This whole revolution means the invasion of politics by new men. At first they are tyros, unstable, untried, well-meaning fellows. Half of them crack in the baking. But there are more coming, and the fibre is growing tougher and the eyes clearer; soon we shall have men. A great passion is soon to replace the feeble conscientious motive that has hitherto brought the new men forward: ambition,--the ambition to stand for ideas, for ideas only, and to get heard. We have almost forgotten that public life is the natural ambition of every young man. Conditions have made it contemptible. But these struggles signify that a change in those conditions has already begun. Your work and mine may be summed up in one word. Make it possible for a young man to go into public life untarnished, and as an enemy to every extant evil. You must have men who will not go except on these terms. The times herald such men. They will appear. We must prepare for them. * * * * * The reason for the slow progress of the world seems to lie in a single fact. Every man is born under the yoke, and grows up beneath the oppressions of his age. He can only get a vision of the unselfish forces in the world by appealing to them, and every appeal is a call to arms. If he fights he must fight, not one man, but a conspiracy. He is always at war with a civilization. On his side is proverbial philosophy, a galaxy of invisible saints and sages, and the half-developed consciousness and professions of everybody. Against him is the world, and every selfish passion in his own heart. The instant he declares war, every inducement is offered to make him stop. “Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail” intervene. The instant he stops fighting he is allied with the enemy: he is bought up by prejudice or by fatigue. He begins to realize the importance of particular visible institutions, as if their sole value did not come from the fraction of unselfishness they represent. He rushes headlong into trade, and thenceforth can see his country only as a series of trade interests. He gets into some church and begins to value its organization, or into some party and begins to value its past, or into some club and begins to value his friends’ feelings. The consequence is that you may search Christendom and hardly find a man who is free. The advance of the world, like the improvement of our local politics, has always been the work of young men. It is done by men before their minds have been worn into ruts by particular businesses, or their sight shortened by the study of near things. What we love in the young is not their youth, but their force. The energy that runs through them makes them sensitive. They feel the importance of remote things, and infer the relations of the present to the future more truly than their elders. They are touched by hints. The direct language of humanity is plain and native to them. The invisible waves of force which do as a