ve in the natural decay of nations. I believe, to speak
frankly, though perhaps not quite so politely as I could wish--but I
am getting near the end of my lecture--that the whole theory is a
speculation invented by cowards to excuse knaves. My belief is, that so
far as this old English stock is concerned it has in it as much sap
and vitality and power as it had two centuries ago; and that, with due
pruning of rotten branches, and due hoeing up of weeds, which will grow
about the roots, the like products will be yielded again. The "weeds"
to which I refer are mainly three: the first of them is dishonesty, the
second is sentimentality, and the third is luxury. If William Harvey had
been a dishonest man--I mean in the high sense of the word--a man who
failed in the ideal of honesty--he would have believed what it was
easiest to believe--that which he received on the authority of his
predecessors. He would not have felt that his highest duty was to know
of his own knowledge that that which he said he believed was true, and
we should never have had those investigations, pursued through good
report and evil report, which ended in discoveries so fraught with
magnificent results for science and for man. If Harvey had been a
sentimentalist--by which I mean a person of false pity, a person who
has not imagination enough to see that great, distant evils may be much
worse than those which we can picture to ourselves, because they
happen to be immediate and near (for that, I take it, is the essence of
sentimentalism)--if Harvey had been a person of that kind, he, being
one of the kindest men living, would never have pursued those researches
which, as he tells us over and over again, he was obliged to pursue in
order to the ascertainment of those facts which have turned out to be of
such inestimable value to the human race; and I say, if on such grounds
he had failed to do so, he would have failed in his duty to the human
race. The third point is that Harvey was devoid of care either for
wealth, or for riches, or for ambition. The man found a higher ideal
than any of these things in the pursuit of truth and the benefit of his
fellow-men. If we all go and do likewise, I think there is no fear for
the decadence of England. I think that our children and our successors
will find themselves in a commonwealth, different it may be from that
for which Eliott, and Pym, and Hampden struggled, but one which will be
identical in the substance of i