553 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION
successor-states of four different West European Powers' colonial em-
pires,1 and the members of the British Commonwealth had been posi-
tively moving away from the former political unity of an old-fashioned
British Empire governed from Westminster. The British Common-
wealth was, in fact, an entente between mutually independent states
that had disengaged themselves from a unitary empire, while the Pan
American Union was an entente between mutually independent states
that had never been united politically hi the past and were not moving
towards unity now. Yet, just because the weaker parties to the associa-
tion were aware—as they were in either case—that the strongest member
of the partnership had no intention of misusing his superior strength in
order to impose his will upon the rest, both the Pan American Union
and the British Commonwealth had achieved a felicitous relation of
psychological parity between states of widely different calibre whose
peoples not only spoke different languages but were also divided from
one another by the more formidable barrier of a diversity in their ways
of life. In this favourable psychological climate it had proved possible
for Great Britain and Ceylon, the Indian Union and New Zealand, the
United States and Guatemala, Brazil and Hayti, freely to co-operate
with one another as moral equals; and the spirit animating these ententes
might be enlisted in the cause of federation.

Though the practical possibility of federation, either with the United
States or with the Soviet Union, was limited by the notorious fact that,
hitherto, so^ intimate a form of political association had proved prac-
ticable only between communities closely akin to one another in their
ways of life, the cultural and social circumstances of the time gave scope,
within these limits, for federal union on a considerable scale. Federation
with the Soviet Union did not, it is true, seem likely, in the dubious
judgement of a Western observer, to prove an attractive proposition
either to the Soviet Union's Orthodox Christian satellites to the south
of her or to her Western Christian satellites to the west of her; but a
federal union between the United States, the other English-speaking
peoples, and the Continental West European peoples would already have
been within sight above the horizon of practical politics if an affinity in
culture and a community of interests had been the sole, or even the
decisive, considerations. The obstacle—and it was a formidable one—
was a human political animal's proneness to give prejudice the pre-
cedence over common sense and to allow itself to be swayed by feelings
instead of taking rational decisions on the merits of a constitutional case.
An American people which had once had to fight hi order to win its
independence would be reluctant to pool its sovereignty in a federal
partnership with other peoples, even if the candidates for partnership
were peoples of like passions with itself3 and also even if the principal
partner were assured that her own representation in the prospective
federal government would be proportionate, not merely to the relative
numerical strength of her population, but to an index figure registering

* The United States was a successor-state of the British Empire, Brazil of the Por-
tuguese, and Hayti of the French. All the other seventeen members of the Pan American
Union were successor-states of the Spanish Empire. a Acts adv. 15.