For concerning political measures, we chiefly ask: How will they affect the happiness of mankind?
Yet here too we may observe that what we term expediency is merely the law of right limited by the conditions of human society.

Right and truth are the highest aims of government as well as of individuals; and we ought not to lose sight of them because we cannot directly enforce them.

They appeal to the better mind of nations; and sometimes they are too much for merely temporal interests to resist.
They are the watchwords which all men use in matters of public policy, as well as in their private dealings; the peace of Europe may be said to depend upon them.

In the most commercial and utilitarian states of society the power of ideas remains.

And all the higher class of statesmen have in them something of that idealism which Pericles is said to have gathered from the teaching of Anaxagoras.