civilization in the boiling cauldron will have twisted and blunted the
very instruments of thought. As Professor Murray points out in a
powerful essay, war rapidly undoes the slow secular process by which
liberty and capacity for individual thought have grown up, and plunges
the personal judgement into the common trough of the herd-mind. It is, I
take it, the recognition of this peril to the human mind, this necessity
of safeguarding the powers of individual thought and personal
responsibility, that brings us here. We seek to fortify the separate
centres of personal judgement, to inform the individual mind, because
the work of making a positive contribution to the unity of civilization
depends upon the vigorous independent functioning of many minds.

This consideration brings me directly to confront the enemy, that is to
say, those who contend that a world-state or any real international
government is now and must always remain an impossibility, an
unrealizable Utopian dream. The process of social evolution on its
political side ends with the national state. It is a final product.
National states cannot, will not, and ought not, to abate one jot or
tittle of their inherent sovereignty and independence, and the
experience of history shows that all attempts at international
federation or union are pre-doomed to failure.

It is evidently quite impossible for me to present here a full formal
refutation of these positions. I will therefore content myself with
brief demurrers. To the argument from social evolution I would reply
that evolution knows no finality of type, and that the presumption lies
in favour of those who hold that the centripetal or co-operative powers,
which have forged the national state out of the smaller social unities,
are not exhausted, but are capable of carrying the organizing process
further. To those who rely upon the authority of history, citing the