rd--let us boldly say it--to that by which we
judge between individuals. It must be a standard based on our sense of
right and wrong. But right and wrong in themselves will not carry us
very far, any more than they will carry the magistrate on the bench or
the merchant in his counting-house. Politics, like business, is not the
whole of life--though some party politicians and some business men think
otherwise--but a department of life: both are means, not ends; and as
such they have developed special rules and codes of their own, based on
experience in their own special department. In so far as they are framed
in accordance with man's spiritual nature and ideals these rules may be
considered to hold good and to mark the stage of progress at which
Politics and Business have respectively arrived in promoting the common
weal in their own special sphere. With the rules of business, or what is
called Political Economy, we have at the moment no concern. It is the
rules of politics, or the working experience of rulers, crystallized in
what is called Political Science or Political Philosophy, to which we
must devote a few moments' attention.

We are all of us, of course, political philosophers. Whether we have
votes or not, whether we are aware of it or not, we all have views on
political philosophy and we are all constantly making free use of its
own peculiar principles and conceptions. Law, the State, Liberty,
Justice, Democracy are words that are constantly on our lips. Let us try
to form a clear idea of the place which these great historic ideals
occupy in the progress of mankind.

The great political thinkers of the world have always been clear in
their own minds as to the ultimate goal of their own particular study.
Political thought may be said to have originated with the Jewish
prophets, who were the first to rebuke kings to their faces and to set
forth the spiritual aims of politics--to preach Righteousness and Mercy
as against Power and Ambition and Self-interest. Their soaring
imagination, less systematic than the Greek intellect, was wider in its
sweep and more farseeing in its predictions. 'As the earth bringeth
forth her bud and as the garden causeth the things sown in it to spring
forth', says Isaiah, in magnificent anticipation of the doctrine of
Natural Law, 'so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to
spring forth before all the nations.' 'Peace, peace, to him that is far
off, and to him that is nea