We are being threatened with that great boon in the near future. And when it takes place a great wave of impurity will rise and will flood through the land; and men will be strenuously misrepresenting the words and thoughts and motives of their opponents--and very often men will be misrepresenting their own motives--because their end is really power--power over others instead of goodwill to others. And out of that process we shall draw together the Council of the Nation! That process--which we see quite well is an impure process--is forced upon us because we are in a stage of transition; it is difficult as a matter of practical politics to suggest a better. But ought not that obvious fact to make us very humble about our present stage of political development--and humble in general about the position to which we have attained in our moral evolution? Is it not a little premature to call ourselves a Free Nation? Is any Nation really free till it has found itself on peace and good-will to all? Now I have put before you these sorry spectacles to show that where the true social ideal of brotherhood and goodwill breaks down, you arrive at some ethical absurdity of which you have to be ashamed--you find yourself driven into inconsistency, into impurity. And the only thing that is consistent and is pure (once you have started with the social idea) is that we are all one brotherhood--and that harm to one member of the community is harm to all. And when you have once got a nation that has really taken that idea to heart and made a practice of it, such a nation will never rest content till there is a Society of Nations of like mind extending over all the world. I referred just now to the Sermon on the Mount. To most of the world its teachings sound impracticable. They are the extreme statement of an ideal; and it is hard in this world to live ideally. But that statement has about it this merit of commonsense--it is pure, it is consistent--it is a united whole; and it is based on something of which we have never yet really allowed ourselves the luxury--a trust in human nature. A belief that if you set yourself whole-heartedly to do good to others--to do good even to your enemies--human nature will respond. We cannot all love our neighbours as ourself--that individual emotion is beyond us. But if we can love our country enough to die for it, we can also love it enough to give to it laws and institutions and policies that shall prepare the way for the universal brotherhood of man. THE RIGHTS OF MAJORITIES (1912) In every age some fetich of government has been set up designed to delude the governed, and to induce a blind rather than an intellectual acceptance of authority.