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politics we may expect to find hundreds engaged in a passionate attempt
to create the new god in their own image.

This may seem a far-fetched speculation, but not to those who see how
through the centuries humanity has oscillated like a pendulum betwixt
opposing ideals. The greatest reactions have been from solidarity to
liberty and from liberty to solidarity. The religious solidarity of
Europe in the Middle Ages was broken by a passionate desire in the heart
of millions for liberty of thought. A reaction rarely, if ever, brings
people back to a pole deserted centuries before. The coming solidarity
is the domination of the State; and to speculate whether that again will
be broken up by a new religious movement would be to speculate without
utility. What we ought to realize is that these reactions take place
within one being, humanity, and indicate eternal desires of the soul.
They seem to urge on us the idea that there is a pleroma, or human
fullness, in which the opposites may be reconciled, and that the divine
event to which we are moving is a State in which there will be essential
freedom combined with an organic unity. At the last analysis are not
all empires, nationalities, and movements spiritual in their origin,
beginning with desires of the soul and externalizing themselves in
immense manifestations of energy in which the original will is often
submerged and lost sight of? If in their inception national ideals are
spiritual, their final object must also be spiritual, perhaps to make
man a yet freer agent, but acting out of a continual consciousness of
his unity with humanity. The discipline which the highly organized
State imposes on its subjects connects them continuously in thought to
something greater than themselves, and so ennobles the average man. The
freedom which the policy of other nations permits quickens intelligence
and will. Each policy has its own defects; with one a loss in individual
initiative, with the other self-absorption and a lower standard of
citizenship or interest in national affairs. The oscillations in society
provide the corrective.

We are going to have our free individualism tempered by a more
autocratic action by the State. There are signs that with our enemy the
moral power which attracts the free to the source of their liberty
is being appreciated, and the policy which retained for Britain its
Colonies and secured their support in an hour of peril is contrasted
with the pol