A good example of the operation of an ideal in a modern nation is that of the ideal of a great colonial empire in the French nation. No doubt, hopes of economic advantages may have played some part in this case; but the growth of the immense oversea empire of modern France, as well as of the great extra-European conquests which France has made in the past but has ceased to control, seems to have been due in the main to the operation of this ideal in the national mind. France has no surplus population, and no Frenchman desires to leave his beautiful France; everyone regards himself as cruelly exiled if compelled to live for a time in any of the oversea possessions; and most of these, notably the Indo-Chinese Empire are very expensive, costing the nation far more in administrative expenses than any profits derived from them, and involving constant risks of international complications and war, as in Morocco in recent years. Nevertheless, the ideal still holds sway and, under its driving power, the oversea territories of France, especially in Africa, have grown enormously. And this ideal has inevitably incorporated itself in the organisation of the nation, in a colonial office and a foreign legion, and all the administrative machinery necessarily set up for securing the ends prescribed by the ideal. In modern times the most striking illustration of the power of ideas on national life is afforded by the influence of the ideals of liberty and equality. It was the effective teaching of these ideals of liberty and equality, primarily by Rousseau, to a people prepared by circumstances to receive them, which produced the French Revolution; and all through the nineteenth century they have continued to determine great changes of political and social organisation in many countries of Europe and in America. In England the idea of liberty has long been current and long ago had become incorporated and expressed in the national organisation; but its application received a vast extension when in 1834 England insisted on the liberation of all British-owned slaves and paid twenty million sterling in compensation. That the idea still lives on among us, with this extended application, seems to have been proved by the results of recent elections which were influenced largely by the force of the no-slavery cry in relation to coloured labour. It is an excellent example of an established collective ideal against which reason is of no avail.