all that gold can buy and guns can give, lord
of lands and bodies, builder of railways and promulgator of police
regulations, glorious in all material glories--postures, complacent and
obtuse, before a Europe content in the possession of all that matters.'
For, as the Greek poet says, 'the soul's wealth is the only real
wealth.' The spirit creates values, while the demagogue shrieks to
transfer the dead symbols of them. 'All that matters' is what the world
can neither give nor take away. The spiritual integration of society
which we desire and behold afar off must be illuminated by the dry light
of science, and warmed by the rays of idealism, a white light but not
cold. And idealism must be compacted as a religion, for it is the
function of religion to prevent the fruits of the flowering-times of the
spirit from being lost. Science has not yet come to its own in forming
the beliefs and practice of mankind, because it has been so much
excluded from higher education, and so much repressed by sentimentalism
under the wing of religion. The nation that first finds a practical
reconciliation between science and idealism is likely to take the front
place among the peoples of the world. In England we have to struggle not
only against ignorance, but against a deep-rooted intellectual
insincerity, which is our worst national fault. The Englishman hates an
idea which he has never met before, as he hates the disturber of his
privacy in a steam-ship cabin; and he takes opportunities of making
things unpleasant for those who utter indiscreet truths. As Samuel
Butler says: 'We hold it useful to have a certain number of melancholy
examples whose notorious failure shall serve as a warning to those who
do not cultivate a power of immoral self-control which shall prevent
them from saying, or even thinking, anything that shall not be to their
immediate and palpable advantage.' To do our countrymen justice, it is
often not self-interest, but a tendency to deal with the concrete
instance, in disregard of the general law, that blinds them to the
larger aspects of great problems. Those who are able to trace causes and
effects further than the majority must expect to be unpopular, but they
will not mind it, if they can do good by speaking. The logic of events
will justify them, and science has a new weapon in official statistics
which will register at once the disastrous effects upon wealth and trade
which the insane theories of the demagogue wil