Conclusively you will find that because you are
king of a nation, it does not follow that you are to gather for
yourself all the wealth of that nation; neither, because you are king
of a small part of the nation, and lord over the means of its
maintenance--over field, or mill, or mine,--are you to take all the
produce of that piece of the foundation of national existence for
yourself.

You will tell me I need not preach against these things, for I cannot
mend them. No, good friends, I cannot; but you can, and you will; or
something else can and will. Even good things have no abiding
power--and shall these evil things persist in victorious evil? All
history shows, on the contrary, that to be the exact thing they never
can do. Change _must_ come; but it is ours to determine whether change
of growth, or change of death. Shall the Parthenon be in ruins on its
rock, and Bolton priory[223] in its meadow, but these mills of yours
be the consummation of the buildings of the earth, and their wheels be
as the wheels of eternity? Think you that "men may come, and men may
go," but--mills--go on for ever?[224] Not so; out of these, better or
worse shall come; and it is for you to choose which.

I know that none of this wrong is done with deliberate purpose. I
know, on the contrary, that you wish your workmen well; that you do
much for them, and that you desire to do more for them, if you saw
your way to such benevolence safely. I know that even all this wrong
and misery are brought about by a warped sense of duty, each of you
striving to do his best; but, unhappily, not knowing for whom this
best should be done. And all our hearts have been betrayed by the
plausible impiety of the modern economist, telling us that, "To do the
best for ourselves, is finally to do the best for others." Friends,
our great Master said not so; and most absolutely we shall find this
world is not made so. Indeed, to do the best for others, is finally to
do the best for ourselves; but it will not do to have our eyes fixed
on that issue. The Pagans had got beyond that. Hear what a Pagan says
of this matter; hear what were, perhaps, the last written words of
Plato,--if not the last actually written (for this we cannot know),
yet assuredly in fact and power his parting words--in which,
endeavouring to give full crowning and harmonious close to all his
thoughts, and to speak the sum of them by the imagined sentence of the
Great Spirit, his strength and his h