Remember that a government based upon gold, {7} wealth, sordidness, must end unhappily. We must have other and higher ideals for our people.
Do not misunderstand me; I do not decry individual, and, in certain degrees, aggregate wealth. Let our citizens accumulate money "beyond the dreams of avarice." Through the natural channels open for its circulation, it will gradually flow back to the community. And overlook not the difference between real and fictitious values. Men often create paper values, which disappear like snow before the summer sun when the operations of true economic principles attack them. So long as individual or combined wealth adheres to its legitimate functions, a State is safe. When, however, it is used to corrupt or influence the judiciary; when it seeks to interfere with, or affect legislation; when it subsidises or controls the press; when it severs instead of combines society; in fine, when it is used as a substitute for character, the people must beware; they must quickly intervene and crush it; for the pillars of all free government will then be attacked, and they will experience an oligarchy of wealth—the worst of all oligarchies and the most destructive of individual liberty.
One word more on the subject of England's alleged material decline. In less than one year she transported in her own ships two hundred and fifty thousand soldiers to South Africa, without the loss of a single life.
No other two existing nations could have accomplished the same task; and, allowing for all drawbacks {8} and mishaps, when the history of that war comes to be written, it will be found that, under all the circumstances, it will not be the least of ancient or modern achievements. And yet with what characteristic absence of self-glorification it has been done!
In the last century, and under the glorious reign just closed, she has been perfecting more and more her constitutional system; the various classes composing her society have been thoroughly interfused; political power has been extended to the masses, education has been disseminated, benevolent enterprise has gone hand in hand with the acquisition of wealth to an unparalleled degree. These are to be set off against any possible decline in her trade. It is hard to see how even that decline can be permanent or anything more than accidental while she retains her other possessions, and along with them the virile qualities which called them into existence.
She commences the twentieth century with undiminished glory and the prospect of increasing influence.
III.-THE PRESENT DIPLOMATIC AND POLITICAL MAP OF THE WORLD
In a little less than four years, the entire relations of the nations of the world to each other have changed. Old maps have become obsolete and valueless. The plans of diplomacy have been upset. All international combinations have been {9} frustrated, and the nice calculations and adjustments of European statesmen are, by the unexpected results of the two, in some of their aspects, insignificant wars, thrown into confusion and perplexity, if not for ever destroyed. The diplomatic slate has been sponged clean, and new alliances and international copartnerships must be written on it.
Does it not seem plain, therefore, in the shifting of places and combinations, that the British Empire and the United States are to be the chief factors in the new historical scenes of the twentieth century?
The world is now, in a practical sense, owned or controlled by five nations: the British Empire, the United States of America, Russia, Germany, and France. China, preliminary to an eventual division of her territories, has become a ward of the preceding powers, and unless, perchance by some miracle, she steals the thunder of modern Jove, and arms her hordes with fashionable artillery and ammunition,—a most unlikely prospect, except in accord with and under the tutelage of Russia,—she can no longer be numbered as a factor in international affairs. Japan, Austria, Hungary, Turkey, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, Norway and Sweden, and the other small sovereignties of the world are mere satellites, revolving around these great political planets, and in due course of time destined to be attached to one or the other of them, or at least so close in sympathy with their principles {10} as to render concert of action between them inevitable.