"sacrifice all they have, themselves, for what is called an idea." But rude men being at one stage no better than divine fools, the line along which to get most assistance from rude men is to appeal to them, as moral idealists; happily this is also the line, along which least resistance would be encountered from the vested interests of the upper classes. Now by the strong tradition of the world for ages, appeals to man's higher nature are the special business for Sunday. The whole public is predisposed and at leisure.

While the democratisation of leisure is less remote than some other desirable changes, it nevertheless is not so near as to be within reach to-day. There is still a long stretch of intermediate ground to be traversed. In order that Sunday may be seized again for man and five years added to childhood, an organisation of the already existing but scattered believers in democracy into a compact but vast party for such ends must be effected.

In fact, all democratic ends must wait for a democratic party. But they need not wait long.

Our thought has here gradually returned from a remote and veiled future to the immediate and palpable present. The step in democratic advance which may be taken without delay is the formation of a great national league for popular government. It is the step to which circumstances have been leading and are now forcing us.

The requisites for the making of a great People's Party are at hand; we have, negatively, the break-up of the Liberal Party, and, positively, a great formative idea, an elaborated programme, and a large number of scattered and isolated believers in the idea.

We have the great idea; it is this:-The government of the religious, educational, recreative, and industrial, as well as the "political" life of the living people, by the living people for the people that shall be living to the end of human time on earth. This great idea, which can win the national allegiance of men, is a component element in a comprehensive philosophy of life and duty. Democracy finds its necessary rational setting in the comprehensive thought of biology, sociology, and ethics, that a community, to be moral,

must become a spiritual organism. Democracy claims to be the means toward this ethical end.

We have also the elaborated programme which we need. For a century, thousands of sturdy English men and English women have been working out the various details of reform which the idea of ethical democracy requires when applied to the existing conditions of Great Britain and Ireland.

In order to find a programme it is not necessary to go to Germany and to Karl Marx, as the London Socialists in the Sixties did, nor to France and Auguste Comte, as the English Positivists have done. Nor, on the other hand, is it necessary to invent a programme. There is a pedantic conceit among many would-be democratic reformers, that they and others must sit and think for thirty years more, to discover remedies for the people's woes. They imagine that they must discover fresh solutions, of their own make, for all the time-honoured problems. But the rank and file, the actual leaders of the various efforts at social reform, know already what needs doing. They know, just as the peasant leaders of Germany in Luther's time knew, what changes are required for justice and humanity. The peasants did not make one single blunder as to what their grievances were and what readjustments would remove the grievances. In every demand they were just and right—they were scientifically ethical. No sociologist or moral philosopher could have improved upon their declaration of articles of reform. In this respect of knowing what ought to be done to-day in England, educated would-be helpers in democratic reform stand to the workingclass leaders of England exactly as Luther stood to the heads of the peasant movement.

These knew the troubles and declared what would end them. So do the organised and intelligent working people of England know to-day. A new democratic party, to begin with, needs only to take over the expressed grievances of the masses and the various remedies which their own tried leaders from within have demanded, and the party's programme will have gained its body and outline. The thought of inventing a programme arises from the pedantry of outside lookers-on. Former workers and leaders have provided us with enough

details to start upon, and to keep a party busy for a hundred years after it has come into power. Let those points be adopted. The cloistered thinker may furnish ideas and expound a philosophy, to reveal the vital unity inherent in all the details of the programme. But more he cannot do; not even a Luther could have discovered the grievances of the peasants from his monkish cell or devised their articles of redress. Yet any one far less than a Luther, and with no spark of genius, if he could but rid himself of all pedantic conceit, might know enough to accept the programme of the working people, just as Luther should have known enough to side with the peasants instead of with the princes.

If it be not individual conceit which is keeping the natural leaders and organisers of a new democratic party from action, it is perhaps the vicious habit of academic hesitation and of non-committal, which has become prevalent among intellectual men in our time. The natural leaders of a great movement are to-day so sane that they see all the difficulties at once, and, seeing, are paralysed. They are sane enough to know that mere enthusiasm will not remove evils, and that energy, unenlightened, must work more mischief than good. They can see a hundred flaws in all the remedies proposed. So they direct their efforts to holding scrupulously aloof from any popular movements and from all new political organisations for fear these in their programmes may not be spotlessly perfect, all-wise, rigidly scientific, and logically exact. In their aloofness they direct whatever brain-force they have to thinking abstractly and observing, not without pity and terror, like so many spectators at a stage-tragedy, the modern masses struggling towards but unable to reach the light. The wouldbe organisers of a democratic party see the need of a programme and want to think out one. But even if it be granted that there is none already at hand, their attitude of noncommittal is a mistake. They are sane enough to know their own ignorance and incapacity. But, as is often the case, they are too sane to be wise, too collected, too cool, too detached. Truth is an object that cannot be seen at a distance. It must be touched to be known. Human truth comes to the soul by the muscular sense-by motion, by the

heat of the blood, by the quickening of the heart-beats, by running and falling and rising and going farther. It is insanity to expect to receive the data of wisdom by looking on. The doctrine of not committing ourselves until we are experts and authorities, or unless others who are experts and specialists approve, is madness in thinkers; and it is fatal to those causes which need the leadership of the best equipped brains.

But the programme has been elaborated! One needs only to bring its scattered items together. I need not specify them here.

The idea, the programme, and thousands of believers are at hand. Why, then, do we wait? Because we lack the rare and supreme gift of creative statesmanship. We require geniuses equal to the gigantic task of democratic leadership. The masses wait for men. If such waiting were passive and unproductive, the democratic outlook were hopeless. But, happily, out of the bosom of this Messianic waiting, are sure to be born the deliverers we need.

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