It will be the old story of competing interests, only with a new unit; and, as it appears to me, a new, inevitable danger.

For the merchant and the manufacturer, in this new world, will be a sovereign commune; it is a sovereign power that will see its crops undersold, and its manufactures worsted in the market.

And all the more dangerous that the sovereign power should be small.

Great powers are slow to stir; national affronts, even with the aid of newspapers, filter slowly into popular consciousness; national losses are so unequally shared, that one part of the population will be counting its gains while another sits by a cold hearth.

But in the sovereign commune all will be centralised and sensitive.