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To remain secure and prosperous themselves, wealthy nations must extend the kind of co-operation to the less fortunate members that will inspire hope, confidence, and progress.

A rich nation can for a time, without noticeable damage to itself, pursue a course of self-indulgence, making its single goal the material ease and comfort of its own citizens -- thus repudiating its own spiritual and material stake in a peaceful and prosperous society of nations.

But the enmities it will incur, the isolation into which it will descend, and the internal moral and spiritual softness that will be engendered, will, in the long term, bring it to economic and political disaster.