THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY
I learned a great deal there, and I learned this: that no political creed is worth anything that does not embrace the spiritual side as well as the material side.
Besides the scientific knowledge that is to make a man a director of machinery and deliver him from a monotonous occupation, there is something more wanted. You want to awaken his interest in literature and art. I have known a good many working men who read their Shakespeare, and some of them their Plato, too. There would be plenty of people with keen tastes in that class if we only gave them the encouragement as well as the opportunity. It is not very fashionable to give such encouragement, and I want to see it fashionable. I want to see the same love of literature and art among the working classes as I find among the best people elsewhere. I want to see the opportunities of life and education such that they shall be the same for all classes in respect of higher values.
Knowledge is power, but knowledge must not be merely abstract and material; it must be knowledge of those things that are high and spiritual, a knowledge that tells men and women that the State is largely their own lives, and that their own lives are a trust to be carried out for the benefit of those around them as well as for themselves.
I will conclude this address with a great saying of a great thinker, because I have now made plain to you what the ideal is which ought more and more to dominate life for all of us. It is this:
"THE SPIRITUAL ALONE IS THE REAL."
At the Pelican Press, 2 Carmelite Street, E.C.
