A world movement for the supersession or enlargement or fusion of existing political, economic and social institutions, must necessarily, as it grows, draw closer and closer to questions of practical control. It is likely in its growth to incorporate many active public servants, and many industrial and financial leaders and directors. It may also assimilate great numbers of intelligent workers. As its activities spread it will work out a whole system of special methods of co-operation. It will learn as it grows and by growing the business of general direction and how to develop its critical function. So that the movement we contemplate will by its very nature be one aiming, not so much to set up a world direction as to become itself a world direction, and the educational and militant forms of its opening phase will, as experience is gained and power and responsibility acquired, evoke step by step forms of administration and research and correction. The modernisation of the religious impulse leads us straight to the effort for the establishment of the world state as a duty, and the close consideration of the necessary organisation of that effort will bring the reader to the conclusion that a movement aiming at the establishment of a world-directorate, however restricted that movement may be at first in numbers and power, must either contemplate the prospect of itself developing in part or as a whole into a world-directorate, and by assimilation, as a whole into a modern world community, or admit from the outset the futility, the spare-time amateurishness, of its gestures. _Chapter VI_ BROAD CHARACTERISTICS OF THE WORLD COMMONWEAL Continuing our examination of the practical task before the modern mind, we may next note the main lines of contemporary aspiration within this comprehensive outline of a world commonweal. Any sort of unification of human affairs will not serve the ends we seek, we aim at a particular sort of unification; a world Cæsar is hardly better from the progressive viewpoint than world chaos; the unity we seek must mean the liberation of human thought, experiment and creative effort. A successful conspiracy merely to seize governments and wield and retain world power would be at best only the empty frame of success, it might be the exact reverse of success. Release from the threat of war and the waste of international economic conflicts is a poor release if it demands as its price the loss of all other liberties. It is because we desire a unification of human direction, not simply for the sake of unity, but as a means to certain definite ends, that it is necessary, at any cost--in delay, in loss of effective force, in strategic or tactical disadvantage--that the light of free, abundant criticism should play upon that unified direction and upon the movements and organisations leading to the establishment of that unified direction.