Now those acts of our national past, which we now reprobate, were only bad prominent expressions of the fundamental idea on which the modern State runs its foreign policies--reflecting outwardly something which lives strongly engrained in our midst--the Will to Power. It is because that principle is more firmly established in the world of diplomacy than either the Will to Serve or the Will to Love, that our policies have been able to shape themselves. It was not because we wished to give the Heathen Chinee a good time that we forced our opium upon him; it was because we wanted to give our opium trade good returns. And that was merely a faithful reflection of what was going on at home. It was because we wanted--or because our ruling classes wanted--to give capital good returns, that the working classes were not allowed to combine, that child-labour, and sweated industries remained like institutions in our midst, that legislation in the interests of labour and of women and children fell hopelessly into arrears. Democracy, you may say, has done away with all that: well, with some of it. In proportion to the broadening of its power in the State, Democracy has looked after its own interests. But so long as the average human mind is bent upon securing advantage to the detriment of others, or upon securing for itself privileges not to be shared by others, that mind will inevitably be reflected in the way we work our State institutions, and the form we give to our foreign policies. And always, and in every instance, you will find, if you follow it out, that this inclination to secure advantage to the detriment of others always lands you in an ethical contradiction unless your ideal is entirely inhuman and non-social. It is inconsistent with that community of interest to which social order pretends. We set up laws for the good of the State; and we call them equal laws. And if they are good laws, and if we love our country, we must necessarily love the laws which are for the good of our country, and embrace them with equal fervour, whether they touch us or whether they touch our neighbours. But when a member of our own family commits a theft, or a forgery, we do everything we can to save him from the operation of that law which we think so good for others. And if we do; then our affection or respect for the law is entirely one-sided and impure. And the people who make laws and devise punishments upon those unequal premises are not at all likely to make their laws just, or their forms of punishment wise. Our whole prison system is bad just because it is not really designed first and foremost to do the criminal good, and to develop him into a useful citizen; but only to repress him and make him a discouraging example to others.