Page:The Case for Capitalism (1920).djvu/28

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and regards the natural beauties of his own country chiefly from the point of view of their adaptability to the purposes of golf links, is not a good example of mental development stimulated by travel. All this has to be granted; but even those who, when travelling, confine themselves most carefully to the hotels and resorts in which they will meet no one but the most aggressively national spirits of their own nation, do get something from change of air and scene. Plenty of arguments can be brought forward against any attempt at trying to get at a better world in which everybody will be pleasanter and more sensible, but there is no need to despair. In spite of all that has happened in the last few years, there are most encouraging signs of an improvement in the outlook of mankind upon its duties to itself.

Little more than two hundred years ago a Te Deum was sung in St. Paul's, specially composed by Handel for the occasion, to celebrate the Peace of Utrecht which gave England a practical monopoly in the slave trade from West Africa to America. About a hundred years ago, at the end of a war which had shaken and strained England almost as much as the one which we have just gone through, the Income Tax, on the declaration of peace,