefully conceived and daringly carried out organization of a real national unity would have no great difficulty in a country so rich in practical genius; it would make an end once for all of every internal difficulty of the State, and would convert the nation into an engine of war which nothing could resist. The more probable and the characteristic event will be a mere continuation in the old way. It will exemplify our usual and often admirable enough contempt for theoretical considerations and dreams, our want of interest in knowledge and foresight, our willingness to take any risk rather than endure the horrid pains of thought. {211} When we remember how costly is our traditional method, how long and painful it makes the way, how doubtful it even makes the goal, it is impossible for the most philosophic to restrain a sigh for the needless suffering it entails, and a thrill of alarm for the dangers it gives our path, the darkness around us and ahead, the unimaginable end. * * * * * To the student, the end of the chapter is a chance to turn from the study of detail and allow his mind to range through a larger atmosphere and over a longer sequence. Closing our small chapter, we also may look at large over the great expanse of the biological series in whose illimitable panorama the war that covers our nearer skies with its blood-red cloud is no bigger than a pin point. As we contemplate in imagination the first minute spot of living jelly that crept and hungered in the mud, we can see the interplay of its necessities and its powers already pushing it along the path at the end of which we stand. Inherent in the dot of magic substance that was no longer mere carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur, and a little phosphorus, was the capacity to combine with its fellows and to profit by the fellowship, however loose. In the slow process of time combination brought freedom which, just like ours, was freedom to vary and, varying, to specialize. So in time great States of cells grew up, their individual citizen cells specialized to the finest pitch, perfect in communion with one another, co-ordinate in all their activities, incorporated with the State.