Not only in distance but in a score of other matters are London and Rome nearer to New York than is Patagonia, and San Francisco is always likely to be more interesting to Japan than Paris or Madrid. I cannot see any reason for supposing that the mechanical drawing together of the peoples of the world into one economic and political unity is likely to cease--unless our civilization ceases. I see no signs that our present facilities for transport and communication are the ultimate possible facilities. Once we break away from current nationalist limitations in our political ideas, then there is no reason and no advantage in contemplating any halfway house to a complete human unity. Now after what I have been saying it is very easy to explain why I would have this idea of human unity put before people's minds in the form of a World State and not of a League of Nations. Let me first admit the extraordinary educational value of the League of Nations propaganda, and of the attempt that has been made to create a League of Nations. It has brought before the general intelligence of the world the proposition of a world law and a world unity that could not perhaps have been broached in any other way. But is it a league of nations that is wanted? I submit to you that the word "nations" is just the word that should have been avoided--that it admits and tends to stereotype just those conceptions of division and difference that we must at any cost minimize and obliterate if our species is to continue. And the phrase has a thin and legal and litigious flavour. What loyalty and what devotion can we expect this multiple association to command? It has no unity--no personality. It is like asking a man to love the average member of a woman's club instead of loving his wife. For the idea of Man, for human unity, for our common blood, for the one order of the world, I can imagine men living and dying, but not for a miscellaneous assembly that will not mix--even in its name. It has no central idea, no heart to it, this League of Nations formula. It is weak and compromising just where it should be strong--in defining its antagonism to separate national sovereignty. For that is what it aims at, if it means business. If it means business it means at least a super-state overriding the autonomy of existing states, and if it does not mean business then we have no use for it whatever.