Page:Future of England - Peel.djvu/116

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104
THE FUTURE OF ENGLAND
CH.

future take a wider view, and form a more generous conception? For the true object of education is that each body should have its own hygiene, and each mind its own Renaissance, and each soul its own Reformation.

Racialism, then, or the culture of the race, and the care of the individual—this, before all! Such, above all things else, will be the domestic business of us in the twentieth century. As we judge the seventeenth century by its work for freedom, and as we test the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the value of their industrialism, so, domestically, the England of the twentieth century will largely stand, or fall, in the estimation of the future by its success, or failure, in dealing with the health and physique, bodily and mental, of the English race.

It may be said in reply that other internal issues much more vital and much more moving fill the air and will engage the energies of men. The battle of liberty, it may be argued, is never won, and the social forces wage a warfare for predominance which can never cease. True,—yet, in sum, the classic time of freedom is in the past not the future, and, were it needful to revive the battles of liberty in the face of new oppression, the refurbished armour of those old days would suffice.

Or again, it may be thought that the reorganisation of our industrial system should be the main goal of our future efforts, and that it is here that we shall witness the most momentous trans-