The second change is the growth, and what appears to be the establishment of nationality as the principle animating those members of which a world-organism must be composed. This change is bound up with the preceding, since nations are masses of men united by language, literature, tradition, and local associations, and it is through the growth of communication that they have come to feel their unity more and more and to demand expression for it in a political whole. I know there are some who hold that the national spirit is hostile to world-organization, and who picture the present state of things as a struggle between nationalism, on the one hand, and a higher principle, such as internationalism, fraternalism, or socialism, on the other. It seems, however, that, although the national spirit must be chastened and regenerated before it is fit for the larger order, there is no possibility of dispensing with it. Sound theory calls for a type of organism intermediate between the individual or the family and the world-whole which we hope to see arise. A ripe nationality is favorable to international order for the same reason that a ripe individuality is favorable to order in a small group. It means that we have coherent, self-conscious, and more or less self-controlled elements out of which to build our system. To destroy nationality because it causes wars would be like killing people to get rid of their selfishness. Our selves are poor things, but they are all we have, and so with nations in the larger whole. So far as the world is nationalized it is organized up to the point where supernationalism must begin. Having achieved the substructure, we are ready to add the upper stories. We seek a synthesis, and anything synthetic already achieved and not hopelessly unavailable is so much gain. It is only too obvious that, on account of their incoherence, those regions where a national consciousness has not yet developed are a peril to any system we may erect. The national state, supported by patriotism, is our central disciplinary institution, the backbone of historical structure, which could decay only at the cost of a vast collapse and disintegration involving the degradation of human character. Even intermittent war would be better than this. And just as it takes ambitious and self-assertive persons to make a vigorous group, so we need national emulation and struggle in a greater society. A world-life that was altogether supernational, without aggressive differentiation, would, I believe, be enervating, and I agree with the militarists in so far as to find this an unsatisfying ideal. We sometimes think of the Commonwealth of Man as likely to resemble the United States on a greater scale; but it would not be well to have the nations of the world so much alike, or even so harmonious, as our States; nor is it likely that they will be. We need a more energetic difference.