2i6 IDEALISM AND POLITICS 



respect in which Idealism is the most radical of all social 

 and political theories. For while preserving present insti- 

 tutions, and civic and international relations, // would 

 moralise them. It would, to take one instance, leave the 

 social reformer no rest till he had made the workshop, the 

 mine, the counting-house, the shipyard into moral institu- 

 tions. Idealism finds manual labour, the transferring and 

 making of goods, to be occupations entered upon for the 

 sake of obtaining a more or less meagre livelihood, and 

 often carried on at the expense of wearing down the bodies 

 and souls of men ; and it is profoundly dissatisfied. It 

 would level "the trades" with "the professions," not by 

 degrading the latter, but by making the former what his 

 profession ought always to be to the teacher, the physician, 

 the minister of religion, and the artist, namely, the expres- 

 sion of a free choice of mode of life, and the outlet of 

 devoted energies. Such a social revolution as that, even 

 although it left the external relations between men just 

 as they stand, would reach sufficiently deep to satisfy the 

 most ardent reformer. And I suspect that instead of 

 pronouncing such an ideal too low, or too narrow, or the 

 change to it not sufficiently sweeping, our radical reformer 

 and socialist would despair of reaching it. But it is the 

 characteristic of Idealism, with its view of the State as 

 spiritual and of society as a moral institution that it cannot 

 be content with less. It believes intensely in the vitality 

 of ideals, and maintains that its hopes are ' ' too fair to turn 

 out false." 



These last considerations have led us to what I believe 

 to be the essential character of the idealistic doctrine in 

 its application to politics to what is, in fact, its central 

 principle. Mr. Hobhouse calls that principle " spiritual." 



