My father presumes to know the shape of the world in A.D. 2107 and he despairs. I say instead, look to 1907 and the world of the emperors. A century before the present day, Germany had an emperor. There was an emperor of "all the Russias." The British King was also the Emperor. The "Austro-Hungarians" - the Austrians, Hungarians, Slovaks, Slovenians, Romanians, Roma, Czechs, Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks, Albanians, and some Italians - had an emperor. Ethiopia had an emperor. China had an emperor. Scarcely thirty-seven years earlier, the French had had their second emperor. (Around the same time, Mexico had an emperor, briefly.) The Japanese had an emperor, a station that persists yet, but I'm the sure attendance of the annual Emperors Club Labor Day Picnic has gotten spotty. If you and I had lived then and I'd told you by 2007 all the emperors but the Japanese would be gone, and that his role would be purely symbolic, you'd have rightly called me a liar.

We must try to make for our posterity a future superior to our present, and this involves an inevitable degree of prognostication, but to say with any presumption of certainly that you know the shape of the world of tomorrow is unforgivably arrogant. It requires, one might be tempted to say, the arrogance of an emperor.