a sterile life at the top of a pillar, eaten by vermin, just as the Hindoo saint to-day thinks it meritorious to live an equally sterile life upon a bed of spikes. But as the early Christian ideal progressed, sacrifices having no end connected with the betterment of mankind lost their appeal. Our admiration now goes, not to the recluse who does nothing for mankind, but rather to the priest who gives his life to bring a ray of comfort to a leper settlement. The Christian saint who would allow the nails of his fingers to grow through the palms of his clasped hands would excite, not our admiration, but our revolt. More and more is religious effort being subjected to this test: Does it make for the improvement of society? If not, it stands condemned. Political ideals are inevitably undergoing a similar development, and will be more and more subjected to a similar test.14
I am aware that very often at present they are not thus tested. Dominated as our political thought is by Roman and feudal imagery—hypnotized by symbols and analogies which the necessary development of organized society has rendered obsolete—the ideals even of democracies are still often pure abstractions, divorced from any aim calculated to advance the moral or material betterment of mankind. The craze for sheer size of territory, the mere extent of administrative area, is still deemed a thing deserving immense, incalculable sacrifices.
Even these ideals, however, firmly set as they are in our language and tradition, are rapidly yielding to the necessary force of events. A generation ago it would have been inconceivable that a people or a monarch should calmly see part of