The phases of the future grow longer as we progress. We will celebrate the armistice for a day; the interim period may well be a year, because in that time we are going to create the organization which will bring us peace for a century--or for ever. This middle period is the critical one; without much warning, we will be in it; the day after we recover from celebrating the armistice, we will have to begin thinking of the future of the world--and at the same time think about demobilization and seeing whether the old car can still go (if we get tires) and sending food to the liberated territories and smacking down capital or labor as the case may be, and planning the next election--by this time we will have forgotten that the desperate crisis in human history has not passed, but has been transformed into the longer crisis of planning and creating a new world--for which there are even fewer good brains than there are for destroying the old one. We can take cold comfort in this: if we do not work out a form of world-cooperation acceptable to ourselves and the other principal nations, we will bring on an event in Europe beside which the rise of Hitler will seem trivial; it will be world revolution, the final act of destruction which Hitler began. And whatever comes out of it, fascist, communist, or chaos, will be no friend to us; twenty years later we can celebrate the anniversary of a new armistice by observing the start of another European war, which will spread more rapidly to Asia and ourselves. Those of us who went through the first World War, and are in good moral status because we have been under shell fire, may be resigned to a third act in the 1960's; but the men who fight this war may be as revolutionary in England and America as they turned out to be last time in Russia or in Germany. They may want assurance, the day after the war ends, that we have been thinking about them and the future of the world. They will give us the choice between world organization and world revolution, and no amount of good intentions will help us. We will have to choose and to act; fascism may be destroyed, but an army returning to the turbulence of a disorganized world will not lack leaders; we can have modified Communism or super-fascism, all beautifully Americanized, if we have nothing better, nothing positive to be achieved when the war ends. And by the time it ends we may understand that disorganization at home or abroad will mean starvation and plague and repression and death. _Seven New Worlds_ Forming now, openly or privately, are groups to put forth a number of different alternatives to revolution and chaos. Some of these are based on political necessity or the desire to punish the Axis; some correspond to the necessities of a single nation, some are more inclusive. They can be summarized so: