has produced the classically successful manifestations of moral and military power, as for example in the cases of Puritan England and Revolutionary France. Such equality as obtained in these cases was doubtless chiefly moral rather than material, and it can scarcely be questioned that equality of consideration and of fundamental moral estimation is a far more efficient factor than would be equality of material possessions. The fact that it is difficult to persuade a man with thirty shillings a week that he has as much to lose by the loss of national independence as a man with thirty thousand a year, is merely evidence that the imagination of the former is somewhat restricted by his type of education, and that we habitually attach an absurd moral significance to material advantages. It seems certain that it would still be possible to attain a very fair approximation to a real moral equality without any necessary disturbance of the extreme degree of material inequality which our elaborate class segregation has imposed upon us.
A serious and practical attempt to secure a true moral unity of the nation would render necessary a general understanding that the state to be striven for was something different, not only in degree but also in quality, from anything which has yet {152} been regarded as satisfactory. A mere intellectual unanimity in the need for prosecuting the war with all vigour, we may be said actually to possess, but its moral value is not very great. A state of mind directed more to the nation and less immediately to the war is what is needed; the good soldier absorbed in his regiment has little inclination to concern himself with the way the war is going, and the civilian should be similarly absorbed in the nation. To attain this he must feel that he belongs to the country and to his fellow-citizens, and that it and they also belong to him. The established social system sets itself steadily to deny these propositions, and not so much by its abounding material inequalities as by the moral inequalities that correspond with them. The hierarchies of rank, prestige, and consideration,