A statesman entrusted
with power should regard nothing but his country's interests; to regard
anything else would be treason. He cannot allow foreign sentiment or
private hobbies to make him misapply the resources of his
fellow-countrymen to their own injury. But he may well have an
enlightened view of the interests which he serves; he might indeed be
expected to take a more profound and enlightened view of them than his
countrymen were commonly capable of, else he would have no right to his
eminent station. He should be the first to feel that to inflict injury
or foster hatred among other populations should not be a portion of a
people's happiness. A nation, like a man, is something ideal.
Indestructible mountains and valleys, crawled over by any sort of race,
do not constitute its identity. Its essence is a certain spirit, and
only what enters into this spirit can bind it morally, or preserve it.

[Sidenote: All life, and hence right life, finite and particular.]

If a drop of water contains a million worlds which I, in swallowing, may
ruin or transform, that is Allah's business; mine is to clarify my own
intent, to cling to what ideals may lie within the circle of my
experience and practical imagination, so that I may have a natural
ground for my loyalties, and may be constant in them. It would not be a
rational ambition to wish to multiply the population of China by two, or
that of America by twenty, after ascertaining that life there contained
an overplus of pleasure. To weed a garden, however, would be rational,
though the weeds and their interests would have to be sacrificed in the
process. Utilitarianism took up false ground when it made right conduct
terminate in miscellaneous pleasures and pains, as if in their isolation
they constituted all that morality had to consider, and as if respect
offered to them, somehow in proportion to their quantity, were the true
conscience. The true conscience is rather an integrated natural will,
chastened by clear knowledge of what it pursues and may attain. What
morality has to consider is the form of life, not its quantity. In a
world that is perhaps infinite, moral life can spring only from definite
centres and is neither called upon nor able to estimate the whole, nor
to redress its balance. It is the free spirit of a part, finding its
affinities and equilibrium in the material whole which it reacts on, and
which it is in that measure enabled to understand.

FOOTNOTES: