mankind is in
possession of, is a problem as old as the very notion of wisdom. The
solution comes slowly, because men collectively can only be made to
embrace principles, and to act on them, by the slow stupendous teaching
of the world's events. Men will go on planting potatoes, and nothing
else but potatoes, till a potato disease comes and forces them to find
out the advantage of a varied crop. Selfishness, stupidity, sloth,
persist in trying to adapt the world to their desires, till a time comes
when the world manifests itself as too decidedly inconvenient to them.
Wisdom stands outside of man and urges itself upon him, like the marks of
the changing seasons, before it finds a home within him, directs his
actions, and from the precious effects of obedience begets a
corresponding love.

But while still outside of us, wisdom often looks terrible, and wears
strange forms, wrapped in the changing conditions of a struggling world.
It wears now the form of wants and just demands in a great multitude of
British men: wants and demands urged into existence by the forces of a
maturing world. And it is in virtue of this--in virtue of this presence
of wisdom on our aide as a mighty fact, physical and moral, which must
enter into and shape the thoughts and actions of mankind--that we working
men have obtained the suffrage. Not because we are an excellent
multitude, but because we are a needy multitude.

But now, for our own part, we have seriously to consider this outside
wisdom which lies in the supreme unalterable nature of things, and watch
to give it a home within us and obey it. If the claims of the unendowed
multitude of working men hold within them principles which must shape the
future, it is not less true that the endowed classes, in their
inheritance from the past, hold the precious material without which no
worthy, noble future can be moulded. Many of the highest uses of life
are in their keeping; and if privilege has often been abused, it has also
been the nurse of excellence. Here again we have to submit ourselves to
the great law of inheritance. If we quarrel with the way in which the
labors and earnings of the past have been preserved and handed down, we
are just as bigoted, just as narrow, just as wanting in that religion
which keeps an open ear and an obedient mind to the teachings of fact, as
we accuse those of being, who quarrel with the new truths and new needs
which are disclosed in the present. Th