that our posterity will be entirely robbed of anything in the nature of a joke. We shall be the joke. Heaven knows that there is plenty in contemporary life which is already becoming a joke.
But I propose this afternoon to suggest to you in a very rough outline which seems to me to be the chief danger of that great principle of liberty and enlightenment, or, to use the word which we generally use now, Education. That danger is a little different from those that you will very often hear about in the newspapers and from the politicians; so I will first of all attempt to distinguish it from those current and generally rather superficial panics. I am not going to talk politics this afternoon if I can help it. I am not going to talk certainly the ordinary sort of politics talked on either side, because I am constitutionally unable to join in those particular sorts of enthusiasm. My opinions in politics are not moderate; they are only violent on both sides. Therefore any expression of any of my opinions on those subjects would be irrelevant and inappropriate, and therefore I will try to avoid them. But it is necessary, as I say, to distinguish between the kind of warning that I would venture to give and the sort of alarum that you hear perpetually from both sides of political expression. I mean that you will hear a vast amount about the danger of Bolshevism. When I talk about the coming peril a very large number of people will probably imagine that I do mean Bolshevism. I quite agree that Bolshevism would be a peril, but I do not think that it is coming. I do not think that, especially in England, we have either the virtues or the vices of a revolution. The
