ourage and enterprise) asked Mr. Bryan to debate with me. Now Mr. Bryan
is one of the greatest orators of modern history, and there is no
conceivable reason why he should trouble to debate with a wandering
lecturer. But as a matter of fact he expressed himself in the most
magnanimous and courteous terms about my personal position, but said (as
I understood) that it would be improper to debate on female suffrage as
it was already a part of the political system. And when I heard that, I
could not help a sigh; for I recognised something that I knew only too
well on the front benches of my own beloved land. The great and glorious
demagogue had degenerated into a statesman. I had never expected for a
moment that the great orator could be bothered to debate with me at all;
but it had never occurred to me, as a general moral principle, that two
educated men were for ever forbidden to talk sense about a particular
topic, because a lot of other people had already voted on it. What is
the matter with that attitude is the loss of the freedom of the mind.
There can be no liberty of thought unless it is ready to unsettle what
has recently been settled, as well as what has long been settled. We are
perpetually being told in the papers that what is wanted is a strong man
who will do things. What is wanted is a strong man who will undo things;
and that will be a real test of strength.

Anyhow, we could have believed, in the time of the Free Silver fight,
that the Democratic party was democratic with a small d. In Mr. Wilson
it was transfigured, his friends would say into a higher and his foes
into a hazier thing. And the Republican reaction against him, even where
it has been healthy, has also been hazy. In fact, it has been not so
much the victory of a political party as a relapse into repose after
certain political passions; and in that sense there is a truth in the
strange phrase about normalcy; in the sense that there is nothing more
normal than going to sleep. But an even larger truth is this; it is most
likely that America is no longer concentrated on these faction fights at
all, but is considering certain large problems upon which those factions
hardly troubled to take sides. They are too large even to be classified
as foreign policy distinct from domestic policy. They are so large as to
be inside as well as outside the state. From an English standpoint the
most obvious example is the Irish; for the Irish problem is not a
British