herland in labor no less than in battle; aiding
them with free hand in the prosecution of discovery, and the victory
over adverse natural powers; establishing seats of every manufacture in
the climates and places best fitted for it, and bringing ourselves into
due alliance and harmony of skill with the dexterities of every race,
and the wisdoms of every tradition and every tongue.

And then you may make England itself the centre of the learning, of the
arts, of the courtesies and felicities of the world. Yon may cover her
mountains with pasture; her plains with corn, her valleys with the lily,
and her gardens with the rose. You may bring together there in peace
the wise and the pure, and the gentle of the earth, and by their word,
command through its farthest darkness the birth of "God's first
creature, which was Light." You know whose words those are; the words of
the wisest of Englishmen. He, and with him the wisest of all other great
nations, have spoken always to men of this hope, and they would not
hear. Plato, in the dialogue of Critias, his last, broken off at his
death--Pindar, in passionate singing of the fortunate islands--Virgil,
in the prophetic tenth eclogue--Bacon, in his fable of the New
Atlantis--More, in the book which, too impatiently wise, became the
bye-word of fools--these, all, have told us with one voice what we
should strive to attain; _they_ not hopeless of it, but for our follies
forced, as it seems, by heaven, to tell us only partly and in parables,
lest we should hear them and obey.

Shall we never listen to the words of these wisest of men? Then listen
at least to the words of your children--let us in the lips of babes and
sucklings find our strength; and see that we do not make them mock
instead of pray, when we teach them, night and morning, to ask for what
we believe never can be granted;--that the will of the Father,--which
is, that His creatures may be righteous and happy--should be done, _on
earth_, as it is in Heaven.

FOOTNOTES:

[139] Compare _Time and Tide_, Sec. 169, _and Fors Clavigera_, Letter XIV,
page 9.

[140] See Appendix, "Modern Education," and compare Sec. 70 of _Time and
Tide_.

[141] [They were deserting, I am informed, in the early part of this
year, 1873, at the rate of a regiment a week.]

_NOTES ON THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PRUSSIA._

I am often accused of inconsistency; but believe myself defensible
against the charge with respect to what I have sa