The entry into the Great War of the United States under the leadership of Woodrow Wilson, and the events of the February Revolution in Russia, were well understood in the British press to be of momentous significance for the conduct of the war and for the shape of the post-war world. It was this sense that the future world might be very different, and that coming changes no longer depended as much on British decisions as they once had, that informed some of the best liberal and socialist journalism of the period, journalism which in turn gave shape to the assumptions of informed discussion in the post-war period. One commentator seemed prescient in predicting a conflict of the American and Russian internationalist models. In ‘Views and Reviews: The Two Internationals’, published in The New Age for 21 June 1917 (that is, before the October Revolution), Alfred E. Randall, writing as ‘A.E.R.’, wrote: ‘Russia and America seem to be destined to bring into conflict two different conceptions of international action to secure peace’, that is, Wilson's League of Nations, and the ‘union of all the working classes to combat all the attempts of Imperialism to prolong the war in the interest of the well-to-do classes’ of the ‘Executive Committee of the Council of Soldiers’ and Workmen's Delegates’. Randall noted that the ‘division between this conception and that of President Wilson is complete’ but that both ideas ‘coincide in their objects’, namely ‘a secure and lasting peace’. He asked rhetorically: ‘Is it not obvious that international Capitalism is the only guarantee of peace, that the proletarian International broke down at the declaration of war?’, and argued that the Russian Revolution was now an embarrassing exception which forced ‘the Allies to use words like “democracy” and “liberty” in a sense different from that which the Russians convey’. The essay went on to prefer Wilson's solution, endorsing Wilson's claim that this should be ‘a people's war for freedom, justice, and self-government among all the nations of the world’, but Randall allowed a concluding doubt to stand: ‘will President Wilson's League of Nations allow for the representation of the working classes of the world; will the two Internationals combine in a Parliament of Man, or shall we exchange the tyranny of Germany for the orderly and constitutional progress of the capitalist system?’