's work, to assist the
Government by obedient service, the best of which he is capable. It
means a people trained every man to his task.

A nation should be like a team in which every man has his place, his
work to do, his mission or duty. There is no room in it either for the
idler who consumes but renders no service, or for the unskilled man who
bungles a task to which he has not been trained. A nation may be
compared to a living creature. Consider the way in which nature
organises all things that live and grow. In the structure of a living
thing every part has its function, its work to do. There are no
superfluous organs, and if any fails to do its work the creature
sickens and perhaps dies.

Take the idea of the nation as I have tried to convey it and apply it as
a measure or test to our customary way of thinking both of public
affairs and of our own lives. Does it not reveal that we attach too much
importance to having and to possessions--our own and other people's--and
too little importance to doing, to service? When we ask what a man is
worth, we think of what he owns. But the words ought to make us think of
what he is fit for and of what service he renders to the nation. The
only value of what a man has springs from what he does with it.

The idea of the nation leads to the right way of looking at these
matters, because it constrains every man to put himself and all that he
has at the service of the community. Thus it is the opposite of
socialism, which merely turns upside down the current worship of
ownership, and which thinks "having" so supremely important that it
would put "not having" in its place. The only cry I will adopt is
"England for ever," which means that we are here, every one of us, with
all that we have and all that we can do, as members of a nation that
must either serve the world or perish.

But the idea of the nation carries us a long way further than I have yet
shown. It bids us all try at the peril of England's fall to get the
best Government we can to lead us. We need a man to preside over the
nation's counsels, to settle the line of Britain's duty in Europe and in
her own Empire, and of her duty to her own people, to the millions who
are growing up ill fed, ill housed and ill trained, and yet who are part
of the sovereign people. We need to give him as councillors men that are
masters of the tasks in which for the nation to fail means its ruin, the
tasks of which I have enumerated thos