Page:The empire and the century.djvu/171

 XX.

The orthodox economy has failed in action, and its influence upon practical statesmanship throughout the world has disappeared, precisely because its disciples, while zealous for humanity, have been deficient in the organic sense of national life. They attempted to study the wealth of nations, while ignoring, as Adam Smith never entirely did, the higher laws governing the power of nations. Even from the point of humanitarian—yes, and of purely economic—ideals this was a profound error. Humanity can only be served through strong nations. What we have from the Greek spirit and the Roman mind we derive in the main from the epochs of their political greatness. In later times, Spanish wit and eloquence shone and were extinguished with Spanish supremacy. In thought, art, letters, France achieved in her ages of victory the best she has done. From the Thirty Years War to the period of Bismarck, the force of German intellect marched with German strength in arms. The Elizabethan genius flushed the dawn of England's rise to power; it is not altogether fanciful to think that with Milton the spirit of the New Model touches literature; and with the struggle against Napoleon came another phase of supreme psychological vigour. And Holland, having her Grotius, her Spinoza, and her Rembrandt while she held the sea, produced no men like them afterwards.

'Humanity' is nothing but the individual men and women composing it, and the worth of the aggregate is determined by the value of the units. But the soul of a whole people seems to strengthen or decay with that sense of national vitality and national achievement which—like the electric helix, giving energy to what was before the dead weight of a soft iron bar—raises to a higher power the faculties of its component individuals. 'Humanity' can do nothing for 'humanity,' and races do most for other races by the example they give and the ideals they pursue in the process of their own development.

But, even from the purely economic point of view,