so that there may be
a firm soil to cultivate and that labour may not be wasted in ploughing
the quicksands.

[Sidenote: and its unrecognised scope.]

When such a starting-point is given, moral values radiate from it to the
very ends of the universe; and a failure to appreciate the range over
which rational estimation spreads is a second obstacle to sound ethics.
Because of this failure the earnest soul is too often intent on escaping
to heaven, while the gross politician is suffered to declaim about the
national honour, and to promise this client an office, this district a
favour, and this class an iniquitous advantage. Politics is expected to
be sophistical; and in the soberest parliaments hardly an argument is
used or an ideal invoked which is not an insult to reason. Majorities
work by a system of bribes offered to the more barren interests of men
and to their more blatant prejudices. The higher direction of their
lives is relegated to religion, which, unhappily, is apt to suffer from
hereditary blindness to natural needs and to possible progress. The idea
that religion, as well as art, industry, nationality, and science,
should exist only for human life's sake and in order that men may live
better in this world, is an idea not even mooted in politics and perhaps
opposed by an official philosophy. The enterprise of individuals or of
small aristocratic bodies has meantime sown the world which we call
civilised with some seeds and nuclei of order. There are scattered about
a variety of churches, industries, academies, and governments. But the
universal order once dreamt of and nominally almost established, the
empire of universal peace, all-permeating rational art, and
philosophical worship, is mentioned no more. An unformulated conception,
the prerational ethics of private privilege and national unity, fills
the background of men's minds. It represents feudal traditions rather
than the tendency really involved in contemporary industry, science, or
philanthropy. Those dark ages, from which our political practice is
derived, had a political theory which we should do well to study; for
their theory about a universal empire and a catholic church was in turn
the echo of a former age of reason, when a few men conscious of ruling
the world had for a moment sought to survey it as a whole and to rule it
justly.

Modern rational ethics, however, or what approaches most nearly to such
a thing, has one advantage over the anci