they evil days. No! I believe it will
even burn stronger and brighter and more helpful in evil days than in
good--just like your harbour-lights, which shine out across the sea,
and which on a calm night gleam with soft refulgence, but through the
storm flash a message of life to those who toil on the rough waters.

But it takes a great party to govern Great Britain--no clique, no
faction, no cabal, can govern the forty millions of people who live in
this island. It takes a vast concentration of forces to make a
governing instrument. You have now got a Radical and democratic
governing instrument, and if this Administration is broken, that
instrument will be shattered. It has been recreated painfully and
laboriously after twenty years by courage and fidelity. It has come
into being--it is here. It is now at work, and by legislation and by
the influence which it can exercise throughout the whole world, it is
making even our opponents talk our language, making all parties in the
State think of social reform, and concern themselves with social and
domestic affairs. Beware how you injure that great instrument, as Mr.
Gladstone called it--or weaken it at a moment when the masses of this
country have need of it. Why, what would happen, if this present
Government were to perish? On its tomb would be written: "Beware of
social reform. The labouring classes will not support a Government
engaged in social reform. Every social reform will cost you votes.
Beware of social reform. 'Learn to think Imperially.'"

An inconclusive verdict from Dundee, the home of Scottish
Radicalism--an inconclusive, or, still more, a disastrous
verdict--would carry a message of despair to every one in all parts of
our island and in our sister island who is working for the essential
influences and truths of Liberalism and progress. Down, down, down
would fall the high hopes of the social reformer. The constructive
plans now forming in so many brains would melt into air. The old
regime would be reinstated, reinstalled. Like the Bourbons, they will
have learned nothing and will have forgotten nothing. We shall step
out of the period of adventurous hope in which we have lived for a
brief spell; we shall step back to the period of obstinate and
prejudiced negations. For Ireland--ten years of resolute government;
for England--dear food and cheaper gin; and for Scotland--the superior
wisdom of the House of Lords! Is that the work you want to do, men of
Dundee