"O Magi of the east and of the west, Your incense, gold, and myrrh are excellent!-- What gifts for Christ, then, bring ye with the rest? Your hands have worked well. Is your courage spent In handwork only? Have you nothing best, Which generous souls may perfect and present, And He shall thank the givers for? no light Of teaching, liberal nations, for the poor, Who sit in darkness when it is not night? No cure for wicked children? Christ,--no cure, No help for women, sobbing out of sight Because men made the laws? no brothel-lure Burnt out by popular lightnings? Hast thou found No remedy, my England, for such woes? No outlet, Austria, for the scourged and bound, No call back for the exiled? no repose, Russia, for knouted Poles worked underground, And gentle ladies bleached among the snows? No mercy for the slave, America? No hope for Rome, free France, chivalric France? Alas, great nations have great shames, I say. No pity, O world, no tender utterance Of benediction, and prayers stretched this way For poor Italia, baffled by mischance? O gracious nations, give some ear to me! You all go to your Fair, and I am one Who at the roadside of humanity Beseech your alms,--God's justice to be done. So, prosper!" I could press, if I chose, both these motives upon you, of pride and self-interest, with more force, but these are not motives which ought to be urged upon you at all. The only motive that I ought to put before you is simply that it would be right to do this; that the holding of property abroad, and the personal efforts of Englishmen to redeem the condition of foreign nations, are among the most direct pieces of duty which our wealth renders incumbent upon us. I do not--and in all truth and deliberateness I say this--I do not know anything more ludicrous among the self-deceptions of well-meaning people than their notion of patriotism, as requiring them to limit their efforts to the good of their own country;--the notion that charity is a geographical virtue, and that what it is holy and righteous to do for people on one bank of a river, it is quite improper and unnatural to do for people on the other. It will be a wonderful thing, some day or other, for the Christian world to remember, that it went on thinking for two thousand years that neighbours were neighbours at Jerusalem, but not at Jericho; a wonderful thing for us English to reflect, in after-years, how long it was before we could shake hands with anybody across that shallow salt wash, which the very chalk-dust of its two shores whitens from Folkestone to Ambleteuse.