_The Great Illusion_ did not assume its impending demise. Democracy had not yet organised socialistic controls within the nation. To have assumed that the world of nationalisms would face socialistic regulation and control as between States, would have implied an agility on the part of the public imagination which it does not in fact possess. An international policy on these lines would have been unintelligible and preposterous. It is only because the situation which has followed victory is so desperate, so much worse than anything _The Great Illusion_ forecast, that we have been brought to face these remedies to-day. Before the War, the line of advance, internationally, was not by elaborate regulation. We had seen a congeries of States like those of the British Empire maintain not only peace but a sort of informal Federation, without limitation in any formal way of the national freedom of any one of them. Each could impose tariffs against the mother country, exclude citizens of the Empire, recognise no common defined law. The British Empire seemed to forecast a type of international Association which could secure peace without the restraints or restrictions of a central authority in anything but the most shadowy form. If the merely moral understanding which held it together and enabled co-operation in a crisis could have been extended to the United States; if the principle of 'self-determination' that had been applied to the white portion of the Empire were gradually extended to the Asiatic; if a bargain had been made with Germany and France as to the open door, and equality of access to undeveloped territory made a matter of defined agreement, we should have possessed the nucleus of a world organisation giving the widest possible scope for independent national development. But world federation on such lines depended above all, of course, upon the development of a certain 'spirit,' a guiding temper, to do for nations of different origin what had already been done for nations of a largely common origin (though Britain has many different stocks--English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, and, overseas, Dutch and French as well). But the spirit was not there. The whole tradition in the international field was one of domination, competition, rivalry, conflicting interest, 'Struggle for life.' The possibility of such a free international life has disappeared with the disappearance of the _laisser-faire_ ideal in national organisation. We shall perforce be much more concerned now with the machinery of control in both spheres as the only alternative to an anarchy more devastating than that which existed before the War. For all the reasons which point to that conclusion the reader is referred once more to the second chapter of the first part of this book. CHAPTER V THE ARGUMENT AS AN ATTACK ON THE STATE