in which may be foreseen the solution of many difficulties beside this. When public education becomes rationalised; when it is employed chiefly as a means of character-making; when the universal education of mankind has the effect of turning out men and women capable of thinking, and not merely of remembering, the teeming population of the working class will begin to exercise an intelligent influence on the legislature—which at present it certainly cannot be said to do. And one thing which the intelligently-elected Parliaments of the new age will assuredly discover is this principle: that it is not good for the State that any one man, or any one associated body of men, should possess an inordinate amount of wealth.[1]
Once this principle is discovered and acted upon; once it is illegal for any person or corporation to be seised of more than a certain fixed capital; the dangers of inconvenient
- ↑ A practical objection to this principle may be here anticipated and answered. Politicians may say that for any one nation to be the pioneer in the adoption of such a policy would have the effect of driving trade and manufactures into other countries where the restriction did not exist. But there are so many highly necessary reforms open to a similar objection that I think there is no doubt that ultimately the jurists of all nations will agree upon some arrangement for universal legislation, whereby laws not affecting the relations of one country with another will be simultaneously enacted by a comity of nations. We have already one very imperfect example of such a procedure in the Convention against bounty-helped sugar.
