them after a hundred years. As I say, it is difficult in any case to sum them up properly. I do not know any better summary of them, perhaps, than that which I once found as the motto of a Scottish debating club in Edinburgh: "The glory of man is reason and speech." It is an old story. In the religious phrase, we have all "fallen short of the glory of God," and it is no less true that we have all fallen short of the glory of man. People say, heaven knows truly enough, that Christians have not lived up to the ideal of Christ; but, heaven help us all, have Radicals lived up to the ideal of Jeremy Bentham, let alone John Stuart Mill?
To go back and read those glorious promises and prophecies of the first Liberal epoch is to be uplifted, but also, I hope, to be a little shamed. It is true, so I think, without attempting any further historical retrospect on that point, broadly speaking, that those great men who so gloriously founded the modern institutions of knowledge and enlightenment did not see all the evils or all the difficulties that even their own movement would produce, let alone the evils and difficulties which the world would inevitably bring against it. In other words, they made a certain number of mistakes, probably not so many as we are making, but a good many. It is a pleasant and consoling thought, if it indeed be true, as some say, that the novel is a form of literature that is dying out, and that theatres are being deserted, to think that our posterity will find sufficient entertainment in the contemplation of the enormous blunders that you are making at this moment. That will be a continuous source of laughter and joy to them, so that we need not fear
