t arises out of uncertainty. It is the
gnawing anxiety of suspense. What is the destiny of our country to be?
Nothing is settled either for or against us. We have no reason to
despair; still less have we any reason to be self-satisfied. All is
still in our hands for good or for ill. We have the power to-day to
choose our fortune, and I believe there is no nation in the world,
perhaps there never has been in history, any nation which at one and
the same moment was confronted with such opposite possibilities, was
threatened on the one hand by more melancholy disaster, and cheered on
the other by more bright, yet not unreasonable hopes. The two roads
are open. We are at the cross-ways. If we stand on in the old
happy-go-lucky way, the richer classes ever growing in wealth and in
number, and ever declining in responsibility, the very poor remaining
plunged or plunging even deeper into helpless, hopeless misery, then I
think there is nothing before us but savage strife between class and
class, with an increasing disorganisation, with an increasing
destruction of human strength and human virtue--nothing, in fact, but
that dual degeneration which comes from the simultaneous waste of
extreme wealth and of extreme want.

Now we have had over here lately colonial editors from all the
Colonies of the British Empire, and what is the opinion which they
expressed as to the worst thing they saw in the old country? The
representatives of every Colony have expressed the opinion that the
worst they saw here, was the extreme of poverty side by side with the
extreme of luxury. Do not you think it is very impressive to find an
opinion like that, expressed in all friendship and sincerity, by men
of our own race who have come from lands which are so widely scattered
over the surface of the earth, and are the product of such varied
conditions? Is it not impressive to find that they are all agreed,
coming as they do from Australia, or Canada, or South Africa, or New
Zealand, that the greatest danger to the British Empire and to the
British people is not to be found among the enormous fleets and armies
of the European Continent, nor in the solemn problems of Hindustan; it
is not the Yellow peril nor the Black peril nor any danger in the wide
circuit of colonial and foreign affairs. No, it is here in our midst,
close at home, close at hand in the vast growing cities of England and
Scotland, and in the dwindling and cramped villages of our denuded