st convert others, they must communicate sympathy and
win over the unconvinced. Upon the whole, they must show that their
object is possible, that it is compatible with existing institutions, or
at any rate with some workable form of social life. They are, in fact,
driven on by the requirements of their position to the elaboration of
ideas, and in the end to some sort of social philosophy; and the
philosophies that have driving force behind them are those which arise
after this fashion out of the practical demands of human feeling. The
philosophies that remain ineffectual and academic are those that are
formed by abstract reflection without relation to the thirsty souls of
human kind.

In England, it is true, where men are apt to be shy and unhandy in the
region of theory, the Liberal movement has often sought to dispense with
general principles. In its early days and in its more moderate forms, it
sought its ends under the guise of constitutionalism. As against the
claims of the Stuart monarchy, there was a historic case as well as a
philosophic argument, and the earlier leaders of the Parliament relied
more on precedent than on principle. This method was embodied in the
Whig tradition, and runs on to our own time, as one of the elements that
go to make up the working constitution of the Liberal mind. It is, so to
say, the Conservative element in Liberalism, valuable in resistance to
encroachments, valuable in securing continuity of development, for
purposes of re-construction insufficient. To maintain the old order
under changed circumstances may be, in fact, to initiate a revolution.
It was so in the seventeenth century. Pym and his followers could find
justification for their contentions in our constitutional history, but
to do so they had to go behind both the Stuarts and the Tudors; and to
apply the principles of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in 1640
was, in effect, to institute a revolution. In our own time, to maintain
the right of the Commons against the Lords is, on the face of it, to
adhere to old constitutional right, but to do so under the new
circumstances which have made the Commons representative of the nation
as a whole is, in reality, to establish democracy for the first time on
a firm footing, and this, again, is to accomplish a revolution.

Now, those who effect a revolution ought to know whither they are
leading the world. They have need of a social theory--and in point of
fact the more th