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Chapter XVIIIThe Ideal Solution —A Free Grouping of MankindTHESE principles founded on the essential and constanttendencies of Nature in the development of human lifeought clearly to be the governing ideas in any intelligentattempt at the unification of the human race. And it might sobe done if that unification could be realised after the mannerof a Lycurgan constitution or by the law of an ideal Manu, theperfect sage and king. Attempted, as it will be, in very differentfashion according to the desires, passions and interests of greatmasses of men and guided by no better light than the halfenlightenedreason of the world’s intellectuals and the empiricalopportunism of the world’s statesmen and politicians, it is likelyto be done by a succession of confused experiments, recoils andreturns, resistances and persistences; it will progress in spiteof human unreason in the midst of a clamour of rival ideas andinterests, stumble through a war of principles, advance by a clashof vehement parties ending in more or less clumsy compromises.It may even, as we have said, be managed in the most unideal,though not the most inconvenient method of all, by a certainamount of violence, the domination of a few vast and powerfulempires or even the emergence of a single predominant worldempire,a king-state that will be accepted or will impose itselfas the arbiter, if not the ruler of mankind. Not any intelligentprinciple, but necessity and convenience, not urgent light, buturgent power is likely to be the effective force in any political,administrative and economic unification of the race.Still, though the ideal may not be immediately practicable, itis that to which our action ought more and more to move. And ifthe best method cannot always be employed, it is well to knowthe best method, so that in the strife of principles and forces