igent and obedient workman: but he will not be a full-grown man.
Government will have starved and stunted him in that which it is the
supreme object of government to develop and set free.

It is idle, then, to talk in general terms about the extension of
government as a good thing, whether in relation to the individual
citizen or to the organization of the world into an international State.
We have always first to ask: What kind of Government? On what principles
will it be based? What ideal will it set forth? What kind of common life
will it provide or allow to its citizens? If the whole world were
organized into one single State, and that State, supreme in its control
over Nature, were armed with all the knowledge and organization that
the ablest and most farseeing brains in the world could supply, yet
mankind might be worse off under its sway, in the real essentials of
human life, than if they were painted savages. 'Though I have the gift
of prophecy and understand all mysteries and all knowledge: and though I
have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity,
I am nothing.' Government may be the organization of goodness, or the
organization of evil. It may provide the conditions by which the common
life of society can develop along the lines of man's spiritual nature:
or it may take away the very possibility of such a development. Till we
know what a Government stands for, do not let us judge it by its
imposing externals of organization. The Persian Empire was more imposing
than the Republics of Greece: Assyria and Babylon than the little tribal
divisions of Palestine: the Spanish Empire than the cities of the
Netherlands. There is some danger that, in our new-found sense of the
value of knowledge in promoting happiness, we should forget what a
tyrant knowledge, like wealth, can become. No doubt, just as we saw that
moral qualities, patience and the like, are needed for the advancement
of knowledge, so knowledge is needed, and greatly needed, in the task of
extending and deepening the moral and spiritual life of mankind. But we
cannot measure that progress in terms of knowledge or organization or
efficiency or culture. We need some other standard by which to judge
between Greece and Persia, between Israel and Babylon, between Spain and
the Netherlands, between Napoleon and his adversaries, and between
contending powers in the modern world. What shall that standard be?

It must be a similar standa