Page:The empire and the century.djvu/23

 Cromwell's example and with the memory of Bunyan's hero, who was not a priest, but a pilgrim. Material well-being was regarded as an ideal to which the nation as a whole, and each man in it, might aspire—not only as something which was not wrong, but as something which opened up a wider range of virtue. On one side was the vice of asceticism, the life apart from the world; on the other, the vice of hedonism, the life in the world and only for the world. The true Puritanism steered the middle course, using the world as a gift of God wherein to work out the Divine purpose. Looking back over the course of history, we cannot avoid being struck with the fact that zeal for political liberty, religious freedom, and industrial ambition were coeval, and combined in all great epochs. The Elizabethans, the Puritans who founded the New England States and gave the first impulse to English industrialism, and, at a later date, the people of the North of England, who combined Methodism and a zeal for political reform with an unfailing practical instinct, seem to prove that Montesquieu's diagnosis is the correct one, and that the English racial ideal at its best, whether we call it Nationalism or Imperialism, combines these three attributes.

Our national ideal, then, properly considered, must combine all three aims. When it is shorn of its practicality it will become the creed of dreamers and doctrinaires; if it is bereft of its spiritual side it will become the dogma of a hard and narrow class of utilitarians, such as Bentham and Mill; if it is shorn again of its political aspect, we get the commercialism of the Manchester School in its decadence, where the individual was looked upon as apart from society, where money-making was regarded as per se a religious and moral act, quite apart from the ends for which money was sought. Ideals were sunk in