mankind. Power which has set itself on great possessions has brought disinheritance to the human race. We do not know what humanity might be—how fair, how lovely, and of what good report—that great beatific vision is still hidden from our eyes—mainly because we have interpreted power in terms of possession; and, forcing others to go without, in order that we ourselves may possess, we stand to-day immeasurably poorer and weaker than we should have been had we interpreted our power and our possessions differently.
For centuries of time (so long, indeed, as history records anything) the leading nations of the world have gone out to conquer other nations and to possess them. And how have they done so?—mainly by depriving them of their liberty, by reducing their power of initiative, by undermining and warping their racial characteristics. How much has not that impoverished the history of the world and the real wealth of nations? For people living in subservience or subjection, accepting and not rebelling against it, breed less nobly as a consequence—they fail, then, to produce great minds or to express themselves greatly in the arts. Their life-potency is diminished; and we, holding them upon those terms, are owners of a property which we squander by our very mode of possessing it.
Quite as much of the art, the literature and the philosophy of the greatest periods of civilisation has been wiped out and destroyed
