terrace,
been confronted with the most opposite principles jostling in the
roughest way, and, as it seems to the outsider, simply annihilating one
another. Whence Martin's plea for criticism; a plea with which I most
heartily sympathize, only that he gave no indication of the basis on
which criticism itself is to rest. And perhaps that is where and why I
come in. I have been watching to-night with curiosity, and I must
confess with a little amusement, one building after another laboriously
raised by each speaker in turn, only to collapse ignominiously at the
first touch administered by his successor. And why? For the ancient
reason, that the structures were built upon the sand. Well, I have
raised no building myself to speak of. But I am one of an obscure
group of people who are working at solid foundations; which is only
another way of saying that I am a man of science. Only a biologist, it
is true; heaven forfend that I should call myself a sociologist! But
biology is one of the disciplines that are building up that general
view of Nature and the world which is gradually revolutionizing all our
social conceptions. The politicians, I am afraid, are hardly aware of
this. And that is why--if I may say so without offence--their
utterances are coming to seem more and more a kind of irrelevant
prattle. The forces that really move the world have passed out of
their control. And it is only where the forces are at work that the
living ideas move upon the waters. Politicians don't study science;
that is the extraordinary fact. And yet every day it becomes clearer
that politics is either an applied science or a charlatanism. Only,
unfortunately, as the most important things are precisely the last to
be known about, and it is exactly where it is most imperative to act
that our ignorance is most complete, the science of politics has hardly
yet even begun to be studied. Hence our forlorn paralysis of doubt
whenever we pause to reflect; and hence the kind of blind desperation
with which earnest people are impelled to rush incontinently into
practice. The position of MacCarthy is very intelligible, however much
it be, to my mind--what shall I say?--regrettable. There is, in fact,
hardly a question that has been raised to-night that is at present
capable of scientific determination. And with that word I ought
perhaps, in my capacity of man of science, to sit down.

"And so I would, if it were not that there is some