World Conference, World Domination or World Government?

Extract

“World Conference, World Domination or World Government?” is the title I have chosen for the consideration of a problem which I venture to think is the most burning question of our age: but which, as a student of history, I shall approach historically.

What do we mean by “World” in this context? Evidently Humanity, the totality of human beings who at any one time inhabit our planet. This humanity is one, both biologically and historically. It has radiated from one centre in primitive times and gradually, in wave upon wave, spread over the whole earth. Primitive man was a food-collector, i.e., one who had not yet learnt the art of food-production; incidentally, and this is of special interest to us here, he did not know nor practise homicide; whether singly or en masse. Survivals of such primitives we still find on the fringes of the inhabited world, as for instance, the Eskimos of Greenland, the Firelanders of Patagonia, the Semangs of the Malay Peninsula, the Pygmies of the Central African Ituri forest: all people, who still have not even formed the conception of war.

With the threefold invention, in widely separated areas, of food-production by Hunters, Herdsmen and Farmers, there arose the three basic civilizations of mankind, which later on and in diverse manner mingled and produced secondary civilizations. Many of these again fused, and thus for instance there issued that great Archaeic Civilization, which we can trace back to the VII millennium B.C. and to which belonged the earliest—and essentially peaceable!—civilizations of the Mesopotamian, the Indus and the Nile valleys.