Page:Future of England - Peel.djvu/123

Rh was the Arctic habit of mind, the polar view of citizenship, which led us so deep into the dangers entangling us to-day.

Nevertheless, this was an artificial and unstable condition of affairs, as appeared every year more obviously with the progress of the nineteenth century. The State and religion began presently to live on better terms with one another, working co-operatively, the one to formulate ideals and the other to fulfil them.

There can be no doubt as to the general influence which this change must tend to exercise upon the commonwealth; for, in the words of Edmund Burke, "Christ appeared in sympathy with the lowest of the people, and thereby made it a firm and ruling principle that their welfare was the object of all government." However, in the perversity of human affairs, there is some danger attending us even here.

That danger is sentimentalism. The risk of sentimentalism is that, whereas, in the past, we have suffered from the conception of the economic, we may, in the future, suffer from the reality of the uneconomic, man. So we shall regret it, if we shed too abruptly our utilitarian skin.

But, on the other hand, and on the whole, we may welcome this new integration, for the fruit of better lives that it will yield us, and for the cure which it will apply to the weaknesses of the race. And besides, there is another danger which it can avert. Since democracy ever opens itself to more