Yet against this tyranny of the present the reformer, after all, has some sources of protection. “He laughs best who laughs the last”: and the longest laugh is always on the side of the forces of change. The hills are nothing, and flow from form to form; the mountains smoke at the touch of His hand: “He washeth away the things which grow out of the dust of the earth and destroyest the hope of man.” Researches in the great canyon of Arizona have revealed not only an eating through miles of solid rock by the flow of a quiet stream of water in a gulf created through almost limitless time, but behind this, in incalculable space of years, a succession of previous operations, formation and upheaval of continents and their overthrow, swinging the plummet of the mind into abysses beyond the powers of that mind ever to comprehend. The sun and rain and delicate air are wasting away, not only the backbone of the mountains, but also the granite stones of the Bank of England. The Future has great allies. Despite the momentary insistence of the material in factory and furnace, the mind can find tranquillity in realisation that this is merely the Idea, clothing itself for a season and in a temporary habitation; the Idea which can make the rocks dance to its music, and the solid ground tremble at its advent. Such has always been the vision of the poet; of all who can see not beyond the present, but through the present, to the future. To all such insight “Cities and thrones and powers Stand in Time’s eye Almost as long as flowers Which daily die.” And as of Nineveh there remains but a heap, and of Tyrus a spit of sandy shore, and of Sagesta but one solemn temple looking down the valley to the sea, so a triumphant imagination can fling off the yoke of the present, to see in solid England dynamic instead of static forces, and all the cities in motion and flow towards some unknown ends. This may not provide any peculiar satisfaction for present endeavour. There is no guarantee, because change is inevitable, that change will come along desirable ways. Nor does any consolation reside in the knowledge that one day, without a shadow of uncertainty, great London itself will become but a vast tomb for all its busy people, and of its splendour and pride not one stone be left upon another. But it does release from the tyranny of a present which sees no change possible. If change must come, then it may be deflected along desirable ways. The direction of forces is so much easier than the initiation of them. _E pur si muove_ is the eternal affirmation, as much over societies which appear stationary as over societies which appear reckless in progress. For over each successive present, with its ample Government offices, its law courts, its police stations, its secure private dwellings, there will be written as epitaph the inexorable law of a universe, not of Being, but of Becoming: “A wind passeth over it. It is gone. The place thereof shall know it no more.”