CHAPTER VII
OUR INTERNATIONAL FUTURE
So far, then, it had seemed that the maintenance of liberty, the extension of industrialism, and the initiation of racialism, or the care of the race, would constitute our domestic future. It was normal and healthy that a nation should realise its destiny in this order, just as an individual aspires first to independence, then to earning wealth, and next to the foundation of a family.
Yet this conclusion had scarcely been reached ere its inadequacy stood confessed. For clearly, a nation cannot cry halt when it has rendered its citizens the freest, the most prosperous, and the most healthy in the world. Its very success in so arduous a work must inevitably awake new ambitions, wider desires, and loftier interests not yet accounted for. The people must aspire to rise on the stepping-stones of these acquired advantages, and to assert themselves in the world. And the sight of London, stretching interminably under the afternoon sun, strengthened that conviction. For she draws so much of her power and life from intercourse with many peoples, and looks oversea. Internationalism, then, or our due
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