As the individual, so the State; the aggregate of individual virtue decides and shapes the lot of nations. May there be no slaves among us and none who fatten upon slavery; no brutes among us and none who cower under brutality! Let us not hold ourselves as the elect in a blind patriotism, but have some vision of the world beyond our shores, of its hopes and dreads and natural ambitions. A narrow national spirit never served mankind! Let the sea be our inspiration and our reminder! For, if it is our fortification, the sea is also our link with all the world, and the greatest force of untamed Nature. It seems to me that they who live dependent on the sea should never be puffed up. Its changing moods and salt winds, its wildness, beauty, desolation, the sudden fates that lurk within it, that leap and clutch and draw away from us our best; the great spaces of it beneath sun and stars—these are constant, and to our souls should surely carry breadth, sweep out of us the littleness of Imperial complacency. The sea is never chained, and the eyes of sailors have in them a look that any man might covet—a steady fronting of something inscrutable, shifting, dangerous. They know the little worth of human strength, the need of unity; they know that when a man slackens his watch, Fate leaps upon him. The ship of each nation sails a sea of incalculable currents and uncharted channels. Sailing that sea, may we have the eyes of sailors, lest our Fate leap upon us! Who would not desire, rushing through the thick dark of the future, to stand on the cliffs of vision—two hundred years, say, hence—and view this world? Will there then be this League for War, this cauldron where, beneath the thin crust, a boiling lava bubbles, and at any minute may break through and leap up, as now, jet high? Will there still be reek and desolation, and man at the mercy of the machines he has made; still be narrow national policies and rancours, and such mutual fear, that no country dare be generous? Or will there be over the whole world something of the glamour that each one of us now sees hovering above his own country; and men and women—all—feel they are natives of one land? Who dare say? When the guns cease fire and all is still, from the woods and fields and seas, from the skeleton towns of ravaged countries, the wistful dead will rise, and with their eyes accuse us. In that hour we shall have for answer only this: We fought for a better Future for Mankind! Did we? Do we? That is the great question. Is our gaze really fixed on the far horizon? Or do we only dream it; and have the slain no comfort in their untimely darkness; the maimed, the ruined, the bereaved, no shred of consolation? Is it all to be for nothing but the salving of national prides? And shall the Ironic Spirit fill the whole world with his laughter? Or shall the nations take the first step in that grand march of real deliverance which will make the whole earth—at last—the islands of the blessed?