eding. Not all: others, just as earnest, just as eager, just as
chivalrous, sprang from the masses. Yet the gently-reared preponderate.
It is a common Tory taunt to say that the battle is one between the
Haves and the Have-nots. That is by no means true. It is between the
selfish Haves, on one side, and the unselfish Haves, who wish to see
something done for the Have-nots, on the other. As for the poor
Have-nots themselves, they are mostly inarticulate. Indeed, the Tory
almost admits as much when he alters his tone and describes the
sympathising and active few as "paid agitators."

For myself, however, I am a born Conservative. I hate to see any old
custom or practice changed; unless, indeed, it is either foolish or
wicked--like most existing ones.

VIII.

_THE ROLE OF PROPHET._

One great English thinker and artist once tried the rash experiment of
being true to himself--of saying out boldly, without fear or reserve,
the highest and noblest and best that was in him. He gave us the most
exquisite lyrics in the English language; he moulded the thought of our
first youth as no other poet has ever yet moulded it; he became the
spiritual father of the richest souls in two succeeding generations of
Englishmen. And what reward did he get for it? He was expelled from his
university. He was hounded out of his country. He was deprived of his
own children. He was denied the common appeal to the law and courts of
justice. He was drowned, an exile, in a distant sea, and burned in
solitude on a foreign shore. And after his death he was vilified and
calumniated by wretched penny-a-liners, or (worse insult still)
apologised for, with half-hearted shrugs, by lukewarm advocates. The
purest in life and the most unselfish in purpose of all mankind, he was
persecuted alive with the utmost rancour of hate, and pursued when dead
with the vilest shafts of malignity. He never even knew in his scattered
grave the good he was to do to later groups of thinkers.

It was a noble example, of course; but not, you will admit, an alluring
one for others to follow.

"Be true to yourself," say the copy-book moralists, "and you may be sure
the result will at last be justified." No doubt; but in how many
centuries? And what sort of life will you lead yourself, meanwhile, for
your allotted space of threescore years and ten, unless haply hanged, or
burned, or imprisoned before it? What the copy-book moralists mean is
merely this--that sooner o