ONE THOUSAND FAMOUS THINGS 11
A Voice From the Last Generation
You will have temptation sent you—you, the labouring people of
this country, and when you have become supreme to such a
degree that there is no other power to balance and counteract the
power you possess you will have approaching you a deep and search-
ing moral control.
You wiU have to preserve the balance of your mind and character
when you have fought the struggle with the capitalist and aristocrat
and great mercantile classes. When you have become in a sense the
political masters you have still before you one achievement to fulfil,
one glory to attain and to appropriate to yourselves—to continue to
be just. I venture to give you that warning of the future. It applies
to the coming days more than to the days that are past.
W. E. Gladstone
The Thing He Could Not Find
ONE of the sorest things in life is to come to realise that one is
just not good enough. Better perhaps than some, than many
almost; but I do not care for matching myself against my kind.
There is an ideal standard somewhere, and only that matters, and
I cannot find it. T. E. Lawrence
Frail Man in a Changing World
IHAVE seen night turned into day in our cities and dwellings by the
aid of gas. I have seen time and distance all but annihilated by
the locomotive power of steam, by sea and land. I have seen the
electric telegraph conveying from zone to zone the intercourse of man
by sparks stolen as it were from heaven.
I have seen mighty monarchies fall. I have seen republics,
founded on their ruins, crumble into dust. I have seen military
despotism grow up and wither.
And shall man, frail man, amid all these changes of Nature and
of policy, stand immovable, unaltered in his opinions and feelings ?
If a man is to refuse to yield to the pressure of the times and of the
circumstances in which his lot is cast—if he is not open to conviction
and, notwithstanding the altered state of affairs and the changed
condition of things around him, refuses to alter his opinions, such a
man may be fit for a lunatic asylum, but I say he does not possess
the true recommendation for any deliberative assembly in the world,
Sir James Graham's last speech to the electors of Carlisle in 1859
What to Do Every Day
ONE ought every day at least to hear a little song, sead a good
poem, see a fine picture, and, if possible, speak a few reasonable
words. * Goethe