poor or rich, ‘is bad.’  There are materials, though far less abundant than we could wish, for a spiritual reformation, which would smooth the transition to a new social order, and open to us unfailing sources of happiness and inspiration, which would not only enable us to tide over the period of dissolution, but might make the whole world our debtor.  No nation is better endowed by nature with a faculty for sane idealism than the English.  We were never intended to be a nation of shopkeepers, if a shopkeeper is doomed to be merely a shopkeeper, which of course he is not.  Our brutal commercialism has been a temporary aberration; the quintessential Englishman is not the hero of Smiles’ ‘Self-help’; he is Raleigh, Drake, Shakespeare, Milton, Johnson, or Wordsworth, with a pleasant spice of Dickens.  He is, in a word, an idealist who has not quite forgotten that he is descended from an independent race of sea-rovers, accustomed to think and act for themselves.  Mr. Havelock Ellis, one of the wisest and most fearless of our prophets to-day, quotes from an anonymous journalist a prediction which may come true:  ’London may yet be the spiritual capital of the world; while Asia—­rich in all that gold can buy and guns can give, lord of lands and bodies, builder of railways and promulgator of police regulations, glorious in all material glories—­postures, complacent and obtuse, before a Europe content in the possession of all that matters.’  For, as the Greek poet says, ’the soul’s wealth is the only real wealth.’  The spirit creates values, while the demagogue shrieks to transfer the dead symbols of them.  ‘All that matters’ is what the world can neither give nor take away.  The spiritual integration of society which we desire and behold afar off must be illuminated by the dry light of science, and warmed by the rays of idealism, a white light but not cold.  And idealism must be compacted as a religion, for it is the function of religion to prevent the fruits of the flowering-times of the spirit from being lost.  Science has not yet come to its own in forming the beliefs and practice of mankind, because it has been so much excluded from higher education, and so much repressed by sentimentalism under the wing of religion.  The nation that first finds a practical reconciliation between science and idealism is likely to take the front place among the peoples of the world.  In England we have to struggle not only against ignorance, but against a deep-rooted intellectual insincerity, which is our worst national fault.  The Englishman hates an idea which he has never met before, as he hates the disturber of his privacy in a steam-ship cabin; and he takes opportunities of making things unpleasant for those who utter indiscreet truths.  As Samuel Butler says:  ’We hold it useful to have a certain number of melancholy examples whose notorious failure shall serve as a warning to those who do not cultivate a power of immoral self-control which shall prevent them from saying, or even thinking,