THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY
the present time; if you get the human machine as far as possible superseded by the machine directed by the man with a certain professional skill, the educated workman, you will have gone a long way towards the point where the elite of talent may take the place of the old-fashioned aristocracy.
That is what I believe in; that is what I mean to work for; that is what I hold to be the only thing that in the days in which we live can give stability to the Constitution of this country. That is the only thing that I believe will carry us on in the future in the proud position we have occupied up to now as leaders among the nations.
But I want to say that you cannot stop there. It is the whole man we want, not the half man. Remember that there is a yet higher side than the side of people's rights. There is the side of people's duties. We are citizens of the State and we owe duties to the State and to each other. The highest values we can reach are those we reach by self-sacrifice, by putting thoughts of ourselves aside, and by thinking of something nobler and greater. That is what our soldiers are doing in the fields of France to-day, and that is why our hearts go out to them, because theirs is the faith that there is something higher than life—the good of their country. We have to bear that in mind. There is a higher side in which we recognise society as there for more than mere self-help, as an organisation in which we can realise our duties to the State, and realise more than merely our individual aspirations. In an organised community like that we do not aim at or think of reward. We live for eternal justice. Your best man does not want reward for doing the right thing. It is the thing itself, the joy of quality, that makes all the difference to him. And so the ideal of the citizen of the State must be that it is quality and not quantity that counts, and that the real reward lies in self-sacrifice itself, even, it may be, in the giving of one's life.
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