Since I accepted the honour of the invitation to deliver the opening
address of your course, I have found no small difficulty in settling
down on an appropriate subject. I half wrote a discourse on modern
democracy,--how the rule of numbers is to be reconciled with the rule
of sage judgment, and the passion for liberty and equality is to be
reconciled with sovereign regard for law, authority, and order; and
how our hopes for the future are to be linked to wise reverence for
tradition and the past. But your secretary had emphatically warned me
off all politics, and I feared that however carefully I might be on my
guard against every reference to the burning questions of the hour,
yet the clever eyes of political charity would be sure to spy out
party innuendoes in the most innocent deliverances of purely abstract
philosophy. Then for a day or two I lingered over a subject in a
little personal incident. One Saturday night last summer I found
myself dining with an illustrious statesman on the Welsh border, and
on the Monday following I was seated under the acacias by the shore of
the Lake of Geneva, where Gibbon, a hundred years ago almost to the
day, had, according to his own famous words, laid down his pen after
writing the last lines of his last page, and there under a serene sky,
with the silver orb of the moon reflected from the waters, and amid
the silence of nature, felt his joy at the completion of an immortal
task, dashed by melancholy that he had taken everlasting leave of an
old and agreeable companion. It was natural that I should meditate on
the contrast that might be drawn between great literary performance
and great political performance, between the making of history and the
writing of it,--a contrast containing matter enough not only for one,
but for a whole series of edifying and instructive discourses. But
there were difficulties here too, and the edifying discourse remains,