To move on a further four years for an afterword, as the PrefatoryNote to the thirteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica rightlyobserved in 1926:In fifteen years, as a result partly of physical conflict unpar-alleled for scale, violence and intensity; partly of the fulland manifold working of influences which had begun toappear before the War, there has occurred a universalrevolution in human affairs and the human mind.Because of this universal revolution, and the consequentuncertainty of the future, the editor J.L.Garvin decided that it was‘almost unquestionably right to depart from the principle ofOlympian judgment practised by The Encyclopaedia Britannica atlong leisure in more stable times’.Nowhere was such a departure more noticeable than in acontribution entitled ‘English-Speaking Peoples, Relations Of’ byJohn St Loe Strachey, former editor and proprietor of The Spectatoramong other journalistic activities, and author of such books asThe Adventure of Living, Economics of the Hour and Problems and Perilsof Socialism. This subject had never before appeared as such in theencyclopaedia, but was now considered by Strachey to be ‘perhapsthe greatest of all causes at the present moment’. Because of itsimportance, the utmost care was needed in its development andmaintenance. In particular:Misunderstanding is the chief and disintegrating force inhuman affairs. It is that which poisons and disturbs thebody politic. It acts as sepsis does in the body natural. Thisis particularly the case with the cause of amity among thespeakers of the English-speaking tongue. Misunder-standings, on both sides of the Atlantic, spring up likemushrooms, and with them arise distrust, suspicion, sore-ness and wounded pride. Thoroughly good intentions usevague and infelicitous language. Their words are misrep-resented, and have reactions, evil instead of good. Theyare suspected of selfish and sly propaganda! Yet, all thetime, the supposed propaganda was launched in perfectgood faith, and without a thought of taking advantage.But, naturally, the repelled well-wisher is deeply hurt tosee himself what he calls ‘cruelly misunderstood’. What iswanted is to make absolutely clear the aims of those whospeak the language of Shakespeare, Bacon and Milton, ofWashington, Lincoln and Emerson.The objection could be made, other than to Strachey’s emotivelanguage, that he juxtaposed three literary figures from Englandwith one literary figure and two statesmen from America. But tohelp avoid what he called ‘the friction of alarm’, Strachey, ‘aconvinced and life-long supporter of Anglo-American amity andgoodwill’, went on to set out: (1) what the friends ofunderstanding wanted; (2) why they wanted it; and (3) how theyproposed to get it:1 True friends of good understanding sought amity not to crushother races or to exalt their own, but rather, through the link oflanguage and the consequent intellectual liaison, to make useof the opportunity for human betterment thereby arising.2 This was wantedfor the reason that in an understanding between those whospeak the English tongue is to be found the instrumentthat will save the civilisation which has been built up withso much toil and anguish, high hopes and high endeavour,from going the way of Egypt and Persia, of Athens andRome and of a hundred noble races and mighty empires.If people of good will did not act together, then they might drift‘into a long series of wars which will sap the vitality of the whiteraces and expose the civilised world, as we know it, to incursionsfrom the barbarians of our epoch’.3 How to arrive at such a goal? There must be forbearance onboth sides of the Atlantic: ‘as zealous Englishmen have gotto avoid the slightest appearance of wishing to catch and leadAmericans, so zealous Americans must avoid the slightestappearance of wishing, as foolish people would say, “to dragJohn Bull chained at their chariot wheels”.’ Both must makeit clear to the whole world that they did not wish to dominateit. They must learn a different kind of propaganda from thatof the French Jacobins who had proclaimed: ‘Be our brothers,or we will slay you’, and remember the words of Tennyson:‘How pure at heart and sound in head,/With what divineaffections boldImplications that England was the senior partner in the union maybe found here, and, indeed, in some senses, England continuedalso to dominate Great Britain culturally speaking until after theSecond World War, which produced another ‘universal revolutionin human affairs and the human mind’. However, the First WorldWar had indeed shaken the foundations of European civilisation,including those of the offshore islands, while pro-moting a shift inthe centre of gravity of the wider Atlantic community.41In this chapter, we have examined German, French and Englishapproaches to the question of Western world order in the earlyyears of the twentieth century, all sharing assumptions about thesuperiority of European civilisation at the same time as expressingdistinctive national viewpoints. We then went on to consider howhistorians meeting in London in 1913 set out their views, nearlyall Eurocentric, even Anglocentric. We have then looked at aspectsof the impact of the First World War on several historians, most ofwhom had been present at the London Congress.What, it may be asked, has happened to constitutional andrevolutionary order, and to the pH test? To answer these questionsas simply as possible: constitutional order has provided much ofthe subtext of this chapter, nearly all the ideas discussed in it comingfrom academics and intellectuals who believed in measuredprogress; in the pH test, the nature of the neutral white has changed,the ‘universal indicator’ now beginning to consist not only ofEurope but also of the USA, which was assuming a much greaterimportance in both English-speaking and Atlantic worlds, even ifsome years would elapse before it became dominant. We shall lookat this process, along with the marginalisation of Europe’scontinental frontier, the USSR, in Chapter