TECHNOLOGY, WAR, AND GOVERNMENT 549
A.D. 1952, would be inclined to amend the text in substitution for the
original words 'on this continent'], 'and its fiat is law upon the subjects to
which it confines its interposition. Why? It is not because of the pure
friendship or good will felt for it. It is not simply by reason of its high
character as a civilised state, nor because wisdom and justice and equity
are the invariable characteristics of the dealings of the United States. It is
because, in addition to all other grounds, its infinite resources, combined
with its isolated position, render it master of the situation and practically
invulnerable as against any or all other Powers.'1

This dictum on the standing of the United States had not lost any of
its cogency in coming to be applicable to a far wider sphere of hegemony
than had been in the mind of the Secretary of State at Washington who
had written those sentences in A.D. 1895; and, though a patriotic non-
American citizen of a twentieth-century Western commonwealth of
nations might be content to make the pertinent comment that the most
lacerating American whips were, at any rate, less grievous instruments of
political chastisement than even the least venomous Russian scorpions,
'a philosopher* might 'be permitted to enlarge his views'2 by taking some
meteorological observations. In the first place he would observe that the
virtual monopoly, by a paramount Power, of the determination and
execution of policies in which the lives and fortunes of satellite peoples
were at stake was pregnant with a constitutional problem that could not
be evaded; second, that, in the partitioned Oikoumen£ of A.D. 1952, this
problem was a live one both in the American and in the Russian sphere
of hegemony or domination; third, that the problem would still present
itself, and still demand a solution, if the two spheres were eventually to
be amalgamated; and, fourth, that this problem could not be solved
without recourse to some form of federal union.

The mere recital of these observations made it clear that the con-
stitutional issues raised by the advent of a supra-national order on the
political plane were unlikely to be settled easily or rapidly. One pro-
mising feature in the situation was that the United States and the Soviet
Union—one or both of whom would have a decisive say in the constitu-
tional development of a commonwealth of nations under its hegemony
—were, as it happened, both of them morally committed to an approval
of federalism in principle in virtue of having written it into their own
constitutions.

The Constitution of the United States was the product of a deliberate
choice of full federal union in preference to a looser form of political
association—between states only, and not also between human beings—
that had quickly been proved inadequate by painful experience; and the
people of the thirteen original states-members of the Union had federated
with one another on terms that had left a door open for the admission of
new-comers. In the minds of latter-day citizens of a United States that
had increased its membership from the original figure of thirteen states
to an eventual figure of forty-eight between A.D. 1792 and A.D, 1912, a

i Secretary of State Richard Olney, in a dispatch of the aoth July, 1895, to the United
States Ambassador to the Court of St. Jameses.

a Gibbon, Edward: The History of the Decline and Fall qf the Roman Empire, 'General
Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West', at the end of chap,