e our mistakes.

The moving Finger writes, and having writ,
Moves on; nor all your piety nor wit
Can lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your tears wipe out a word of it.

And now I think I cannot ask you to listen any longer. I will only add
that these ceremonial anniversaries, when they are over, sometimes
slightly tend to depress us, unless we are on our guard. When the
prizes of the year are all distributed, and the address is at an end,
we perhaps ask ourselves, Well, and what then? It is not to be denied
that the expectations of the first fervent promoters of popular
instruction by such Institutes as this--of men like Lord Brougham and
others, a generation ago--were not fulfilled. The principal reason was
that the elementary instruction of the country was not then
sufficiently advanced to supply a population ready to take advantage
of education in the higher subjects. Well, we are in a fair way for
removing that obstacle. It is true that the old world moves tardily on
its arduous way, but even if the results of all our efforts in the
cause of education were smaller than they are, there are still two
considerations that ought to weigh with us and encourage us.

For one thing, you never know what child in rags and pitiful squalor
that meets you in the street, may have in him the germ of gifts that
might add new treasures to the storehouse of beautiful things or noble
acts. In that great storm of terror which swept over France in 1793, a
certain man who was every hour expecting to be led off to the
guillotine, uttered this memorable sentiment. 'Even at this
incomprehensible moment'--he said--'when morality, enlightenment, love
of country, all of them only make death at the prison-door or on the
scaffold more certain--yes, on the fatal tumbril itself, with nothing
free but my voice, I could still cry _Take care_, to a child that
should come too near the wheel; perhaps I may save his life, perhaps
he may one day save his country.' This is a generous and inspiring
thought--one to which the roughest-handed man or woman in Birmingham
may respond as honestly and heartily as the philosopher who wrote it.
It ought to shame the listlessness with which so many of us see the
great phantasmagoria of life pass before us.

There is another thought to encourage us, still more direct, and still
more positive. The boisterous old notion of hero-worship, which has
been preached by so eloquent a voice in our age,