In the last five or six thousand years, empires one after another have arisen, waxed powerful by wars of conquest, and fallen by internal revolution or attack from without.
In recent times, European nations, with the use of gunpowder and other technical improvements in warfare, controlled practically the whole world. One, the British Empire, brought under one government a quarter of the earth and its inhabitants.
When the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century brought a rapid increase in wealth, the demand of workers for a fair share of the wealth they were creating was conceded only after riots and strikes.
Empires won by conquest have always fallen either by revolt within or by defeat by a rival.
However difficult it may be to bring it about, some form of world government, with agreed international law and means of enforcing the law, is inevitable.
After the First World War the economic problem was no longer one of production. It was the problem of finding markets to get the output of industry and agriculture dispersed and consumed.
Nearly every country in the world is now becoming industrialized as rapidly as it can.
We are now physically, politically, and economically one world and nations so interdependent that the absolute national sovereignty of nations is no longer possible.
It is said that those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad. It may well be that a war neurosis stirred up by propaganda of fear and hatred is the prelude to destruction.
Our civilization is now in the transition stage between the age of warring empires and a new age of world unity and peace.
Our civilization has evolved through the continuous adjustment of society to the stimulus of new knowledge.
Science has produced such powerful weapons that in a war between great powers there would be neither victor nor vanquished. Both would be overwhelmed in destruction.
