I do not wish to dwell on the disadvantages which we have thus incurred in international competition—­our inferiority to Germany in chemistry, and to almost every continental nation in scientific agriculture.  This lesson we are learning, and are not likely to forget.  It is our spiritual loss which we need to realise more fully.  In the first place, the majority of Englishmen have no thought-out purpose in life beyond the call of “duty,” which is an empty ideal until we know what our duty is.  Confusion of means and ends is especially common in this country, though it is certainly to be found everywhere.  The passion for irrational accumulation is one example of the error, which causes the gravest social inconvenience.  The largest part of social injustice and suffering is caused by the unchecked indulgence of the acquisitive instinct by those who have the opportunity of indulging it, and who have formed a blind habit of indulging it.  No one, however selfish, who had formed any reasonable estimate of the relative values of life, would devote his whole time to the economical exploitation of his neighbours, in order to pile up the instruments of a fuller life, which he will never use.  To regard business as a kind of game is, from the highest point of view, right, and our nation gains greatly by applying the ethics of sport to all our external activities; but we err in living for our games, whether they happen to be commerce or football.  A friend of mine expostulated with a Yorkshire manufacturer who was spending his old age in unnecessary toil for the benefit of a spendthrift heir.  The old man answered, “If it gives him half as much pleasure to spend my half million as it has given me to make it, I don’t grudge it him.”  That is not the spirit of the real miser or Mammon-worshipper.  It is the spirit of a natural idealist who from want of education has no rational standard of good.  When such a man intervenes in educational matters, he is sure to take the standpoint of the so-called practical man, because he is blind to the higher values of life.  He will wish to make knowledge and wisdom instruments for the production of wealth, or the improvement of the material condition of the poor.  But knowledge and wisdom refuse to be so treated.  Like goodness and beauty, wisdom is one of the absolute values, the divine ideas.  As one of the Cambridge Platonists said, we must not make our intellectual faculties Gibeonites, hewers of wood and drawers of water to the will and affections.  Wisdom must be sought for its own sake or we shall not find it.  Another effect of our misologia is the degradation of reasonable sympathy into sentimentalism, which regards pain as the worst of evils, and endeavours always to remove the effects of folly and wrong-doing, without investigating the causes.  That such sentimentalism is often kind only to be cruel, and that it frequently robs honest Peter to pay dishonest Paul, needs no demonstration.  Sentimentalism does not believe that prevention is