290 The Ideal State 



minds for a long period of time : no doubt it fulfilled a 

 great purpose in the past, but to-day its tendency is to 

 smother the interests of humanity. The boundary of 

 a country is an artificial thing, and we are too apt to 

 extol the merits of the people on one side, and decry 

 those on the other side. How much better that we 

 should all act for the betterment of the men and women 

 of all countries, and not with the selfish view of bene- 

 fiting only those of our own. This no doubt will be the 

 last phase of the ideal state, and then the whole earth 

 shall behold the rule of the law of Righteousness and 

 Love, and individual possession, like many another 

 fetish of the past, like many another evidence of the 

 foolishness of men, shall have passed to the limbo of 

 forgotten things. All a dream ! you say. Alas ! it 

 may be, but we think not, and have given many strong 

 and powerful reasons for this faith and hope. The 

 world can never certainly be so miserable under a reign 

 of self-denial as it has been under that of its opposite. 

 The rich have accumulated only pain, even for them- 

 selves ; money has not brought good in its train as they 

 had hoped and believed ; all this wretchedness — this 

 dead-sea fruit — will be eliminated ; all will have enough, 

 and the cry of the poor and the needy will be heard no 

 more. 



We must now consider a very ancient evil, for which 

 the cure can only come effectively through the elimina- 

 tion of the lust for gold and the power of money, and 

 that is the white slave traffic. That is how we know it 

 in the country of the white man, but in some of our 

 Protectorates the name of the black slave traffic might 

 be more appropriate. In the latter, however, prostitu- 

 tion does not exist ; it is rather a system of concubin- 

 age, and is certainly not attended by anything like the 

 misery, suffering, disease, and early death which accom- 

 pany this canker of the body politic in the countries in 



