We move slowly. Pan-Angle federation is still a dream. But no one can foresee how rapidly external pressure may turn dreams into practical politics. The federation of the Pan-Angles may be forced upon us--ready or not. Or we may find some day that it is too late to federate. Our method of combining, the distribution of powers between the existing governments and the {225} new government, it is not here necessary or appropriate to discuss, other than to acknowledge that our history confesses that federation is the present ideal of government of this civilization. In other instances of suggested closer union, "The advocates of national consolidation have been constantly subjected, as everyone familiar with current discussion knows, to two diametrically opposite forms of criticism. They are vigorously reproached . . . for not stating in detail the method by which their purposes are to be accomplished; they are ridiculed . . . as people who aim at binding together by means of a 'cut and dried plan' an Empire which has hitherto depended upon slow processes of growth for its constitutional development."[225-1] Enough that in our previous separate histories we have had constitutional conventions to draw up both national and state constitutions. Many men who have taken part in such conventions are now living. What we have acquired a habit of doing on a large scale, we can do again on a larger scale. Such representatives can construct, for submission to our voters, a framework of federal Pan-Angle government. With the voters of the seven Pan-Angle nations rest the decisions of when and how our co-operation is to be accomplished. That it is to be accomplished many now earnestly believe. And of it many can now say, as did Washington in the American Constitutional Convention: "Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair." Before that future constitutional convention can have been accomplished, men will have {226} gathered together the wisdom of the race, and will have drawn up a constitution better than any now in use. Voters from the ends of the earth will discuss what our governmental framework should be, and, although our statesmen will act the major parts, we may agree with Burke: "I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observations of those who were much inferior in understanding to the person who took the lead in the business."[226-1]