stion, then postponed, indeed left in
interrogation-marks--that of seeking not indeed sharply to define the
future order of things, yet in some measure to discern such elements of
progress as may be already incipient in the existing order, if not yet
largely manifest there. Such elements may be reasonably expected to grow
in the near future, perhaps increasingly, and whatever be their rate of
growth are surely worthy of our attention.

Contemporary science, with its retrospective inquiries into origins in
the past, its everyday observation of the present, is apt practically to
overlook that the highest criterion and achievement of science is not to
decipher the past, nor record the present, not even to interpret both.
It is to foresee: only thus can it subserve action, of which the present
task ever lies towards the future, since it is for this that we have to
provide. Why then should not Comte's famous aphorism--"_Voir pour
prevoir, prevoir pour pourvoir_," become applicable in our civic studies
no less than in the general social and political fields to [Page: 104]
which he applied it? In navigation or engineering, in agriculture or
hygiene, prevision and provision alike are ever increasing; yet these
are no mere combinations of the preliminary sciences and the fundamental
occupations, but obviously contain very large social elements.

It is proverbially safe to prophesy when one knows; and it is but this
safe prediction which we make every day of child or bud, where we can
hardly fail to see the growing man, the coming flower. Yet do not most
people practically forget that even now, in mid-winter, next summer's
leaves are already waiting, nay, that they were conceived nine months
ago? That they thus grow in small, commonly unnoticed beginnings, and
lie in bud for a period twice as long as the summer of their adult and
manifest life, is yet a fact, and one to which the social analogies are
many and worth considering.

While recognising, then, the immense importance of the historic element
of our heritage, renaissance and mediaeval, classic and earlier;
recognising also the predominance of contemporary forces and ideas,
industrial and liberal, imperial and bureaucratic, financial and
journalistic, can we not seek also, hidden under all these leaves, for
those of the still-but-developing bud, which next season must be so much
more important than they are to day? It is a commonplace, yet mainly of
educational meetings,