setting up of a republic in China, demonstrating the ripeness of the
East for free institutions, the entry of the American republics into
world politics--these things slam the door on any idea of working back
to the old nineteenth-century system. People calls to people. "No peace
with the Hohenzollerns" is a cry that carries with it the final
repudiation of emperors and kings. The man in the street will assure you
he wants no diplomatic peace. Beyond the unstable shapes of the present
the political forms of the future rise now so clearly that they are the
common talk of men. Kant's lucid thought told us long ago that the peace
of the world demanded a world union of republics. That is a commonplace
remark now in every civilized community.

The stars in their courses, the logic of circumstances, the everyday
needs and everyday intelligence of men, all these things march
irresistibly towards a permanent world peace based on democratic
republicanism. The question of the future of monarchy is not whether it
will be able to resist and overcome that trend; it has as little chance
of doing that as the Lama of Thibet has of becoming Emperor of the
Earth. It is whether it will resist openly, become the centre and symbol
of a reactionary resistance, and have to be abolished and swept away
altogether everywhere, as the Romanoffs have already been swept away in
Russia, or whether it will be able in this country and that to adapt
itself to the necessities of the great age that dawns upon mankind, to
take a generous and helpful attitude towards its own modification, and
so survive, for a time at any rate, in that larger air.

It is the fashion for the apologists of monarchy in the British Empire
to speak of the British system as a crowned republic. That is an
attractive phrase to people of republican sentiments. It is quite
conceivable that the British Empire may be able to make that phrase a