Till the war drum throbbed no longer and the battle flags were furled
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

These lines come from Alfred Tennyson’s poem “Locksley Hall” (1842), a dramatic monologue in which a disillusioned speaker reflects on lost love, social change, and the future of civilization. Written in early Victorian Britain amid rapid industrialization and expanding global power, the poem famously turns from personal bitterness to sweeping prophecy. In its later stanzas Tennyson imagines technological progress and moral development culminating in international cooperation. The “war drum” and “battle flags” evoke the militarism of nation-states, while the envisioned “Parliament of man” expresses a utopian hope that humanity might eventually replace war with global governance and law.

Tennyson pictures a future in which war becomes obsolete: the drumbeat of conflict fades and national banners are put away. The culminating image—“the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world”—suggests that political maturity would mean transferring disputes from battlefields to representative institutions on a planetary scale. The lines are often read as an early, influential statement of liberal internationalism: progress (material and ethical) makes cooperation possible, and shared deliberation replaces violence. At the same time, the phrasing is prophetic rather than programmatic; it registers a Victorian faith in progress while acknowledging that such peace lies beyond the speaker’s troubled present.

“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.”