Page:Speeches and addresses by the late Thomas E Ellis M P.pdf/94

 with his conquering hosts to the gates of India and wept because he had no more worlds to conquer, not that Greece ruled the Eastern Mediterranean or vanquished the Macedonians, but that it produced the epics of Homer, the odes of Pindar, the masterful periods of Demosthenes, the dramas of Sophocles, who saw life steadily and saw it whole, the dialogues of Plato and the politics of Aristotle; and that Greek society, the common folk of Athens and of Achaia, lived in the current of their ideas, were permeated with intelligence and love of right thinking. The Bismarckian Imperialism of Germany and its army of three or four million soldiers will not, in the judgment and interest of history, count so much for Germany as the production of Goethe and Goethe's ideal.

We in England are proud of an empire on which the sun never sets, and we stand aghast at the amazing figures of the statistics of Our population, commerce, and shipping But are we not too apt to attach an exaggerated importance to the mere unfettered pursuit of the production of wealth, forgetting