Page:Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919).djvu/273

Rh to do with a mighty Going Concern. If you stop it, or even slow down its running, it will punish you relentlessly. If you let it run without guidance, it will take you over the cataract again. You cannot guide it by setting up mere fences, and by mending those fences if it breaks them down, because this Going Concern consists of hundreds of millions of human beings who are 'pursuing' happiness, and they will swarm over all your fences like an army of ants. You can only guide Humanity by the attraction of ideals. That is why Christianity wins on, after nineteen centuries, through all the impediments set up by criticism of its creeds and its miracles.

What we need, in my belief, to guide our Reconstruction is a presumption of statesmanship in favour of the balanced nation, and the balanced province, sinning neither with the Free Trader nor the Protectionist. If we persist for a generation or two, with such an ideal before us, we may gradually change the Going Concern, so that we shall have fraternal nations and fraternal provinces, instead of warring, organised interests ever striving to extend their limits to the international field in order to outflank opposing interests which still lag on the merely national scale. Remember how that curious negative ideal of