at very much the same pace in much the same vehicles and vessels. At the
advent of steam and electricity the muse of history holds her nose and
shuts her eyes. Science will study and get the better of a modern
disease, as, for example, sleeping sickness, in spite of the fact that
it has no classical standing; but our history schools would be shocked
at the bare idea of studying the effect of modern means of communication
upon administrative areas, large or small. This defect in our historical
training has made our minds politically sluggish. We fail to adapt
readily enough. In small things and great alike we are trying to run the
world in areas marked out in or before the eighteenth century,
regardless of the fact that a man or an army or an aeroplane can get in
a few minutes or a few hours to points that it would have taken days or
weeks to reach under the old foot-and-horse conditions. That matters
nothing to the learned men who instruct our statesmen and politicians.
It matters everything from the point of view of social and economic and
political life. And the grave fact to consider is that all the great
states of Europe, except for the unification of Italy and Germany, are
still much of the size and in much the same boundaries that made them
strong and safe in the eighteenth century, that is to say, in the
closing years of the foot-horse period. The British empire grew and was
organized under those conditions, and had to modify itself only a little
to meet the needs of steam shipping. All over the world are its linked
possessions and its ports and coaling stations and fastnesses on the
trade routes. And British people still look at the red-splashed map of
the world with the profoundest self-satisfaction, blind to the swift
changes that are making that scattered empire--if it is to remain an
isolated system--almost the most dangerous conceivable.

Let me ask the British reader who is disposed to sneer at the League of
Nations and say he is very well content with the empire, thank you, to