Take the idea of the nation as I have tried to convey it and apply it as a measure or test to our customary way of thinking both of public affairs and of our own lives. Does it not reveal that we attach too much importance to having and to possessions--our own and other people's--and too little importance to doing, to service? When we ask what a man is worth, we think of what he owns. But the words ought to make us think of what he is fit for and of what service he renders to the nation. The only value of what a man has springs from what he does with it. The idea of the nation leads to the right way of looking at these matters, because it constrains every man to put himself and all that he has at the service of the community. Thus it is the opposite of socialism, which merely turns upside down the current worship of ownership, and which thinks "having" so supremely important that it would put "not having" in its place. The only cry I will adopt is "England for ever," which means that we are here, every one of us, with all that we have and all that we can do, as members of a nation that must either serve the world or perish. But the idea of the nation carries us a long way further than I have yet shown. It bids us all try at the peril of England's fall to get the best Government we can to lead us. We need a man to preside over the nation's counsels, to settle the line of Britain's duty in Europe and in her own Empire, and of her duty to her own people, to the millions who are growing up ill fed, ill housed and ill trained, and yet who are part of the sovereign people. We need to give him as councillors men that are masters of the tasks in which for the nation to fail means its ruin, the tasks of which I have enumerated those that are vital. Do we give him a master of the history of the other nations to guide the nation's dealings with them? Do we give him a master of war to educate admirals and generals? Do we give him a master of the sciences to direct the pursuit of knowledge, and a master of character-building to supervise the bringing up of boys and girls to be types of a noble life? It would serve the nation's turn to have such men. They are among us, and to find them we should only have to look for them. It would be no harder than to pick apples off a tree. But we never dream of looking for them. We have a wonderful plan of choosing our leaders, the plan which we call an election. Five hundred men assemble in a hall and listen to a speech from a partisan, while five hundred others in a hall in the next street are cheering a second partisan who declaims against the first. There is no test of either speaker, except that he must be rich enough to pay the expenses of an "election." The voters do not even listen to both partisans in order to judge between them. Thus we choose our members of Parliament. Our Government is a committee of some twenty of them. Its first business is to keep its authority against the other party, of