understand, but for those determined to misunderstand if a possible chance be given. So with most debates. One is speaking to people not anxious to find out what you really mean, but to find lapses which they can make capital of. The Germans have tried to give precision to words by compounding them. Whether they have made a success is doubtful. They have a great contempt for our monosyllabic language, but probably preciseness is more to be found in our system than in theirs. In the end every mental conception goes back to some notion of some fact appreciated by one of our five senses. Conceptions which do not so go back when reduced to simple language usually become nonsense pure and simple. Every science has technical terms, its words of art. These words are to express shortly ideas of which they are a succinct summary. Take the words "parallel lines," as used by Euclid. Challenged as to the meaning of parallel," and it can be given in short, precise words with a meaning not in doubt. And so the grandest word used by every philosopher ought to be translatable into plain, simple, monosyllabic words which every one can understand. It is to avoid being cumbersome the big word is used and alone ought to be used. Undoubtedly those who plume themselves on their superiority because of the strangeness of the words they use are legion. To some, to use a word which no one else understands is the acme of intellectual supremacy. As a matter of fact the savage is more intelligent when he tries to impress his enemy with the terrors of his tom-tom or the horror of his cries. If words are not understood, why use them? They are more impressive when not understood, as one word artist frankly and cynically confessed. He knew his audience. One incident: it was the close of an election campaign. "And now," said the great man to his brother candidate, " now if we say nothing we are all right," and for more than an hour he and his brother candidate spoke vigorously and no doubt did say nothing.

CHAPTER V.

WHITHER.*

It was at our last meeting you did me the honour to elect me as your President, and when I consider the roll of those who have preceded me in such officeincluding, among others, our illustrious fellow-citizen, William Roscoe himself—I find it difficult to put into words how deeply I appreciate the kindness you have done me.

And now, at the opening of this session, I know that first and foremost you would have me voice the deep gratitude we all feel to that Mighty Power which has brought us in safety through the terrible dangers of the past five years.

Far other might have been our meeting to-night. What might have been! And we shudder at the possibilities. But Providence, in its infinite goodness, has seen fit to bring us safely through the war, and though anxieties of peace still beset us they are restfulness to the anxieties we have now put aside. Victory ours, nothing really matters. Folly or wisdom may mean years of more or less unsettlement, but little else. A mighty world-change has taken place, is still taking place. The transition will be accomplished, but whether with creaking and groaning or in amity and peace is alone in the balance. The flood of life is moving forward, slowly, maybe, but irresistible as an Alpine glacier. Who the engineer to stay one of those ice floes as inch by inch it travels to the sea? And who the magician to bid life's river change its course

*An address read before the Liverpool Literary and Philosophical Society at the opening of the one hundred and ninth Session, October, 1919.

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in its passage through eternity? If he but round off a few snags, dynamite a few boulders, that it may run more smoothly, he will rank as the benefactor of his kind.

And had we gone under, again nothing would have mattered. Our tale told, we should have ceased to exist. The Incas of Peru, high lords of a proud and haughty race, rule half a world. To-day, draggled slaves of disaster, its people flee the light of the sun, and representative of the once god-like Montezuma we see a tramp or some beggar in rags. In their songssongs of unutterable pathos and sadness-do we alone find trace of this once mighty people of the past. And such the change of but some few hundred years. They could not thrive in subjection. Such their nature, such ours. Overwhelmed, and our proud AngloSaxon spirit had also been numbered with the things that have been.

And now to-night for a moment I would like to speculate on what the morrow may hold for us, and speculate a little further as to how far, if at all, the moulding of that morrow may be in our hands. Can we even bring that morrow nearer by one hour by anything we say or do? I know as individuals we seem conscious of a power to go our own whither, do our own will, and yet as years pass by do we not seem more and more as a child set to journey between two steep precipices. It can, as an irresponsible whim prompts it, now run a little up this side, now the other, but in the end to be returned to the course marked out for it by the iron hand of nature. Or another simile. In the Hartz Mountains or the watershed of the Danube, from many a hill wells a little streamlet. And it rushes along, so fussy and important, so free, so bright, so joyous, so sparkling, so individual and independent. And as it leaps from crag to crag in the very ecstasy of living, as it were, free agency personified, it is joined by many another like little rivulet and on they all pour in torrent together until they join and become one with the mighty slow moving river,

making its resistless way through soil and rock, mountain and sea, until it in turn loses itself in the waters of the still mightier ocean.

And of that river that little stream is still a constituent part. But where, we ask, its will or power to go its own way, as in early days it seemed to do? And thus ourselves: our little sojourning here until we also are one with the great ocean of life.

And so the great flood of life as it wends its way into the vast ocean of eternity. Has there never been a parting of the ways where it has been in its own choice which channel it will take? The winning or losing of the war was but the tossing of a coin. Would no reversal of fortune have varied the flow of existence? Has no such cataclysmic happening ever rewritten the story of what might have been? Or has no man, however titanic, ever made his age or even helped to fashion his age, or never done more than voice his age? And yet who is the happier philosopher? The deepest thinker? No, but he who best puts into words the nebulous thought of his times. And the measure of his acceptance is fair index of what such thought must have been. We honour those with whom we agree, and thus whatever its machinery a nation is mostly represented by those who express its character and ideals. In a crisis communities usually find the leader they may reasonably expect. When does a great nation ever want a really great exponent of its will, and if he be wanting, where seek the explanation? A nation sold to the worship of mammon will find its high priests chief amongst its princes; and if in time of stress no high soul finds hearing, why should it be otherwise? What seed

flourishes in uncongenial soil? To be a leader a man must be in tune with his times. A little latitude may be his, but it is but little. It is the prevailing thought that sways humanity, the thought born and burnt into the very life of man by experience in the past. And this thought is the soul of a nation-is the soul of the world. For good or bad, in the end it is this

thought, the thought of the ages, which is all irresistible in its power. Individually, we may have some power of volition; collectively in the aggregate, we know but law alone.

And "Whither' tends this thought to-day? We would know, not that we have any great hopes of largely modifying it, if at all, but simply that by an understanding mind we may make it just a shade pleasanter and more easy for us who have to tread the road. And first our query-Whence this thought; this spirit of humanity, this driving power of the world? What moulds it in its turn? we ask. How is it modified or varied? And here we note how in common with everything of which we have sensation this thought is also subject to ever-recurrent change. The flood of life, like the ocean itself, seems subject to vast ebbs and flows, and almost with the same rhythmic precision. Perhaps better analogy, the very wave of such ocean. On the crest of a terrific Atlantic roller we look down into the abysm below; now in the trough we mark the mountains of waters towering above. And so mankind, and so his story oft repeated. Now on the summit he rushes down into the depths; now in the depths once more he ascends on high, but once more as prelude to yet another descent. One variation-one happy variation-must we mark; for whilst the trough is not so deep the crest of each successive stage has mostly been just a trifle higher. But it is only with the lapse of thousands of years that these culminating points and points of extreme depression are to be observed and measured; and, coming to particulars, perhaps the earliest trace of some such movement is to be found in the skull of that Neanderthal man, a cast of which is to be seen in every museum. And we mark the jaws. No canine or incisor teeth. What a story we can reconstruct as they tell us of a peaceful race, a grain eating race, probably an agricultural race; and then we fill in details of their doom! There is a rush of a wild, fierce, meat-eating horde ourselves of the past—and they were driven off