g into just the same danger of exacting too much, and
exacting it in wrong ways. It's human nature we have got to work with
all round, and nothing else. That seems like saying something very
commonplace--nay, obvious; as if one should say that where there are
hands there are mouths. Yet, to hear a good deal of the speechifying and
to see a good deal of the action that go forward, one might suppose it
was forgotten.

But I come back to this: that, in our old society, there are old
institutions, and among them the various distinctions and inherited
advantages of classes, which have shaped themselves along with all the
wonderful slow-growing system of things made up of our laws, our
commerce, and our stores of all sorts, whether in material objects, such
as buildings and machinery, or in knowledge, such as scientific thought
and professional skill. Just as in that case I spoke of before, the
irrigation of a country, which must absolutely have its water distributed
or it will bear no crop; there are the old channels, the old banks, and
the old pumps, which must be used as they are until new and better have
been prepared, or the structure of the old has been gradually altered.
But it would be fool's work to batter down a pump only because a better
might be made, when you had no machinery ready for a new one: it would be
wicked work, if villages lost their crops by it. Now the only safe way
by which society can be steadily improved and our worst evils reduced, is
not by any attempt to do away directly with the actually existing class
distinctions and advantages, as if everybody could have the same sort of
work, or lead the same sort of life (which none of my hearers are stupid
enough to suppose), but by the turning of class interests into class
functions or duties. What I mean is, that each class should be urged by
the surrounding conditions to perform its particular work under the
strong pressure of responsibility to the nation at large; that our public
affairs should be got into a state in which there should be no impunity
for foolish or faithless conduct. In this way the public judgment would
sift out incapability and dishonesty from posts of high charge, and even
personal ambition would necessarily become of a worthier sort, since the
desires of the most selfish men must be a good deal shaped by the
opinions of those around them; and for one person to put on a cap and
bells, or to go about dishonest or paltry ways o