Poetry

The passage most quoted by world federalists is from "Locksley Hall" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson:

"For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew
From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue;

Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,
With the standards of the peoples plunging thro' the thunder storm;

Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle flags were furl'd
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law."

This poem was written in 1842, and reflected the optimism of the Victorian age. Tennyson had travelled by the first train from Liverpool to Manchester in 1830. The poem's narrator, diappointed in love, finds consolation in thinking about progress and the future achievements of mankind. In 1951, in an interview with The New Yorker journalist John Hersey, U.S. President Harry Truman revealed that he had carried the lines cited above in his wallet for fifty years, and commented: "I guess that's what I've been really working for ever since I first put that poetry in my pocket."

There is a certain irony in that statement, since Truman was instrumental both in setting up the United Nations and in dropping the first atomic bomb, and both events seem to be presaged in Tennyson's lines.