First let us examine the grounds of the very distressing forecasts of the Conservative. In the vast majority of cases that are worth examining one will find that the pessimism has not very firm foundations. Your dismal prophet is usually a man with an ancient gospel which we are discarding, or a new gospel which does not attract us. The appeal to the modern world, he realises, must be utilitarian: he must show us that, without him, we perish. So he recklessly heaps up before our eyes statistics of crime and consumption and lunacy and alcohol: he makes weird and totally inaccurate statements about France or the United States or some other country: he marshals the shades of dead empires--which seem to have died of a wonderful complication of modern maladies--before us with appropriate rhetoric. Now to this kind of conservatism, which says that we are decaying, I reply that, on every positive test of national health, we are more flourishing than we ever were before. Dark as the earth is, it was never brighter than it is to-day, or more full of promise for the morrow. The war is not inconsistent with this general statement, as I will show later. A failure to advance in one direction does not alter the fact that we have advanced in a hundred others; and the gross behaviour of one nation does not destroy the gain that half a dozen other nations were ready to behave with a new decency in warfare. As to that "lesson of history" which is stridently read to us by men and women whose command of history is not otherwise conspicuous, I would remind them that the civilisation of dead empires always reached its height just before, or at the time when, they began to decay. Does anyone suggest that we ought not further to develop our civilisation lest we also decay? However, I have sufficiently discussed elsewhere this nonsense about "laws of history"; and I will show later that these older empires decayed, not because of their high development of intellect and fine sentiment, which leads to revolt, but from the natural defect of those very institutions which our conservatives defend. We are not decaying. England is, for every class of its citizens, an immeasurably finer place to live in than it was a hundred years ago. I speak on the strength of a rigorous comparison of the moral and social life of England a century ago with that of modern England, but I cannot give the facts here. Let it suffice to make plain that I have no sympathy with pessimists and preachers of penance and austerity, of any school. The world improves, and improves more rapidly than it ever did before. What stirs one's impatience is the consciousness that we could, and do not, move with infinitely greater speed: that we tolerate abuses and shams which insult our intelligence and mock our professions of humanity.