, {204} efficiency, wise self-assertion,
watchful self-restraint, patience, defiance of fortune, resignation in
defeat, your daily social duties, your individual self-development,
your personal rights and dignity, your obedience to the calls of duty,
your justified self-sacrifices, your rational pride in the unique
moral office to which you have individually been called--all these, I
assert, can be rightly defined, defended, estimated, and put into
practice through an accurate understanding and development of the
principle of loyalty just laid down.

Since I am, indeed, speaking of sources of insight, and am not
portraying at any length their results, you will not expect of me a
deduction of such a moral code here. But this assertion of mine is no
mere boast. I have repeatedly endeavoured, elsewhere, to portray
loyalty and to apply its principles to life. For the moment it
suffices to ask you to consider the lives of the loyal, in such
examples as I have suggested to you, and to try for yourselves to see
what they teach. To help you in such a consideration, I may here
simply remind you that when one is not only loyal but enlightened, one
cannot finally approve or accept any cause or any mode of living that,
while seeming in itself to be a cause or a mode of living such as
embodies the spirit of loyalty, still depends upon or involves
contempt for the loyalty of other men, or a disposition to prey upon
their loyalty and to deprive them of any cause to which they can be
loyal. No loyalty that lives by {205} destroying the loyalty of your
neighbour is just to its own true intent. And that is why charity and
justice are fruits of the loyal spirit. And that is why, if your cause
and your loyal action are rightly accepted and carried out, the common
interests of all rational beings are served by your loyalty precisely
in so far as your powers permit. Whatever your special cause (and your
special personal cause--your love, your home, or your calling--you
must have), _your true cause is the spiritual unity of all the world
of reasonable beings._ This cause you further, so far as in you lies,
by your every deed.

And that also is why the principle of loyalty, once rightly defined
and served by you--served with the whole energy and power of your
personal self--is a principle that, upon any enlightened survey of
your life you can never regret having served. This, then, is what we
were seeking--an absolute moral principle, a guid