Nor do we find in the nominal rulers and official representatives of other countries any clear admission of the necessity for a great and fundamental change in the scope and spirit of government. These official and ruling people, more than any other people, are under the sway of that life of use and wont which dominates us all. They are often trained to their positions, or they have won their way to their positions of authority through a career of political activities which amounts to a training. And that training is not a training in enterprise and change; it is a training in sticking tight and getting back to precedent. We can expect nothing from them. We shall be lucky if the resistance of the administrative side of existing states to the conception of a world commonweal is merely passive. There is little or no prospect of any existing governing system, unless it be such a federal system as Switzerland or the United States, passing directly and without extensive internal changes into combination with other sovereign powers as part of a sovereign world system. At some point the independent states will as systems resist, and unless an overwhelming world conscience for the world state has been brought into being and surrounds them with an understanding watchfulness, and invades the consciences of their supporters and so weakens their resisting power, they will resist violently and disastrously. But it will be an incoherent resistance because the very nature of the sovereign states of to-day is incoherence. There can be no world-wide combination of sovereign states to resist the world state, because that would be to create the world state in the attempt to defeat it. § 4 In the three preceding essays an attempt has been made to state the pass at which mankind has arrived, the dangers and mischiefs that threaten our race, and the need there is and the opportunities there are for a strenuous attempt to end the age-long bickerings of nations and empires and establish one community of law and effort throughout the whole world. Stress has been laid chiefly upon the monstrous evils and disasters a continuation of our present divisions, our nationalisms and imperialisms and the like, will certainly entail. These considerations of evil however are only the negative argument for this creative effort; they have been thrust forward because war, disorder, insufficiency, and the ill health, the partings, deprivations, boredom and unhappiness that arise out of these things are well within our experience and entirely credible; the positive argument for a world order demands at once more faith and imagination.